Change the structure of the 4-dungeons, maybe?

[Sylvain]

I would love something along the difficulty of WoW Cataclism Heroic Dungeons. They were not overly hard but you could easily wipe if you failed the strat just once.
You actually needed to know the strat. Pull required CC, we dont have so a "good" fix could be to make Mass Pull a much harder thing to do. More priority target would be nice and removing ground mark could also greatly increase the difficulty.
But as people pointed, these dungeon are catch up. So all these change would probly fit a new difficulty mode better.

[Lambdafish]

I'd like to see dungeons with 1 tank, 2 heals, and 2dps. That would allow for much more difficult content without a massive burden on the healer

[xJimmehx]

Id like to see 1 tank, 1 healer and 4-6 dps so we have faster queues and faster dungeons. I get sleepy during trash pulls in almost any dungeon so the faster we shread through them the better. Or just lower the health of trash. Even with all 4 people hitting them they still take longer to die than overworld mobs. It would be great if it were closer to the same. 1v1 overworld monster = same time as 4v1 dgn monster.

[Iromi]

1.x cutters cry and aurum vale had very interesting mechanics.

In cutters cry - you had to split up your pt (dungeons were 8 man, and a lot more fun) and kill the ants at the same time in separate rooms to open the next path. In aurum vale there was certain parts of the instance that had a poison effect and you could stop and rest at certain points..also had to kill peculiar mobs to open the next part. Also every boss fight in 1.x dungeons actually was a boss fight...not push overs by any means.

Why not give us dungeons like that again, can still keep the face roll ones but let us do these for more tomes or better rewards ^^ they just need to make things a little dynamic. 1.x had the perfect balance of it imho.

[Sida]

The party split would be interesting thing in 4 man's. Not necessarily "kill mob the same time" sort of coordination, but need to have killed mobs oractivate a platform in few separate paths at the same time to unlock way forward. Idea that's actually used to some extent in 24 man dungeons.

[Sylvain]

In my opinion, the problem with dungeon isn't the trash trash trash trahs boss system.

It's that the current trash is not really interesting in itself and offers no interesting and engaging gameplay.


I am well aware that dungeons are meant to help player catch up with gear. Unfortunately, most people spend quite some time in these "catch up" places which, unless your whole group has the minimum gear requirement, offers no challenge and become rather dull because of it.

This has been discussed many times, offering different dungeon difficulty.
WoW has pushed the concept to the extreme to the point many player actually prefer "raiding" dungeon with a small group of 4 close friend than doing raids.
In WoW, a dungeon has 3 difficulty. Normal (which you essentially steamroll like in FF unless everyone has minimal gear requirement), Heroic which aren't all that hard and are usually lower level dungeon tunned for high level playstyle. You can steam roll them but it takes quite some gear and it doesn't get even close to what you can do in FF (In WoW term, no need to cc and you can pull 1-2 pack at once).
To put it in perspective with 2.5, if you were to do an expert in heroic mode with players, your team of 240-250 would have some hard time and could easily wipe on a multi pull. Most boss aoe that are meant to be big dmg dealer could oneshot them. A group of 265-270+ would still be able to do like we currently do in expert. But it would still be much harder. (Don't expect your healer to squeeze 5 gravity and have the tank still alive for instance). Big dmg aoe won't one shot you, but you can't take more than 1.

And then comes Mythic.
So mythic dungeon are simply Heroic dungeon with buff coefficient and new effects coming into play. You access these with a keystone that you can upgrade everytime you complete the said dungeon.
The level of the keystone represent the dungeon difficulty.
At some point (difficulty 15) the dungeon gets really really hard, you need CC optimal gameplay and they basically start turning into your classic savage raid, on a smaller scale.
For instane, let say you were to do Sohm Al (Mystic +15), don't expect your tank to survive any cleave from the boss. The nuke-like aoe will effectively require cooldown and good positionning to survive and everyone will be very high level gear and play top notch.
On a side note, with their last patch they upgraded the difficulty of all heroic dungeon to match the new power creep. Making all dungeon + the new one available in the expert with an "evenly" difficulty.

So, would this system work in FF? Probably, do we want an exact copy? Perhaps no. Every system has its pros and cons.

One of the biggest issue in FF however is the dungeons list in every roulette
The expert contains 2
The 60 contains 2*number of patchs+3

Since most player get their daily reward from the expert, it is obvious why people get bored.
We do the same dungeons too often.
Also, the 60 roulette tends to prefer the 150 memoquartz dungeon making older dungeon extremely rare. I can't recall the last time I went to the Flying Bird-tribe island dungeon.
Not even considering the leveling 52-59 dungeon who aren't that bad actually. Gubal library have some fun boss that would perfectly fit the "mystic" dungeon system in WoW. (Imagine how challenging these boss could be)

So, here what I think could be done to help this dungeon crisis and make SE actually use the god damn content they create. I'll cover what could be done to every roulette in SB.

I will also add a new mechanic named "Call for Arms" where you're asked to queue as up to three different roles (A menu pop up and you can click which roll you can fullfil with which job. The game then check you actually have an equipement set of each role saved before allowing you to do so and will look at the ilv saved on each role. A new player who only posses a BLM lv 32 can't queue as a tank if he has no tank gear and job saved). The queue will then determine which job is the most needed and queue you accordingly. Obviously, if you wish to join as a DPS only, you only check "DPS". Call for arms are not daily and offer a bonus everytime the function is used. Call for arm is spammable. Less rewarding than the daily bonus, but still reward offers rewards.
Also, Call for Arm windows show which roll is needed. If you queue as one of these role you get a secondary reward bag

Leveling Roulette: Contains all dungeon from 18 - 69
Daily Bonus : Exp increased to help lower level get through their content faster. Especially ARR
Call for Arm: If leveling: Bonus Exp, If max level: Bags of goods including tombstones.

LV 70 roulette: Contains all max level dungeon including the new one.
The game seek for your queued item level and limit yourself to the highest available dungeon. If a dungeon A requires 320 and dungeon B requires 340, and your ilv is 330, you'll be queued for 320 and not for 340.
Daily Bonus: No change, offers a boost in tombstone
Call for Arm: Grant an additionnal bonus bag if you were queued as a rare role.

Expert roulette:
Expert dungeon have a higher difficulty which is increased every patch
For instance, assuming in 4.0 the relic gear ilv is 400. the Expert roulette would have a 380 requirement and offer 390 ilv rewards.
Next patch, new gear is 430, expert roulette gear requirement increases to 410 and offers 420 ilv equipement.
Also, all gear dropped from bosses are synced to the new ilv.
Daily: no change
Call form Arm: Grant additional tombstones.


Now, Expert roulette would offer more challenge than the current one not only because the gear gap is smaller. But also by design. These are suppose to be content for people who have already catched up. Someone cannot be under 10ilv of the max ilv offered by tombstones.
But, I believe many player would like some more interesting challenge. Me included.

Savage Roulette:
Every week SE select one 70 dungeon. On patch day, the new dungeon would be prefered. Savage roulette offer material that can be used to upgrade gear in the same fashion Raid does. Except that it only increase by 5ilv to prevent power creep and keep them hard every week.
There is no daily nor call for arm and no call for arm.
Ilv requirement is high. If on 4.0 relic is 400 ilv, than 395 ilv is required. There is no requirement for premade group

Beside adjustement to dungeon boss health, damage and perhaps mechanic (new effects could be added, for instance, ground telegraph are invisible. One exploding goo cannot be stunned (interrupt the explosion). The lizard boss scream applies the weakening debuff for longer to all part member. Trash mobs can also get new interesting mechanics.
The goal is however to make mass pulling impossible and make the whole dungeon challenging.

Reward: Savage Dungeon come with 5 bonus objectives.
Completing each objectives award one "star rank reward"
Only one reward per rank can be acquired every week.
To obtain the 5 star reward, you need to complete the 5 objectives.
There is no specific order, if one objective is failed, it will be grayed in the objective list.
3 objectives are staple and will never change.
2 are dungeon specific.

1- Finish [Insert Dungeon Name]
2- Finish [Insert Dungeon Name] under 30min (here, this must be really challenging and can't be achieved without player doing really good dps.
3- No one dies
4- Kill [Boss A] before [X Event] happens three times
5- Kill Nidhog without Estinien health going under 80%

So assuming you got a handful of relic and have overall good gear.
This should be feasible but very hard. Especially #2 which would be the usual blocker for players to get ★★★★★ 5stars.
Completing the savage always grants a one star bag at least.
Each bag can only be obtained once.
You cannot farm ★ bag by spamming the savage dungeon
Technically speaking, anyone being very careful and taking their time can complete ★★★★. Only ★★★★★ is the real deal.
Again, reminder, all of the above objectives must be met within one dungeon session

★ : 1 rank VI materia item - 100 none relic tombestone
★★ : 300 none relic tombestone, 100 relic tombestone
★★★: Item to upgrade accessory by +5 ilv
★★★★: Item to upgrade armor by +5ilv (requires 2 for chest and pants)
★★★★★: Item to upgrade weapon by +5ilv (requires 6)



The system could be expanded and improved.
But, something like this would, I believe, be a step in the right direction.
The call for arm mechanic might be hard to implement and isn't really required.
We can live without it.

The most interesting part would be the implementation of something akin to these savage dungeon.
FF14 has a great variety of dungeon and many bosses have actually interesting mechanic.
But no matter how good a mechanic can be, if it deals 10% of players health. No one will notice it and the boss will become a boring tank and spank.

What do you guys think. (I tried to be more creative than "do something new")

[Acidblood]

@Sylvain

Sounds interesting, especially the change to 'Expert' (and addition of 'Savage') roulette... i.e. actually making it a 'hard mode' of the existing dungeons, instead of just the 2 'new' dungeons. I would also love to see this retrospectively applied to older (e.g. level 50) dungeons, as a lot of them are generally more interestingly designed than the current dungeons. Of course, this would require a fair bit of upfront effort, and new systems to make dungeons scalable etc. however in the long term it would mean that all dungeon designs could remain 'current', mid-core / hard-core players would have something to do outside of weekly raids / tomestone runs, and the existing easy mode dungeon progression (for people playing catch-up, etc.) could be preserved.

As for the 'Call for Arms', it sounds a bit like the adventurer in need, but yeah it would be nice to able to queue as several different roles (especially for 24 mans) in order to get the fastest queue without having to try and work out that you are actually waiting on a Healer / DPS (it happens..) even though it says Tank in need.

[Molic]

--snip--

I think that your ideas are pretty great sylvain, they expanded on the current system without having to create something completely new and refresh old content. It would be nice to actually have the boss mechanics do something also besides "10% of the player health". Even at minimum ilvl requirements you don't notice some of the boss mechanics at all currently.

The 5 bonus objectives you mentioned for the savage dungeon is actually pretty similar to how the 1.0 dungeons worked, depending on what you did in the 1.0 dungeon you got an extra chest at the end for a total of 5 chests. In 1.0 the objectives were to beat the boss, beat the dungeon in under 12mins, kill certain mobs, do things in a certain order etc. They could populate more chests at the end of the final boss like 1.0 also depending on objectives completed.

[ArielLoha]

I would like dungeons that confuse you. Antitower could of been fantastic if they changed our camera so we were actually upside down.
Even changing the controls completely like a mirror dungeon up is down left is right.

I've had this boss attack idea for a while now where it flips every ones directional buttons to their opposites for 5-6 seconds. Up is down, down is up, left is right, and right is left. And everyone would need to navigate out of an AoE or something.

Then a secondary attack could be switching the camera to opposites also. If they really wanted to mess with people they could do both at the same time.

I think it would be great, and hilarious, in a 24 person raid. Imagine if Ozma did this!

[seekified]

I'd like to see dungeons with 1 tank, 2 heals, and 2dps. That would allow for much more difficult content without a massive burden on the healer

Considering I spend 75-90% of dungeon runs not healing, I don't think that'd be the weak link if they increased the difficulty. I'd say poor DPS is still the greatest vulnerability in most runs, and 1 tank, 1 healer, 3 DPS parties would mitigate that as well as speed up queues for DPS players.

As for the actual dungeon designs, I'd love random mechanics that prevent all runs from being exactly the same - a rock blocks a path on one run, but blocks a different path the next run, or something like that. Not something that'd mean one path is slower than the other, but just different. Also, we really need actual Hard Mode dungeons that are worthy of the name. They could be slower and more difficult, but offer more tomes as an incentive. Just something to break the slog of expert roulettes that I could tank in my sleep.