Since some people showed interest, I'll explain my vision of it...

Escalation Mode is compromised of an infinitely repeating set of two stages, Arena Type A and Arena Type B. Arena Type A has 3 arenas, and Arena Type B has 4 arenas. On Type A, you only need to clear 2 Arenas, and Type B, you only need to clear 3 Arenas, giving you some choices. Instead of the arenas being one after the other in a line, they're connected to a central lobby akin to Jelly Palace. You get an arsenal station at the start of each floor, and every ten floors you get a checkpoint letting you resume from that point.

The trick is that on each floor, each room has modifications made to them to enhance the difficulty over time. As you go further and further, more modifications will get added to each room. These modifications can include spikes, elemental traps, monster spawners, turrets, and other unique elements.

One of the main differences between Escalation Mode and other modes is the addition of the concept of "Sealed" weapons. Essentially, instead of cursing random items in your inventory, "Sealed" targets specific types of weapons. For example, early on you might encounter an Arena that "seals" all of your normal weapons. You would now be unable to use purely normal weapons and would take damage if you tried to. Damage types and weapon types are both eligible to be sealed. Split damage type weapons are sealed based on the extra type that is in addition to neutral, they aren't counted as neutral.

Additional types of seals simply disable functionality of certain elements. For example, your trinket slots might be sealed, so you simply don't gain the benefit of them in that arena. Or your perk or even your pet might be sealed, preventing you from gaining their buff or using them at all.

There is also a vast number of other effects that can be inflicted on you. Resistance debuffs, halve shield strength, 1 HP shield, debuffed speed/damage/charge time among many others. These types could potentially be extremely deadly when mixed with unique periodic hazards, such as earthquakes, that will occasionally have pre-tremors before stunning any player who doesn't have their shield up., or thunderstorms that slowly sweep across part of the arena and shock anyone within them.

All of these conditions in each arena on the floor can be viewed prior to making your loadout selection on each floor. This way, not only is your fighting skill judged (in diverse ways too, when you're pushed out of your comfort zone and forced to use weapons you normally wouldn't), but also your preparation and intelligence. Deciding what to bring and what encounters you're going to face as a team is vital to ensuring success on the deeper floors, where dozens of these modifications will be in action.

Every X months, the best teams will be awarded prizes and unique cosmetic items, checkpoints are reset, and new changes to the arenas can go into effect. In short terms, the concept of "seasons" is introduced into PvE, and the best of the best will constantly be in a competition to clear the most stages. I feel this is the easily the most time effective way to introduce competitive PvE short of player created content (which has a slew of other issues).

Uhh... what? It promote a large variety of weapons. You can't excel unless you have a stable of normal, pierce, shadow, and elemental bombs, swords, and guns, because in any arena your particular favorites might be sealed. If you use purely normal or use pure swords, yes this hurts you, but that's the point. You can't call yourself the best if you can't adapt to the situation.

I already nailed the split damage thing here -

"Split damage type weapons are sealed based on the extra type that is in addition to neutral, they aren't counted as neutral. "

The point of weapon sealing has multiple reasons behind it (not all of them are listed below, but here are some samples):

A) Forces you out of your comfortable zone

B) Promotes a variety of weapons to be used

C) Promotes decision making (Do I do Arena X where my sword is sealed, or Arena Y where pierce and shadow are sealed)

D) At the very high end, increases difficulty dramatically (IE Sealing Shadow and Normal when fighting Jellies and Gremlin)

Why are you obsessed with fiends? And silkwings too. That many silkwings means that venom veiler is an instant kill on anything.

The challenge isn't the quantity of monsters anyways... although there should be a fair amount of them, it shouldn't be about omg-so-many-monsters-on-the-screen. It should be omg-so-many-hazards-on-the-screen and qq-my-favorite-weapon-is-sealed-and-that's-all-I-know-how-to-use.

Thanks for posting!

Yeah, I can see how this could get VERY repetitive... I mean, if you do a heart of ice, where you have several arenas in a row right after another if you're unlucky, it can be frustrating to go back to back to back like that without any sort of stress-relief encounters.

So perhaps I need to rethink the idea and mix in other types of stages as well... arenas are simply super easy to program and add modularity to so that was my first thought on content vs effort.