Variant/Criterion Dungeons are a huge success!!

Want to thank everyone involved in making this amazing content!
I do have some requests for the future of Variant/Criterion Dungeons, can we get 1 of each for every major patch and a possible Variant Dungeon Roulette?
I'm finding these more interesting than the current normal dungeons we have now.

As for Criterion Savage Dungeons, can we have gear related rewards?
For example, 620/625 ilvl gear with 4 materia slot options. Basically better than crafted/non upgraded tome gear. Still making Savage/Upgraded tome gear the best option.

I really hope this is the future for dungeon content and can't wait to see more! Thanks again! :D

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Originally Posted by Super_Smiley

Want to thank everyone involved in making this amazing content!
I do have some requests for the future of Variant/Criterion Dungeons, can we get 1 of each for every major patch and a possible Variant Dungeon Roulette?
I\\'m finding these more interesting than the current normal dungeons we have now.

As for Criterion Savage Dungeons, can we have gear related rewards?
For example, 620/625 ilvl gear with 4 materia slot options. Basically better than crafted/non upgraded tome gear. Still making Savage/Upgraded tome gear the best option.

I really hope this is the future for dungeon content and can\\'t wait to see more! Thanks again! :D

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These are great solutions I can get behind. More gear rewards that have actual use are at the top of the list of things that should be added to this content, especially seeing as the means to get such gear from a Relic Zone isn't possible this expansion. If 5.25 dropped the idealized sets, then 6.25 should've given us more than some random modern glam.

The content, while certainly not bad, I fear is a bit too limited in terms of its current reward incentives for people to do regularly for more than one or two weeks.

I definitely think giving us gear rewards that are better than crafted and non upgraded tome gear will make more players participate in the content and even farm it for those awesome rewards. Feel like great rewards is key to keeping certain content active, until the next big thing.

I'm honestly shocked that it does does not have high level gear in the first place tho. But yes i agree.

When they announced criterion I assumed they'd be an alternate way to get gear for savage, specially with how they teased the difficulty. That's the only part that really really disappointed me so far.

The rewards really sucks !

I wasn't expecting much but I've been having a blast so far.

Criterion is the most fun ive had in a long time.

I hope it becomes a regular thing! Only bummer is that the rewards are pretty bad heh

I would go as far as to say that they should replace expert with variant dungeons, they have so far been a vastly more interesting experience. Will they eventually get boring? Sure, there are only so many variations you can get, but atleast you get any variation at all and that's already a big improvement over the normal dungeon experience.

I would love it if criterion gave 520 gear. I would like to be able to flex to other roles more seamlessly.

I've only cleared t he first boss of criterion and mostly finished the second boss and I could not be happier with the difficulty and the boss prog. This is so much fun.

I also want to add, can we get a certain action to reduce emnity? After playing on SMN I have actually worry about emnity, since certain skills have emnity attached to them. Like maybe a smokescreen action. Of course this for situations where you have no Tank in the party, and you don't want to the tank boss.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

I would go as far as to say that they should replace expert with variant dungeons, they have so far been a vastly more interesting experience. Will they eventually get boring? Sure, there are only so many variations you can get, but atleast you get any variation at all and that's already a big improvement over the normal dungeon experience.

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at the least it'd be nice if the variant dungeon was included in expert roulette.

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Originally Posted by Listrella

at the least it'd be nice if the variant dungeon was included in expert roulette.

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I feel after we get more Variant Dungeons we can get a proper Variant Dungeon Roulette, that way everyone wins. :D

I hate to the the guy to ask for more once we're given something good, but as someone who's cleared criterion+criterion savage, I'd like a similar challenge with solo players. My main issue with PotD and HoH solo as "hard content" is that the difficulty is largely from sunk cost, where a single run can cost you multiple hours if you wipe, which is no fun to me.

A solo variant (or wipeless criterion) run can be 15-25 minutes though, which is a huge benefit when it comes to small-form hard content. It would be cool to see even lower-party-member form content though like a solo criterion dungeon (which gave maybe 1 variant action to equalize dps/survivability among roles), so that there was a way to run hard content solo that could be attempted/learned in 20 minute bursts, without losing hours if you failed.

Even without that though, Criterion+Savage are great, I just wish the rewards were maybe a little better / gave more tomes or something.

While Variant is fine (though a bit more railroady than I'd like), my issue with Criterion is that I think it puts too much emphasis on the bosses. Instead of feeling like a dungeon, it just feels like 3 raid bosses that have to be cleared consecutively in the same lockout. There's only two trash sections, you clear them out quickly, and the high damage forces you into single pulling anyway so there's not much new gameplay there.

Single-target boss fights are what FF is designed for and what it's designers are good at. But with Criterion I was really hoping for a brand new take on higher-end content, a whole new STYLE of content that utilizes the battle system in ways you don't normally see in the highly scripted raid boss encounters. A hard DUNGEON, not just a raid but with 4 players.

I was hoping for something where things like routing, enemy management, CC, and risk-vs-reward plays are highlights. You can pull another pack of trash and save some time, but this increases the amount of mechanics the group has to handle, as well as putting more burden on the tank and healer. Instead trash in Criterion is just tuned to deal ridiculous damage, forcing you to single pull and treat each trash mob like it's own mini boss encounter. Not that time saving is even really a consideration, since the time limit only applies in savage and the majority of time is spent on bosses anyway.

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Originally Posted by Akonyl

I hate to the the guy to ask for more once we're given something good, but as someone who's cleared criterion+criterion savage, I'd like a similar challenge with solo players. My main issue with PotD and HoH solo as "hard content" is that the difficulty is largely from sunk cost, where a single run can cost you multiple hours if you wipe, which is no fun to me.

A solo variant (or wipeless criterion) run can be 15-25 minutes though, which is a huge benefit when it comes to small-form hard content. It would be cool to see even lower-party-member form content though like a solo criterion dungeon (which gave maybe 1 variant action to equalize dps/survivability among roles), so that there was a way to run hard content solo that could be attempted/learned in 20 minute bursts, without losing hours if you failed.

Even without that though, Criterion+Savage are great, I just wish the rewards were maybe a little better / gave more tomes or something.

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I don't think it's being ungrateful to ask for/expect improvements to existing content. I know there's a very small minority of players that are diehard fans of PotD/HoH and don't want them changed at all, but the vast majority of players seem to not really like them much, only engaging with them for the XP or items, not out of enjoyment.

I think they could do a *lot* better with those systems, and as you've said, the way criterion and variant dungeons feel, it feels like a possible path for them to take.

If they are a huge success, why are there so few groups for it in the party finder?
It is clearly not the difficuly, because you can find a lot of groups for ex trials or savage raids and ultimates, but for criteon , there is almsot no one searching.

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Originally Posted by PangTong

While Variant is fine (though a bit more railroady than I'd like), my issue with Criterion is that I think it puts too much emphasis on the bosses. Instead of feeling like a dungeon, it just feels like 3 raid bosses that have to be cleared consecutively in the same lockout. There's only two trash sections, you clear them out quickly, and the high damage forces you into single pulling anyway so there's not much new gameplay there.

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Agreed.

We asked for harder dungeons and all we actually got were small scale Savage progression raids. Which is nice, but it's not a dungeon. It seems odd that they keep giving us more aoe tools in our toolkit, things like Shoha II, Orogeny or updates to existing aoe and the only thing we really get to use that toolkit on is leveling dungeons and faceroll Experts where it's mostly irrelevant what buttons you press.

I don't think we were really looking for more progression raids. There are people who will enjoy it because it's smaller scale and it fills a niche (that's a good thing), but most of us have our Extreme trials, Unreal, p5-8S statics and Ultimates and that's a good fill of raids. Yet any real dungeons are sorely lacking in this game. I won't speak for everyone, but personally I'd really like to have that authentic dungeon experience, and not just 3 corridor 3 boss bland facerolls.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

Agreed.

We asked for harder dungeons and all we actually got were small scale Savage progression raids. Which is nice, but it's not a dungeon. It seems odd that they keep giving us more aoe tools in our toolkit, things like Shoha II, Orogeny or updates to existing aoe and the only thing we really get to use that toolkit on is leveling dungeons and faceroll Experts where it's mostly irrelevant what buttons you press.

I don't think we were really looking for more progression raids. There are people who will enjoy it because it's smaller scale and it fills a niche (that's a good thing), but most of us have our Extreme trials, Unreal, p5-8S statics and Ultimates and that's a good fill of raids. Yet any real dungeons are sorely lacking in this game. I won't speak for everyone, but personally I'd really like to have that authentic dungeon experience, and not just 3 corridor 3 boss bland facerolls.

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The problem is that we can't really have that experience right now, because they've removed all of the buttons involved in that "dungeon experience." Why do you need CC when raid bosses are immune to it? I mean, look at the sheer breadth of control effects BLU has access to - it's absolutely possible, but they don't want to put it into the game because normal dungeons aren't designed to be remotely challenging, and they'd have to add a bunch of buttons that are otherwise useless in raids if we wanted something even vaguely like WoW's mythic+ dungeons, or even old-school MMO dungeons where CCing monsters was important.

Moreover, that kind of skillset isn't present in players anymore, anyway. WoW flirted with making heroics actually challenging several times, and most of the time it was a failure because the majority of players simply did not have the skillset necessary to handle that kind of content. And rather than accept the need to learn new skills, they pitched a fit until Blizzard nerfed them. The same thing would happen here, but probably even worse because of how trained this playerbase is to expect "free" victories.

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Originally Posted by Gserpent

The problem is that we can't really have that experience right now, because they've removed all of the buttons involved in that "dungeon experience." Why do you need CC when raid bosses are immune to it? I mean, look at the sheer breadth of control effects BLU has access to - it's absolutely possible, but they don't want to put it into the game because normal dungeons aren't designed to be remotely challenging, and they'd have to add a bunch of buttons that are otherwise useless in raids if we wanted something even vaguely like WoW's mythic+ dungeons, or even old-school MMO dungeons where CCing monsters was important.

Moreover, that kind of skillset isn't present in players anymore, anyway. WoW flirted with making heroics actually challenging several times, and most of the time it was a failure because the majority of players simply did not have the skillset necessary to handle that kind of content. And rather than accept the need to learn new skills, they pitched a fit until Blizzard nerfed them. The same thing would happen here, but probably even worse because of how trained this playerbase is to expect "free" victories.

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If it's separated into its own difficulty like Criterion is then it's not a concern. Criterion is already far, far harder than what a typical roulette player can handle.

As for things like CC, between stun, interrupt and sleep there is actually a reasonable amount of CC between the roles. Not that CC even need be the primary challenge of a hypothetical hard dungeon. Even just things like routing, mob positioning, target priority, and overlapping mechanics already give quite a bit of fresh gameplay that otherwise isn't really represented in FF14. And heck, we already have a type of "harder" content that ISN'T boss-focused and where CC sees use: Deep Dungeon. A difficult dungeon experience that is quicker and more focused than something like deep dungeon is absolutely something the game is capable of having with the current combat system.

Deep Dungeon is a pretty poor example, considering that literally only 10 floors out of 200 on PotD are considered actually difficult. And even then, it's almost entirely due to having to manage proper pulls and deal with potential bad RNG, not the actual monsters or mechanics.

Still better than literally anything else they've done with non-boss monsters in dungeons, though. Even Criterion mobs aren't particularly interesting or difficult.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

Agreed.

We asked for harder dungeons and all we actually got were small scale Savage progression raids. Which is nice, but it's not a dungeon. It seems odd that they keep giving us more aoe tools in our toolkit, things like Shoha II, Orogeny or updates to existing aoe and the only thing we really get to use that toolkit on is leveling dungeons and faceroll Experts where it's mostly irrelevant what buttons you press.

I don't think we were really looking for more progression raids. There are people who will enjoy it because it's smaller scale and it fills a niche (that's a good thing), but most of us have our Extreme trials, Unreal, p5-8S statics and Ultimates and that's a good fill of raids. Yet any real dungeons are sorely lacking in this game. I won't speak for everyone, but personally I'd really like to have that authentic dungeon experience, and not just 3 corridor 3 boss bland facerolls.

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Because who plays dungeons for the trash mobs? Trash is nothing more than a break between bosses, which are the real meat of the dungeons.

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Originally Posted by Vivian_Vex

Because who plays dungeons for the trash mobs? Trash is nothing more than a break between bosses, which are the real meat of the dungeons.

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Only in this game.

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Originally Posted by Gserpent

Only in this game.

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Not even in this game. While trash mobs have 0 mechanics they somehow still manage to be more difficult than the boss that has maybe 3 mechanics, all of which have a 3 hour telegraph and hit like a wet noodle.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

Not even in this game. While trash mobs have 0 mechanics they somehow still manage to be more difficult than the boss that has maybe 3 mechanics, all of which have a 3 hour telegraph and hit like a wet noodle.

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Only when you pull as many as you're allowed to pull. Trash monsters do so little damage, in single pulls, that you can do a dungeon with 4 DPS. That's probably by design.

Compare this to, for example, Mythic+ in WoW, where the trash is just as relevant (sometimes even moreso) than the bosses, subject to which affixes you get that week. There are some significant problems with M+ from an overall design perspective and the issues with scaling at higher key levels (tanks getting literally one-shot *through* the best mitigation tools available is definitely a thing, and not fun or interesting), but as a basic concept... man, this is how dungeons are supposed to be.