Castrum.... kinda sucks

Here's the thing: I get it, a 45 minute dungeon was... a bit of a strain with the cutscenes, but I mean, every interesting section of Castrum seems to have been pulled out of it. The stuff people actually ENJOYED while doing Castrum.

No longer are we the ones bringing the shields down in general, that's just Cid, and we're pretty much just helping him out with punching things. The long escort run, where there are cannons you can use to take care of any mobs that make it to the end with you? Gone. Actually, anything involving cannons are gone, as is the placing charges on the ceruleum processing plant, or bringing down the airship that's been hammering the area all dungeon. All of it has been dumped for incredibly ho-hum mob pulls/boss/mob pulls/boss/mob pulls/boss.

Anything that could resemble something fun to do got deleted. The mortars you can use against mobs at various points? Gone. Planting bombs in the Ceruleum plant? Yup, nope, can't have that anymore. Get to shoot down an airship into the last shield generator? Nope. Cid's gonna fiddle with a fuse box, while you just fight more mobs.

They even cut down the boss. She lost her freakin' mech, which would've been a nice way to tier the final boss-battle. Yes, it's nice that she has actual mechanics in the non-mech part, but did we really have to sacrifice every cool part of Castrum for this?

Here's where I stand on the previous version of the MSQ roulette:

- Only do it for the EXP bonus
- Alt tabbing during cutscene
- Semi AFK at times

This whole thing changes everything. It's vibrant, it's new, it's refreshing, and it's long overdue. Everyone suddenly can't go AFK. MSQ is now just another dungeon with unskippable cutscenes. Now, I completely agree that interactible cannons and flak cannons is a thing that is very excellent, and honestly lacking in nearly all dungeons after HW (there's the final steps of faith cannons and harpoons). I miss that. But if I'm to be honest, I think you're a veteran player from ARR. You miss relying on those things. Look at the state of MSQ now, every1 just start sprinting like crazy pulling mobs wall-to-wall and even trigger cutscene during midfight, some even pulled the boss even when trash hasn't been killed yet. When your HP is 3300 as a tank, and the rest of the party's hp is around 1900-2200, you'll tackle the dungeon in a very different manner. Someone triggered the patrol lights? If the offtank doesn't start aggroing the reinforcements, the tank will go splat.

With the overbloated stats in here, there's 2 options the devs can take (not forced actually, they can just leave it as it is).
1) Item level sync the dungeon instead of to 130, but to 90 or even lower (your first clear in castrum / praetorium is supposed to be around 50). This will lengthen the dungeon, even if without cutscene, should take around 45 mins to clear. With cutscene? Solid 1h15m+. Wipes because people pulled an accidental pack? Longer. I still remembered my first clear of praetorium queueing 4 times with 3 failures because we ran out of time attempting the ultima fight. Castrum on the other hand, isn't too hard, the hardest part is protecting Cid from the mobs and iron giants. Those reinforcements didn't go down that easy.
2) Change how the dungeon work. I don't need to explain what should be done since it has been done.

So far I'm loving the dungeons. I actually haven't seen enough people complaining about this (maybe JP does, idk), but hat's off to the devs to change something that's not deemed broken for nearly 8 years now.