What Expert Roulette had no skips?

I thought about making this a poll, but that would require a bunch of research, so I'm posting it here open-ended instead.

Over the history of the game, which patch's expert roulette had you saying "all of these dungeons are awesome and I never get tired of them"?


For me, I think it's hard to beat 5.0's base set: Amaurot, Twinning, Akadaemia

The ancient city of Amdapor and Wanderer's palace normal
Well, the latter is just because the tonberries are cute and has really nice bgm.

I guess it's mostly the leveling and first two sidequest dungeons in ShB, EW and DT. The reason for this is: I rarely do the leveling dungeons in comparison to Expert, and the first two sidequest dungeons add more variety into Expert roulette.

It's the patch dungeons that not only get thoroughly boring due to item level increases, but also from the lack of variety in Expert roulette now. They used to completely change the dungeons in Expert after 3.5 months, whereas now each one is in there for at least 8-9 months.

The Stormblood dungeons didn't bore me because a lot of things mattered back then: if I pulled enemies as a tank, the healer had to heal me like crazy and some of them were on edge frantically casting heals, even in a lot of patch dungeons. I was frantically scrambling to juggle my cooldowns. There was also more teamplay involved, such as being able to influence eachother's MP or enmity. I had to manage enmity, particular at the beginning of fights, depending on the DPS of the party and if they used enmity reductions.

Heavensward, to be honest the dungeons did get kinda boring then, but it was due to the fact they did not sync them well back then. There was no tier sync like there is now, so dungeons like Antitower and Gubal Library to this day are still way undertuned for a 270 player. However, some dungeons remained fun just because of certain pulls or their aesthetics:

• Baelsar's Wall felt really fun climbing up that giant wall and grabbing lots and lots of enemy packs, and the final fight was fun on the basis of trying to keep uptime on this boss that jumps around and uses things like gazes.
• In Sohm Al HM I mostly liked the vents, the actual reliance on the healer when bosses got my HP low, and trying to pull enemy packs in the days when many tanks didn't have gap closers.
• Gubal Library HM was mostly fun just because of the pulls and the fact I was often the only one who knew the mechanics to the second and third bosses. Ironically, its lack of sync meant I was like a god compared to all the casual players in there.
• Xelphatol was mostly always a striking dummy dungeon, but I loved doing it because of the music and beauty, dragging enemies into vuln areas and the fun in it was trying to speedrun and mechanic skip. There was an interesting tankbuster in it called Swiftfeather which is essentially swiftcasting a tankbuster so you can't dodge it and need heavy mit.
• I guess Sohr Khai was kinda similar - how many mechanics can we skip.
• Hullbreaker HM got kinda repetitive, but the adds actually really hurt, some of the enemies had jobs such as Ninja, and people didn't know the mechanics to the second and last bosses.
• Lost City HM, honestly, the adds used to really hurt me but then item level gains happened and it's never been the same since.

The last 2 dungeons in HW got a little repetitive due to the timespan before Stormblood release.

I don't need to go over ARR dungeons.

I personally liked most of the Post-SB stuff, and up until Heroes Gauntlet in ShB. Every expert after that has been kind of a snore.

I think my Personal favorite Iteration of expert Roulette was the final SB patch for reasons similar to what was mentioned before.

Back in SB you had to be careful about tank mits and had to actually do some healing on healer. On top of that, the Burn and Ghimlit dark had some of my favorite Dungeon bosses at the time.

Neverreap + Fractal Continuum. I know Neverreap is somewhat of a meme these days, but I never get tired of those two dungeons. Very nostalgic!

Other than that, hm… I quite enjoyed the version of Expert Roulette that we had in 7.0! Tender Valley and the Strayborough Deadwalk are real bangers of dungeons.

up until StB, I never had any problems with grinding any of the roulettes since the jobs were insanely fun to play

Probably not popular choices, but I enjoyed the Post 6.0 patch dungeons personally. I found myself queueing Expert roulette quite frequently when the likes of:
- The Fell Court of Troia
- Lapis Manalis
- The Aetherfont
- The Lunar Subterrane

were current. As well as the gameplay within the dungeons themselves I loved the aesthetics of them.

Sadly, as things currently stand, I actively avoid Expert Roulette.

For me it was patch 5.3 and 7.0.

5.3 brought us Anamnesis & Heroes’ Gauntlet. While I don’t particularly think the dungeons being outstanding, I adore the aesthetic, BGM, their overall spiciness on some isolated cases like Anamnesis last wall pull & Berserker with subpar party.

7.0 is up there purely because Strayborough—their first boss specifically. Speaking of dungeon bosses, nothing comes close to that boss in terms of fun factor in my eyes. For the context, I’m a former bullet curtain shooter games, so they easily captured my interest.

Gubal Hard was one if not the most pleasant, awesome expert dungeon I've had, although I couldn't begin to explain you why. Perhaps the trash pull variety on top of the last's boss mechanics but there has to be something else, perhaps just the mood. It was just that great.
Baelsar's Wall definitely a good contender. Some good mechanics, the (ranged!) archers with the poison dots that actually hurt, the prey mechanics, the gigantic pulls on the climb to LB down...
Xelphatol was cool.
Twinning and Akadaemya but that's mostly for the mood.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Rein_eon_Osborne

For me it was patch 5.3 and 7.0.

5.3 brought us Anamnesis & Heroes’ Gauntlet. While I don’t particularly think the dungeons being outstanding, I adore the aesthetic, BGM, their overall spiciness on some isolated cases like Anamnesis last wall pull & Berserker with subpar party.

7.0 is up there purely because Strayborough—their first boss specifically. Speaking of dungeon bosses, nothing comes close to that boss in terms of fun factor in my eyes. For the context, I’m a former bullet curtain shooter games, so they easily captured my interest.

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Gotta agree here. I only started playing 3 days before 5.25 dropped, so I don't quite remember what the expert roulette was for that patch, but 5.3 expert and 7.0 expert were probably my favorites in my time playing.
7.3 would be up there if the 7.1 dungeon was still in rotation, because I loath 7.2's dungeon, but it doesn't help that I haven't run an expert roulette multiple days in a row in years, cuz I'm always just... doing anything else for tomes.

My other post was longwinded. So overall, I think what changed that made people tired of dungeons was a combination of factors:

- Stormblood (in 2017) made us only have 1 new dungeon in some patches, and Shadowbringers (in 2019) made us only have 1 new dungeon, period. This meant going 7 months with the same dungeon in Expert.

- Endwalker increased the patch gap to 19 weeks, leaving us with nearly 9 months of the same dungeon in Expert.

- Dungeons were still fun in Stormblood because jobs could affect eachother's MP, TP, enmity. The holy trinity mattered, healers still had to heal and pulls could be rough sometimes. But with that being taken away in Shadowbringers combined with having the same dungeon for 7-9 months, it got very boring.

- Now consider a dungeon released in 7.4. That dungeon will be part of expert roulette for over a year. It's 4.5 months (until 7.5) followed by 8-9 months (until 8.0). After doing your daily expert roulette for that long, it feels like torture.

5.0 and 5.3 were peak expert roulette, and they shoild just ilvl sync all the dungeons harshly and remove max level roulette so that expert isn't a slog.

Probably some time in Heavensward or maybe early Stormblood, I'd usually queue in as Healer.
Definitely avoided 90% of roulettes post-Shadowbringers launch, since WHM was still a recovering mess from SB and AST in dungeons was basically like going in without a job stone or relevant ilvl gear.