I want to start this out by saying that I am by no means one of the best players in the game. I can easily beat vMA, vDSA, and all vet trials, but haven't completed or even tried HM AA or MoL yet. There is still a tier of players above me so what I'm about to propose applies even more so to them.

With the announcement of the new trial today, a lot of members from the few end game guilds I'm in have been talking about the severe lack of challenging end game content available and will be disappointed if the difficulty of the new trial isn't at least as difficult as vMoL. This is on top of the fact that one trial per year gets played out really fast. The quick solution I am proposing is to add a new master difficulty to all dungeons complete with scoring, and possibly to MA and DSA as well, to add a new level of score leaderboards and competitiveness to the game. I got this idea when playing through vDSA where enemies hit very hard (channeled attacks basically one shot all dps and healers and bosses can wipe your team with AOEs) and team cohesiveness is much more important. This also has the benefit of not increasing the base difficulty of the game and alienating the player base even further.

Currently, to a lot of top players, vet dungeons are a complete joke. Some of them can be soloed, some can be ran with 4 dps, quite a few can be ran without a dedicated tank or healer, and in general most mechanics can be totally ignored or bypassed with high group dps (I'm looking at you Planar Inhibitor). Crypt of Hearts II is actually a pain in the ass for good groups because you can get the final boss to 35% before he even spawns one set of wraiths, let alone 2 sets, leaving your team running around doing nothing until the 4 wraiths spawn. Vet maelstrom arena isn't much different since most bosses can be killed in 30 seconds or less. DSA is the hardest content outside of trials, and even that isn't particularly difficult outside of the few high damage attacks.

The master difficulty could add a few new things to the game that I think top players would like. First and foremost, the content would need to be challenging on the level of HM trial bosses where you are severely punished for making mistakes, total incoming damage is high, and you need to maintain high dps/heals and control the fight through all of this. Don't interrupt that channeling enemy? One or more players die. A melee heavy enemy isn't taunted and uppercuts your healer? Dead. Also boss and add health needs to be increased significantly. You shouldn't be able to kill a boss before you get to see their mechanics. It's been months since I've had to pass the pinion around on the Inhibitor, I've never ever had to kill the healing/cc adds during the Bogdan fight, and the Lord Warden can be killed without having to go through a single portal.

To compensate for this increased difficulty, rewards also need to be increased. It has always kinda irked me that you cannot get any gold dungeon set jewelry. I know it doesn't make a huge difference to your overall stats but if you look at any top end player their jewelry is always either IA/moondancer/alkosh/mending/etc. Part of this is due to the fact that the minor slayer bonus is so strong but it also increases the magic/stam/damage bonuses by a small amount so if you want to max your stats you have to use gold jewelry. This would also potentially add to build diversity as some sets might surpass the minor slayer buff since it doesn't really benefit executes on nightblades or templars. The other reward increase would come in the form of plunder from all bosses in the dungeon. Players that only play end game content and don't farm overland items and mats, do writs, or focus on selling things are usually fairly poor and this would add another avenue to make money. The last reward would come from having a weekly leaderboard for a random dungeon that gives a random gold reward from that dungeon similar to what there is for the weekly trial. This is all on top of the glory that comes from getting a high leaderboard score for each piece of content, which is the only thing that top players play for at this point.

The reward change for MA and DSA is a little different. Beyond adding plunder to each boss, I think at the end there should be a chest for each weapon type so your chance of getting a certain piece is significantly improved. People will probably dislike this bit as they feel that something like this should already be implemented in vMA and vDSA but IMO if you aren't easily able to beat these, vMA and vDSA weapons will give you less of an increase over cleaning up your rotation, build, and increasing your overall skill.

I feel that beyond the testing needed to figure out the required difficulty level, this could be implemented rather easily since no new content is actually being created. What do you think of this suggestion?