I worked on greater rifts in D3 yesterday. For the uninitiated, Diablo 3’s adventure mode gives you access to two types of rifts. The normal “Nephalem” rifts have difficulty that is set when you set the game difficulty for yourself overall. They are procedurally generated dungeons that take on the appearance of various places from the story, and are populated with random monster sets. As you kill monsters you fill up a progress bar, and once it is full the rift guardian boss is spawned. Rifts are great because they have a higher chance of dropping legendaries, and the rift guardian drops greater rift keystones.
Greater rifts have the same random tileset and monsters, but none of the normal monsters drop any loot or gold. Instead, you are trying to beat a timer, filling up the progress bar to summon and defeat the guardian before 15 minutes are up. Doing this nets you loot from the guardian plus legendary gems with special powers. Each completed greater rift gives you the chance to level up those legendary gems and make yourself ever more powerful. Greater rifts also have a more granular difficulty setting that you can choose when you open a new rift, and they’re not capped at Torment XIII like normal rifts.
Yes, I really finished that rift with less than 8.5 seconds to spare.
All this is a really long introduction for the fact that yesterday I attempted GR65 (functionally a few tics higher difficulty than TXIII) and won. Barely. As you can see in my screenshot I had less than 9 seconds left on the clock. On that run I died a few times to dumb things early on (stupid effing bees in long narrow hallways), fell behind, and almost just gave up and reset. In greater rifts when you’re fighting against the clock you also get increasing penalties when you die, forcing you to wait up to 30 seconds until you can rez again. I wish that there was a way to instantly rez and just deduct that time from your timer instead of having to sit still for 30 seconds and think about what you did, but at least watching those bees hovering around my corpse filled me with enough determination to continue. So let this be a reminder that even when things look terrible and you’re surrounded by evil bees, there’s still a chance that you can make it through okay!
