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I have been so bored from dungeons for a bit. Like they are beautiful don't get me wrong! But I would love to see a little more variety. Like maybe have alternative routes inside the dungeon that could lead to different bosses. Have secret bosses! Have puzzles that maybe only specific classes can solve with magic or strength. I want to see something new other than wall to wall and then boss wall to wall and then final boss. I want to use my brain and have fun in them.
yeah thats kinda what we stuck with now. they streamlined everything out of the game and now we have a beautiful husk without soul
We had alternative paths in 1.0/ARR dungeons... but the player tail wagged the development dog as players as usual just wanted to rush through and insisted on only taking the shortest path (especially once they started running them over and over for tomestones), and SE oblidged accordingly, changing dungeons from the 2.1 patch to a long single corridor with no variation.
The new Variant/Criterion dungeon system though has alternative paths which is exactly what you're looking for, but that's of course seperate from the 'normal' dungeon duty system.
Alternate paths obviously don't work in the long run without replenishing motivation to actually run different paths - the ARR ones are a super bad example of how it should be done because they are, first of all, just detours, and secondly you don't have good reason to explore them even on your first run, let alone once half the party has already ran the dungeon twenty times. Not to mention having to pick up keys and stop for "do you want to open this door?" prompts is nothing but an annoyance. You have to make it rewarding for everyone involved too, not just the one guy who wants to slow everyone else down to get whatever reward just for themself.
I'd say the bigger issue is the lack of mobs having any mechanics. The key here is that 99% of the players want to run dungeons fast and efficiently, the encounters should support doing that in more interesting ways than just run wall to wall and pop your cooldowns.
Like you have to keep in mind it's a multiplayer game. If you just play each dungeon once or twice with your close knit friend group, great for you, but that's not representative of the vast majority of the player experience.
I agree it’s really trash that should determine alternate dungeon routes
Let’s say sorta like variant you can chose one of two paths, one path will lead to earth sprites that do more damage but are easier for the tank to group, the other leads to water sprites that do less damage but are harder to group. Or one path keeps a drain closed leading to mud monsters that do lots of chariots so a caster heavy party is liable to prefer this route, if you pick the other path the drain opens and the mud monsters become water monsters that do lots of dynamos favouring melee parties
Neither options really changes the outcome or the rewards but players who know the ins and outs can direct others to chose a “preferable” route so to speak for the comp you are running with
While I like the idea of having different types of mobs on each route, say a lot of heavy magic damage on one path but a little quicker to kill mobs when you have a Dark Knight tanking, unfortunately the job design has kind of stripped away any unique strengths to make it work on a grand scale. Like you barely have a caster role left in this game anymore, if you say wanted to have one route have a lot of random target AOEs to dodge, you might want to avoid if you have... Well, 2 BLM. Or rewarding 2 melee comp or 2 ranged on specific paths. While a nice idea rewarding knowledge and communication, I'm not sure they can really pull it off with their current homogenizing design paradigms, honestly.