To make Oryx’s Sanctuary 100% free to enter on a normal day/permanently might be a little too generous in my opinion (outside of events ofc), especially given that the loot the dungeon drops as well as their rates have been balanced with this limited ascessibility in mind.
But that being said, I really don’t like the current rune system since it pretty much forces you to join a discord run, alongside the fact that with how rare runes are and how discord raid groups are run, has led to the dreaded entitled, privileged and toxic behaviour of having “private” runs or owning realms.
For a good while, I’ve seen a few different ideas from people to try and make the dungeon more accessible and become more public-friendly (I’ll list 2 of my favourite ideas below, albeit slightly modified). The loot chances would definitely have to be revised if any of these alternate ideas actually became reality, so I suppose it boils down to the fact of whether you prefer being able to do more runs with less drop rate, or less runs with the drop rate we have now.
1 - Have a chance of having one of the three runes already present
Straightforward, it’s basically the event we are having right now, except it’s permanent and doesn’t always happen. That way, instead of always having to require all 3 runes, it only takes 2 runes sometimes instead.
The original idea suggested that there would be a x% chance for one rune to appear, a much lower chance for 2 runes to appear, and a very unbelievably low chance for all 3 to appear. That could possibly work, but we don’t want to make runes completely irrelevant so I’d prefer if it was just a small chance of one of the three runes being present
2 - No runes needed to enter, but you suffer very harsh punishments throughout the run without them
Basically, the podiums arise as usual, but after a certain amount of time (eg. 30 seconds), Oryx’s Sanctuary opens regardless of whether runes were used or not. The twist here is that the absence of a specific rune will inflict a permanent, incurable debuff on you throughout the dungeon run. For example, with no sword rune, your attack damage will be halved, or no shield rune means your defense is halved (or health reduced), and maybe no helmet rune means your speed is reduced by 35%. Again this is just an example, but the gist is that you can technically complete the dungeon with no runes, but it will be extremely dangerous and much harder. It doesn’t take away the relevance of runes, because most players would want to maximise their survivability, so it would still encourage people to use runes to ensure a smoother, more realistically possible run.
The original idea was basically the same except that the runes gave you buffs instead. But seeing as how people can already do O3 in the current times and how he’s meant to be the hardest boss, definitely didn’t see this working out.
