Temple Feedback - a HCSSF perspective

The Temple doesn't start out with this annoying feeling - fresh into the campaign it's pretty good for upgrading gear, up until about act 3.

The fact that the temple levelled up with me felt nice until I hit a hard ssf gear-progression wall and needed to farm the venom crypts for upgrades.

Every few crypts I'd get access, however, since my gear was bad, and I was now over-levelled, I was functionally slapping a wet noodle at dangerous bosses in close quarters, and it took a lot of time and felt tedious - I preferred just farming the campaign zone.

I felt "soft locked" out of the temple around the end of act 3/beginning of act 4 on my Shaman because my gear was bearly (lol) good enough for me to farm the act zones, keeping me perpetually over-levelled. The temple would be the same level as me, and assumed my gear was commensurate with my level.

The temple felt un-rewardingly grindy and time consuming - it was just more dangerous wet noodle slapping that I eventually decided to give up on. I had no desire to dodge a buffed Molten Smith's attacks for literally 5-10 minutes for a chance to add 2% quality to my gear, especially not in hcssf where if I miss one dodge, it could quickly be the end of my character.

Part of the fatigue is related to the forced discovery you've gotta do to build and participate in the Temple: It wasn't immediately clear what rooms did what, how destabilization worked, etc. What started out as a few rooms slapped down here and there, and not a huge commitment in early act 1, became a tedious and dangerous grind by the end of act 4 and into the interludes where every 6 zones I had an opportunity to spend 1 minute confusingly placing rooms and then the next 25 minutes feeling underpowered as I wet-noodle slapped tier-3 commanders down.

It was not a lot of fun.

So I stopped doing it for a while. I basically just killed the mobs on the platform and opened the chests. Ripped to the monkey 7hrs before it was nerfed (lol). Got a new character to maps - skipped temple during campaign on that one too.

Saw it was getting patches daily, that there were people using borderline exploit mechanisms to "print divines" which I don't care about in ssf at all, and honestly it just seemed like a buggy dangerous encounter not necessarily worth the effort.

I decided somewhere around level 90 to give it a fair shake, so here's some feedback other than "I don't like doing it that much":

Certain monster mods are absolute cancer in the small areas - even with a relatively well-rounded character, I don't bother with rooms if I can tell there's certain mods in there, even mods I'd happily take on anywhere else.

I really don't enjoy playing "the floor is lava" while chipping away at 1000000% effectiveness volatile-plant extra-chaos-damage Molten Smiths in a 4x4 room alongside a 1000000% effectiveness no-regen-above-50% mana-siphoner. (The numbers are hyperbolically exaggerated for dramatic effect.)

It felt like I was tolerating the temple because it was the only way to get surgical implants. Once I got some suitable implants, I decided to fight Atziri.

Now that Atziri is down, I have nearly 0 desire to go into the Temple anymore because even if the "risk" is technically worth the reward, it's full of dead ends, damage sponges, rippy mods, and it kills my mapping flow.

Abyssal depths do to some degree as well and I think the difference there is that I don't have to do any "what's the best way to arrange the zone"- arithmetic before running the depths. I just go in and kill and get out, and get on with my mapping.

- During campaign, you don't pick temple rooms until Doryani becomes your sidekick in Act 4. Prior to this, you basically just get some Vaal mobs and some loot and every few zones the Temple opens and it's pre-made - you can run it or leave it. It's a different basic temple each time you generate it - based on the level of the zone you stepped out of.

- When Doryani starts being a sidekick in a4, he takes your "random generated temple", flips the machinery around, and now you have 6 crystals to place 6 rooms with, or, you can farm up 6 more crystals to reroll the room selection. You can place rooms as long as you've got crystals to roll for them, and if you want more crystals, you just farm Vaal platforms in zones.

- So what if I really don't like temple but I still want to interact with the platform? Make it so when you get a Vaal platform you get a choice a-la PoE1 Eldritch altar-style - do you want some loot, or some vaal "crystals"? - after your choice some monsters (or a boss) appear for you to fight, and when you kill them, you get your reward. You could even make the choices hard, like maybe instead of generic loot vs crystals after a mob fight, it can be more interesting choices like "+1 to level of items dropped by rare monsters, rare monsters have +1 rare modifier vs defeat this random group of vaal monsters/boss and get 6 temple crystals.

- You do not have a cap on crystals.

- Going into the temple, there's buttons to simplify the trip where you can randomly "auto-place" the rooms generated, and then maybe spend some crystals to roll some more rooms, and do it again, or maybe spend your crystals to scrap it all and "regenerate" a new basic random temple starter layout and start fresh - there's basically a way to just "alch and go" your temple.

- There are no more roads. Every room can connect to every room on all 4 sides.

- the concept of filler tiles doesn't need to go away, just the fact that they're currently used as connecting roads . Just call them some kind of theme-room based on whatever white/blue/yellow chest is in the area and keep the actual road-like aspect of the rooms intact, still always connecting on 4 sides, and make their icon something more interesting than "road". It's not a "depot" it's a "zealous corridor" lol.

- Make some of the rooms bigger.

- maybe rooms you put beside the same room combine into larger rooms - but their mod doesn't necessarily duplicate, or it can change the layout or mod types that the room gives. Maybe you could build a temple to choose to fight in larger zones with lower effectiveness or take your chances in a claustrophobic juice-fest.

- The architect is like a vaal-orb for your Temple - everytime you fight him, each room in your temple has a chance to change, change it's mods, disappear, or duplicate.

- Atziri appears in a random location in the temple after you collect 4 architect medallions. If you regenerate the temple at this point, you've gotta do it again.