Strongboxes are really not in a good place right now

tl;dr: Strongboxes bad, need improvement.

Currently the best way to interact with strongboxes is to completely ignore them. The monsters spawn very inconsistent and all over the place, to the point where it gets hard to keep track where they even are (maps with corridors where monsters spawn seemingly around two corners especially). The black smoke completely obscuring vision of any ground effects is just awful. Especially with the strongboxes themself also having quite often dangerous modifiers. I get what is being tried to achieve here thematically, but from a gameplay perspective with so many potentially lethal effects it just doesn't work. On top of all that the rewards are simply not worth the effort, as they seem to drop basically the same loot as any random normal or magic monster pack, regardless of the rarity.

Strongly agree (pun intended)

I think the rewards are fine tho.
It just takes way too long.

Make them like PoE1 or maybe 2 cycles of spawns. And spawn the monsters around the strongbox (in a map with walls, sometimes you have to walk miles to find them)

If they fix that I think they are good enough to spec into.

These things are worse than the trials. Sometimes I wonder how they take this many steps backwards on a mechanic.

Opening strongboxes takes waaay too long is just boring. The rewards for all the waiting are simply not worth it, the only reason for me opening/waiting them is the lack of waystone drops.