A request for Endwalker Dungeons (No more Undertuned)

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If Trusts can carry players who are in it for the story through dungeons there is def room for more difficulty and complexity in dungeon design and I hope the devs seize it.
It feels like a way to make everyone happy.

It's because of your gear. It's designed for item level 470 and it's easy to be 510-530 now. Consider that at the time of release, the max item level was just increasing from 500 to 530 so casual players that don't understand tomestones were still in 475 gear from the previous dungeon.

The leveling dungeons will most likely hurt a lot like the previous ones because of gear sync but I expect the max level ones will be easy like the one you mentioned because of the sync not being tight.

The fun I get out of them is in completing them faster and skipping even more of the mechanics.

The highest ilvl gear when Matoya's Relict was released was 500, and that was overkill for it. Now that everyone is even above that, it's very underleveled content.

You could always get yourself a pre-made group of 4, and do the dungeon with the minimum ivl option to see if the dungeon is undertuned or if people are just overgeared.

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Originally Posted by EnigmaticDodo

Can we PLEASE not get undertuned dungeons anymore? Matoyas Relict comes to mind. This is just, in my opinion, incredibly boring. Everything dies pretty much immediately and there isn't any serious risk. That's all.

Thanks for coming to my Talk.

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Agreed. Everything in this game, except for a few things like savages and extremes for example is just WAY to easy, like cellphone level of easy, like kids game easy. Please make normal and hard dungeons at least twice as hard. Also: trash mobs shouldn't exist, please make trash mobs actually require a little bit a of tactic, care to pull, and give them some dangerous AOEs, nothing boss level, but make "trash" dungeon bosses a challenge, be creative, otherwise: why bother?

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

It's because of your gear. It's designed for item level 470 and it's easy to be 510-530 now. Consider that at the time of release, the max item level was just increasing from 500 to 530 so casual players that don't understand tomestones were still in 475 gear from the previous dungeon.

The leveling dungeons will most likely hurt a lot like the previous ones because of gear sync but I expect the max level ones will be easy like the one you mentioned because of the sync not being tight.

The fun I get out of them is in completing them faster and skipping even more of the mechanics.

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No excuse in my opinion, just poorly planed level syncing from the start, it should be better implemented really. Really the game is just way, way, way, too easy, almost autoplay. Basically there is no middle ground really, save for a few exceptions, you either have savages, extremes, or a kids cellphone game. They really need to make every normal and hard dungeon challenge, no matter the level, same goes for open world content, otherwise why bother at all?

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Originally Posted by CaptainLagbeard

The highest ilvl gear when Matoya's Relict was released was 500, and that was overkill for it. Now that everyone is even above that, it's very underleveled content.

You could always get yourself a pre-made group of 4, and do the dungeon with the minimum ivl option to see if the dungeon is undertuned or if people are just overgeared.

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Level synchronization should bring players way lower than it does. It's just very poorly implemented. I know there is the MINE option, sure, but the normal sync mechanic should still do more than it does, much more, while leaving a bit of room for MINE option to still be even more challenging.

While I do understand the desire for more challenging, lower player count content - regular roulette (despite being called expert roulette) will not be the place it is added. I know people don't like when other MMOs are referenced, but the early heroic dungeons in World of Warcraft's cataclysm expansion tried to bring back more challenging mechanics to its dungeon content and what happened was a tier of content that couldn't be completed by casuals, players sitting in queues for 40 minutes for a one-in-five chance of being able to clear the assigned dungeon.

The developer team has said in the past that they want dungeon content to be easily accessible to all the player base, which is a big part of why it isn't particularly challenging. The average skill level of players is surprisingly low.

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what happened was a tier of content that couldn't be completed by casuals

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ZulAman and ZulGurub..made famous when it was common to see this happen:

Player zones in.

Sees which dungeon it is.

"No. God NO...JUST NO..."

<Player has left the group>

WoW has no mandatory dungeons while leveling. FF14 dungeons are intended as “story mode”, and their difficulty level is adjusted for it. If someone wants challenge, run Savage raids when it is just released.

Dungeons have slowly been getting reduced expansion by expansion for other even more casual content. I doubt they'd release a whole new tier of them.

Going back to earlier points, using WoW as a comparison point...

It's kind of like doing normal difficulty dungeons while using a full set of gear from Raids and complaining that the dungeons are too easy.


But stated, there is also the fact that dungeons are a part of the main story, for the sake of the story they kind of have to available to be beaten by the most casual of casual players.

They could make more challenging optional dungeons, sure but those would be more of an annoyance when grinding tomestones than an actual fun challenge.

I guess I must play the game in an alternate universe. Players die left and right in dungeons I run through duty finder. If they did up the difficulty it would only chase away the largest portion of their player base. That would be an absolutely terrible decision.

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Originally Posted by Dawn_FF14

WoW has no mandatory dungeons while leveling. FF14 dungeons are intended as “story mode”, and their difficulty level is adjusted for it. If someone wants challenge, run Savage raids when it is just released.

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Basically, this. If you've completed it already...take a break from the game. Really, nothing wrong with that and it's what the developers intend. No one that works on XIV expects this to be the only game you play. They understand that there are valleys between the content, where you'd either be making things for yourself to do or going off to play something else for a month or three.

God yes please. I don't want dungeons to be punishing, but I want them to actually engage me, especially in the non-boss areas. I'd LOVE to see more segments like the kill-hallway before the final boss(es) of Puppet's Bunker. Or the mechanics boss of bardam's mettle, but like JUST as an environmental hazard as you're trying to progress.



Or just different takes on the "go down hallway, pull a couple packs, aoe, pull a couple packs, aoe, boss" formula. It's SO TIRING. Like, I don't want to have to be in an intense raidboss setting to see fun mechanics.

Like, how about a different take on wanderer's palace's chasing tonberry? Let's get a demon wall dungeon. It could be short, mini boss rush with environmental hazards that you have to race down a hallway before it gets ya, at the end of that gauntlet is a relic that if you destroy, the demon wall becomes vulnerable and also the final boss! Hell, could even have a difficulty setting that affects the speed at which the wall advances by the lowest ilvl player in the party. (maybe difficulty affects the rare drops)


Or what about a tower defense allagan dungeon? Where the mobs come to you and you can build a couple of defensive and offensive towers to help destroy the coming allagan machines coming down the lanes? Say, waves come out every x seconds after the previous wave is defeated, or the next wave will be triggered after the last available build node is completed and no waves are currently in progress, or immediately upon a successful ready check if you just WANNA GO. Separate the party into 2-4 lanes and have the towers cover up the roles the separated players are missing. After 2 waves the walls will drop and a boss will spawn, after the boss, two more waves, then walls drop and another boss, one more wave and then it's final boss time. Same formula as the current dungeons, but different presentation + a couple of fun new mechanics. Oh and lets say the defense point determines those rare drops again. Mounts, minions, hairstyles, etc. Maybe add a title in that you can get if you sustain no damage to the defense point with no turrets.


I just woke up so I can probably think up more ways to shake up the formula later.
Expect edits, and maybe the eventual design doc, 'cause I'm crazy.

The unfortunate truth of the matter is that this simply won't be the case with their current design strategy. I've asked for a while when I'm allowed to expect people to know what they are doing and ultimately the answer I've found is 'never'. Seeing some people make it to Paglth'an and STILL don't know what a stack marker is or have never used Limit Break was the realization moment for me. Content that is meant to be part of the story has to be accessible and complete-able or people stop playing.

I'd love to see more engaging 'trash mobs' but I feel boss difficulty is in a good place right now, all things considered.

I've encounter a fair amount of players who, even in Shadowbringer, still haven't figured out the basics like stack markers and tank CDs, along with some who don't have the reaction time to dodge mechanics (or perhaps can't be bothered).

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Originally Posted by Lexis

I'd love to see more engaging 'trash mobs' but I feel boss difficulty is in a good place right now, all things considered.

I've encounter a fair amount of players who, even in Shadowbringer, still haven't figured out the basics like stack markers and tank CDs, along with some who don't have the reaction time to dodge mechanics (or perhaps can't be bothered).

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Yeah, the bosses have been getting pretty fun. Love the akadaemia anyder final boss where you have to stand on the vents to stop the adds from spawning, and how established mechanics play with eachother. Or that one adds boss in Pagl'than. It's really just the in-between bits that are stale.

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Originally Posted by VelKallor

ZulAman and ZulGurub..made famous when it was colmmon to see this happen

Player zones in.

"No. God NO...JUST NO..."

<Player has left the group>

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Those were bad. So, so bad. They definitely weren't for the faint of heart.

They also need to make the overworld dangerous. I can count on one hand how many times I've died in the overworld since ARR(1.0 was a lawless overworld and it was fantastic)

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Originally Posted by Likethewind

They also need to make the overworld dangerous. I can count on one hand how many times I've died in the overworld since ARR(1.0 was a lawless overworld and it was fantastic)

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https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/i...3.jpg&usqp=CAU

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Originally Posted by Likethewind

They also need to make the overworld dangerous. I can count on one hand how many times I've died in the overworld since ARR(1.0 was a lawless overworld and it was fantastic)

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It wouldn't bother me, but I doubt they'll ever do that. I do feel that it needs way more activities than it currently has though.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

The fun I get out of them is in completing them faster and skipping even more of the mechanics.

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I couldn't object more to that statement. How is AoEing a group down and standing in orange circles to DPS more fun? I couldn't be more bored by dungeons at this point.

It's an MSQ dungeon, what did you expect? It needs to be accessible to everyone. Yep, it's going to be boring for some. That's why Extremes and Savages exist for that challenge. The rest of the game doesn't need to cater to that.

I saw this mentality back in EQII. People who only cared about raiding would do group content and solo content and complain it was too easy. They never took a step back and acknowledged "This content isn't made to challenge me"

And MSQ dungeon content isn't made for challenge. It's made to be accessible to the wide spectrum of players, because it is the one thing required by everyone who plays. You want to ask for tricky things in optional dungeons, that's fine. I fully support more challenge in optional content. But I'm glad the developers stick by their guns and maintain this healthy balance where they want their base game to be accessible and give options for those who want more.

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Originally Posted by Dawn_FF14

WoW has no mandatory dungeons while leveling. FF14 dungeons are intended as “story mode”, and their difficulty level is adjusted for it. If someone wants challenge, run Savage raids when it is just released.

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Why does [I like story] equate to [I'm too stupid to hold a controller]? That's simply not true. Casual also doesn't mean brain-dead and yet SE pretends it does. And it always baffles me how complacent the community has gotten. Like it's unheard of for games to have difficulty settings.

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Originally Posted by CaptainLagbeard

You could always get yourself a pre-made group of 4, and do the dungeon with the minimum ivl option to see if the dungeon is undertuned or if people are just overgeared.

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People have. I've tried it myself too. They're definitely undertuned. Leveling dungeons like Holminster are still much harder than recent lv80 dungeons at min ilv.

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Originally Posted by VelKallor

ZulAman and ZulGurub..made famous when it was colmmon to see this happen

Player zones in.

"No. God NO...JUST NO..."

<Player has left the group>

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Only issue with those two places was the duration. The difficulty in itself was just fine, but it took towards two hours to just reach the last boss which made pugs through the duty finder a bit... messy. Especially if there were two/three guild members in the group because then you could almost guarantee that they would exploit the vote kick...

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Originally Posted by Payadopa

Why does [I like story] equate to [I'm too stupid to hold a controller]? That's simply not true. Casual also doesn't mean brain-dead and yet SE pretends it does. And it always baffles me how complacent the community has gotten. Like it's unheard of for games to have difficulty settings.

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You're talking in extremes, but I have personally experienced playing with people who just didn't understand how to play their job pretty frequently doing expert roulette. Players that don't AoE for big trash pulls. Bards that mash burst shot all day and never activate a song or apply a DoT.

Not everyone who plays casually falls into that group of very poor play, but some of them do. Either they don't want to learn, or aren't able to understand the mechanics of the game, the dungeons are still made easy enough that they can be carried through. Dungeons are story mode content - story mode *is* a difficulty setting.

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Originally Posted by Lexis

I'd love to see more engaging 'trash mobs' but I feel boss difficulty is in a good place right now, all things considered.

I've encounter a fair amount of players who, even in Shadowbringer, still haven't figured out the basics like stack markers and tank CDs, along with some who don't have the reaction time to dodge mechanics (or perhaps can't be bothered).

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I agree.
Bosses have a nifty amount of variety right now, but every trash pack is more or less the same in a way that is def not stellar (even before taking into consideration just how many trash packs there are and how much of your dungeon run is spent dealing with them).

There are some dungeons that hide a special add in a trash pack, like WHMs in Heroes Gauntlet that cast an interruptable protect, but they are too few and far between.

It makes me sad to see that new players sometimes don't even get to see half of the boss mechanics anymore.

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Originally Posted by Lexis

I'd love to see more engaging 'trash mobs' but I feel boss difficulty is in a good place right now, all things considered.

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Most of those special mobs in my experience just get blasted or stunned to oblivion. Good example are the lava slimes in Sahm Ahl Hard. If there is something special, the group does everything it can to remove that special. WHM are particularly good at this with Holy. I honestly don't know if there are any special mobs in ShB mostly because of Holy.

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Originally Posted by ACE135

It makes me sad to see that new players sometimes don't even get to see half of the boss mechanics anymore.

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This I fully agree with. I don't care at all about the mobs, but the bosses I wish could live longer to actually do their cool thing. Maybe make the max item level lower or perhaps the stat squish will take care of it?

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

It's because of your gear. It's designed for item level 470 and it's easy to be 510-530 now. Consider that at the time of release, the max item level was just increasing from 500 to 530 so casual players that don't understand tomestones were still in 475 gear from the previous dungeon.

The leveling dungeons will most likely hurt a lot like the previous ones because of gear sync but I expect the max level ones will be easy like the one you mentioned because of the sync not being tight.

The fun I get out of them is in completing them faster and skipping even more of the mechanics.

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Warrior and Paladin have solo Paglth'an. That's how massively undertuned they are. Even at min ilvl, dungeons have been laughably and embarrassing undertuned lately.

Remember in THIS game rpg comes first. So long as dungeons are tied to story and are mandatory for story progression, it probably won’t happen.. personally i am just fine with that. I like games to be more laid back. I don’t join anything passed hard mode because things get annoying at that point.. And even then I don’t often do hard dungeons unless it is an unlock, so usually I only play it maybe twice if a friend wants to unlock and wants a fast que. You want difficulty play extremes. There are difficulty levels for a reason I imagine.

Of course they could make things like squadrons more easily accessible, co-opable, and make those npc players level faster with less time and effort so that they can be used almost from the get go and for all dungeons .. make those dungeons the easier ones and scale up difficulty for dungeons with real people.. tho this might have a negative effect for que times.

Counterpoint. Dungeons are mandatory, and if you want your mandatory content to be the main content representing your game, you don't want it to be repetitive and dull. And after 8 years worth of dungeon content, the pretty reskins of the same dungeon format has gotten stale as hell.

"Interesting" doesn't have to mean "difficult." It just means shake up the format a little.

I would be much less likely to expect speedruns in my dungeons if getting the dungeon over with as fast as possible wasn't the most interesting interaction I could do with the instance.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

Warrior and Paladin have solo Paglth'an. That's how massively undertuned they are. Even at min ilvl, dungeons have been laughably and embarrassing undertuned lately.

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Dungeons are for people who only play for the story and only have the gear they picked up in the last dungeon, so they are never going to present much threat to those of us who play regularly, gear properly and do rotations correctly. The best fun we can get out of them is doing them faster, skipping more things and maybe even soloing.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Dungeons are for people who only play for the story and only have the gear they picked up in the last dungeon, so they are never going to present much threat to those of us who play regularly, gear properly and do rotations correctly. The best fun we can get out of them is doing them faster, skipping more things and maybe even soloing.

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I'm well aware. Just because they're story focused doesn't preclude them from having some measure of teeth. No one is asking for Extreme or Savage level difficulty here but for mobs to require more than a pulse. When a tank can entirely solo a dungeon meant for four players, it's utterly ridiculous. As Roda pointed out, it reduces these story dungeons to slogs people blitz through. Incidentally, it's that entire lack of bite that has pretty much standardized wall-to-wall pulls. If mobs somewhat threatening, you'd have a more reasonable argument not to pull everything.

And I sincerely doubt dungeons were ever designed to be soloed. Not upon release at the very least.

Every dungeon in this game is undertuned, and they've gone through the effort to nerf these undertuned dungeons even further. I wouldn't hold my breath for any dungeon to have complexity, especially since they have to be easy enough for bots to carry you through now.

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Originally Posted by Payadopa

Why does [I like story] equate to [I'm too stupid to hold a controller]? That's simply not true. Casual also doesn't mean brain-dead and yet SE pretends it does. And it always baffles me how complacent the community has gotten. Like it's unheard of for games to have difficulty settings.

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Because they are literally that stupid. Just look at the speed 'no' arrives. There is no reason why any achievement should be overly easy or it means nothing. Casual indeed should have remained time invested, not the amount of IQ points.

These people struggle with a single button at best. The trouble is that catering to it, besides increasing profits due to the increasing number of the population who are lazy looking for instant gratification - has exponentially worsened the issue. They are correct, we aren't the target market anymore. Yet what is the point of beginning something so brainless that its attainment is devoid of any meaning? Eventually the only people gaming will be streamers and those who think Scholars one button festival is skillful play.

No not everyone is equal. But improvement requires a collective standard of difficultly to be established. You are effectively gimping yourself and your potential ceiling - no matter your ability; by reducing a game to something barely fit for the lowest common denominator. If the so called 'casuals' believed in compromise, beyond 'hurr durr you get your 1% of difficult content now stfu and leave me to my 99%' things might be different. Instead the ''elitism'' they talk about; stems from a jaded community. Who have conceded far too much of their fun to imbeciles.

What you see here on the forum, and what you see in the game, are two completely different worlds.
You'd think, reading these forums, that everyone playing this game is extremely skilled, and the dungeons are too easy.
Then you log into the game, do a roulette, and the tank doesn't know what a cooldown is, the healer hard-casts Cure I, and the DPS stand in the bad.

Dungeons are part of the story, and as long as that's the case, they can't be harder.
For balance, not the extremely skilled elite, made up of forum posters, but the actual player community in game is relevant.

Everyone having their own definition of 'challenging' makes these discussions all the more difficult to nail down.

I consider myself an average player and while trash mobs present no challenge, bosses sometimes leave me struggling (but ultimately succeeding, sometimes one the second try after an embarassing death). That seems like a pretty good challenge line to me: not too difficult that the average player gets overwhelmed, but challenging enough that it's still fun.

If your skill is such that these bosses offer no challenge whatsoever and you can't remember the last time you messed up a mechanic, good on you and I'm sure you're killing it in savage and Ultimate raids, but I don't think that's where the challenge line for normal dungeons should be, least FFXIV suffer the same fate as Wildstar (I absolutely adored that game, so sad to see it gone :( )