The problem with Eureka Orthos

Eureka Orthos, while being basically a carbon copy of HoH (which in turn is a carbon copy of PotD), still has enough differences from PotD and HoH to talk about that reveal why deep dungeon was a successful concept back in HW (that sadly has not seen innovation). Anyone who soloed both types would understand.

With talk of SE making a new deep dungeon that will supposedly innovate much more than what we've seen so far, I hope that SE remembers what make the original deep dungeons fun for hardcore players (people who clear it), and these differences between PotD+HoH and Orthos reveal much.

The biggest departures of Orthos from PotD/HoH are that:

(1) Monster and boss mechanics are way more dangerous
(2) Monster autos are much lower

However, there is a slight consensus that Orthos is less fun than HoH, and far less challenging. That seems unintuitive: who cares about autos? Yet this makes all the difference.

While I liked that (1) made bosses much less of a snoozefest and made monsters more dynamic, (2) actually hurt the identity of deep dungeon in Eureka Orthos. That's because a huge draw of PotD/HoH for clearers is the necessity to carefully manage pomanders and manage RNG. With Orthos, that is practically non-existent unless you were playing on Astrologian. That's because on any DPS job, if you successfully execute the mechanics for the monsters and the bosses, you can clear very reliably and easily:

Time constraints and incoming damage are not an issue on DPS and tanks in Orthos, since they can kill any monster very quickly while not receiving much damage from the monsters at all. Formerly, DPS killed monsters quickly in PotD and HoH but are much squishier and necessitated kiting and optimal usage of pomanders of steel, along with a good knowledge of the outgoing damage from every mob in the higher floors. This required clearers to be strategic in situations that demand a choice from the players. For example, if you saw a treasure room full of Flood Dragons and Chimeras, what do you do? Do you try to pick off the proximity mobs (Chimeras) who don't deal a lot of damage since they are constantly casting, and try to sneak pass the sight mobs (Flood Dragons) when they aren't looking? To do that will require you to expend some time killing Chimeras who have much higher HP than other mobs in that set. Or do you want to use Rage to kill the treasure room to expedite the process? But what if you only had 1 rage left, or what if you have 16 mins left in the set? Or if you aren't getting any Steel drops, do you want to risk opening gold chests and get a Mimic, or should you just move on and pick off the archaeosaurs? Do you want to use Serenity on this floor with a Gloom and Amnesia debuff or use Rage through it, or simply power through it? What if it was flighted or altered? These are the many decisions players need to make in PotD and HoH. Due to how rare gold chests are beyond 180 and how dangerous everything in 81-99 is in HoH, it's fair to say that optimal pomander usage is essential to get a clear if you're solo.

That isn't the case at all in Eureka Orthos. As long as you can do the mechanics associated with every mob, you can kill them without worrying about Steel. Floor debuffs largely have no bite other than No Items, because mobs don't auto you hard enough for Gloom to be noticeable. You can pretty much randomly use pomanders and get a clear in Orthos as long as you can do the mechanics. Autos not mattering in Orthos seem like a small issue, but the way it interacts with the rest of the system reveals why those hard-hitting autos made PotD/HoH a different kind of skill check. It forces DPS players to understand every mob and their outgoing damage and therefore have to make snap decisions on which mobs to pull and which not to, depending on the floor layout, the patrols, the floor debuffs, and the current pomanders held. This blends a strategic layer to the gameplay: to plan out your pomander usages while adjusting on the fly to unexpected situations tactically while going through the floors. In Orthos, the only thing required is the tactics: resolve mob mechanics and it's a free win.

Part of what makes deep dungeon enjoyable is that it's a departure from how most other combat encounters in FF14 work. It requires the player to think strategically about multiple interwoven systems: pomanders, traps, floor layout, DD mechanics (such as patrols, mimic rates), and of course the actual combat. Orthos reduces that to just performing the combat mechanics correctly. It's a huge shame.

Edit:

What should be kept from Orthos, and the good things that Orthos did:

(1) Bosses that have actual bite, and do actual mechanics that are arguably about as difficult as the easier duels in Bozja. This is good.
(2) Mob mechanics are dangerous and many one-shot you. I don't like that a lot of it boils down to memorizing a bestiary, but some of these mechanics make the moment-to-moment gameplay far more dynamic. Some people hate it, but I particularly enjoyed the mechanics of Orthos Fitter and Orthos Sasquatch. They do a huge pointblank AoE with an extremely late telegraph that will one shot you even when out of combat. While in PotD and HoH some mobs also were a nuisance when out of combat, these actually demanded proper respect. More mobs should be like these two, but not necessarily simple one-shots. For example, a mob that slowly walks around the floor and eats other monsters and getting a huge damage buff, meaning that you may want to find it ASAP or stay out of its way. Or a mob that starts homing in on you whenever you attack another enemy and explodes if it gets to you. Also, while I like mechanics actually being dangerous for once, having everything from 71 and up basically be one-shots is a bit too much; I'd rather have more difficult mechanics with possible recovery states.

I'm also not a fan of how the difficulty of Orthos basically stagnates right out of the gate, the first 30 floors are way too tanky and take too long to do, thus resulting in queuing into orthos to level dying off very quickly as you're better off going to Zadnor for alt jobs than playing actual Endwalker content.

Let's be real. The real reason that PotD is praised so much is because of how much of a hurdle Behemoth was at 180 floors deep losing hours upon hours of progression. The drive and thrill to overcome such a legendary hurdle is what drove hardcore players to it. Making not only some incredible stream content to watch but also the fact that the Necromancer title was more rewarding for a period than any individual variation of the Legend title. This "fun" design though was actually a massive game design oversight. PotD wasn't balanced to be cleared Solo and took many trial and error attempts as well as various indirect game adjustments before it was finally cleared. PotD 200 solo was the pinnacle of hardcore achievements. Something HoH and EO both made way more accessible from the very start of their release. No deep dungeon will ever live up to the legacy that PotD gave the community. The hardcore players were driven to challenge because it was arguably bad game design, which made the reward more desirable to chase. PotD 200 Necromancer was like the One Piece and being the King of Pirates but for hardcore players.

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Originally Posted by Oizen

I'm also not a fan of how the difficulty of Orthos basically stagnates right out of the gate, the first 30 floors are way too tanky and take too long to do, thus resulting in queuing into orthos to level dying off very quickly as you're better off going to Zadnor for alt jobs than playing actual Endwalker content.

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For specifically EO, this is my personal issues with it. The first 30 floors are way to dull, full of instant wipes, and take almost the full instance timer to clear. Every time I run 1 - 30 I often wipe due to falling asleep of absolute boredom. Low floors just don't give me the level of focus I need like high floors do. I just want to spreedrun back to my high floors but EO doesn't allow it.

The first 40 floors are abysmally paced. On subsequent playthroughs.

They really need to give it some HoH style speed pace for the 1-40 floors. They can keep the monsters' 1 hit mechanics, and even keep the bosses hp as is, but please either make Aether arm strength scale far stronger or change the hp values of monsters between 1-40.

EO feels like a letdown in some weird ways, doesn't have the same deep dungeon niche attached to it like HoH or PotD does. PotD still being peak Deep Dungeon.

As solo player i like HoH more, the latest 10-20 floors are challenging
PotD is interesting too but it's to much bloated (200 floors)
i still did not explore EO enough.

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Originally Posted by Bonoki

This "fun" design though was actually a massive game design oversight

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It is indeed an oversight, but sometimes the most fun comes from players overcoming these unintended challenges. That's because whereas you are railroaded in doing everything in a specific way or wipe the group in modern Savage and Ultimates, in PotD and HoH there are many ways to tackle the same problem, and no two situations have the same optimal solution. It is probably precisely because of that oversight that make them fun, because the developers are not forcing you to do things a specific way. Unfortunately in Orthos, it looks like they're trying to wrest some control back from players which is why it's a downgrade.

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Originally Posted by Bonoki

Let's be real. The real reason that PotD is praised so much is because of how much of a hurdle Behemoth was at 180 floors deep losing hours upon hours of progression.

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I completely disagree. PotD and HoH are fun because of the necessity of thinking strategically and adjusting your strategy on the fly as I've explained in the OP. Most hardcore DDers actually don't like having to grind early, snoozefest floors, so I'm not sure why you think it's praised because it forces you to lose 8 hours of progression if you make a mistake.

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Originally Posted by Noumenon

I completely disagree. PotD and HoH are fun because of the necessity of thinking strategically and adjusting your strategy on the fly as I've explained in the OP. Most hardcore DDers actually don't like having to grind early, snoozefest floors, so I'm not sure why you think it's praised because it forces you to lose 8 hours of progression if you make a mistake.

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Nobody likes grinding early snoozefest floors. Not just hardcore players. PotD was praised for multiple reasons. Being the first deep dungeon of course which created new interesting content. But it was also praised for real genuine hardcore solo content that was actually fun and globally more impressive than clearly Ultimates, at it's infancy. HoH tried to carry the torch but failed to deliver and EO didn't even try to carry the torch. Even hardcore DDers have zero interest in EO because there is no real challenge to chase on top of boring unspeedrun-able floors. Obviously the difficulty isn't the only thing that carried PotD but I think it's disingenuous to not say it played a tremendous part in it's legacy. Even to this day, Necromancer is still the most sought after of the three. Maybe it's because it has 100 more floors to fight through or maybe it's just better designed? That answer is personally subjective and always will be.

(Also more rewarding sack drops with a mount drop that people actually want as well as other good rewards like Fire Crest/Pumpkin Glass earrings)

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Originally Posted by Oizen

I'm also not a fan of how the difficulty of Orthos basically stagnates right out of the gate, the first 30 floors are way too tanky and take too long to do, thus resulting in queuing into orthos to level dying off very quickly as you're better off going to Zadnor for alt jobs than playing actual Endwalker content.

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That explains why my Orthos queues take long and I see a quite of bit of people in the Bozja/Zadnor regions lately. [At least the reward structure for Bozja/Zadnor has become rather reasonable for the average player than in the past].

PotD and HoH were pretty good stuff back when I ran them. Haven’t really touched the new one yet, but I agree with a lot of OP’s points.

What kept me interested in PotD was the arcades game feel to it…like Gauntlet. It was absolutely not a guarantee to get through the dungeon on any given run (my skill is mid at best, don’t judge me!). This was fun. I liked having to pull carefully and take down a few monsters and minimize auto attack damage to get through it.

It auto attack damage is basically gone, then you can just steamroll pulls…which I think would feel very…meh. I mean, variant dungeon is already pretty boring because once you’ve done it maybe two or three times, you’ve seen everything it has to offer.

Deep dungeons can be very same-y, but the skin of your teeth/arcade game feel of it made it work.

Ultimately though, because there isn’t any horizontal progression or Diablo-style loot the appeal/push to do them does kinda burn out fast.

As most people have said, you have to spend way too long to get to the interesting stuff. It's all mindless and unrewarding grind until the good floors.

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Originally Posted by kaynide

What kept me interested in PotD was the arcades game feel to it…like Gauntlet. It was absolutely not a guarantee to get through the dungeon on any given run (my skill is mid at best, don’t judge me!). This was fun. I liked having to pull carefully and take down a few monsters and minimize auto attack damage to get through it.

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I remember when it first came out and you'd get a full party on 11-20, round a corner and see a slime, and everyone starts screaming in party chat and trying to run away quickly. And forget the rooms that had multiple slimes. I think we were more afraid of those slimes than some of the stuff on 40-50. Good times.

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Originally Posted by Bonoki

Nobody likes grinding early snoozefest floors. Not just hardcore players. PotD was praised for multiple reasons. Being the first deep dungeon of course which created new interesting content. But it was also praised for real genuine hardcore solo content that was actually fun and globally more impressive than clearly Ultimates, at it's infancy. HoH tried to carry the torch but failed to deliver and EO didn't even try to carry the torch. Even hardcore DDers have zero interest in EO because there is no real challenge to chase on top of boring unspeedrun-able floors. Obviously the difficulty isn't the only thing that carried PotD but I think it's disingenuous to not say it played a tremendous part in it's legacy. Even to this day, Necromancer is still the most sought after of the three. Maybe it's because it has 100 more floors to fight through or maybe it's just better designed? That answer is personally subjective and always will be.

(Also more rewarding sack drops with a mount drop that people actually want as well as other good rewards like Fire Crest/Pumpkin Glass earrings)

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I am not talking about its legacy. I was explaining why the content is enjoyable on its own.

If SE followed the same design principles, expanded some features, cut the bloat, and made a midcore version of it it'll be massively successful.

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Originally Posted by Noumenon

I am not talking about its legacy. I was explaining why the content is enjoyable on its own.

If SE followed the same design principles, expanded some features, cut the bloat, and made a midcore version of it it'll be massively successful.

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I agree. I think another issue that is often not talked about is that the exp gain for EO is extremely bad for leveling. Deep Dungeon is historically the expected go to quick leveling location and EO just wasn't it for EW. Though that might fall in line with rewards depending on who you asked.

EO is frankly just a miserable experience for casual play. My partner and I cut our teeth doing full duo clears in POTD and HoH and were both looking forward to the new deep dungeon a lot, but our time spent just farming aetherpool was incredibly unfun with how even basic enemies took way too long to kill + the sheer amount that could spawn at once, to the point where new enemies spawning in before we could even clear out a room was a regular occurrence. Trying to level alt jobs was twice as frustrating, since the highly punishing mechanics and bloated hp on enemies left no room for error on jobs we weren't as comfortable playing. We both ultimately decided to cut our losses and give up on the whole deal.

While I'm at it, I'd love to know what they were smoking when designing the layout for 20-30, the set of floors most frequently run by everyone whether for EXP or early aetherpool. I like Allagan nonsense, but they're so visually busy that everything blends together (even the enemies!), the dumb curved hallways makes scouting room harder than it should be AND the uneven terrain makes it a pain in the ass to even move around in, let alone dodge the billion AoEs enemies throw at you.

Interesting, I think how they designed mobs and bosses really fine in Orthos, but what it gets me is that is literally the same Deep Dungeon system for the 3rd time. The pomanders are almost the same, and the new gimmick of clones only can do so much when it comes to novelty. Most of it all, the same type of level layout. I hope the next one gets to be more innovative - imagine if instead of 100 levels we had just 10, but each being huge horizontal, maze like scenarios.

Oh, another thing that I disliked about EO is the story. Idk if we needed yet another Crystal Tower narrative, especially when there's Meracydia and Corvos for the future with certainly a lot of Allagan references. If they wanted a 'tech-themed' Deep Dungeon, they could've used an abandoned Garlean subterrane laboratory, exploring the same trope of bosses being the forgotten experiments. We could even revisit the Black Rose, or its origins.

I'd love to see deep dungeons take a page out of Honkai Star Rail's book. The Simulated Universe is a piece of content in HSR that's similar to Deep Dungeons. The enemies become progressively more and more unfair to a standard party, but every enemy you defeat earn you a choice of random augments called "Blessings" that you can stack as your progress through the different floors, and there are different categories of blessings that, when stacked, enable you a special nuke based on which category you're stacking.

For example, the Preservation path revolves around barriers. Different passives do things like granting you a barrier after so many turns, or converting a percentage of the damage you take as a barrier, as well as attacks that increase the damage you deal based on the value of the barriers currently on you, and other things like that. You also gain a nuke that deals AoE physical damage that gets stronger the more barriers there are on your team. And there are a bunch of different routes you can take with these.

I don't think FFXIV should copy that exactly of course, but something that lets you collect random power ups, or collecting tokens that you can spend on different augments that change how you interact with the enemies and the dungeons would make deep dungeons way more interesting to replay over and over.

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Originally Posted by AceNoi

EO is frankly just a miserable experience for casual play. My partner and I cut our teeth doing full duo clears in POTD and HoH and were both looking forward to the new deep dungeon a lot, but our time spent just farming aetherpool was incredibly unfun with how even basic enemies took way too long to kill + the sheer amount that could spawn at once, to the point where new enemies spawning in before we could even clear out a room was a regular occurrence.

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This is my biggest problem with Orthos. I love PotD and HoH but the amount of HP low level mobs (<40) have in Orthos is ridiculous. You hit like a wet noodle and so do they (unless you stand in stupid). In HoH and PotD I can go in solo at 0 aetherpool and start farming it by myself without any problem within a reasonable time. In Orthos, even at 99 aetherpool they take way too long to kill. If you move to the higher floors where things start to become interesting and happen to die, you have to clear that trash again. Just cutting the HP of lvl <40 mobs would go a long way for me. I prefer the attacks of the mobs in HoH and PotD vs the AoEs of EO.

I don't think the mechanics are hard though, you just need to know what kind of aoe the mobs do. Mobs do very little unavoidable damage.

I am ok with the layout and I find the bosses better than HoH and PotD.

Putting the Triple Triad card on floor 40, that requires a group, despite the card representing the level 10 floor boss was a boneheaded move.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

Putting the Triple Triad card on floor 40, that requires a group, despite the card representing the level 10 floor boss was a boneheaded move.

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It would also encourage participation for aetherpool farm. Atm it is dead contrary to the other two old dungeons. Lvl 30 would have been much better

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Originally Posted by Toutatis

It would also encourage participation for aetherpool farm. Atm it is dead contrary to the other two old dungeons. Lvl 30 would have been much better

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The Aetherpool weapons is easily the worst of the three in aesthetics.

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Originally Posted by Bonoki

The Aetherpool weapons is easily the worst of the three in aesthetics.

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Oh I don't like any of them. It's just farming aetherpool to progress in the dungeon. I am 99/99 on main but I have an alt that's at 0 and no one runs lvl 1-30 anymore. Starting solo at 0 isn't a problem in the two other dungeons but mobs in EO have lots of health and time becomes an issue.

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Originally Posted by Toutatis

Oh I don't like any of them. It's just farming aetherpool to progress in the dungeon. I am 99/99 on main but I have an alt that's at 0 and no one runs lvl 1-30 anymore.

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Party. Finder.
People switched from using the in-built duty finder to using Party Finder when floor 101-200 of PotD dropped. It allows you to go beyond 100, and keep pomanders between sets.
Just put up a PF that says "1-30+ aetherpool farm" and it'll fill pretty quickly.