Difficulty doesn't equate to creativity. I'm all for dungeons being more difficult, but the current design of the dungeons are entirely the player bases fault lol.
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The worst penalty for somehow failing to successfully manage a wall-to-wall pull is someone saying something nasty about you on these forums or reddit. That's it. There is no experience loss. The whole dungeon doesn't reset. You don't lose your expert roulette bonus.
There is nothing to lose, so players are going to pull wall-to-wall even if it was harder. Part of this is the developer's choice and part of it is how players play the game... coupled with developers then catering to what players want.
I think rolling all current expansion max level dungeons into the expert might help the monotony a bit. I imagine the queues are significantly slower for any other than the current 2, and it's not like HW/StB anymore where they introduced the expert roulette because there's only MSQ max level dungeons now, no more optional ones.
Aetherfont actually made me angry my first time through because after 4 months of waiting for a new dungeon, all of the bosses died like 5 seconds into the chorus, and this was day 1. I guess there's a good chance your party is made up of better than average geared players on day 1 but like, cmon. Dungeons have to be more than just Soken and the environment design teams trying to carry the weight of battle design.
The fact that there's so many other ways to get weekly tomes nowadays should be a reason the dungeons SHOULDN'T HAVE TO conform to hallway with wall, boss, hallway with wall, boss, hallway with wall, cutscene, endboss, and with mechanics never going beyond 'dodge the thing on the ground'. Like, Coincounter might be "too hard" nowadays, but the Chimera still exists and you still don't get a visual for Ram's and Dragon's Voices.
If they're not going to enforce an ilvl on the dungeon capable of making bosses last as long as a fate boss solo, or not going to make trash that is at least memorable in some way, they should at least reverse the paradigm where a boss follows its rote pattern until it's dead for these smaller encounters. Go back to % based HP phases like ARR thru HW, because as it is the dungeons are harder for folks with less gear mechanically, not just from the stat difference.
Raise your hand if you've ever been in a group with low DPS and been surprised when a boss did a pattern you haven't seen before.
24 mans are the same way, lately. You'll just skip anything interesting the boss does if your group is too strong like you're unsyncing the damn things.
Even within the hallway dungeon design there's fun and there's boring.
The full pull in Doma Castle from the first boss to the second is loads of fun.
As a tank, for example
- you want to pop sprint right before the first mob is triggered to aggro you to get its full duration in combat
- sprint down the hallway grabbing the additional triggers
- dodge the cannon fire by sidestepping into a small safe space instead of stopping
- grab group 2
- probably use a super potion to heal off some autos as your sprint's expiring and your healer might be tempted to stop and cast otherwise
- dodge through the cannon fire again
- grab group 3
- either invuln or start mitigating like hell while getting ready to stun the mob that randomly AoEs the backliners
And then the fight itself happens while the cannons on both sides of you continue to fire, constraining the battle area in a more exciting way than just having walls there. It's still only ~3 packs worth of enemies, but it's technical, exciting, and gives a chance to show off dungeon knowledge and tank soft-skills like solidly establishing aggro on the run.
Compare to 3-pack pulls in ShB+. You sprint down the hall, grab pack 1, grab pack 2, grab pack 3, and then park.
You can't excuse the badness of ShB/EW dungeons by pointing to mistakes from ARR anymore. We know how to have interesting gameplay in hallway dungeons. CBU3 just isn't doing it. They're spending their labor budget on visuals and phoning the rest in.
I love this dungeon. All blue in the cavern.