After a long period of inactivity I came back to SK and I'm having fun again. This last week I've been revisiting all the Shadow Lairs because I've been told that they are harder and have been looking for a challenge.
Now, I don't wanna rant about how they scaled difficulty. Let's just say it's been lazy work and I feel that not much of thought and testing has been put into it. But I get it, the team is small and there is other stuff to worry about.
What really grinds my gears is how there haven't been made any changes to the loot. The implemented changes make it look like a failed attempt of suicide, to be frank.
While browsing through the forums today I saw a nice post about gear drops from boxes and it gave me this imo great idea: Implement gear drops in SL as a common occurence. Of course, most of the drops would be low level gear but give each SL a few unique strong weapon drops. I'm talking Mixmaster, Viking weapons etc. Those would still be very rare but you would have a humane chance to get them.
I haven't put much thought into this and I'm open to criticism but the upsides I see in this are:
1. It's RNG. You love RNG.
2. It should be fairly simple to implement, test and adjust droprates if needed.
3. It would revive Endgame! SL is fun, challenging and such a cool endgame. It's something special but not having any reward for long-time players to it makes all it's great ideas worthless.
4. "Casual" players like me would actually have a chance to get those awesome weapons
5. It would bring life into the AH (I think? not a big trader)
What do you think of this?
Adding more to shadow lairs reward-wise is an absolute must right now, and while people need more of a reason to run them, doing this might kill the value for certain items that people may have paid top dollar for.
Maybe, adding free to play versions of mixers as a craftable at the end of shadow lairs in the sanctuary could be good. Gear themed to the lairs would not only be very welcome thematically, but also as a nice reward for getting through the lair.
Shadow lair gear has been requested for a very long time, but I think that rewards from shadow lairs should be kept until the very end of the lair, and away from rng, so the player has something to feel accomplished about. Either way, you're 100% right about the current lairs needing something more enticing.