Dungeon improvements & suggestions

FFXIV dungeon experience has been the same since ecisting really and it feels less fun if I re-clear it, I feel like this formula has to change or it will be like this forever.

I would like to discuss what do think FFXIV dungeon could improve to make it better?

For me when I am thinking of a dungeon in its definition there is 3 feelings comes to my mind: Wonder, Fear, Treasure, but how to implement these emotions in-game?

Wonder: adding 2 type of variances in each dungeons: random, players choice, this will change dungeon experience each time.

Fear: adding rouge-lite/rouge-like experience so death means something.

Treasure: a reward that is different based on team performance + choices that has been taking.


What do think?

I think that I got Matoyas cave on a roulette today, after taking me over 6 months to barely getting my second job from 90 to 100 since DT release because the game is so stale. And all I felt was an urge to tear my eyeballs out of boredom. The healer somehow found a way to get himself killed. Probably fell asleep. And despite that and taking like a million vulns from not bothering to get any mechanic right I still managed to keep the rest of the party alive and clear it.

I did walk out with a sense of embarrassment because for the life of me I could never bring myself to care about doing anything other than hitting the boss so I could get the hell out of there.

There was a time back in ARR when dungeons could be scary.
People had to utilize strats like [Sleep] and other crowd control spells to "reduce" the amount of "active" enemies you were fighting since you could be overrun and die.
Pulling more packs of mobs than 2 often spelled certain death.
Heck, if your group wasn't experienced even 2 packs of mobs could spell disaster.
Edit:
Dungeons also had a couple of "wandering packs", meaning that enemies walked in (set) paths back and forth.
So if you weren't careful you could get ambushed while already fighting another pack, which often lead to a group wipe.

I miss those days honestly.
But I also understand that in the modern era of MMO's people don't want to spend longer than needed in dungeons (and other duties).
But it did make the game feel more engaging and rewarding when you beat the content with others, imo.

There were dungeons that had diverging paths as well.
But they were simplified into a single pathway since people only used the most optimized paths anyways.

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Originally Posted by Evergrey

I miss those days honestly.
But I also understand that in the modern era of MMO's people don't want to spend longer than needed in dungeons (and other duties).

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This a paradox that highlights how illogical people are. They don't want engaging content but if it's not there it's not a game worth playing. This is why you need people with a high degree of common sense to flat out ignore bad feedback and produce something fun. Knowing which complaints are valid should be a core part of a game designer.

While dungeon bosses have been good, the trash is still trash. They need to change up their formula for the trash between bosses, because just bulldozing through random groups of enemies no matter how big the group is is getting stale. They've made some interesting trash pulls in like alliance raids, and variant, and criterion dungeons, so I would like to see some of those design philosophies carry over to regular dungeons. I think forcing players to change up their tactics a will lead to more memorable dungeons, but not like how Origenics was handled.

Another thing that will make dungeons better is dyable gear. Just please stop with the undyable dungeon gear.

I'll bite !


Curious by what you mean by rogue like features? Can you provide an example?


Treasure-> if it can work as the participation collapses, sure (like it doesn't require 4 gods or you can never get a mount, cause it's a pure nude run or something lol).


--My thoughts on your three items:

Wonder: I think all content needs greater variance, starting with some mechanics... where possible.. taken off strict cadence (this is not going to always be possible without destroying the fight, don't do it then). Modify the trash pack make-ups and patrol patterns occasionally, including different mini-boss gimmicks (not complicated boss fights, but like one might draw in and toss, while another does high sustaining aoe damage that enhances each successful interruptible cast completed that cast faster and faster, etc). Add freak events that are even rarer and offer an extra drop treasure at the end of the dungeon. For example in the goblin dungeon there is a chance a group of goblins air drop while you're in combat, even during the boss fight (if you're not below 75% health). Those poisonous like theme'd zones may occasionally have thick miasma, which reduces healing received after taking avoidable damage (and can be lessened by jumping ;) ). Make some of these path changing, like you enter the cave to see gunpowder trails- you notice and or already know that in some rooms that the slimes die in fire... Hmm. Leads to a mini-boss with the chance to either drop double boss chest (kill the final boss get double treasure), a unique chest with guaranteed minion / card / music (each person, game will bias to something you DON'T have), or add 25% bonus to the rewards of the run.

Totorak may have an eerie sound where those scorpion spiders start to spawn at the entrance and run to the players, increasing as the dungeon persists.. each boss increasing the rate further... to the point there are like 10-20 coming in endless waves (easy-ish to kill but their damage is not nothing). This may even include minor variations of boss mechanics (don't spend forever to make, but like the patterns can vary or they gain a new spell that functions differently), for example the gobbue that sucks you in may suck in an additional player or at lower health start to devour the hp (regenerate self hp) of the eaten player and RUN from the other surviving players. These new mechanics are not guaranteed, they just change things up (they also throw baby wrenches into addons, and maybe gives content creators more to talk about lol).

Add more potential events in later patches especially, like you can release as is, and every so often the dungeon gains newer potential tweaks. Yes, stop at a certain point lol, but at least a handful.

Fear: ...in short words (explained longer else where), reduce the power creep of gear by going horizontal-lite. If we go deeper, make savage tier gear in the same level of horizontal as the other gear with the pro being more damage BUT less defense (so mistakes are punished more, but your runs are theoretically shorter potentially and damage is a king value). This means dungeon / that kind of easier to obtain gear would tend to have more survive-ability (in that horizontal tier).

Return management choices. Like CC, or like "if I don't do this optional objective the boss will have two side cannons the whole fight and they hit like TANKS". Give TRASH skills that you memorize cause they'll ruin your day, and make you think twice about wall to wall pulls (and require more than just the tank to interrupt). The above sudden events and variations can add to this.

Treasure: Just add a glamour log... lol. I mean I know it's 'just' (not easy), but that would add huge incentive. Add minor variations to important content that is starting to dry up (internal metrics), don't do the dye thing WoW does but for example their top tier PvP / Mythic tends to have some extra minor features. Here you might think "oh cool a plant theme'd armor" and the variation added later has little flapping butterflies on blossomed flowers. Let players extract effects at the cost of X gear, for that glamour log. So you can apply fire to another sword, etc.

In one of the variant dungeons, there is a random chance for something different to happen. Yet I don't find that I care enough about the change. I think it would help to randomize the order of casts, but dungeon bosses don't typically have a lot of casts to begin with or they are in that order for a reason, so I'm not sure it would help shake it up much.

Player choice - well, variant dungeons showed what that would look like. Do you want to go left... or right? The regular dungeons that tried it like Sastasha, nobody explores all the different routes there (I only remember one tank doing it ever).

The best implementaton of content that induces fear of regular enemies in this game is Deep Dungeons and Field Operations, both of which left bodies everywhere when the wrong mob saw them. But this was primarily due to the fact neither of them necesarily had a tank. Although there were times in those two content types where the tank had to be "good" (tanking dragons, enemies with interrupts or mobs higher than the cap), having a tank still kinda makes it trivial for everyone else. You can say that about a lot of the game actually. If we just removed tanks it'd introduce all sorts of chaos and strategy.

Nevertheless, they did try "fear of enemies" with Criterion dungeons. In the first one, there are enemies that have all sorts of cleaves to be careful of, which make you want choose your priority carefully depending on which are giving you a hard time. Some of them also have interrupts. It was a while ago, but I recall there was also a section that involved sneaking around to carefully take out one enemy at a time, because if you got caught, it didn't go so well. It was a bit like Metal Gear Solid.

I can't imagine rewards mattering much. If there were any rewards people wanted, they'd do what they need to in order to farm them all in 1 day, then go to the forums and say "there are no rewards!"

Variants are a good example of choice rewards not mattering, since if you make all the different possible choices, you get different routes. Once you've got them all, it's done, and you go to the forums and say "there is no reason left to do this content!"

I think they could try to push Variants into an expert roulette of their own that gives as many tomestones as expert roulette. But the same problem needs to be solved with it as expert roulette: getting the same dungeon for 8 months or more is enough to cause physical nausea and it needs more variety in the actual amount of dungeons in it to be able to last that span of time.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

I think they could try to push Variants into an expert roulette of their own that gives as many tomestones as expert roulette. But the same problem needs to be solved with it as expert roulette: getting the same dungeon for 8 months or more is enough to cause physical nausea and it needs more variety in the actual amount of dungeons in it to be able to last that span of time.

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Thats why I'm a proponent of making every dungeon a variant dungeon with a randomly chosen forced path at the beginning. Say you're dungeon design now includes 25 mechanics per boss, 5-10 variable paths and set of 10-15 different trash mobs each with a unique special ability.

At the time the dungeon finder pops, the dungeons goes RNG and "locks" into a random path, with random mobs and the bosses have a random set of their mechanic list. The dungeon will never feel the same thus keeping it fresh. It just has to be designed broadly enough that it always makes sense in the context of the MSQ.

One word, why any other system will not work in this game.

"Roulette".

U can`t make long, deep and hard dungeons because u anyway need a lot of stuff to do any day.
Players asked for simplifications because visiting them every day was becoming a routine.

The simplification and standardization of dungeons also led to the simplification and standardization of professions.
This suits the developer and the player. One likes to run around the most boring arenas, the other finds it easiest to create such battles.

I miss the days when I could visit a dungeon for a partial clear, for a different clear rating and then get a different reward, for crafting resources farm. With a deeper role-playing system, where things like ninja "hide" or magic "sleep" could be an incredibly useful option. But, I know that in this game we will never see this.

We also need to remember that these dungeons are for story players that have no idea how to play the game. You will get tanks that barely know how to do anything other than attack enemies. You will get healers that fish for freecure procs in bare minimum gear they got via MSQ.

To show a real world example of how this affected me in past dungeons, let's take the Ala Mhigo dungeon. I once did a giant pull there with a sprout MSQ healer. They were barely keeping me alive due to their gear and spamming cure, and the only reason I lived was because I had tanked for years and knew how to give sprouts ages to heal me - most tanks would have just died with how the game was then.

I felt really bad for the healer, and this used to be a common feeling for tanks. They have to pull all the enemies, because groups usually get upset if they don't, but then they felt (with certain pulls) they were giving healers a heart attack by doing it. And in some cases, the tank would die because the sprout healer had no idea how to handle it.

This is why SE added walls. It's probably why they made tanks have all these self heals to trivialize said pulls. So they are not giving sprout healers a heart attack. But obviously it makes the dungeons braindead for "experts" in an "expert roulette".

Maybe what they could do to solve that is just have 2 routes always, one of which is an easy route and one of which is a very challenging route, and the challenging route can give lots of special rewards. This way a story player could just choose the easy route.

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Originally Posted by Evergrey

There was a time back in ARR when dungeons could be scary.
People had to utilize strats like [Sleep] and other crowd control spells to "reduce" the amount of "active" enemies you were fighting since you could be overrun and die.

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I remember reading about that when I started tanking in ARR and the guides saying to mark enemies 1, 2 and 3. I quickly discovered that was... not workable because there were BLMs casting AoE spells and ripping aggro, and instead spread out my combo attacks because PLD had no AoE.

The enemies hurt a lot more, that is for sure, and especially since many dungeons at that time were leveling dungeons which sync tighter. But I never personally saw anyone bother with Sleep.

Enemy packs have almost always been "sets of 3", so a strategy I learned right away as a tank was to carefully wait for a patrol to move away so I would only pull 3 instead of 6. This used to be useful in ARR dungeons due to them be tougher back then. Eventually, SE taught this in Hall of the Novice - but by then it was irrelevant in every dungeon except Aurum Vale and Dzemael Darkhold.

But this is where all the points I made at the start of this post come in. If you pulled everything in Aurum Vale or many ARR or leveling dungeons, you were giving healers a heart attack and I can't say SE is wrong for addressing that issue.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

I remember reading about that when I started tanking in ARR and the guides saying to mark enemies 1, 2 and 3.

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I still have my 1, 2, 3 keys on the hotbar since ARR for old times sake, like a little memento.
Yes, there would be people who didn't care much about killing mobs in a certain order and used AoE's instead.
I remember I had to spam the cone AoE as a WAR to build aggro.
And with skills costing Stamina back then, making sure to keep aggro without a real Taunt skill (early on at least) meant that I spend a great time just building aggro to make sure no mob would break and attack someone else.
Which now when I'm saying this reminds me that the 1, 2, 3 was also helpful for the tank to make sure that people stayed on 1 enemy to not spread out the aggro, making it more difficult for the tank to manage the aggro & Stamina consumption.

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Originally Posted by mallleable

While dungeon bosses have been good, the trash is still trash. They need to change up their formula for the trash between bosses, because just bulldozing through random groups of enemies no matter how big the group is is getting stale. They've made some interesting trash pulls in like alliance raids, and variant, and criterion dungeons, so I would like to see some of those design philosophies carry over to regular dungeons. I think forcing players to change up their tactics a will lead to more memorable dungeons, but not like how Origenics was handled.

Another thing that will make dungeons better is dyable gear. Just please stop with the undyable dungeon gear.

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The annoying thing is that they have done interesting things with trash mobs in the past and just decided in Ew that they weren't going to do that any more for some reason.

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Originally Posted by BigCheez

The annoying thing is that they have done interesting things with trash mobs in the past and just decided in Ew that they weren't going to do that any more for some reason.

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I can't remember all encounters, but one I do remember one specific that I liked.
Was it The Sunken Temple of Qarn? Where there was Wasp trash mobs that could 1-shot people if not deal with quickly?

I enjoyed it simply because it added a priority list of targets making those engagements "feel" different than others.
It was a pretty simple yet effective way to add a new way to tackle a trash encounter.

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Originally Posted by Evergrey

Was it The Sunken Temple of Qarn? Where there was Wasp trash mobs that could 1-shot people if not deal with quickly?

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The wasps were in more than just Qarn, but I think Qarn was the first one to introduce them. Qarn also introduced the "kill mobs on specific locations" thing which never got done again.
The level 40 guildhest "ward up" introduced enemies that had to die at roughly the same time (a mechanic that was, iirc, also never revisited)
And the Sil’dihn Subterrane had a puzzle where, when you killed a group of enemies in specific order, a special path was revealed.

Trash mobs can be more than just hp sponge obstacles, and CS3 has proven that they know how, too. They just need to be a bit more confident and don't let naysayers shun them away from doing new things occasionally.

they should add more randoms trash mobs with actual mechanics (kill this one first cause enrage, this one will do a spread/share, this one needs to be silenced, this one will have X/Y/Z mech)

they should make bosses with only "execution type" mechanics, and if they do "dance type" mechanics it should be very creative (no aoe/share/spread/rotating aoe/bump/etc)


the should make more open dungeons, with incentives to do side quests/paths in the dungeon

I enjoyed the boss fights of Variant dungeons and the Dawntrail boss fights. They are much more engaging than your typical dungeon boss fight. The Dawntrail dungeon bosses required you to anticipate what would happen next rather than just waiting to see the orange AoE and run out of that.

The biggest weakness of the dungeons is that they are boring outside of the boss fights. In contrast, the environments of WoW's dungeons are large enough that you can choose which trash mobs to avoid and which to engage (pre revamp Aurum Vale had this somewhat, with the first room), and terrain is more interesting such as whether or not the tank is going to park in the middle of a sludge river, or if he is going to try to push up back onto dry land (but will involve aggroing a difficult mob ontop of whatever else he has aggroed, so he might die). Or fighting mobs that have knockbacks while up on a bridge. Mobs in WoW dungeons have much more varied abilities, have abilities that must be interrupted, etc, and are generally more threatening and engaging to fight against. Whereas trash mobs in FF14 feel like boring filler.

There is also the expectations with which players enter dungeons. In FF14, most people queue for duty roullette and don't care about the dungeon experience. It is just a means to an end to get their exp or their endgame tomestones ASAP, which leads to the homogenization of the dungeons. In WoW, people PUG for M+ dungeons - and yes they want to do them fast to get score - but they are doing this dungeon content (as opposed to raiding or PvP, which are alternate paths to get the same rewards) specifically because they enjoy the dungeon experience of pathing through the levels, dodging mob patrols, fighting the dangerous trash mobs, etc. Variant dungeons not being in the duty roullete (that people just want exp/tomestones ASAP from) helps so that people go into that content with the intent that they really want to experience that dungeon's content, but again the experience outside of the boss fights is too shallow compared to WoW's. And Criterion ofcourse is really brutal with its one shot mechanics, feeling like raid prog where you die on a boss fight dozens of times and have to watch 1 hour+ long youtube videos, which is not very fun.

Just for further explanations:

Wonder: is basically adding 2 type of event that could be cause by a player (which exist in variant dungeons) and other events happened randomly, different routes that changes the experience (no more illusion of choice).

Fear: rouge-lite/like is a game genre substance of RPG genre watch this video to explain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RERyFXXHjsU I would explain it in short give dungeons sense of danger

Treasure: If loot is valuable people will queue many times a week maybe days to just enjoy content that reward them for exploring and giving content a hard shake.

People who enjoy Rolette mainly want to dungeons to be as braindead as possible, I don't see the benefit of it tbh, if the game balanced because of a problem that devs create which is Rolette I believe there should be an another solution to increase player engagements without making content braindead

I would like to see "easy mode" for dungeons with trust for people who just want to skip content for story and playing with other 3 players online will give higher value items and points for people who want the "true dungeon experience".

Get rid of the arbitrary walls between 2 packs, or at least bring back "one of those pulls" ala Bardaam's Mettle or Mt. Gulg. Trash mobs in WoW were more stimulating. Raid trash mobs. From 2015.

Making them actual dungeons without arbitrary walls that just NTR you from having any actual fun

Boss fights are the same old boring.

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Originally Posted by BabyYoda

Fear: rouge-lite/like is a game genre substance of RPG genre watch this video to explain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RERyFXXHjsU I would explain it in short give dungeons sense of danger.

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I don't think they were asking what a rogue like/lite is, but more, what mechanics do you want from those genres that could be implemented into dungeons to make them more interesting, ideally with examples of how it would be implemented.

Dungeons don't feel like dungeons. They just feel like extra msq flash without substance

There's no gearing, no chasing upgrades, its so lame that like 2-3 dungeons only have accessories?
There's no unique ways to have fun with your specific job
There's no rare things to chase after (some housing items here and there I guess)
Aside from chasing tomestones, I don't see a reason to do the dungeons at all aside from leveling jobs, which SHOULD include the open world more, but alas. We have NO OPEN WORLD activities that play into leveling your character, like I don't know... every other MMO? That's why I keep saying this is a single-player RPG wearing the skinsuit of an MMO.

So until the systems of actual pve and how they approach it, and how jobs are. I don't think its worth to "improve" dungeons. Because the systems around the dungeons are so busted anyway and officeworker-levels of boring AFTER the first thrilling time of seeing the scenery and bosses. (okay maybe two).

Some rng needs to be introduced for the thrills for example, so you actually want to chase something. Gear upgrades shouldn't be free and the catch-up gear / making gear useless in the next patch should be toned down, the materia system needs to go or needs to be revamped.

But thats just me coping, I don't think this game will ever upgrade itself into an MMO until they lose a huge amount of subscribers.
Until that they will be super careful, timid and scared. Because they have this Coca-cola mentality of "We want to offer the same quality and things to the customers" newsflash Square Enix, FFXIV is an MMO, you need to innovate. Not Coca-Cola.


Also would it hurt to update the Gold Saucer too while you're at it, like making the chocobo racing more smoother, add new tracks, add a new game. Hell, add games to the open world to make it more interesting.

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

I don't think they were asking what a rogue like/lite is, but more, what mechanics do you want from those genres that could be implemented into dungeons to make them more interesting, ideally with examples of how it would be implemented.

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Yeah, exactly this. I actually missed the response as I wasn't thinking it was to me, but since you caught it, that's what I meant exactly.

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Originally Posted by Hallarem

FFXIV is an MMO, you need to innovate.

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Not disagreeing with your points, however, FF14 is not wearing an MMO skin. It's an MMO wearing an FF14 skin. It's a Final Fantasy first and foremost presented as an "MMO." Do they need to innovate? Absolutely. Will they ever get the idea something is wrong? Probably not. Square is a company, they respond to loss in profit. How do they lose profit? Lack of subs. Everyone's happy to yap and not do the one thing that'll get their attention because "but muh house." Not defending it or saying it's right, but that's just how it is.

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Originally Posted by Lilapop

Not disagreeing with your points, however, FF14 is not wearing an MMO skin. It's an MMO wearing an FF14 skin. It's a Final Fantasy first and foremost presented as an "MMO." Do they need to innovate? Absolutely. Will they ever get the idea something is wrong? Probably not. Square is a company, they respond to loss in profit. How do they lose profit? Lack of subs. Everyone's happy to yap and not do the one thing that'll get their attention because "but muh house." Not defending it or saying it's right, but that's just how it is.

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I keep hearing this. What does "It's a final fantasy foremost" mean in the context of MMO's. I get the stories, the themes and callbacks? I don't see turnbased combat nor some "Final fantasy" specific system at play here that stops innovation within the MMO-system.

But I do agree with the fact that its CRYSTAL CLEAR (there's a final fantasy theme for them) that they are coasting on goodwill. I gave WoW multiple years to course correct, but if 8.0 is another lackluster expansion. It's time to move on, house or not, at least in my case.

It's better to "Yap" then just silently watch from the sidelines or PRAISE them for doing nothing. Then after that it's up to just stop giving them money if thats the language they understand.

Fear: install death penalty again. And make the time it takes to gain levels longer. It is way too easy to level all jobs to 100. And there is no fear if you die because of this. The only time I had "fear" of exploration in this game was in Eureka where death could "hurt." And training enemies above your level commonly meant death.

I'm not sure I play XIV to get perpetually fear of deleveling or whatever loss of the sort. I've played eve online for years until it became obvious that the idea of farming pve for hours to make enough money in order to buy a ship that would probably blow up under 10 minutes was frankly toxic to my mental health. I'm not sure I want that kind of things back into my MMO experience.