General design idea to be pitched for development and implementation into D3:
All basic functions of Greater Rifts, Rifts and Bounties up to paragon 1500 remain unchanged including itemization and content power dynamics
After Paragon 1500 or when the player fully upgraded minimum 1 character the Avatar of the Raider Endgame activates
Runic tokens are now enabled in GR, Rifts and Bounties with a greater drop rate in higher GR’s.
3b. 6-12 Runic Tokens assembles into a gateway to the various Raid Dungeons with all new boss encounters.
3c. The reward for completing a dungeon is a runeword in the form of an avatar or icon
3d. The purpose of Raid dungeons is not to overhaul endgame it is rather to break the monotony of Rift/Gr/Bounty cycling using easy updates to already existing content with new art design like rune tokens/rune words and icons/avatars.
3e. List of avatar ideas:
(Runeword) Icon of the Troll: Grants a Goblin to replace players in Vault runs. The goblin clears a vault and receives the same randomized rewards as a players would. Whenever the Goblin is active The Icon is visible in the UI and the player can interact with the icon to follow the goblins progress and stats and these can be upgraded for speed and power by completing deeper Raid content. It is similar to a gem with the difference of enabling ingame NPCs to perform content operations. Requires Puzzle ring to open as usual.
(Runeword) Avatar of the Marader/Colossus/Magi/Reaper/Paragon etc up to 12 class based Avatars are delivered in the form of an inventory icon upon raid completion depicting the art of the class such as the helms of the different classes with their styles of sets.
These Avatars will be placed into the gateway of the raid lair before entering and the bonus received are enablement of participation of the players alts as NPCs who are contributing to the fight against evil. It goes without saying that if the coding for followers can be cloned to players multis, the list of reward upgrades to cover paragon 1500-10 000 is endless with Raids involving up to 12 players owned NPCs. So to go into more detail about this concept:
For example the player owns 1 fully upgraded main wizard and a secondary barb with lower tier equipment. The Avatar of the Colossus is a tier 1 reward that the wizard completed solo in an entry level raid dungeon. If the Icon is placed into the new dungeon after obtaining 6-12 Runic tokens from GRs/Rifts of Bounties, the Barb will participate in the higher level tier as an active combatant against the boss similar to a follower but with more bells and whistles. The barb is naturally more powerful as his base equipment progresses by original content exploration, but the Avatar reward from Raid completion also contain class specific bonuses to make the NPC stronger, similar to the Icon of the Goblin bonuses which is also an NPC Runeword.
So, at full capacity the solo player will perform raid content together with all of his multis and there will be archetypal bonuses like you see in MMORPGs healer/DPS/Tank etc. In fact the general idea of this concept is basically a copy of the Raid system in traditional MMOs like Age of Conan. But there is also some strategic ideas borrowed from games such as World of Warcraft with the NPCs Goblins and it’s UI tracking.
There are many layers of rewards that can be customized for this type of content and importantly it will linearly scale with paragon levels which are incredibly tedious over 1500. Thi system will enable content scaling without power creep in the original areas although there can certainly be some cross over in passive bonuses such as stun immunity, freeze, unhindered movement, run speed, experience gain, area damage, shrine duration, chance to find keys or rune tokens. Basically quality of life bonuses that are unrelated to direct power creep which is primarily obtained from higher paragon, items and the added power of multiple NPCs in raid battles.
There will be significant experience bonuses when all 12 player owned characters are battling raid bosses and the primary reason is to accelerate the progress between paragon 1500 and 10 000.
Last but not least of course the Raid Dungeons can be completed by teaming up with up to 12 other real players to enjoy the same rewards.