Pre-50 dungeons...are so boring...

Sleep-inducing. Going from 15-50 on DPS is painfully boring. And it isn't just because i'm not level 50, either -- i love leveling up! It's because the dungeons are designed in a way that prevents you from feeling like you're progressing in strength. I am 110% for the preservation of immersion when it comes to lower levels playing with high levels in story dungeons. I'm no fan of what happens to new players in Prae or Castrum. But...it's just so boring.

- The enemies have way too much health in regards to the people fighting against them. Level 50 dungeons with a party of i47s will die faster then any given pre-50 dungeon. There's no reason 2 dragoons and a Paladin fighting one trash mob should have to each throw 3 combo rotations at it before it dies.

- There's nothing worse then getting a brand new, integral ability and then having to reorganize my pallete because it got sync'd off. It makes me fear low-level roulettes.

- Level Sync in general makes queuing as any job a potential nerf until about level 47-49. All your job skills get sync'd off, and being a job not only clips the amount of CCs you can equip, but the classes you can take them from.

- Equipment is also synced off way too early. The only real improvement to appropriate gear is not getting killed. Damage variance in FFXIV makes the difference between a level-appropriate dungeon drop and one 5-ilvls lower nearly unnoticeable.

- Likewise with Materia and Food. No amount of forward progression matters in pre-50 dungeons.

In a nutshell: The trash pulls aren't hard, or dangerous. They don't have any scripted waves (like in guildhests) or mechanic. There is nothing to dodge, nothing to think about. They're just tediously, sheep-countingly long-lived. My brain goes into autopilot, i curse at my screen when i don't get queued with a Thurmaturge/BLM, and I secretly find ways to AFK between pulls to take my mind off the grind. Nearly any type of enemy is better than one with heavy health bars. Send them at me in waves, give them high attack values, difficult to manage enmity tables, throw in some healer/buff units, give them formations, ANYTHING but 1-2-3 Tank n Spank. It's boring for every role, and there's no way around it. The newer dungeons dont suffer this problem so badly, but i've been praying for some of the old dungeons to get some tweaks to their playstyle.


Most painfully, I've been playing through the 1-time completion guildhests, and those quests prep you for situations that never happen. I never have to dodge AoEs during dungeon pulls. There has never been a healer-type enemy in a dungeon pull. ALL of the mobs are i220 Warriors with infinite CDs.

- The lvl sync prevents high lvl players from going around killing monsters in one blow. Without this, it would ruin a newer player's experience.
- High HP enemies encourages teamwork in dungeons, and sometimes FATES. There is no way to be a solo player in those scenarios, and you must temporarily work together with others if you want to survive.
- All though it is true that your equipment will get sync'd down to an appropriate level until most lvl 50 dungeons, part of the game is being able to manage your gil & equipment funds, while enduring the harsh MMO world.
- Materia before lvl 50 is only meant to be a small little bonus, or gil for marketboard. It's a strategy move to decide what equipment piece you want to add it to.
- I'll give you points on the food part. Enix could find a way to make it more important earlier on.


Overall, if you really feel this way, you should just move onto another game.

I actually like how FFXIV does the level sync, despite some side-annoyances.
- In most other games, and even in FFXIV V1, people "leech" XP by joining higher leveled parties and then just getting carried for the entire run. The level sync cuts both ways in preventing "carries" and preventing "zerg rush" in the low level content. it could be improved by using the iLevel of the gear as both a minimum and a maximum on all dungeons. That way you're not doing a dungeon with a level 49 tank who decided to remove all his gear.

- The skill palette thing is one of those side-annoyances. Put your AOE (eg blizzard II) in the first slot and the put everything that you could possible need beside it for dungeons of that level. eg, as a healer, you can't cast resurrect anyway in the first few dungeons, so I moved swiftcast to the second slot, and put blizzard II in the first slot even though I almost never use it, and does almost no damage. However during FATE's that's the only option to tag all the mobs, since Aero has a CD between casts.

It will be interesting to see what will happen in V3. Will they create more Duty Roulettes, or tack on new dungeons to the Extreme roulettes?

I'm not bothered by the fact that you lose stuff to level sync. That's expected. It's not quite fun, but I do not ever expect them to change that.

My actual issues with content that isn't Dzemael Darkhold onwards is that there's just not enough actually happening. Tam-tara normal is the worst of it, with literally only about one boss fight the entire time and every other 'boss fight' being no different from the rest of the trash mobs. But even then, a lot of the dungeons are dragged down by simply having too many trash mobs filling space, which aggravates the whole "we don't even have an interesting rotation" thing. They're just not fun. Which is unfortunate; there actually are some mildly entertaining boss fights sprucing things up as early as Haukke Manor (and steadily as of Brayflox onwards), but show me someone that wants to actually struggle through the mess in Stone Vigil normal.

It's not like the 50+ dungeons are so much less "sleep-inducing" though...

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Originally Posted by BreathlessTao

It's not like the 50+ dungeons are so much less "sleep-inducing" though...

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I spam Holy instead of Stone I. There's more stance dancing in low level...

There is a small area between what people consider too easy and what they consider boring, and it varies per person.
As someone who once spent a year getting 1 level in lineage 2 with constant farming, I can tell you this game by far favors people with short attention spans.
They picked where they like it, it seem to be doing well, player retention wise.
I doubt they will change it anytime soon.

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Originally Posted by Ashett

- The lvl sync prevents high lvl players from going around killing monsters in one blow. Without this, it would ruin a newer player's experience.

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This is exactly why I really wish they would level sync Prae and CM-- these are supposed to be the last major dungeons of the main scenario, but it really ruins the fun for new players when all of the mobs melt within seconds. There's no sense of danger or tension left.

Eh, I think anything Haukke Manor or higher is fine. It's all the dungeons below that lower that are just plain abysmal.

Ironically, I find the level 50+ dungeons to be so boring. There's nothing to them, speed run this, tank and spank that, it's so monotonous.

If SE allowed us to go in to the low level dungeons with gimped stats (echo debuff), but with all of our abilities, it would make these dungeons much more bearable. But since that probably won't happen, might as well not worry about it and just play the level 50 dungeons and let the newcomers learn to play in the lower level stuff like we all did when we started :D *And being forced to re-run them for the Zodiac quests with RNG playing with our emotions was not cool SE.*

You look at these pre-50 dungeons as a post-50 player with experience in expert dungeons and end-game content.

Remember that time when you're lvl 31 PLD with only sword oath struggling to get enmity on mobs off your blm? That's why the sync is there.

Also, you have to remember that there are always newbies around that doesn't have much experience under their belt yet. And when you impose a certain level of difficulty on them that they feel it's almost impossible to do their roles, it would totally ruin the experience.

My point is, you being as a veteran player who have done that content shouldn't forget the newer player who haven't done it before. Pre-brayflox dungeons are places where the newbies can get the hang of their roles and how it should be done. Complex mechanics will only get in the way. Partly why I think suddenly in Brayflox you will notice how tanks got more damaged than usual and there's a mechanic in the last boss that you HAVE to find out if you want to kill it.

*thinks about a lv50 BLM in any 15-35 dungeon unsync-ed*

yeah, no. I prefer it that way

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Originally Posted by elemental10

You look at these pre-50 dungeons as a post-50 player with experience in expert dungeons and end-game content.

Remember that time when you're lvl 31 PLD with only sword oath struggling to get enmity on mobs off your blm? That's why the sync is there.

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I do remember. But many of the pre-50 dungeons were boring to me on my very first run-through of the game too, for the exact same reasons. Most of my fun was getting to the new areas and fighting the dungeon bosses...but the rest was still boring until you get around Darkhold.

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Originally Posted by Bushido_Brown

If SE allowed us to go in to the low level dungeons with gimped stats (echo debuff), but with all of our abilities, it would make these dungeons much more bearable. But since that probably won't happen, might as well not worry about it and just play the level 50 dungeons and let the newcomers learn to play in the lower level stuff like we all did when we started :D

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TBH, my issue has alot less to do with the level sync, and more to do with the design of the dungeons themselves. Like i said, they're just boring by design. There are more intuitive ways to teach the tank how to control enmity, or teach the healer what to prioritize, or DPS what to focus, or everyone how to dodge AoEs. This is all lightly touched upon in the guildhests. They just don't do it anywhere else, until endgame trials where you're forced to. I wouldn't mind being level-synced if i was doing anything other than pure DPS, or pure Tank, or pure Heal.

I don't really care about being able to use Flare in lower dungeons, and i don't really mind the fact that the pre-30 dungeons are pure tank-n-spank. That all makes perfect sense. The problem is the mobs are shallow. FFXIV seems to have no problem coming up with cool mechanics, or bosses. The endgame is chocked full of them. It's just a bit sad the trash pulls feel like padding more than anything.


Edit:

This is mostly from the mind of a queue-weary DPS player. After Paladin and White Mage, going back to leveling other DPS classes is just a bit tedious. Paladin had its tough learning points and WHM took some time to adjust to, but DPS classes are just universally boring to suffer dungeons with, and that's primarily because i'm not doing anything. If the Tank is doing his job right, i actually don't even have to be there.

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Originally Posted by LunaHoshino

This is exactly why I really wish they would level sync Prae and CM-- these are supposed to be the last major dungeons of the main scenario, but it really ruins the fun for new players when all of the mobs melt within seconds. There's no sense of danger or tension left.

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Not to mention, new players who are getting to endgame for the first time are rushed through with no explanation. I was lucky that during my first Prae run I had a leader who not only coached us through it, but also waited to make sure I got a Magitek suit so I wouldn't miss the fun. I totally understand why people want speed runs, but I also think it ruins the experience for new players.

I think pre-50 dungeons are in a good spot. Leveling up if I had any complaints it would be dungeon length, some of my best times pugging were still pretty much 45+ minutes. And then dps are waiting 25 minutes on top of that. Also I think the guildleve trials need more work. When I leveled my alt DPS job, I rarly ran into a tank who knew what the hell he was doing. Tanks need more threat indicators and perhaps some on screen instructions on how to gain threat. Otherwise leveling dungeons were plentiful, offered lots of boss mechanics, and made it hard to steamroll while at the same time working in higher level players.

I do think things like shield of oath should be given atleast 10 levels lower. I find that making tanking harder at lower levels is not ideal for keeping players interested in playing as a tank.