Game Mechanics Grey Beacons need to be taken down a peg or 10

We've seen a couple of beacon adjustments early on in the lootrun update, Dark Grey got 2 curses removed, aquatsack got nerfed by means of no more than 2 in a row (rainbow says hi lol) and the rarer beacons no longer dissapear after a set # of challenges.

But one beacon has been completely ignored in all of this (except for the afformentioned removal of dissapearance).

The Grey Beacon!

It's fucking busted!

I appoligize in advance to all of the sweats that think I and the devs hate fun because we care about game ballance, but something very much needs to be done about Grey Beacons.

Basically, Grey Beacons double your pulls, or triple, or quadruple, etc. without a drawback. I don't think that it's bad to have a beacon that gives rerolls, or even that it doesn't give a drawback; the problem is that they can be easily manipulated to giving you 10 rerolls. All that you need to set this up is Orange Beacons and a Rainbow Beacon, evectively giving you whatever 2x vibrant-aquastack vibrant beacon you want. And before someone hops in and says "but beacons are heavily RNG dependant", yes, you would be correct. But, it is also easy to kill a run early if you don't get a quick Orange 2 or 3 times and get the ideal set up for a 10rr Grey.

For context, my last 3 lootruns have had: 10 rrs, 16 (yes, 16) rrs, and 10 rrs.

What does this mean? It means that it's really easy to get a good setup and aquastack into a mega Grey, (beacon rerolls are also here to help your cause). Get 2 Oranges, Aquastack to Grey, Aquastack to Dark Grey and boom, 770 pulls in 20 minutes.

You may also notice that I got 16 rrs, how can that happen? Easy, use rainbow to breack up your Aquas so that it doesn't kill the stack and circumvents the "no more than 2 in a row" rule. Admittedly this is unlikely, but 10 rrs is already ridiculous and circumventing the "rule of two" is important for my suggestion.

Aquastacking into free reward nultipliers also kindof undermines the point of the bew lootrunning, to level the playing field between the rich and the poor. It is much more difficult for plebs running morph for money to aquastack late enough in a run to abuse Aquastack Greys than peeps with Idol or another busted Mythic build to breeze through challenges. (Boons do not play a large role here, aside from need to actually get the Blue Beacons, boons themselves are much more RNG dependant than beacons and also not viable when you have to pass them to grab Oranges and Rainbows and Aquas.)

So what is my proposed solution?

Make Grey Beacons like Rainbow Beacons.

Instead of Aquastacking injecting steroids into Greys, they skip over them and effect the next set of beacon choices just like Rainbow. And this could even give the side boost of having 2 opportunities to 4stack or an opportunity to 6stack.

However, only 1 rr all the time is kind of lame right? I agree! So I suggest buffing the base Grey Beacon to 2rrs and give the Vibrant the #Wynnmath treatment that Blue gets of 3rrs (or just straight up double it to 4). There is really no reason that players need to be able to reroll your rewards more than 3-4 times, (you'll still be able to do 4-5 with daily rr). And the base buff to Greys makes it easier for newer/poorer players who either don't know that you can Aquastack greys or don't have the adequate gear to pass up on boons to get an optimal run a chance at a larger reward pool.

I would strongly oppose adding curses to the Grey Beacon (as a few of you may notice I have suggested on other threads before) as I have realised that this only makes the problem of new players struggling to get a high# of rewards, while barely punishing powerful players, much much worse.

 

I think this is a solid suggestion, as much as I don't like it. BUT, the loot pool would need to be more common to compensate, because that amount of rerolls is absolutely necessary to even have a chance at a mythic, and nerfing it to this degree would just create the problem you're trying to solve.

 

While a slight buff to the rewards might be fine, this amount of rrs is absolutely not neccesary. I got 4 Mythics in 6 runs using 1 rr and 2 rr on 2 of those runs.

 

That's pretty exceptional luck. I've had as many as 10 rerolls on a run and got basically nothing of value out of it. I'd also argue that it does have a downside: any decent reward is sacrificed in favor of maybe getting a better one. If you get 3 le on the first pull, you can reroll and potentially get nothing actually valuable. Even with 10+ rerolls, you might never get more than a few le or less, I've done it.

 

This is exactly my point. You (tig) say that Gray Beacons are OP, but they’ve already been balanced by the loot pool need so that the utility they give to a run isn’t an instant Mythic machine. Nerfing them further would just completely kill the pre-hotfix 1 joy of getting a lucky run in a way that has already been balanced for.

 

some of us dont find mythics even with 10 rerolls and 90 pulls a run, leave grey how it is

 

Of course, I understand your point, but already, are we sure, that the fact that rainbow doesn't cancel aqua is not a bug ? Because, I do believe it is one, and the balance team just doesn't know what to do with, so they let us believe, it is a mecanic of gameplay.
Moreover, making grey behaving like rainbow currently do, would only create more chance to give birth to even more broken combo of beacons, imagine aqua aqua rainbow vibrant aqua vibrant aqua grey vibrant aqua vibrant aqua Dark Grey, or even white, 110 reward pulls for the first, and 110 rounds for the second.
I believe they should (if it was to be done), set a maximum amount of rerolls, just like it is currently for Blue beacon, even if we should have 7 or 11 choices of boons, we are just limited to 5, in the Grey example, let's assume it would be 6.

 

Even though it would remove a lot of the rng involved in getting a good run I agree that grey should give a flat amount of rerolls (maybe even scaling with your lootrun rank) since, while making a single run give less effective pulls, you can get good runs much more often since you only need a double stacked dark grey with a grey appearing at any time without the need of an Aquastack before getting it