A way to spice up expert roulette

One issue I’ve always had since the end of hard mode dungeons was a lack of variety in expert roulette. As much as I’d like to see new hard mode dungeons, I understand wanting the devs not wanting to commit resources and hours to a whole new dungeon. But then I had an idea. Instead of making a whole new dungeon, what if you just added an old dungeon to the roulette? It would be mostly the same as the original dungeon, but it would be scaled up to the current max level, like unreal difficulty trials. This could rotate periodically (once every month or two depending on how long development of this would take), and would add some extra spice to expert roulettes. Furthermore, it would allow newer players to experience legacy dungeons at a difficulty closer to how they were at release. I don’t think there would need to be any special rewards or anything, it would just be there as a fun little throwback that people could do without needing to put together a minimum ilvl party in the PF.

Fundamentally, the point of roulettes is to fill queues for people who need to do instanced content to progress the MSQ. Currently, the Expert roulette contains 2 mandatory story dungeons and 2 optional ones. So what incentive should someone then have to queue directly for a scaled up dungeon (and people who do lots of roulettes are prob tired of old dungeons anyway), which then need to be filled up with Expert Roulette queuers?

What a terrible idea, why would anyone want to keep on doing old(er) content in a brand new patch? Square Enix should stop being lazy and introduce 3 to 4 new dungeons per patch like they used to.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Yukimin

Square Enix should stop being lazy and introduce 3 to 4 new dungeons per patch like they used to.

---

We're getting a bunch of new content this expansion, it's most likely the cost to having 2 dungeons per major patch. People are likely looking forward to those.

Expert roulettes are fine, and don't need spice

I fully support your idea, I have been thinking that they could make a rotating expert dungeon every other week and spice that dungeon up a bit.

My image of it would be, say, imagine you get Shisui in expert, boss chests drop materia/extra tomestones alongside the 63 armor, and the fights are ever so slightly tweaked to make things more interesting, nothing too complicated, a stack and a spread sprinkled between mechanics, maybe re-use a raid mechanic from somewhere else, and there you go.

To the argument of "Running old content" - The dungeons in expert get old very fast when you do them daily, for me all the dungeons in expert have me more burnt out that the entire MSQ dungeon list (save for endwalker, I hate those).

To the argument of "But we are getting other forms of content!", I dont disagree with you, but patches take longer, and content is lower quality, so please stop doing PR for them. A request to improve exisiting areas should be met with constructive criticism, a comment that doesnt add anything is worse than no comment. Outright refusal does nothing for the game, other than hurting it, as you dont want the game to improve.

On the argument of "They should add dungeons instead", yes, yes they should, but they wont because its 'too much work', so this suggestion to spice things up with older dungeons comes from someone who already got bored of asking for that and is trying to ask for something more reasonable.

The 100% solution to this would be more new optional dungeons to add into the roulette, everyone wins, more content, more variety.

So then the question would be, how would you tackle this problem without adding new dungeons, re-using old dungeons, or touching the rewards of the roulette? And doing nothing to it isnt an option on this context, the idea of this thread is to improve the roulette, not leave it the same.

Another interesting way to spice up Expert would be adding the normal mode raids of the patch/expac into the pool of duties to pick from

Let it at least be a new dungeon. I don’t see how adding an old dungeon at lvl 100 would “spice up” the roulette. Jade Stoa Unreal isn’t spicy and it does not feel new at all: it’s the same old fight and I do it just for the rewards (I wish they’d at least rotate the unreal bosses weekly/bi-weekly). As for new dungeons, they are fun the first few runs and after that it’s just the same old two sets of adds, a wall (or something that acts as a wall), two sets of adds, a boss with no more surprises, repeat x 3.

I no longer even bother with daily roulettes and just go for whatever duty I feel like doing. Only daily roulette I’d do is a DT roulette with everything in it (a bit like mentor but just newer content and no ex - ex are better suited for PF…trying to run a synched ex with people who don’t want to be there isn’t a good idea).

Tbh, the whole predictable and rigid formula feels a bit stale at this point and an old dungeon won’t change that.

Slightly easier solution set for keep dungeons feeling more fresh:

• Create a set of some 20 decently interesting extra mechanics to draw from and toss onto trash mobs (just 1-3 per pack to spice up each) -- including some kiss-curse and friendly fire mechanics and significantly more random and/or not-completely-avoidable damage,
• reduce the maximum item level for dungeons to at most 5 over the ilvl they drop to keep the difficulty more consistent,
• generally increase healing requirements through more unavoidable damage or greed-worthy damaging opportunities on bosses, and finally
• reduce trash and boss HP a bit in compensation to keep the lower ceiling and added trash difficulty from becoming a slog.

As long as we've got 4 dungeons at a time in the roulette, the variety isn't too bad. It's the moment-to-moment gameplay relative to player power that needs work.

The rest is... XIV dungeons being XIV dungeons (the packs, boss, packs, boss, packs, boss hallway model at its common denominator). Older ones fair no better (especially after the changes to even the ARR outliers).

They could just keep all of the level 100 dungeons in the roulette. It's fine now with four dungeons, but as soon as 7.2 drops it's only going to have two. Like, why?

Whatever they do, they should do something . Having daily filler tasks that aren’t intended to be fun but a grind is one thing, but I’d like to hope people aren’t cool with expert being extremely dull and predictable because it ‘makes them quicker’.

Is it really so hard for them to be creative with dungeon design? Like what if you had to do an obstacle course or mini jumping puzzle every so often in dungeons? Or like a ‘use these trampolines disguised as a mushroom to ascend to the next area’ and you have to do like a mini Gold Saucer platforming thing? Or a section where you have to ride a mount somewhere while a bunch of aoes goes off. Maybe some ‘randomly-determined location’ teleporter that have a different ‘gimmick’ in each but all lead to the same boss? Or what about a boss with a win condition that isn’t just ‘reduce HP to 0’ like ‘survive for X minutes’ or ‘protect these supply crates / npcs from approaching adds!’ Or something. I think it’d feel so much less tedious if they designed the dungeons to be ‘actually fun’ and not just ‘extremely streamlined efficiency to maximise tomestone grind’ lol. But then I guess that’s impossible because Trusts anyway

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by PorxiesRCute

They could just keep all of the level 100 dungeons in the roulette. It's fine now with four dungeons, but as soon as 7.2 drops it's only going to have two. Like, why?

---

Because there's going to be Duty Roulette: Level 100 Dungeons?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by LibitIncarne

Because there's going to be Duty Roulette: Level 100 Dungeons?

---

But WHY though?

They've been doing roulettes this way since ARR. The 2-4 (depending on what patch it is) most recent dungeons go in Expert, all the rest of the current level cap dungeons go in Level Whatever Dungeons.

Why not just leave all the max level dungeons in Expert Roulette for the whole expansion, and then move them to High Level Dungeons when the next expansion launches? That'd fix the late-expansion Expert dungeon variety problem immedately.

Answer: Because Level Whatever Dungeons as a roulette grants a fat pile of uncapped tomes and exists to help expansion latecomers get caught up to current patch gear strength without having to bankrupt themselves on crafted gear. In a world where all the level cap dungeons were left in Expert all expansion, we'd need something to fill that gap.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ArchlordPie

Answer: Because Level Whatever Dungeons as a roulette grants a fat pile of uncapped tomes and exists to help expansion latecomers get caught up to current patch gear strength without having to bankrupt themselves on crafted gear. In a world where all the level cap dungeons were left in Expert all expansion, we'd need something to fill that gap.

---

Another reason is that the gear drops from Expert dungeons meets the requirements to clear regular content. I just got an alt quickly through EW and DT and this gear was very welcomed for the first week as I didn’t have enough tomes to gear up my left side on the 3 roles I played (having a healer and tank greatly speeds up unlocking dungeons).