Please raise Variant Dungeon difficulty to Lvl 100 Expert dungeons

Hello,

when Variant Dungeons/Criterion Dungeons were announced, I was thrilled to hear we might get some midcore content, because it was called such.

I expected Variant Dungeons to be kind of like Castrum Lacus Lacitore or Delubrum Reginae, Criterion to be tougher than that but below Savage level and then Criterion (Savage) be on the level of your average savage normal raid.

I was incredibly disappointed when I heard Criterion is rather somewhere between Savage and even partially an Ultimate part with the final boss. (Not my evaluation but the one of active savage and ultimate raiders I know, so this is not "a filthy casual whining about having to turn off netflix".) Considering we had no Bozja, no Eureka, but a ton of savage tier, Unreal fights and ultimates, and the normal content was able to be facerolled as soon as people got slightly better gear, it felt really bad for me. Especially when the most interesting loot was locked behind criterion, even the Portrait /Adventurer Plate stuff.

Anyway, I still enjoyed Variant for figuring out the puzzles together with friends, I liked this a lot, and the fights were a bit more challenging in comparison to the normal stuff.

Fast forward to Dawntrail, my friends and I were fighting the new optional level 100 dungeons and having a blast! Really keeps you on your toes but without being super challenging, I like them a lot.

However... Today we went back to the Alo Alo Variant Dungeon, figuring out more paths, same job combo as in the other dungeons and we had little trouble. Of course we knew the core mechanics of the fights by now and still had the puzzle part but compared to the normal contant we got in Dawntrail they felt quite tame, especially for something that was announced in a way it could be understood as midcore. I have played scholar in Alo Alo and the Dawntrail dungeons both. The Dawntrail dungeons kept me busy, in Alo Alo the usual Excog on my tank usually expires instead of getting used up.

Can we maybe adjust Variant Dungeons to be a bit more like our current Lvl 100 Expert dungeons and/or something akin to the final Variant Dungeon fights? And include something of the difficulty inbetween these dungeons and that Criterion dungeon version? Maybe call the Criterion Dungeon difficulty we have atm "(savage)", so the expectations are on level with what people would expect from anything with "(savage)" in the name. And rename the current Criterion Dungeon (Savage) into whatever, "no death mode" or something.
If you are afraid it might block people out of story content, you can just keep the current difficulty and call it "story mode", considering it's barely any different than the dungeons level 90 downwards and you can go on in any possible team composition, whatever meets your fancy.

The new expert dungeons on level 100 really made it painfully obvious how much Variant Dungeons do not fit what they were promoted as when they were announced. "Tender Valley" was basically more or less what I expected from them (+ the puzzles). It would be cool to have more of that. :)

I did not enjoy endwalker's variant dungeons at all. I also hope they make it more akin to expert dungeon difficulty.

I like to clarify I still very much love the puzzle aspect and I very much don't want this to be taken out for a mode that would be on par with expert dungeon difficulty. Figuring this out and getting more and more lore bits with each path instead of just smashing stuff and having little else to do is half the fun for me. (Otherwise I could just run a normal expert dungeon if it's solely the challenge in battle that would matter...) Should there be a version where the current mode would be an easy mode, please don't limit the whole puzzle and lore and multiple path stuff to that one. This would completely defeat the point of my request of having the Variant Dungeon concept but with more challenging battles along the way, not just at the end.

Hear, hear!

Make the trash in variant more interesting too, and not just the puzzle trash! Variant allowing every role to perform every role would be a great opportunity to have trash that can likewise do things you would expect a fully balanced group to handle with a range of actions from rez to provoke to cover each other.

It's just a shame when the trash works the same way as regular ass dungeons when the whole point of Variant is to be different enough from regular ass dungeons and not required for MSQ progression!