Liquid Flame is an example of how overly easy things are.

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Originally Posted by Kaurie

Honestly, it doesn't even have to be hard - just engaging and interesting.

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An encounter can't be engaging if you can ignore the mechanics regardless of gear level. It's possible to have easy mechanics that are punishing none-the-less like Megadeath.

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Originally Posted by Lambdafish

I still stand by the notion that pharos sirius was never too hard, it was just avoided because it was much harder than the alternatives, so nobody bothered running it, and this would create the same problem.

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There was also the problem where better gear actually caused all but the 3rd boss fight to become harder due to hp% based phases overlapping and overwhelming groups with adds even when mechanics were performed as intended. Gear made the other dungeons easier but it made Pharos Sirius harder.

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Originally Posted by basketofseals

An encounter can't be engaging if you can ignore the mechanics regardless of gear level. It's possible to have easy mechanics that are punishing none-the-less like Megadeath.

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I guess, I was agreeing with you. Sorry for the confusion. Yes, there needs to be more punishment for ignoring things. Weeping City may be a bit too far, as it's good if a group can more easily recover as well.

I think the difficulty level of dungeons at Amdapor Hard, Wandering Palace Hard and Keeper of the Lake was pretty good. It wasn't hard by any means, but it was engaging. Ignoring the bombs or placing them improperly on the first boss of Keeper of the Lake meant death.

I disagree with you there. Keeper of the lake was even easier than the current expert roulette at release. Same goes for the other two dungeons you mentioned. First boss of Keeper could be very easily ignored. Literally all Jr took to handle it was a Cos or an overpower and that mechanic was pretty safely handled. Even in the rare event one of the larger bombs was set off, it was easy for an attentive healer to heal through or mitigate the damage. The second boss was a snore, and the last boss didn't have any mechanics besides the dps check bird.

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Originally Posted by Thunda_Cat_SMASH

I disagree with you there. Keeper of the lake was even easier than the current expert roulette at release. Same goes for the other two dungeons you mentioned. First boss of Keeper could be very easily ignored. Literally all Jr took to handle it was a Cos or an overpower and that mechanic was pretty safely handled. Even in the rare event one of the larger bombs was set off, it was easy for an attentive healer to heal through or mitigate the damage. The second boss was a snore, and the last boss didn't have any mechanics besides the dps check bird.

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This is just patently false. The healing requirements for spam pulls were much higher, and the mechanics were much more punishing. The current expert at release, you could spam pull and Eos could solo heal it.

If the large bomb went off, on release, you died. As we geared up, you could out heal it, but it wasn't til quite late into the patch that it was easy to do so. Conversely, every mechanic in the new dungeons you can ignore 100% and people will not even drop to 50% hp.

The last boss had more mechanics than the last boss of Xelphatol. In both situations, you just dodge AoE's (which was way harder in KoL than Xelphatol) and in KoL you also had to DPS down the bird and activate the shield and get in it.

What healers were you playing with? I went in on the first day with my scholar that I hardly used and had no difficulties surviving two large bombs back to back, and I never even mained it, and spam pulls were being done of those dungeons since day one as well. In addition, the only hard part of the last boss was the dps check. All of his AoE are pathetically easy to dodge so long as you watch your positioning. Literally all you had to do as a ranged dps was stand to the side near the middle, and you could dodge literally every AoE without moving, except for the occasional blue AoE on the side you chose to park at. Seriously. It took me maybe half a run before I noticed that the edges are nearly untouched. The only one that had to pay attention was the tank, and that was only because standing on the wrong side with the wrong dragon lowered dps.

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Originally Posted by Thunda_Cat_SMASH

What healers were you playing with? I went in on the first day with my scholar that I hardly used and had no difficulties surviving two large bombs back to back, and I never even mained it, and spam pulls were being done of those dungeons since day one as well. In addition, the only hard part of the last boss was the dps check. All of his AoE are pathetically easy to dodge so long as you watch your positioning. Literally all you had to do as a ranged dps was stand to the side near the middle, and you could dodge literally every AoE without moving, except for the occasional blue AoE on the side you chose to park at.

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Either you are lying, or you are misremembering.

Anyway, I don't care to argue. It's not like the dev team has shown any sign of interest in actually improving the dungeon experience in the game.

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Originally Posted by Yudzster

ramp up the difficulty, people will complain

ease the difficulty, people will complain

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The problem is the scale of difficulty between Expert/mini raid to savage/Ex primals is still big. There is nothing that really fills that in between content to prepare players for savage etc. I also would of preferred it if they never nerfed savage and actually created mid core content to fill the gap.

I know some will disagree but I just dont think it scales up smoothly through the difficulties.

So many asked for another tier of difficulty for dungeons, while SE is already struggling with pushing out the current content and the 8-man raid only have 2 tier of difficulty. While i do hope for a real difficult dungeon, i don't think we will see it soon, at least not before they handed us another difficulty tier for 8-man raid. The next PotD, on other hand, could be developed to fill that niche though.

You can't have higher difficulty in dungeons unless you're willing to accept SE taking stricter measures to stop speedrunners (something I wouldn't be sorry to see play out at long last). That would start with harder hitting lower-tier enemies that even the most decked-out tanks would need to respect and not pretend to be Superman. Secondly, there would need to be traps equivalent to PotD in each dungeon to make groups really think about pulling whole rooms (Let's see how bada$$ a tank is after tripping a Toading trap with 10 enemies in tow. If I'm the healer of that group, I'd be wishing for a "sipping tea" emote right there). Thirdly, there have to be Zelda-like puzzles that must be completed to open doors or reveal keys. These three elements would certainly make dungeons more challenging and expose the blusterers who talk crazy about XIV being "too easy".

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Originally Posted by Hayward

Snip.

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I'm sad I only have one like to give. Anything that stops speed running is A-OK in my book.

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Originally Posted by Exiled_Tonberry

How about this then. Make the story dungeons easy, and the optional dungeons a bit more difficult.
Say, if Xelphatol is 210ilv, then Gubal would be 230ilv. Most people playing casually can reach that and it would allow for a more challenging and fun experience.

Sometimes I like to feel like a healer in dungeons, not a DPS that occasionally heals every 40 seconds or so.

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That would be a nice step towards something better imo, but even at i230 minimum by the time the average item level of parties hits i250-i260 its just faceroll again :/

So maybe they could start trying that though and see the response and then maybe they can start adding some dev time into making some extreme versions of the dungeons that offer maybe a bit higher item level versions of the gear it drops, maybe dyeable if possible, and hopefully a bit more of a tome reward for taking on the higher difficulty. You can't make the rewards too much higher though I don't think...because they don't want to alienate people who enjoy just doing the easy modes or the people where the easy modes are difficult enough for them.

Yeah I definitely like to heal and push my limits so I am with you on that. Just have to remember that a lot of us have been grinding weekly tomes since 2.0 launch so sometimes people might just want to get it done quickly instead of doing something difficult every day so I think we might need to have both modes; the Expert we have now and then Expert Extreme or something that offers a bit more rewards? I don't know just rambling thoughts I had and trying to think about what other points of view might think about difficulty changes :)

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Originally Posted by Hayward

You can't have higher difficulty in dungeons unless you're willing to accept SE taking stricter measures to stop speedrunners (something I wouldn't be sorry to see play out at long last).

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A higher difficulty would in itself be a deterrant for speedrunning. You can't speedrun if you actually have to heal and mitigate for each pack of mobs.

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Originally Posted by Hayward

You can't have higher difficulty in dungeons unless you're willing to accept SE taking stricter measures to stop speedrunners (something I wouldn't be sorry to see play out at long last)....

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Very true, I'm sorry I only have one like to give. This is why I liked it when dungeons first came out for a while they weren't able to run through them, didn't last long but I enjoyed my moment. Things like poisons and vulnerability, silences like in PoTD where it lasts for a while, potent paralyze, tank busters ..things that could be dispelled. Of course all of your suggestions in itself would make the dungeons a ton more fun and stop the "I'm going to pull big". They talked about dungeons in 4.0, lets see what they do.

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Originally Posted by Zojha

It is powerful heals that allow you to ignore non-lethal mechanics, because the damage you took has no consequence....

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This reminds me of a SCH I met doing roulettes. We were in Cutters Cry and we were doing just fine until the second boss. The Sludge was killing people, he couldn't keep them up. He wasn't level 40 yet so he didn't have Leeches. He did have Fey Caress, but had to use Whispering Dawn. We found out after that he was very low in gear and ilv. We explained about gear and he said he would like to try one more time and if it was that bad he would leave and gear up, come back. We said sure. This time though took some extra pre-cautions such as using HQ Potions with their shorter cool downs. Anyways, we got over it and we did a full run for gear. Got him some real nice upgrades that made the boss a bit easier. In the end he explained, he didn't do it because he was being lazy but that the game up until this point has been such a breeze he's never had an issue and just upgraded what he could as he could.

This goes back to what you said about how powerful heals are. I was wondering, instead of decreasing the power of the heals. Would it be a bit better to have that debuff appear more that decreases the amount of HP healed? The only ones that come to mind are the spiders in Tam Tara Hard Mode, but they die so fast I can esuna as I dmg deal and he lives. Sure the ability in itself is manageable still like I just mentioned, but add that with a pack of mobs that one gives a frontal attack that adds a DoT but has decent damage. The two paired up..might be nice.

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Originally Posted by Zojha

It is powerful heals that allow you to ignore non-lethal mechanics, because the damage you took has no consequence. The healer won't run risk of going OOM because he has to heal the damage you took and he won't risk having to let the tank die because he's busy fixing your error either. He'll dip out of cleric stance, hit Essential Dignity/Lustrate/Tetra, maybe throw a HoT and then go back into cleric stance. The error is fixed in under 5 seconds with one or two casts at negligible mana cost. This trivializes any mechanic that isn't completely unforgiving and why all "hard" encounters rely on lots of insta-kill and wipe mechanics.

As for mass pulls - that one is a little bit more complicated because it's indeed a matter of incoming healing vs incoming damage, as the stream is continuous. So you "can" theoretically work with increasing the damage, reducing the mitigation or reducing the incoming healing.

Reducing the mitigation might be warranted to some degree, but it makes tanks feel less tanky and the mitigation tanks contributes far less to the effective HP than healing. If you heal a tank with 15000 HP that mitigates 50% of all incoming damage for 4000 HP, you have contributed 8000 effective HP to his health pool. In order to achieve the same effect, he would need to get 4000 HP via gear or mitigate 60% of all damage - except then the heal would be worth around 10k effective HP. And that's just a single heal here, not multiple. That's why 3-man runs without a tank can usually continue with little issues, whereas 3-man runs without a healer result in people dying, wipes and standstill.

The issue with upping the damage instead of nerfing the healing is that it only makes things more unforgiving - In the extreme case of powerful healers and powerful damage, a healer could heal to full every second and mobs could get you to 1% every second. Now that's stress-free gaming, right? We are already at the point where healers can crit you for over half your health in a single, spam-able spell. How hard do you want to make mobs hit to match that? At this point, the issue is healer power, not the incoming damage. It's not one bit surprising that despite their low mitigation, healers rank highest in PotD. They are also the only role that has a skill flat out disabled in PvP for balance sake. How much more obvious do things have to get? >_>

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I wont say heals aren't powerful because yeah they are.

but its not the core problem really. I think it's how these mechanics are triivailised in most content.for example you can clear the current expert dungeons without even having a healer in your party. take a tank and 3 dps off you go with next to no negative impact from missing a healer. hell taking a third dps actually makes things easier in many cases. globals last boss with 3 dps barely even gets gets to do anything to you..

the problem is how weak everything is more than how powerful healers are because even without healers you can still smash a huge amount of the games content and can still laugh at a lot of those non lethal mechanics..