Dungeons, group work - please a development!

@Developers
This is a serious proposal from a tank that has been drifting into a yawning niche over and over again for the last few years whose fault is the current challenge to the group.

Can you please consider raising the difficulty of the dungeons?

I'm not talking about all the trash pushing more damage into the tank but that there are enemy types that need to be handled differently.

1 opponent who strengthens his environment with +attack and +defense
Which as an example must be cc'd by the healer (sleep) and the two adds must be played clean.

Or enemy types that have a special ability to take key roles like Tank or Heal out of the fight for a few seconds if they are not interrupted correctly.

Really for years FF14 follows this one track, that there are 3 groups of enemies before the boss that the tank bluntly pulls together and just neatly collects blows. A real punching bag.

The simple mechanics of the simple % Damage Reduce has become really monotonous over the years.
Why is there so little emphasis on dodging, parrying or even blocking?! Relevant stats that also existed in many other MMOs and are still an important part today.

I would really like to see the evolution of group play.

Pull everything together, go through AoE skills and look at the screen yawning.

Honestly, you might as well skip the enemy groups :)

I'd love to see some form of CC again, it was pretty good fun back when it was briefly the meta at the start of ARR. Bonus points if healers become the best choice for the job++

Fun Fact: The add that spawns in the second boss of Brayflox can be slept... Though most of the time when I try to sleep it, someone immediately attacks it :(

I would love more complexity in attacks, more interesting dungeon pulls. I think Tower of Zot is a good example of what SE can do with boss fights to make them fun for me at least. It's a shame it was a one off for the rest of the dungeons in EW. I wish they would design encounters to utilize everyone's toolkits and maybe teamwork to accomplish the fights instead of zerg boss, sometimes dodge mechanics, move to next boss.

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Originally Posted by Vejj

@Developers
This is a serious proposal from a tank that has been drifting into a yawning niche over and over again for the last few years whose fault is the current challenge to the group.

Can you please consider raising the difficulty of the dungeons?

I'm not talking about all the trash pushing more damage into the tank but that there are enemy types that need to be handled differently.

1 opponent who strengthens his environment with +attack and +defense
Which as an example must be cc'd by the healer (sleep) and the two adds must be played clean.

Or enemy types that have a special ability to take key roles like Tank or Heal out of the fight for a few seconds if they are not interrupted correctly.

Really for years FF14 follows this one track, that there are 3 groups of enemies before the boss that the tank bluntly pulls together and just neatly collects blows. A real punching bag.

The simple mechanics of the simple % Damage Reduce has become really monotonous over the years.
Why is there so little emphasis on dodging, parrying or even blocking?! Relevant stats that also existed in many other MMOs and are still an important part today.

I would really like to see the evolution of group play.

Pull everything together, go through AoE skills and look at the screen yawning.

Honestly, you might as well skip the enemy groups :)

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Or, y'know, puzzles? Most dungeons in other games have puzzles and such and I don't mean boss mechanics of memorizing what weird new aoe pattern or stack type they have but actual puzzles. Slow the parties down between bosses with less emphasis on just killing shit and more on other things. Hell, some parkour would be nice which would be doable considering it already exists in the game. Throw some parkour in the dungeons.

When I first started playing, it was common to sleep the big guy so we could get the add down on the second boss of Brayflox before it killed her, then go back to the main boss when it was dead. Now it's just zerged even with new people.

There's a mob in Amaurot that tethers to the healer and severely gimps our healing until it's dead. Groups from the outset just AoE everything instead of trying to focus that down. There's a mob that can buff another in Dohn Mheg and makes that trash harder but nobody interrupts it. People stand in the DoTs in Aurum Vale.

The devs do put some of these mechs in the game but they just get ignored to zerg everything. They could do things like the second boss of Bardam's Mettle where it's unavoidable, but then there are concerns that those duties will get insta-dropped.

I think a really good place for this could be the Criterion Dungeons. If I have one hope for those, it's that they think outside the box in terms of dungeon mechanics.

I would have suggested pulling more, but you already covered that.

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Originally Posted by Vejj

1 opponent who strengthens his environment with +attack and +defense
Which as an example must be cc'd by the healer (sleep) and the two adds must be played clean.

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CC does not work in this game because we just spam our aoe and wake them up. In fact, the only time CC is useful is when you have no healer at all and the incoming damage is too high for your tank heals. I have seen it useful in only one dungeon without a healer. A lot of people say CC was common in ARR, but I discovered in ARR that my party would just use aoe, wake them up and take all the enemies off me if I didn't aoe myself.

There is a mechanic in a lot of Shadowbringers dungeons where one or two of the enemies in a large pull can be interrupted and the difficulty for a tank is picking this enemy out of the crowd and interrupting it. If the cast completes, it buffs the outgoing damage to the tank a lot or does heavy aoe damage to the party and sometimes this causes a wipe. This does not seem to have continued for EW.

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Why is there so little emphasis on dodging, parrying or even blocking?! Relevant stats that also existed in many other MMOs and are still an important part today.

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Parry or RNG mitigation was seen as pointless. Why would we stack mitigation that has a chance to work on a tank buster, but probably won't? Why would we stack it when we just don't take enough damage to absolutely need it? Why would we stack it when it doesn't work on magic? We needed it to be a stat like Tenacity, so it changed to Tenacity. We still don't take enough damage to need it, but some people probably get it to feel more tanky.

We used to have a lot of tank abilities that would proc from parries, but it was a problem if it didn't proc when we needed it or the boss mostly used magic. They just felt broken so they were removed.