People that say dungeons are too easy...

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Originally Posted by Rithy255

I think for one damage spikes in wall to wall pulls should come back, and or even stopping tanks from being walled off (until boss) so more experienced tanks can large pull again

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Because nothing said "difficulty" like a melee job attempting to attack mobs with overlapping AoEs that are surrounding the tank.

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Originally Posted by Akonyl

I'm not really looking for hard challenges from dungeons, but as a DPS player I do wanna have to use my brain a bit. It seems like for the most part, doing wall-to-wall depends on the tank+healer, and not so much the dps. The dps has to kill the stuff quick enough, but unless it's super egregiously bad dps, if the party wipes because the tank ran out of CDs when the fight dragged too long.

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I see this happening suprisingly often, that the tank and healer will run out of mits because of bad DPS during w2w pulls.
DPS might not feel rewarding to play, But when I play healer or tank, its extremly easy to notice dps performance being good or bad.

"You think dungeons are too easy? What, you wanted to be criterion hard????"

You seem to think, like the developers, that there is no in-between.

I think another thing to keep in mind, at least when it comes to the trash pulls, is that the trash in the dungeon just auto-attacks and uses a telegraphed cleave, line, or circle AoE with a cast bar. If they had little mechanics with them without changing how long they take to kill could make them much more enjoyable, and the mechanics dont have to be something difficult or complex.

Could be like 1 mob applies a "Healing Received Down" debuff, making the tank take way less healing, so you'd target it down first and then go back to AoEing, or another idea could be that the mobs explode at half hp and 0 hp, so you'd either want heavy mit on everyone, keep everyone topped off with healing or kill them one at a time... or just blowing everyone up anyways.

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Originally Posted by ReynTime

"You think dungeons are too easy? What, you wanted to be criterion hard????"

You seem to think, like the developers, that there is no in-between.

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I think the issue is more can they actually balance or make midcore content work in the first place, The game is designed in a way that it's either really easy even if you fail the dance fight mechs you get a vun stack and carry on, or one mistake leads to a party wipe.

This is pretty much the Issue with difficulty in the game, theirs just nothing in-between Easy or super difficult hard mode, so theirs no real way of players jumping into hard content without just diving into it failing over and over or looking at a guide and that's even if people want to do that content in the first place, not everyone wants to do either super easy or super difficult content. And it's not like the Jobs really have much to master anymore anyway.

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Originally Posted by KenZentra

I think another thing to keep in mind, at least when it comes to the trash pulls, is that the trash in the dungeon just auto-attacks and uses a telegraphed cleave, line, or circle AoE with a cast bar. If they had little mechanics with them without changing how long they take to kill could make them much more enjoyable, and the mechanics dont have to be something difficult or complex.

Could be like 1 mob applies a "Healing Received Down" debuff, making the tank take way less healing, so you'd target it down first and then go back to AoEing, or another idea could be that the mobs explode at half hp and 0 hp, so you'd either want heavy mit on everyone, keep everyone topped off with healing or kill them one at a time... or just blowing everyone up anyways.

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Sohm Al Hard is a good example of stuff like that. The slimes will self destruct if they don't die fast enough. People just stun them and continue aoeing. Any mechanic remotely interesting from dungeons packs will be optimized out of existence by the community almost as a reflex. In my opinion this is part of the reason mobs do more damage with autos then anything else.

I would say that more than the absence of difficulty when it come to dungeon, the main issues are gameplay and dungeon design which are both shallow and streamlined.

It remind me more and more of what you can find in a mobile game : No thinking, bare bone gameplay, flashy thing on the screen and boring reward.

I don't want complex hard fight that ask you to watch a 10 min guide because the mechanics are far to cryptic to be understand quickly. I want to be asked to kick/stun/prioritize target, i want more tool and situations to use them instead of just optimizing my damage output, i want to be stimulated instead of having my brain slowly shutting down as the dungeon goes on.

And while we're at it, if they could make easy to avoid telegraphed attack deal far more damage that would be nice, the easier attacks are to avoid the more damage they should deal.

Warcraft kind of lives in this alternate reality in terms of Dungeon difficulty; over there it's about overgearing the content as they have no type of syncing system and only when undergeared; is when mechanics tend to be somewhat challenging; although the gearing process used to be the carrot for WoW, gear was always drip-fed back in the day so it kept the gap of difficulty curves a bit wider than it is today in current retail.

That's not a issue FFXIV suffers from, the sync system always keeps content in pace with it's ilvl; with a bit of wiggle room here and there; there is no real overgearing unless you deliberately unsync; at which point rewards are moot unless it's mount/minion/glam/seal farming.

I remember my first time through Stone Vigil as a fledgling paladin way back in the 2.0 days. Our healer was a vet, but the rest of us were new. We had to work to get through it, largely due to a lack of kit, and stat bloat was not yet an issue. As a tank, I had to know what to pull and when (e.g. didn't want a patrolling dragon aevis to join the party unannounced), and enmity management was still a major thing. It wasn't a clean or particularly fast run, but I had a good time and I think the rest of the party did, too. We felt like we really accomplished something when we finished.

Criterion is a neat concept, but there are only three Criterion dungeons and the rewards suck. Meanwhile, there are 89 regular dungeons that are just facerolls at this point. Let's reuse current dungeons, but tune enemies and bosses for higher ilvls and add additional objectives (i.e. rescuing hostages or time challenges). I've had the idea of bringing back levequests, but using them to spice up dungeons by way of the aforementioned means. Leves can add another path for gear progression, while making older content more relevant, more challenging and, perhaps, more fun.

Unfortunately, as long as item levels continue to grow at an almost unchecked pace, normal content is tuned for solo players using Trusts, and optional content (deep dungeons, exploratory zones, V&C dungeons, etc.) is just abandoned by the devs when the next expansion rolls out, those of us looking for a little more challenge will still be left out in the cold.

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Originally Posted by Neoyoshi

That's not a issue FFXIV suffers from, the sync system always keeps content in pace with it's ilvl; with a bit of wiggle room here and there; there is no real overgearing unless you deliberately unsync...

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This isnt really true, aside from dungeons that have specific iLvl syncs on them, which is typically the last dungeon of the expansion's story. Most dungeons do not have a tight iLvl Sync, for example The Dead Ends requires 540 iLvl but syncs down to iLvl 570, a 30 iLvl difference while Smileton requires 540 iLvl, but syncs down to 600. Doing Smileton at 540 and at 600 iLvl are going to be very different in terms of difficulty.

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Originally Posted by Lium

This is partly true. But WoW dungeons from vanilla and TBC required CC, strategy good group composition and tanks would only pull a pack at a time. Sometimes you would even have to pull strategically or risk aggroing another pack which would result in a wipe.

And classic dungeons like Blackrock Depths and Maraudon could take hours to complete fully.

Wrath of the Lich King is what started the YOLO pull everything, with dungeons being super easy, barely an inconvenience. Players, similar to what is happening now in this community, began complaining that dungeons were way too easy. So Blizzard responded in the next expansion Cataclysm, by making dungeons a lot more challenging.

Everyone hated it.

So, they went back to the YOLO pull snoozefest and that's where they've been ever since. If you want a greater challenge, you have to run mythics. Maybe players here want something similar. I will say this may be a case of forum posters not being what the majority of the playerbase actually wants.

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The comparison made was between current XIV and current WoW, which reached its difficulty levels beyond Heroic more than a decade ago and has had M+ for over 7 years.

And many still consider Cataclysm to be the best period Normal/Heroic dungeons ever had. Dislike for any difficulty in dungeons was far from unanimous.

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Originally Posted by kayll

Wild times, set up CC on 5/6 targets in a trash pull or prepare to wipe lmao

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Unless you were running a Survival Hunter and/or there was the perfect mixture of mobs for your composition, hard CCing at least as many enemies as you have party members wasn't even possible. Nor was that amount of pre-fight hard CC (unless you mean something else by "set up") necessary unless the whole party was significantly underskilled and/or undergeared.

CC was essential, yes, but not to that point. Smart interrupts (DK had ~4 at the time by itself, and some other specs came close to that) and just 1-2 hard CCs on the most annoying but isolateable mobs was enough for decently geared and skilled parties and made dungeons far faster than sacrificing all AoE damage.

Cataclysm dungeons were a terror only for those equivalent to Ice Mages, won't damage-even-in-downtime healers, or those without utilities even on hotbars. For most randomly matched players, they caused some wipes, and not every party was guaranteed a clear without their knowing/learning at least parts of their spec and fights'/mobs' mechanics, but they were plenty manageable.

Difference being that WoW has Mythic Plus where you can scale the dungeon up as much as you want. Those mechanics that don't do anything on normal can and absolutely will slap you around on higher keys.

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Originally Posted by Rolder50

Difference being that WoW has Mythic Plus where you can scale the dungeon up as much as you want. Those mechanics that don't do anything on normal can and absolutely will slap you around on higher keys.

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I understand the point that you and others are making, but normal dungeons is where everyone starts when leveling. That's the baseline. How many casual players are doing higher keys? That would be like comparing the base raids of any other MMO to savage raids here. That not really and apples to apples comparison. It's more like an apples to caramel apples comparison.

And now I want some caramel apples.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

And many still consider Cataclysm to be the best period Normal/Heroic dungeons ever had. Dislike for any difficulty in dungeons was far from unanimous.

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This...doesn't feel legitimate. The sudden ramp up in difficulty of dungeons in Cata is near-universally given as a big reason Cata crashed, and the significant re-vamps they were given to tone the difficulty down considerably are further evidence of that. I spent years in WoW, both in-game and on the forums, and for every rare person I encountered who "liked" the original Cata dungeons, there were probably a dozen others who didn't...and even that rare one who did likely acknowledged the difficulty level was overwhelmingly disliked.

I know it's been parroted enough times, but I'd like at least to see some more interesting trash in dungeons. I know I saw a few people talking about trash mechanics but for the life of me I can't seem to find that discussion. There's plenty they could do without turning mob packs into mini-bosses, or whatever else people seem to think is going to happen if they made trash mobs any more involved than just standing there getting stunlocked to death.

People mentioned seeing more mobs that use the prey mechanic, tethering to a random player and focusing them. More of that would be nice.

I don't know if I've seen it in normal dungeons, but why not put sets of mobs among packs that enrage when the other is killed, getting a not-insignificant buff to their damage and attack speed.

Throw in the occasional mob that focuses the healer and also has stun immunity. Mobs with stun immunity is a thing I think the devs should use more often in general, but I feel like they're afraid to do because god forbid players getting upset that their wall-to-wall facerolling is met with even the slightest bit of inconvenience.

There's a decade worth of mob mechanics to pull from and iterate on, and too many good ones to just continue going with the 'vomits AoE puddle at random players feet every 3 seconds' garbage.

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Originally Posted by Lium

Quick preface. I have been playing WoW: Dragonflight for the past month or so and got a character to max level over there. I am maining a Havoc Demon Hunter. (It kind of goes with my reaper main here.:))

It takes no time at all to level a toon in WoW and it is an overall very shallow and empty experience, as most of the WoW community will readily tell you. (Just take a peep at their forums. It's just as bad as this one.)

But running dungeons is still the fastest way to level up, so I ran a bunch of Dragonflight dungeons and previous expansion dungeons on the way to level 60.

The dungeons are a complete joke, even at level 70. Everyone just ignores mechanics and the vast majority of boss fights are tank and spanks and they die in seconds. These are normal dungeons and if you want a greater challenge you run mythics, but normal dungeons is how you level.

Compare that to FFXIV dungeons where everything past level 50 has myriad one-shot mechanics that require you to be aware of your surroundings and to watch what the boss is doing. You are constantly tap dancing and doing the Hokey Pokey to avoid instant death. Especially in Expert dungeons.

I didn't have a care in the world while running WoW dungeons because mechanics in normal dungeons are inconsequential. I do, however, have to pay attention in roulettes because the moment I get complacent after running the same dungeon over and over again, I can die instantly. And sometimes do!

So, in your opinion, when you say dungeons here are too easy, what kind of challenge level are you looking for exactly? Should everything be on the level of Criterion dungeons?

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What one shot mechanics? What instant death? And no, Doom that can be dispelled/bar goes to 100 doesn't count since it is hilariously overgeared. You'd have to be trying to have that filled up to max.

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Originally Posted by Striker44

This...doesn't feel legitimate. The sudden ramp up in difficulty of dungeons in Cata is near-universally given as a big reason Cata crashed, and the significant re-vamps they were given to tone the difficulty down considerably are further evidence of that. I spent years in WoW, both in-game and on the forums, and for every rare person I encountered who "liked" the original Cata dungeons, there were probably a dozen others who didn't...and even that rare one who did likely acknowledged the difficulty level was overwhelmingly disliked.

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I've played about 16 years of WoW. More relevant to this point, I played through all of Cata, half of MoP, most of WoD. Across MoP and WoD among Challenge dungeon parties or in Dungeon Finder Heroics one of the most frequent complaints I'd hear was that there was no "real" dungeons outside of those requiring premades (and often dependent on being undergeared even then). Heck, I encountered far more irritable/angry/impatient/generally-upset parties in tBC and WotLK Heroics than in Cata Heroics.

Perhaps there were just fewer people running them --that's not something I can know beyond queue times, which were largely the same-- but for those who actually like dungeons for the dungeoning, instead of just for the Valor farm / grinding gear-currency, things were pretty damn good.

They were not particularly hard for people who at least mostly knew their spec and could at least mostly figure out mechanics, but they weren't a steamroll. But neither, a couple weeks in, was there any expectation of them being a steamroll, which in many ways made the experience far more enjoyable than WotLK. You had actual dungeons again, not just mere hallway sprints the speed of which was, above all else, determined by gear and just how gun-ho your tank was or could be made to be (WoW's version of "Pull to the ****ing wall, tank!").

* And for however much talk there may be Cata dungeons being intolerable, they had nothing on the toxicity-inducing speedbump that was Pit of Saron and Halls of Reflection in terms of the average quality of Dungeon Finder parties.

My hot take here is that the dungeons feel dumbed down because they require the trust AI to be able to do them, so you will never get interesting mechanics with trash before bosses. Even bosses have a hard time surprising you because it needs to be doable by the AI itself.

You cannot have an adventure without stakes, and gameplay wise the stakes are always to lose or wipe, but nothing Endwalker from the 2 years I've been playing has been threatening, maybe I saw a couple of wipes at the beginning of Smileton but after 6.1 it never happened again.

Some of the design decisions this expansion feel like a response to what the devs think the players find fun. People figured weird openers to have a 6 min buff aligment? Well let's make a 2 min buff aligment so everyone can do that easily. People liked wall to wall enemies and had to do some work not everyone could do to kill big amounts of mobs? Well let's do without aggro and make AoE as simple as possible so everyone can do it, cuz that's what players find fun right?

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Originally Posted by Striker44

This...doesn't feel legitimate. The sudden ramp up in difficulty of dungeons in Cata is near-universally given as a big reason Cata crashed, and the significant re-vamps they were given to tone the difficulty down considerably are further evidence of that. I spent years in WoW, both in-game and on the forums, and for every rare person I encountered who "liked" the original Cata dungeons, there were probably a dozen others who didn't...and even that rare one who did likely acknowledged the difficulty level was overwhelmingly disliked.

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I loved the cata dungeons, but they were tuned too hard for queueing into with randoms. I did all the heroic dungeon achievements for the mount the first week or so of the expansion. As much as I would personally enjoy more challenging dungeon content, the experiences I've had in duty finder makes me think they're as difficult as they can be while still being able to consistently be cleared.

I think that the dungeon difficulty is mostly fine. However, a DPS check on each boss would be a nice addition. DPS are mostly irrelevant outside of Extreme, Savage, and Ultimate fights because those instances already have DPS checks.

Clear it in twenty minutes. There’s your DPS check, I’m not spending over a half hour.

All I really want from them is to be more than a long hallway where you grab 2 packs of mobs, hit a wall, do it again, fight a boss and repeat that 2 more times.

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Originally Posted by Volgia

My hot take here is that the dungeons feel dumbed down because they require the trust AI to be able to do them, so you will never get interesting mechanics with trash before bosses. Even bosses have a hard time surprising you because it needs to be doable by the AI itself.

You cannot have an adventure without stakes, and gameplay wise the stakes are always to lose or wipe, but nothing Endwalker from the 2 years I've been playing has been threatening, maybe I saw a couple of wipes at the beginning of Smileton but after 6.1 it never happened again.

Some of the design decisions this expansion feel like a response to what the devs think the players find fun. People figured weird openers to have a 6 min buff aligment? Well let's make a 2 min buff aligment so everyone can do that easily. People liked wall to wall enemies and had to do some work not everyone could do to kill big amounts of mobs? Well let's do without aggro and make AoE as simple as possible so everyone can do it, cuz that's what players find fun right?

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Nah, you have prey mechanics and healing down tethers in Amaurot, and that can be done with trusts. Amaraurot actually had pretty interesting trash for dungeons.

Sohr Kai has those fans that give you haste after you kill them. Exploding enemies like the ones at the beginning of Thalalia or the adds in Sephirot EX could easily be done with trusts; they don't aoe anyway. Trap enemies, like in Shisui, mimics like in Lost City of Amdapor, more debuffs, like Misery from the Gremlins in Holminster Switch, environmental hazards, like in Lost City of Amdapor, the first part of Dead Ends or the last part of Tower of Babil, enemies that spawn adds, like those gate things in Alzadaal's Legacy, miniboss enemies like that ghost thing in Sirensong Sea that you used to have to interrupt, or endlessly spawning enemies until an objective is fufilled, like the balloons in Xelphatol. Every expansion has had at least one dungeon with something to make trash interesting. They just won't do it consistently for some reason.

As far as boss attacks that can one-shot, the one I see most often is the final boss of Grand Cosmos. That one hits hard, mortal flame can easily put parties in a bad place if they're not coordinated or paying attention to wear the fires are hitting. That's a great fight.

Also, not a mechanic that'll kill you, but the debuffs you get from island hopping in Hullbreaker Isle's Kracken fight are a great idea. Give resources to the player that they must use, but give them downsides that the players will have to manage at the same time. Zombie/Mega Death is another good example of that.

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Originally Posted by Sacae

Nah, you have prey mechanics and healing down tethers in Amaurot, and that can be done with trusts. Amaraurot actually had pretty interesting trash for dungeons.

Sohr Kai has those fans that give you haste after you kill them. Exploding enemies like the ones at the beginning of Thalalia or the adds in Sephirot EX could easily be done with trusts; they don't aoe anyway. Trap enemies, like in Shisui, mimics like in Lost City of Amdapor, more debuffs, like Misery from the Gremlins in Holminster Switch, environmental hazards, like in Lost City of Amdapor, the first part of Dead Ends or the last part of Tower of Babil, enemies that spawn adds, like those gate things in Alzadaal's Legacy, miniboss enemies like that ghost thing in Sirensong Sea that you used to have to interrupt, or endlessly spawning enemies until an objective is fufilled, like the balloons in Xelphatol. Every expansion has had at least one dungeon with something to make trash interesting. They just won't do it consistently for some reason.

As far as boss attacks that can one-shot, the one I see most often is the final boss of Grand Cosmos. That one hits hard, mortal flame can easily put parties in a bad place if they're not coordinated or paying attention to wear the fires are hitting. That's a great fight.

Also, not a mechanic that'll kill you, but the debuffs you get from island hopping in Hullbreaker Isle's Kracken fight are a great idea. Give resources to the player that they must use, but give them downsides that the players will have to manage at the same time. Zombie/Mega Death is another good example of that.

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I agree those mobs are fun (I think to mention two others, the fairy dungeon in ShB with the trunks that tankbuster) but they have been absent for the past 4 patches. It would have made the last stretch to Zeromus so much more epic if the last dungeon felt more difficult than the everything that came before it. I feel like it's just lazy design at this point? I don't know. I'm so unsatisfied with the state of dungeons at the moment.

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Originally Posted by Ardeth

Also, I mean, what can you do to a dungeon to make it harder?

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"Tankbusters" that actually take more than 25% of the tanks total HP unmitigated

Frequent small aoe damage (think Barbariccia)

Big enemies that hit REALLY F*ing HARD in trash packs that have to be focused down first or CC'd and moved away so the group aoe don't hit them (requires DPS with CC to actually think instead of hurr durr flare goes BOOM)

Lots of ways.

Make all content difficult and I'll leave the game. I don't play this game for content like ex trials, savages or criterion. This content is completely irrelevant for me. Don't forget, FFXIV is supposed to be a theme park - there should be content for everyone. You get your hard content, I want to get my easy content. Everyone who says dungeons should be hard - are complacent. I don't see easy content as a 'steping stone' to harder content. I like it how it is and it should be kept like that.

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Originally Posted by fumofu

Make all content difficult and I'll leave the game. I don't play this game for content like ex trials, savages or criterion. This content is completely irrelevant for me. Don't forget, FFXIV is supposed to be a theme park - there should be content for everyone. You get your hard content, I want to get my easy content. Everyone who says dungeons should be hard - are complacent. I don't see easy content as a 'steping stone' to harder content. I like it how it is and it should be kept like that.

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For the most part I don't think people want to take away easy content. The issue is that almost anyone playing this game will have to play through dungeons. If they could be avoided, or if there were alternatives there would be less complaints. It's also not a binary divide between Savage and dungeons, some people want something in between as well.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

For the most part I don't think people want to take away easy content. The issue is that almost anyone playing this game will have to play through dungeons. If they could be avoided, or if there were alternatives there would be less complaints. It's also not a binary divide between Savage and dungeons, some people want something in between as well.

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They stop asking for easy content to be harder. Ask for totally separate content that is midcore.

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Originally Posted by Boblawblah

They stop asking for easy content to be harder. Ask for totally separate content that is midcore.

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I often comment about the consequences of changing the game on different player demographics. I'm not aiming to take anything away from you. It needs to be recognized that dungeons are a common content for all players though. When a there is a very wide range of player types in the same content, you might expect a large range of opinions on that content, and such is the case with dungeons. It still doesn't mean that dungeons as they are have to be replaced and I'd be very happy with a new alternative that with a higher difficulty curve, but with very real limitations on the developer side of things, I don't think it's unreasonable to at least propose rebalancing dungeons. If you disagree, voice your opinion or suggest your own ideas. My opinions are no more valuable than anyone else's.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

I often comment about the consequences of changing the game on different player demographics. I'm not aiming to take anything away from you. It needs to be recognized that dungeons are a common content for all players though. When a there is a very wide range of player types in the same content, you might expect a large range of opinions on that content, and such is the case with dungeons. It still doesn't mean that dungeons as they are have to be replaced and I'd be very happy with a new alternative that with a higher difficulty curve, but with very real limitations on the developer side of things, I don't think it's unreasonable to at least propose rebalancing dungeons. If you disagree, voice your opinion or suggest your own ideas. My opinions are no more valuable than anyone else's.

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The problem I have with rebalancing to suit the midcore players is that for them to feel like they're getting a good challenging experience, you'd have to make dungeons 5 times harder than they are now, which would absolutely destroy your casual playerbase (people like me). When I hear people unironically saying that Sastasha is the same difficulty as The Dead Ends I shake my head because for someone like me, although I can get through both of them, from my point of view, they're night and day in terms of difficulty. I can't even imagine what the difficulty would be like if it suited the midcore population. I'd simply stop doing dungeons unless there was a very easy mode difficulty.

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That said, I do appreciate people better than me but not wanting to get into hardcore raiding feeling like they don't have appropriate content to do. I do hope SE puts in some scaling content that the midcore people can chew on for a while.

It's like I said a few pages back: Most people can stand a dungeon being easy the first time for the story. It's brand new, there's the spectacle of the event (stuff like the Garlemald train, for example), you have the notes to read in some of them, and so on. The problem comes from having to run them over and over for tomes since they're the most efficient way of getting them.

The solution isn't to make MSQ harder (as some have expressed and as I said, many people don't want to move to harder content, so using dungeons to "train" them isn't a valid argument, especially since there are better places to do that, like Eureka/Bozja/Deep Dungeons/Criterion), the solution is to make separate content that's just as efficient but more difficult so the players wanting harder things to do to get their tomes have that avenue. It's really that simple, and we already have it: Just make a Criterion roulette and tune the tome rewards to be comparable to the time investment were one to run Expert roulette instead.

Then if the people wanting hard things keep running Expert, they have only themselves to blame and we'll all know they didn't want harder content, they wanted to force other people into harder content, which is unacceptable. They will have their option there. Indeed, Criterion should REALLY be flexed a lot more since it's such a great system. They could even, going forward, have it be the MSQ dungeon is just one path (a specific one) in the patch dungeon, and the Criterion just have the pre-dungeon 3 paths room and the other two paths to work on, and those doing Criterion roulette instead of Expert roulette get that with a random assigned path. Basically double-dip the assets and content to get your different versions, MSQ (one path), Criterion (three paths, the standard solo/friends group thing now), Variant (the hard one, roulette will pick a path for you, quing regular lets your party pick the path they want), Savage (same as today). Devs can actually save some asset/dev time doing this, too.

Either way, the solution is to give people that want hard stuff other stuff to do, not to make MSQ harder.

The idea of making MSQ dungeons "harder" is going to imply something different to a lot of people. I think bosses are fine, but my want is for dungeon trash packs to be more involved than just having to avoid AoE puddles on random players every few seconds. We already have involved mobs in a number of dungeons, I just want to see them more often. I don't really know what to say to anyone who would classify that as 'harder.' Even at level cap, dungeon trash is only about one step up from being the easiest thing to confront in this game. And no, I'm not saying "skill issue," I'm saying I don't want the lowest bar you could possibly find to be the bar for dungeon-format content.

Secondly, I think it's far more plausible for the devs to actually follow through on this simple request, than it is for them to just outright make a new subset of content to cater to people like me who want these changes. It's just trash mobs being more interesting. That said, I'm not opposed to a new subset of content to satisfy me, but I know better than to ask for it. The devs seem to have a lot of trouble with incremental difficulty with content on the lower end of the spectrum, and I'd rather they didn't just duplicate Criterion.

I'm all for the return of an optional, non-MSQ dungeon per-patch to fill this desired niche, though. They could share gear drops with the MSQ dungeons, as they used to do, and also give that extra bit of worldbuilding lore that people miss, too.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

Either way, the solution is to give people that want hard stuff other stuff to do, not to make MSQ harder.

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I have to slightly disagree, depending on what we mean by "harder".

I don't think MSQ should be much more punishing (except where whole mechanics are merely a tickle), and certainly shouldn't be any less intuitive or even much more complicated in what places complexity exists. But, it should have at least a bit more opportunity for engagement, which may in some cases require things not being so negligible. And it definitely shouldn't forbid trash from becoming more than a mindless slog.

The occasional wipe.. is fine. That said, I would much rather have wipes to a boss respawn us right in front of that boss room. I also wouldn't mind letting anyone rez in those dungeons (a la pre-Savage V&D-Ds). Heck, I wouldn't mind seeing Echo (purged upon killing the given boss), if it came down to it.

Would also give several limbs (not necessarily my own, but surely the thought still counts) for proportionately greater reward for Minimum Item Level runs.

And, tbh, I'd love it with made the max ilvl for content equal to or barely greater than that content's drops, so we can actually have a decent experience both on content drop and months later, with less merely/purely gear-dependent gaps on content for which that gear makes no difference except in providing unnecessary/excessive speed (reward per minute already being tuned basically around min ilvl). Because I'm a sadist, I guess.

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Criterion (three paths, the standard solo/friends group thing now), Variant (the hard one, roulette will pick a path for you, quing regular lets your party pick the path they want)

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...Isn't this the opposite? I could have sworn the one with variable pathing is Variant. The one originally suggested to have a psuedo-scoring system based around certain criteria is... Criterion.

If what you want to spread is the branching paths system (what you're calling "Criterion" here but I thought was "Variant"), not the single-path harder mode, then it wouldn't be nearly so easy to implement over existing dungeons and would require sacrificing much of their aesthetic cohesion and uniqueness as they nearly "Aquapolis-ify" those environments.

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The problem comes from having to run them over and over for tomes since they're the most efficient way of getting them.

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And there's the kicker: Make its rewards per minute less OP (by bringing the grind time per week required through other content down or bringing Expert Roulette's up to their times required) and there's a lot less pressure on dungeon design and play, both, to degenerate with all possible haste. Heck, balance Hunts, too, and you might even have *gasp*, something much more closely approximating actual content choice even when playing with few hours per week while wanting to fully progress or otherwise having the efficiency-itchies.
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A quick aside:

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Originally Posted by Renathras

Wait...what?

Trash - when doing wall-to-wall pulls - is the only thing threatening in dungeons. Tanks have to be more spot on in their defensive CD cycling and when DPSers aren't pulling their weight, it's more noticeable and Tanks can run out of defensives and see their health go to danger zone extremely quickly on big pulls.

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And is a wall-to-wall pull a single trash pack? Would you similarly be (still pretty easily) able to take on 3 bosses simultaneously?

Any why must three packs worth of trash collectively still have fewer mechanics/mechanical involvements than even a single (still fairly barren) boss? The only gameplay possible from them is entirely based on tuning relative to tank/healer sustain (since, yes, the DPS necessary is likewise dependent on the dynamics of tank/healer sustain -- aiming to kill before all resources are depleted), rather than offering anything original.

If the interest is in "doing more" with trash, then simply amping their tuning so that one is exposed to even less mechanical depth at a time clearly was not the intention.

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Originally Posted by Mayhemmer

Even at level cap, dungeon trash is only about one step up from being the easiest thing to confront in this game.

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Wait...what?

Trash - when doing wall-to-wall pulls - is the only thing threatening in dungeons. Tanks have to be more spot on in their defensive CD cycling and when DPSers aren't pulling their weight, it's more noticeable and Tanks can run out of defensives and see their health go to danger zone extremely quickly on big pulls.

Granted, this is just because of the unavoidable damage of a dozen enemies all beating on one person, but watch a Tank's health in a dungeon run sometime. You'll notice it being much more accordian-like on the trash pulls than the bosses in Expert roulette. Other than SPECIFICALLY tankbusters or the Tank standing in bad - that is, assuming in both cases the Tank is avoiding all avoidable damage - the Tanks' health will be going up and down a lot more wildly during the trash than any of the current bosses. Trash isn't interesting, but it's more deadly than bosses at this point. Take from that what you will.

As to the plausible - I disagree. The Devs have taken dungeons to the state they're in deliberately. It IS their intent. The proof is in the live-game: They literally added Criterion (with three difficulties) instead of increasing the difficulty of dungeons. They've already done the thing you are saying is less plausible than the thing you're asking to do, which is something they've explicitly done the opposite of.

Considering roulettes are how people gear who aren't doing Savages, you're not going to end up in a situation (at least not unless there's some huge shift that Yoshi P has given exactly zero indication of) where the roulette/MSQ dungeons are harder. Your best hope IS an additional roulette.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

I have to slightly disagree, depending on what we mean by "harder".

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Semantics. While "harder" is definitely an open-ended term, "harder than now" is pretty obvious. Additional complexity, damage, anything that reduces the odds of success vs the status quo. What IS a more complex concept to nail down is the one you used, "more opportunity for engagement". What does that MEAN? How do you do that in a way that a hyper-casual player WON'T see it as being harder? And WHY do you need that in MSQ dungeons SPECIFICALLY instead of in other content? Why SPECIFICALLY do MSQ dungeons/roulette need to be the thing changed?

"The occasional wipe.. is fine" - TO YOU. But not to everyone. (That said, I do agree resawning at the dungeon start and the "shortcut" always taking you to the prior boss room is kind of stupid.)

As for the side conversation: Criterion is the "base" version, right? That's what I was quing up and running solo earlier to unlock more of the paths alone. I've never done the Variant, though I notice the tab has only "Variant Raise" as the duty action...? So I assumed that was the medium one (as I haven't done any of those, I haven't unlocked the "Another" savage versions).

But as I say, which is harder to do per patch, make an entire dungeon and an entire SECOND dungeon with 3 difficulties, or make ONE dungeon with 4 difficulties? It seems to me the latter requires less work, since the "new" difficulty is on the bottom end and so would be the least dev resource intensive thing to do, not to mention save on asset, art, and mechanics designs of having to come up with things for the other dungeon. NOT ONLY THAT, it would actually mean if the casual player ever DID want to step up to the next difficulty, they would be familiar with some of the base mechanics (less punishing due to less damaging and longer time to identify and react to them), so this would actually help with that "casuals need to be taught mechanics so they can do harder stuff" thing.

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As for the end:

That's my point. And no, you don't need to make things more painful for casual players. As I say, make other things worth the tomes on an equal basis per average time investment. If the "hardcore" players then do the Expert anyway because it's faster (and easier), then they forfeit the right to complain about it since they have the harder alternative and are choosing to avoid it themselves.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

Semantics. While "harder" is definitely an open-ended term, "harder than now" is pretty obvious.

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Not merely semantics. There's "harder" as in "more to do", and there's "harder" as in reduced leniency. While both may contribute, they encounter diminishing returns separately.

Which was clearly the point -- the source and manner of difficulty, not merely the amount. As you clearly noticed from the other parts in that comment, so I'm not sure why you're portraying it in this way, short of just being rhetorically disingenuous?

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Additional complexity, damage, anything that reduces the odds of success vs the status quo

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That status quo which itself broke multiple status quos to make things as negligible as they are now?

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Originally Posted by Renathras

Wait...what?

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I'll simplify. I don't like criterion. It's too many steps above what I'm looking for, hence why I pointed out the devs having issues when making these steps in difficulty. I don't want criterion dungeons, I just want regular dungeons to have better trash. That's it. That's all I want. It's been done, I want it to be done more often. The challenge current dungeon trash provides is artificial in that you have to pull disconnected packs of mobs to even get to that point.

I don't want every one group of mobs to hit with the strength of multiple groups of mobs, for every group, in every dungeon. I want single packs of mobs to have more mechanics than just "vomits AoE at your feet" more often. I don't care if that's too much for the ever-nebulous "casuals" demographic.

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Originally Posted by Mayhemmer

I'll simplify. I don't like criterion. It's too many steps above what I'm looking for, hence why I pointed out the devs having issues when making these steps in difficulty. I don't want criterion dungeons, I just want regular dungeons to have better trash. That's it. That's all I want. It's been done, I want it to be done more often. The challenge current dungeon trash provides is artificial in that you have to pull disconnected packs of mobs to even get to that point.

I don't want every one group of mobs to hit with the strength of multiple groups of mobs, for every group, in every dungeon. I want single packs of mobs to have more mechanics than just "vomits AoE at your feet" more often. I don't care if that's too much for the ever-nebulous "casuals" demographic.

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That's the biggest thing. I'm for that, but stop making the dungeons hallways. Stop prioritizing speed clears. I want to do harder things. I want to do more challenging things, but that crowd of people are so damn uninviting. They will cry and moan until you can still grab the packs to the wall and aoe them down. And you know what? I don't find that interaction remotely interesting. It was interesting before because the game wasn't designed for it. Pushing wall to wall and healing it was a skill. Now it's the bottom level. If you can't do that, then you have no business queing, which is just absolutely stupid. Dungeons are such toxicity traps now. I did a snow cloak the other day, and I was healing. The tank was pulling wall to wall, and the dps weren't aoeing. I don't know why they weren't, but the tank threw a hissy fit and left. Leaving me the healer to have to heal two dps who didn't aoe. And what made it worse is he left after one pack, and we didn't get a new tank until the final boss. Which was fine. Healing is dirt easy, but he left because his style of play wasn't placated to, and I just adapted to it and tried to make the best of it. I just don't see a world where the meta isn't going to suck out the fun of your new tougher trash as well. Because the current dungeons are just boring enemy funneling tunnels. It's just a snooze fest all the way around.

If I end up running Piece of Content X multiple times, it will feel easier and easier over time, by virtue of increased familiarity. If I run roulettes repeatedly for, say, tomestones, the dungeons in them will all feel easier and easier over time.

Rather than focus on easier vs. harder, I'd rather the focus be on variety of mechanics and environments. Make them memorable. The problem is when content is so bland that it's not even worth remembering -- like what passes for a dungeon's hallways and trash packs these days.

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Originally Posted by AmiableApkallu

If I end up running Piece of Content X multiple times, it will feel easier and easier over time, by virtue of increased familiarity. If I run roulettes repeatedly for, say, tomestones, the dungeons in them will all feel easier and easier over time.

Rather than focus on easier vs. harder, I'd rather the focus be on variety of mechanics and environments. Make them memorable. The problem is when content is so bland that it's not even worth remembering -- like what passes for a dungeon's hallways and trash packs these days.

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Like Bartum's Mettle. You remember the not boss fight more than anything else. Or that AR raid with the math boss.

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Originally Posted by Ardeth

I'm for that, but stop making the dungeons hallways. Stop prioritizing speed clears.

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This, too.