FF 14 has the worst dungeons

The problem came about due to the fact people would pull wall to wall back when the game first came out and would do all in their power to ignore deviating from the main path in order to complete the dungeon as fast as possible. The dev team, in their infinite wisdom, decided to play into that by making all dungeons over time essentially a glorified hallway with a sprinkle of trash mobs here and there.

The dev team has a very bad habit of appealing to parts of the playerbase that try to do everything in their power to make things as monotonously efficient and sterile as humanly possible.

I really wish fun came first before efficiency more often when it came to all content in this game, period. :(

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Originally Posted by Arohk

i highly doubt that the "majority" of players even uses this system, does anyone have actual numbers?
There is no benefit in running with NPC's over players, usually a dungeon with NPC's takes twice as long to finish, the only reason i see to use this if you are playing late at night and can't find a party for anything.

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Other than dps queue times, there are two massive advantages. Lower-skilled players use them to avoid wasting the precious time of higher-skilled players, most of whom just want to get the dungeon done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Complementary to that, lower-skilled players can enjoy the dungeons at their own pace.

Thus lower-skilled players can safely run dungeons knowing they are not going to get laughed at on these forums by gaming gods, who seem to think anyone who isn't as good as them lack reading and observational skills, while the high-skilled players can min-max the snot out of the "braindead" dungeons.

But as I've noted elsewhere, if higher-skilled players want more difficult dungeons, the only solution is dual- or tri-mode dungeon difficulty. Because SQEX isn't about to gate the people they seduced with a once-compelling story via harder dungeons.

All that said, I don't think FF14 dungeons are boring because they're easy. They're boring because they are formulaic and rely almost exclusively for their challenge on DDR slop.

FFXIV dungeon bosses have been great, but the trash is still trash. A bit of a take, but I think designing dungeons around wall to wall pulls is doing more harm than good. It turns every dungeon into the same murder corridor. Combat in the spaces between bosses needs to be more varied so that the answer isn't just bulldoze through a bunch of random enemies.

Something something Criterion trash wink wink nudge nudge.
The only part of Criterion that I actually find pretty stellar (bosses are just doubling down on regurgitated obnoxious ddr raid mechanics).

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Originally Posted by Valence

Something something Criterion trash wink wink nudge nudge.
The only part of Criterion that I actually find pretty stellar (bosses are just doubling down on regurgitated obnoxious ddr raid mechanics).

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Agree so much. I first ran them with a friend, both of us commenting that the trash mobs were actually something a little different. Then we hit the boss and.... ah... this crap again.

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Originally Posted by mallleable

FFXIV dungeon bosses have been great, but the trash is still trash. A bit of a take, but I think designing dungeons around wall to wall pulls is doing more harm than good. It turns every dungeon into the same murder corridor. Combat in the spaces between bosses needs to be more varied so that the answer isn't just bulldoze through a bunch of random enemies.

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This. The murder bees in a few of the ARR dungeons is a good example of having an enemy you actually have to keep your eye on, otherwise they could potentially kill the Tank or another party member if the Tank failed to notice and pull them.

If there were at least 2 or 3 trash enemies per dungeon that you actually had to pay attention to and dispatch, stun, sleep; etc. In order to make sure they don't cause any sort of problems for player party, then I think trash mobs would be at least somewhat more enjoyable.

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Originally Posted by TakoyakiLala

This. The murder bees in a few of the ARR dungeons is a good example of having an enemy you actually have to keep your eye on, otherwise they could potentially kill the Tank or another party member if the Tank failed to notice and pull them.

If there were at least 2 or 3 trash enemies per dungeon that you actually had to pay attention to and dispatch, stun, sleep; etc. In order to make sure they don't cause any sort of problems for player party, then I think trash mobs would be at least somewhat more enjoyable.

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Agreed, and similar ideas could be applied to bosses as well. While there are exceptions, the typical boss arena fight is avoiding their attacks/mechanics while trying to maintain your offensive rotation. This isn't a lack of imagination, it's a complete absence of imagination.

To some extent maybe this goes back to the job kits. But even with the current ones we have sleep, stuns and interrupts that we rarely get to use. Perhaps the path to more interesting fight design is to require more than dps maximization and standing on the right pixel.

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Originally Posted by Mawlzy

To some extent maybe this goes back to the job kits. But even with the current ones we have sleep, stuns and interrupts that we rarely get to use. Perhaps the path to more interesting fight design is to require more than dps maximization and standing on the right pixel.

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You could make a case for dungeons having to be designed around the now equally boring and formulaic job kits...if they didn't already have this dungeon design pretty much since Stormblood, when job kits still included a lot more crowd control effects.

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Originally Posted by Mawlzy

require more than dps maximization and standing on the right pixel

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never gonna happen. this game from top to bottom is designed for log-brainrotten parsers

Regardless, people will always streamline and find the easiest, fastest, and least friction path. This applies to every single game, even those that offer ample variation and complexity.

That's why every single game under the sun has a guide on how to achieve the best, the fastest X. (The best build, the fastest gold, the fastest levels, the best specs, the best gear.. etc)