Yet another Variant/Criterion dungeon discussion

I want to start this off by saying, I very much enjoy Criterion dungeons. Even the Savage version. It is a brutal test of skill that is incredibly rewarding when you push yourself further. However I do believe the system has some flaws in it that I want to express somewhere before we move into Dawntrail. So please allow me to give my opinions on these dungeons, and bring some suggestions as to how I feel they could be improved.

Variant Dungeons
I'm going to be perfectly honest here, I didn't particularly engage well with Variant dungeons. The concept of them is somewhat interesting, however the result of exploration ending up to be as basic as a minor change in the next dungeon boss' mechanic does feel somewhat anti-climactic. I'm glad to see lore associated with each one, however doing effectively the same boss 3-4 times if I get all the steps correct is a little tedious to me, and if I get them wrong it's another time round figuring out what I need to do. I quickly went to follow guides to get the mount unlocked because of this, and for AloAlo I haven't even yet ventured into some paths because I found the Criterion bosses so different and fun, I didn't particularly have value in approaching Variant anymore.

I would love slightly more intricate puzzles and map design. Give us a room where you get a 3 x 3 grid of tunnels, and setting them in different ways allows you access to different rooms or maybe even different bosses. Introduce slides where you can move left to right letting you dodge obstacles and gain some kind of resource as you do. Give us adds that require us to do mechanics so we aren't just pressing 2 or 3 buttons over and over until they die. This world of dungeons opens up such a big realm of possibilities, and I really want to see them being utilised going forward. I did not feel like my time was spent well exploring Variants and I would love that to be proven wrong in the future.

Criterion Dungeons
This may be a little bit divisive to some, but honestly? No notes I love this content. Other than some minor quarrels with boss designs (as a melee player in Criterion WOW did someone hate melees on the design team? I just want uptime :( ) this is probably my favourite content in the game currently. It is quite hard, it's so fun having this much player responsibility, it truly is fantastic content and I highly recommend people that you should give it a go for the sake of the content it is, rather than a need of reward. Rewards will not go amiss, and we'll get to something a little later that I think would benefit from having rewards from this; but please, get a group together and just ram your heads at these fights. There is some really fantastic design in here that I can tell is trying to teach people to improve in other Savage Raid fights.

Savage Criterion
Many people seem to question who this tier of fights is for. And honestly? It's me. I'm currently close to clearing AloAlo Island (Savage). This content is brutal, it's easily equivalent to an Ultimate fight, 24 minutes of constant attention where a single mistake could reset you to 0:00. I have found it so exhausting but the knowledge I will clear it is too enticing to pass up. It does definitely feel similar to Criterion, but the pacing differences with the HP bars, having minor mechanic fails becoming fatal, and having to weave your rotation though 2 add phases & 3 bosses while ensuring you keep enough damage to not hit enrages, is for me exquisitely enjoyable.

Yet I feel like there is a fundamental flaw with this content, and that is its accessibility. It is sync'd to the highest possible iLvl of each savage tier. This means the ONLY way to have enough gear to beat this is if you've already cleared savage for at least 8 weeks (these tend to release 8 weeks after a savage has dropped), been diligently farming your tomestones so you can have BiS on a job, and know that job to an extremely high level of competency. And this is absurdly detrimental to me. There's not enough time to gear multiple jobs, meaning if both your tanks in your static don't want to do Criterion, even if the other 6 did, you'd have to go searching to find someone who could even play with you. If you fail to clear Savage Raids Week 1, you can't clear Criterion (Savage) Week 1, you might not even be able to attempt it. Tomestone gear doesn't even upgrade without Savage until the next patch, meaning you have an extra 8 weeks before you can even START thinking of playing this outside of raids.

I fully get that this content is meant to be extremely difficult, and just like Ultimates they are meant to be for those who are on top. But I haven't been able to try a Savage properly until AloAlo Island because my static was very casual, so I was always severely under-geared. Obtaining gear would harm my static's ability to do so themselves, or give me a tiny window each week to PF and hope I could grab something. I got gatekept out of content I have ended up loving because of multiple different systems clashing with each other. No wonder the playerbase for Savage Criterions is small, you're doing a subset of a subset in an already smaller subset, while not having systems to let people outside of these subsets join in.

How do we solve it?
Give Criterion Dungeons uncapped tome upgrades, or even its own set of max iLvl gear. It desperately needs its own gear progression, and that progression needs to give access to the Savage version. Barring that, Savage Raids need to be uncapped significantly earlier than they are. This game has done incredibly well based on the fact that you can change job at the press of a single button, but being locked out of content KNOWING that you could heal but you can't because you were a SMN for P9-12S, and neither of your healers want to do Criterion (Savage), hurts. If you open this up, more parties could be formed, more people would have access, and word of mouth of how fun and incredibly difficult this content is, would likely create more interest. I have never been more engaged with this game than I have doing AloAlo Island(Savage), and I truly want everyone to be able to just try it out, but I know the hoops to get there are just a little too big for a lot of people, and that makes me feel pretty sad.

TL: DR - Please go try out Criterion and Criterion (Savage). They're really fun. And please give us gear progression so more people can try. And can that whale please give me in first more, my 2 minute burst window is way too rough with out first.

I like going through the Variant Dungeons casually, my biggest issue with though is the first boss. Why is it the same on every route, just with slightly different mechanics?

As for Criterion, I haven't cleared any of them so I cannot comment on the fight designs other than Silkie, but I find the most common complaint is simply lack of rewards for doing something so difficult. They don't have to create new armour sets, just make it so the first time you kill a boss each week you're given a token, with the final boss dropping 2, and then you can exchange 4 tokens to upgrade tomestone or normal raid gear. Since these dungeons come out on odd patches, it would be an alternate way to gear up other jobs before the next savage raids are released.

The solution is simple.

Variant:They are mostly fine, you run each route once, you get the mount and never do them again, although, some cosmetic drops are a bit too rare and should be purchasable with the according currency.

Criteon: Should drop loot of the same ilvl as Savage raids, maybe with different stats to give people an alternative way to get gear.

Savage: remove, useless content.

just did the easy ones, they get boring after few runs.
The criterion sounds like savage and i dont want to look at guides and wait for ppl to be able to even try this. I got too casual to do this but its cool that they made some content for the more hardcore ppl out there!