So, I messed up.
This is a tale of me, for about ten minutes, turning into the Chaos-wearing, Combuster-wielding jerk I've strived to avoid being since I met a bunch of FSC runners that kicked me for not having a Shivermist or Blitz Needle five years ago, and I'll explain why.
So anyway, I led a group of four players through the T3 Arcade. We were hitting all the danger rooms, opening all the CE gates, you name it. Passed through Shrine of Slumber, maybe a Vault, I forget. We'd waited on levels to cycle before, so I'd thought nothing of it.
The problem came at Depth 27.
We'd hit a Graveyard, the reverse Treasure Vault of the Clockworks. Mostly harmless in terms of the zombies, but the real hell came in the form of the Phantoms. Sorely under-equipped for handling four of the Curse-wielding ghouls at once, we barely made it to the elevator. I'd thought our troubles were over, and that that bright display monitor would lead us to fortune untold at Depth Twenty-Eight, the treasure trove of the arcade that we'd easily chewed up half an hour reaching. We were so close.
Instead, that display glared at us with the eye of the devil himself, that terrifying visage of a Dust Bunny denoting the agreed-upon hell of the Clockworks worse than a Devilish Drudgery teeming with tech support: Ravenous Warrens.
No payout, no heat, nothing but a million Dust Bunnies at the judge's seat, bringing a gavel of claws and teeth down upon your wretched soul before shattering it into a hundred betrayed pieces. Truly, the rougher part of the apple tree you want no business eating.
So yeah, I kinda tried to stall for literally ANYTHING other than a compound cycle which ended up getting my entire party killed by Phantoms. I accept full blame for this, but I was trying to do the widely-agreed-upon "right thing" To add insult to injury, the levels cycled five seconds after the elevator activated.
To Grey Havens, I petition you with no small amount of self-inflicted distress:
PLEASE get rid of depth 28 compounds.
They're not fun, they require little to no skill to complete, and they're horribly lacking in any sort of gratification that even a Lichenous Lair (the next level cycle) would provide more of. It's an insult to an Arcade party that's spent half an hour completing a run, it's anticlimactic, and quite frankly I don't ever want someone to be in my or my party's positions in that moment ever again. It's not in the spirit of the game to have to make a choice like that.
Or maybe we just got unlucky and I made it worse. It's up to interpretation.
I'd rather like it if they stay, but all mini monsters drop as much loot as a normal monster like a wolver, slime cube or a zombie. This would make them fairly balanced so that instead of being just very hard to do but have very little loot they'd be very hard to do but have much loot, bet you can get around 3kcr from a D28 compound if this was to be implemented.