The new spires has a few challenges compared to version 1:
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Annoying Teamplay Pattern: You’re encouraged to stack players on your team at different floors to maximize what Eternal items you can use. What’s worse is that this is not intuitive to new players and creates an arbitrary barrier to playing the mode well. This makes the mode feel clunky; instead of playing with your friends immediately you have to stagger before queuing up.
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Worse SoloQ Coordination: The players with the highest Floor advancement have the most restrictions, but these conversations assume your allies talk to you. If you’re with people who can’t speak your language or refuse to talk, the builds get significantly worse. Worse yet, your team may throw at item selection by not knowing whose Floor is most restrictive.
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Harder to Teach New Players: The old chest model dropped lots of loot on the ground, true, but that pool of loot is smaller than having access to all in-rotation items in the game (current Shrine). More experienced players were better able to teach new players with the older setup by pointing out what was strong or viable from the pool of options. Now experienced players have to ping each item in the Shrine to communicate that same information and walk through the entirety of the game to give newer players build concepts. Before it was “pick these 4, hit the dummy, here’s the combo, go”.
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Missing Sense of Achievement: I got to Floor 27 on the old Spires and was reasonably proud of that. I saw other players and teams posting their floors to show how high they could ascend and there was a feeling of competition. Now that there are only 10 floors, reaching the pinnacle doesn’t have a strong feeling of accomplishment.
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Frustration of Unstable Builds: Playing 1 Bo3 of <insert_favorite_Eternal> across a possible 10 Bo3s is unsatisfying. In SoloQ or teamplay, you know what Eternals you play best. Being forced off of practice (one of the stated goals of Spires) hurts much of the appeal of the mode.
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Lower Amounts of Unscripted Excitement: It’s FUN to open chests and pull a full Eternal! Even playing and getting a bad hand on loot rolls encourages salty runbacks and makes upsets more likely across player skill. There’s also nothing quite like knowing you won despite having nothing in your run. Compared to variable loot, the current Shrine feels stale and mathable (see first point).
It’s for all of these reasons that I would like a change back to the old Spires for the mode going forward. Failing that, I would like as much of the above as possible to change in a positive direction.
