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As others have mentioned, I personally believe this is largely increased by the very high demand to do new content more exclusively rather than in balance with other content. The drop rates are set to a point where you should encounter them at a healthy rate with the standard endgame gameplay loop. For example, you should get lightless arbor keys about as often as it takes to farm enough gold to make it feel decently rewarding to run it. If you got the keys more often, you’d have a surplus of keys since you wouldn’t want to run it until you got more gold anyways creating a surplus of keys - more rare and you’d have an overdemand of keys and still be left with surpluses of gold after runs.
This is a delicate balance, but something we’re targeting with the drop rates keeping in mind that these are a feature for a 1.0 core game and healthy gameplay experiences - not targeted to be seasonal content to keep players busy outside of the normal existing endgame gameplay. And this is certainly something we’re looking for feedback on in regards to if that healthy gameplay is being achieved here.
Each dungeon is designed to ensure it provides necessary supplies to utilize the reward mechanic. Temporal Sanctum will always give you an LP item and matching exalted base. The first 3 modifiers in Lightless Arbor are discounted to ensure you can at least afford a couple of modifiers just from gold drops found in the dungeon, and Soul Bastion is completely self contained. While these are not the “optimized” usages of the reward mechanic by any means, we ensure the reward mechanics are always accessible.
I’m not personally sure how this is considered a ‘gate’ any more than more corruption in monolith of fate is a ‘gate’. Yes, better rewards come from higher difficulty, however there is a breakpoint until everything is “unlocked” which is designed to not be unreasonable to obtain.
This is an aspect called “Cost of Entry”. By having a cost of entry we can allow something to have exceptionally high rewards without greatly skewing the power curve. Cost of Entry also creates a demand for the contents within. I quickly explained this in a different post, and will copy here: By having a cost of entry, it increases the desire to optimize rewards - clear more of the dungeon to get more from each key spent. Without having anything spent, there’s no incentive to do anything other than rush the single most rewarding aspect (typically boss) and ignore everything else. This is one of the issues currently encountered with the Monolith. And while we are working on other solutions for the Monolith to provide more than simply rushing the objective, Dungeons work differently, and the same solutions won’t apply.
We currently believe having a cost of entry (dungeon key) is an effective measure for Dungeons to provide value to what can be found within, and allow the rewards within to be more rewarding based on key scarcity.
If we were to remove key requirements, we would also need to greatly reduce the rewards, otherwise it would become the definition of, where I might normally say “power creep”, it may be more akin to “power sprinting”. We certainly understand that players will always want access to the most rewarding content, however if they can infinitely run it with no cost, no ‘gates’ then the game loses the loot hunt aspect, and other aspects of the game fall further behind. Monolith becomes a “needless grind” which will then be demanded to match the rewards of the dungeons, normal drops that aren’t from empowered dungeon rewards fall further and further behind as there’s a new “normal” created, and it becomes an endless loop of power creep. We want dungeons to be exciting to complete, for players to want to do dungeons because of the great rewards they can contain - however in order to have that there has to be a cost, a limiting factor to not completely imbalance and throw off everything else in the game among other reasons earlier mentioned.