Suggestion - (Optional) - High difficulty, High rewards Dungeons

Hey! I have just recently come back to the game. I have noticed alot of changes (some good, some bad) and there is something I would like to see in the game. A challenging environment to level up my new classes or lower levels disciples of war and magic.

So, I was just wondering if anyone else would be interested in harder low/mid/high level dungeons. (Accessible by roulettes)
These could be similar to the primals higher difficulties.

Higher Difficulty Dungeons

Those dungeons would require:

• Careful pulls
• Crowd Controls (Binding monsters, Silencing/Stunning at the right time, sleeping etc)
• Managing resources and cooldowns
• Using different tactics depending on the group of enemies you engage.
  (This could bring back some uses for low level food, potions and buff or debuff potions.)

Why:

• Those dungeons would be meant for people who are looking for a good fun challenge while leveling, instead of having to wait all the way up to the endgame content.
• Getting a sensation of accomplishment and receiving a good reward for it.
• Helping some players who are willing to tackle these challenging difficulty to get better and attuning for more challenging part of the game.

Rewards:

• Would simply be way higher EXP and gils than normal. Since those dungeons couldn't be rushed, it would need to be a substantial amount.
• (Maybe also some little achievements or special pets, mounts, piece of fashion garment to attract some more players?)

Difference:

• There could be:
• Some additional monsters.
• Additional skills for some monsters, like more frequent status effects and debuffs (poison, paralysis, etc) or heals. - Giving some uses to those antidotes and other potions.
• Special monsters patrolling.

Daily Roulette:
In order to prevent that from splitting up the dungeon community too much, a daily random high difficulty dungeon could be added.


I think it could be a great change from the current way of grinding levels in roulette, which is currently pretty straightforward.

I personally would like to see something like that appear in the future and would like too hear the thoughts of others on the subject! ^_^
:p:p:p:p:p:p:p:p

The primary reason stated that this won't happen is because it puts so much stress on the healer. i.e. difficulty in these dungeons is far more disproportionate than 8 man content. What I have suggested in the past is 5 man dungeons that are made up of 1 tank, 2 healers, 2 DPS, which would take the stress off a single healer and allow content to be more flexible.

So...
Palace of the dead\ Heaven-on-High solo?

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Originally Posted by Lambdafish

The primary reason stated that this won't happen is because it puts so much stress on the healer. i.e. difficulty in these dungeons is far more disproportionate than 8 man content. What I have suggested in the past is 5 man dungeons that are made up of 1 tank, 2 healers, 2 DPS, which would take the stress off a single healer and allow content to be more flexible.

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As a healer, I don't think it would put undue stress on the healer unless they had it drastically tuned incorrectly. More healers want to heal more, and not be green dps. In current content, so little healing is needed or is scripted to the point an ok healer ends up with a lot of downtime to just DPS.

Have you not seen all the threads about healers DPSing? People don't want healers to DPS, but they also don't want the healer sitting around doing nothing. These "hard" dungeons would be a good place to try finding that correct balance without messing it up in the normal ones. As we all know how touchy people are about challenging content if its required for progress.

We have that. It's called Deep dungeon :D

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Originally Posted by Lambdafish

What I have suggested in the past is 5 man dungeons that are made up of 1 tank, 2 healers, 2 DPS, which would take the stress off a single healer and allow content to be more flexible.

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For this point here...We're already thin with healers, especially with the boring changes that have been made.
We would be waiting years for a second healer.
I say add another DPS into that.
(In general tbh, would help the DPS. I think the 1-1-2 thing is kinda odd.)

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Originally Posted by Hawklaser

As a healer, I don't think it would put undue stress on the healer unless they had it drastically tuned incorrectly. More healers want to heal more, and not be green dps. In current content, so little healing is needed or is scripted to the point an ok healer ends up with a lot of downtime to just DPS.

Have you not seen all the threads about healers DPSing? People don't want healers to DPS, but they also don't want the healer sitting around doing nothing. These "hard" dungeons would be a good place to try finding that correct balance without messing it up in the normal ones. As we all know how touchy people are about challenging content if its required for progress.

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Not for levelling dungeon which the OP mention. Your argument is valid for end game, when most healers get all their healing sets and better gears.

It's not Deep Dungeon, and I can only assume the fascination the community here has with thinking that's the same thing is that they've never played other MMOs. It's not about healers not being able to keep up, either, "more challenging" doesn't mean artificially inflated damage. It means more using your brain and using utilities rather than directly beating enemies to death as the means of progressing the dungeon.

I used to play LOTRO, Rift, and SWTOR and I've always really missed that era of MMO dungeon design. LOTRO in particular had great dungeon design, most trash pulls had some kind of mechanical difficulty to them and it was rare that you got to face pull your way through most of an instance. Everything in the dungeons there felt dangerous, not just more enemies to be bunched up and beaten down. There were frequently enemies that were in stealth who would sneak up on party members and hit them with a high damage attack or even stun them for extended periods of time if you weren't careful, wandering captain enemies that would call for reinforcements and buff their allies around them to obscene levels if you didn't deal with them smartly, and environmental hazards like traps or poison.

Bosses could really use some extra thought too, the formula has gotten extremely stale at this point. One of my favorite bosses in LOTRO involved having to lure him into pools of oil and then set him on fire to hurt him, but he would also start setting the party on fire as well so you had to all run into water spouts periodically. Another one involved needing members of the party to put out burning books while fighting the boss and dealing with adds running in trying to burn down a library, and your rewards afterwards were directly linked to the number of books you saved. It was all just really creative interaction with the environment and enemies that made every fight feel special in some way, instead of copy-paste mechanics and AOE markers that everyone's seen before hundreds or thousands of times.

In the past SE has attempted to break out of the formula but it was always very brief and on-off, like Stone Vigil Hard's second and last bosses which were interesting and chaotic with that old-school MMO feel. A lot of ARR's hard mode dungeons had some attempts at being creative in them and you can tell that SE hadn't determined their formula yet and were being innovative and experimental instead. At some point, probably around the start of HW, they started killing all of that off in the regular dungeons, though. They kept experimenting occasionally, like a7s had some interesting mechanics around the arena and a8s was an all-around amazing fight, but those were only savage at that point. I'm not sure what motivated them to stop trying to break the formula but I'd say it's the general mentality of SE as a company: they are very stubborn and averse to risk.

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Originally Posted by ksuyen

Not for levelling dungeon which the OP mention. Your argument is valid for end game, when most healers get all their healing sets and better gears.

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You realize the only reason healing is any kind of stressful in a leveling dungeon is due to the wall to wall pulls? And the only reason those get stressful for decent healers is usually due to someone being undergeared, not aoeing and the mobs take too long to die, or not using their cooldowns. Decent healers still end up with tons of downtime to just spend DPS'ing in leveling content too. Every boss in the leveling dungeons is scripted and the damage is predictable, coupled with a much larger room for error with people messing up the mechanics.

And people even complain about when the wall to wall pulls don't happen as it makes things take a few minuets longer. The community adopted the wall to wall pulls, which likely stresses the bulk of new healers out way more than any single mob pack pull or boss in the game ever will.

So pray tell, what exactly does leveling dungeons have and endgame content doesn't that makes it worse? Excluding the wall to wall pulls.

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Originally Posted by Lambdafish

The primary reason stated that this won't happen is because it puts so much stress on the healer. i.e. difficulty in these dungeons is far more disproportionate than 8 man content. What I have suggested in the past is 5 man dungeons that are made up of 1 tank, 2 healers, 2 DPS, which would take the stress off a single healer and allow content to be more flexible.

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Well, the goal would be to have everyone learn to work together, use the marks and available abilities, for planning the pulls, dimishing the damage that the tank takes with binding, sleeps or other CC available, etc.

Simply pulling away and relying on the healer to carry the entire team wouldn't work.

Adding more people could be a good idea too! :D

We got those. They're called Dungeon (Hard).

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Originally Posted by rance-sama

We got those. They're called Dungeon (Hard).

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I hate to break the illusion, but "(Hard)" is codeword for "flipped assets".

We had that before. It was called pre-nerf Pharos Sirius. People would literally not run it because they were so afraid of actually doing mechanics.

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

We had that before. It was called pre-nerf Pharos Sirius. People would literally not run it because they were so afraid of actually doing mechanics.

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And Amdapor Keep. I remember people failing not just the Demon Wall, but even the first boss. Mechanics were "difficult".

Just look at the Ivalice raids. Probably the hardest set of "casual" content we have yet. I hope that trend continues with the NIER raids. It'll have glamour people want, would be interesting to see if people would learn to do mechanics for glams.

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Originally Posted by YojimboM

It's not Deep Dungeon, and I can only assume the fascination the community here has with thinking that's the same thing is that they've never played other MMOs. It's not about healers not being able to keep up, either, "more challenging" doesn't mean artificially inflated damage. It means more using your brain and using utilities rather than directly beating enemies to death as the means of progressing the dungeon.

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That is a great part of what I would mean yes ^_^

No need for a diferent kind of dungeons (look at the the pseudo-hard mode ones).
We just need the dungeons to have more interesting designs or mechanics than just running through corridor into circular arenas.

Like dungeons with a recurrent mechanic, extensive usage of the duty skill slots, and interesting design, both vertical and non-linear. Like party splits, last stand mechanics, wave combats, scorting, running and jumping mechanics.

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Originally Posted by Hawklaser

As a healer, I don't think it would put undue stress on the healer unless they had it drastically tuned incorrectly. More healers want to heal more, and not be green dps. In current content, so little healing is needed or is scripted to the point an ok healer ends up with a lot of downtime to just DPS.

Have you not seen all the threads about healers DPSing? People don't want healers to DPS, but they also don't want the healer sitting around doing nothing. These "hard" dungeons would be a good place to try finding that correct balance without messing it up in the normal ones. As we all know how touchy people are about challenging content if its required for progress.

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Let me put it this way then. Healer is the only role where the group instantly wipes if you die, every other role has a chance of recovery if they die. If you only have one healer, and they die, it is impossible to continue unless you have a SMN or RDM in the party. That is the disproportionate difficulty I am talking about.

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Originally Posted by Kyux

Those dungeons would require:

• Careful pulls
• Crowd Controls (Binding monsters, Silencing/Stunning at the right time, sleeping etc)
• Managing resources and cooldowns
• Using different tactics depending on the group of enemies you engage.
  (This could bring back some uses for low level food, potions and buff or debuff potions.)

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These are factors in Deep Dungeon/ Heaven on High if you choose to try to get to the end. Careful Pulls? You pretty much have to resort to only fighting one monster at a time in most higher floor situations. Not helped that some monster types patrol. Crowd Control? Sleep is an incredible life saver if things start going off the rails and you end up with more enemies than you want and stun is always an option for those mobs with lethal abilities. Managing Resources/cooldowns? The Pomanders play a key role in survival of the upper levels and using them frivolously can leave you in a bad situation later. Different monster tactics? A lot of the more dangerous monsters on higher levels get increasingly more lethal abilities that require you to handle them more carefully and react accordingly when you see their ability charging. Pomanders also give the potential to approach different situations with a few different strategies.

Both also cover your "Why's" and "Rewards" with the exception of exp, with that being a part of the lower floors' appeal. And your "Differences" pretty much describe the monsters inside both areas. If you're concerned about another exp outlet, I think right now there are more than enough options without needing to give a particularly punishing piece of content just to "grind levels." I admit the zerg-rush-hallwaysdungeons are repetitive and boring after the 2nd run, and I think they should introduce something different from it (extra paths with loot isn't the answer), but pretty much everything you described is a feature of Deep Dungeon and HoH when you go beyond the easy floors.

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

We had that before. It was called pre-nerf Pharos Sirius. People would literally not run it because they were so afraid of actually doing mechanics.

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It was always more about the other 2 dungeons of the same level being braindead easy and taking less time and effort and gave the same rewards. It's why things like the Mentor Roulette has that stigma of people dropping when they see a trial they don't like because there are easier and quicker options available in the same roulette.

[QUOTE=Cidel;5146363]These are factors in Deep Dungeon/ Heaven on High if you choose to try to get to the end. Careful Pulls? You pretty much have to resort to only fighting one monster at a time in most higher floor situations. Not helped that some monster types patrol. Crowd Control? Sleep is an incredible life saver if things start going off the rails and you end up with more enemies than you want and stun is always an option for those mobs with lethal abilities. Managing Resources/cooldowns? The Pomanders play a key role in survival of the upper levels and using them frivolously can leave you in a bad situation later. Different monster tactics? A lot of the more dangerous monsters on higher levels get increasingly more lethal abilities that require you to handle them more carefully and react accordingly when you see their ability charging. Pomanders also give the potential to approach different situations with a few different strategies.

I do agree with you and I enjoyed very much the deep dungeons, most of the thing were there but you still had to level all the way and reach those floors. :P

But I would still love to see older dungeons with higher difficulty like "Haukke Manor" or "Brayflox's Longstop" etc. Using my gear, melding materia to gain a needed edge in fight, then requiring a good strategy and team play style to actually conquer and win the dungeon to get a satisfying amount of experience, gil for the effort put in by the party. ^_^

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Originally Posted by Hawklaser

So pray tell, what exactly does leveling dungeons have and endgame content doesn't that makes it worse? Excluding the wall to wall pulls.

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1. Experience (for first timer either tank or healer)
2. Undergear (either tank or healer)
3. Some of the important spell set is still not available
4. Mobs that hit a lot harder
5. Boss mechanic that is more punishing

Obviously, we are talking about OP suggestion where the difficulty is set higher. The factors above will stress the healer more than other roles.

I think it's a good idea. A new challenge with a small party would be fun. The upper floors of HoH and PotD do this but the grind to get there make it pretty unattractive.

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

We had that before. It was called pre-nerf Pharos Sirius. People would literally not run it because they were so afraid of actually doing mechanics.

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As Cidel said it wasn't so much that people couldn't handle Pharos, it's that the other dungeons were the exact same reward faster/easier and with less risk(of a bad party messing up the run), why would people be happy about pulling the 'penalty' card out of the roulette.

If it was it's own roulette
a) it's not blocking msg progress
b) all the dungeons are around the same difficulty/reward, it's not just 'bad luck' to get those dungeons
c) people know what they're signing up for, and (hopefully) are there because they *want* to do this more challenging content, and will have more patience with it

This type of content* would be great to see... sadly with the simplification in 5.0 there are almost no job interactions left to add meaningful depth to combat encounters (i.e. BLM is now the only DPS job with CC). I fear all we would get are the same dungeons we have now just with extra annoying mechanics and hard enrage timers :(

* PotD / HoH does not count, as at the very least they require hours of tedious grinding before you get to the challenging part.

Very long time ago, in 2.0, we actually needed crowd control in the form of THM's Sleep or CNJ's Repose in leveling dungeons because of the incoming damage. People accepted it because that's just the way it is.

Dungeons being an AOE fest is something that started with the Darklight wall-to-wall pulls of Wonderer's Palace, from where it spread to every other dungeon and people justified it by saying, "you just want to get it over and done with by the 100th time."

In response, the devs did not raise the rewards to fit the time and effort required, but started to design all dungeons for wall-to-wall pulls and provided the tools to all jobs for AOE fests.

The gradual increase to player power during leveling as a result of end-game tuning is the primary reason we don't need any cc now in leveling dungeons.

I think the multiple recent threads about risk and reward is essentially a call to return to the slower paced crowd-controlled dungeon gameplay. Personally I don't mind it. I actually like it a lot more than the brain-dead AOE-fest we have now, coming from a WoW pre-2.5 Warlock background, joggling Fear, Seduction and kiting a third mob all at the same time.

But we have to be careful about what we're really asking: are you prepared to have FFXIV turn into a game where each dungeon is expected to take around 30 minutes for the very skilled premade veteran parties, with 40-50 minutes being the normal pugging speed and 70-80 minutes for the mediocre party with newbies and less skilled players?

Yes, 10 minute AOE-fest brain-dead runs are boring, but they're also convenient, and the vast majority of current players have formed their habits and play schedules around this. It is also a proven success formula. If the high risk high reward format had the potential to be more successful in a multi-player environment where most failures are due to other people and you just have to keep wasting time with them, then we wouldn't be where we are now anyways. FFXIV would have gone down that route already.

And if we try to have it implemented as optional content, then we have to ask ourselves: isn't that design effort and developer resource much better invested in improving the current state of brain-dead leveling dungeon trash? I mean at this point, even just inserting some common boss mechanics into the trash would improve the boredom a lot.

Yes please.

Deep dungeon is great and all - but the unnecessary grinding to reach end game makes the whole thing feel like more of a time-sink exercise than challenging content.

Pomanders & Random Status effects also arguably have too much power.

But new difficult dungeons that offered high scaling gear would be lovely.

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Originally Posted by Kyux

A challenging environment to level up my new classes or lower levels disciples of war and magic.

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My problem is right here.

In a common scenario, I've leveled up my main DPS to 80. I have my alt Tank to 80. Now I want to level a new role, do I really want to go through challenging content to get my ignored classes to 80? In this scenario, my main is progging Savage, my alt is just there for fast queues into Expert roulette. If i wanna level a 3rd job or more, I honestly wouldnt bother with a more challenging option bc I'm pretty worn out from my other weekly activities.

Also, most of your ideas are in Eureka / Baldesion Arsenal.

I think this should be along the lines of Baldesion Arsenal, and 54 was biting off way too much to chew for them, basically making it unplayable now.
8 Man hard dungeons would be an awesome endgame content.

YoshiP gave an interesting answer when people liked Rathalos Extreme being a four-man trial, and would like challenging dungeons. Something to consider, but I'm glad they tried something different because the amount of end-game four-man content had been disappearing from the game.

I hope we get the content at some point, they love to experiment like they did with Baldeson Arsenal, raid Eureka style, limited-deaths dungeon.

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Originally Posted by rance-sama

We got those. They're called Dungeon (Hard).

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Why not Dungeon (Extreme) or even Dungeon (Savage)? You do have Trial (Hard), Trial (Extreme) and Trial (Savage).

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Originally Posted by Nora_of_Mira

My problem is right here.

In a common scenario, I've leveled up my main DPS to 80. I have my alt Tank to 80. Now I want to level a new role, do I really want to go through challenging content to get my ignored classes to 80? In this scenario, my main is progging Savage, my alt is just there for fast queues into Expert roulette. If i wanna level a 3rd job or more, I honestly wouldnt bother with a more challenging option bc I'm pretty worn out from my other weekly activities.

Also, most of your ideas are in Eureka / Baldesion Arsenal.

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Well the point of it would simply to have old dungeons reworked abit as harder versions to have the "option" to play them. Forcing people who likes the easy way of leveling would be bad as well imo. It would mostly be for people who are looking for an extra challenge/reward while leveling up, and help them understand the classes better as well as the potential that they can bring to the team/party before the endgame.

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Originally Posted by Acidblood

This type of content* would be great to see... sadly with the simplification in 5.0 there are almost no job interactions left to add meaningful depth to combat encounters (i.e. BLM is now the only DPS job with CC). I fear all we would get are the same dungeons we have now just with extra annoying mechanics and hard enrage timers :(

* PotD / HoH does not count, as at the very least they require hours of tedious grinding before you get to the challenging part.

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I do agree that the classes themselves had their CC ability mostly taken out. But since all of the cross class skills were replaced with Role actions, we still have some options that could help out on this. Even our beloved healers have "Repose" that puts a target to sleep for 30 sec. :P

They could add a minimum required item level duty roulette. It could grant a very large amount of experience in exchange for the large difficulty of the dungeon due to the fact that the players would not be over-geared for the challenge.
It would be a fun and challenging way to level up for the players seeking a greater challenge while not being slower than the other means to level a character. It would also not affect the other players preferences of the current state of the game.
Would seems like an easy and quick fix to make everyone happy.

Maybe they could unlock deep dungeon higher level floors that's past final story boss floor to them. That give better challenge. Then wouldn't need to form per formed party and be there hours that some don't have.

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Originally Posted by Hawklaser

You realize the only reason healing is any kind of stressful in a leveling dungeon is due to the wall to wall pulls? And the only reason those get stressful for decent healers is usually due to someone being undergeared, not aoeing and the mobs take too long to die, or not using their cooldowns. Decent healers still end up with tons of downtime to just spend DPS'ing in leveling content too. Every boss in the leveling dungeons is scripted and the damage is predictable, coupled with a much larger room for error with people messing up the mechanics.

And people even complain about when the wall to wall pulls don't happen as it makes things take a few minuets longer. The community adopted the wall to wall pulls, which likely stresses the bulk of new healers out way more than any single mob pack pull or boss in the game ever will.

So pray tell, what exactly does leveling dungeons have and endgame content doesn't that makes it worse? Excluding the wall to wall pulls.

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I think it's more that the healer has to do their job and stay alive - whereas a DPS can die and be ressed and, usually, can readjust.

If we assume that all the players in the dungeon are skilled enough to clear it there is still additional pressure on the healer to not make a mistake as the whole thing, usually, would unravel with them dying.

I think this is what Yoshi P was alluding to in that conversation I'm too lazy to find.

Personally i would like the challenge - as I'm quite a thick-skinned healer who (in old age) could deal with the potential 'spicy' situation. But I can see the potential for everything to go South pretty quickly and people to blame the healer.
So it would have to be outside of the DF I'd imagine.

It is interesting though - as it does kind of bring up the argument of personal responsibility within parties. Healers basically can't slack whilst (literally) shielding the other players from their own mistakes.