Solving a ancient problem with Normal Dungeon Difficulty

So I've put out various ideas about this for the past few years, but what I would want requires a major re-work.

So instead I thought back to the Difficulty adjustment feature that is present in various spots of the Main Story.

Rather than reworking monsters and bosses in a major way but instead their mechanic speed and Damage Rating is adjusted by difficulty (except a hypothetical very hard mode)

Normal Difficulty - This would be the standard everyone is used to doing.

Hard Difficulty - Monster & Boss Mechanic behavior is sped up and harder to evade, and damage is increased.

Very Hard Difficulty - Same as above, but only unlocked after beating the main story of the expansion. You visit the Yoshi P Bard guy to unlock them by telling of your exploits.

-Gear drops in Very Hard have pink icon variants at max MSQ ilvl (Pink Gear was abandoned years ago) that has increased ilvl by 5 points and one more materia slot. Same gear, but just upgraded. Might be useful for those looking for alternative gear to help with Extreme raids.

-Normal Monsters in very Hard Mode are changed to more dangerous variants with different mechanics, the last boss of each dungeon gets a new soft enrage ability.
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-Each Difficulty comes with increased percentage of rewards

Gil x 2 for Hard, x 3 for Very hard
Tomestones x 2 for Hard, and x 3 for very hard
Gear Drop + 1 at the very last coffer (Hard)
Gear Drop + 2 at the very last coffer (Very Hard)

-Each Very Hard Difficulty Dungeon gets a new color variant of the same minion if it drops in that dungeon.

-New titles for people who beat the very hard versions

-New Roulette for Very Hard difficulty Mode Dungeons

-Beating all the Very Hard variants of a Story Expansion unlocks a new mount and one more title. The Mounts will be based on a monster you encountered in one of the dungeons (whichever that maybe for a developer to pick).

Well, that is all I got. Good idea? Bad idea? Let me know.

This is what I think a lot of us wanted for years. Them to simply get the all the past dungeons and just apply a simple buff/debuff effect like Deep Dungeons do, to increase your incoming damage, increase boss HP and outgoing damage, reduce telegraphs or speed their casts up as you said, and adding an enrage cast. Others wanted them to simply apply a random effects buff to make each playthrough different, like what deep dungeons do. Really the exact technology they use in deep dungeons to buff/debuff you and enemies would be fine and achieve most of this.

Their answer to all that was to make criterion dungeons. They seem unwilling to revisit old ones, despite that it would instantly give people over 100 dungeons' worth of challenges.

And then they're removing trash from harder variations of the V&C dungeons, which is a shame.

I like the OP's ideas, and while they're at it, would be interesting to make every dungeon of an expansion relevant to this mode too. We only get dungeon diversity in roulettes with the patched ones, but I'd love to do a level 100 of Vanguard, for example. They would need to find an alternative loot table for it though. Maybe accessories in this variation.

One idea I was thinking that could spice this up even further was a challenge log entry for those duties: something like "Don't get hit by avoidable mechanics for <runs/bosses/etc>".

That will definitely play in what I had in mind, basically very hard mode is max level of that story expansion for each dungeon.

Pink Gear drops will reflect that too having max MSQ ilvl + 5 additionally added.

Very Hard Dungeon Roulette incorporates them all from lvl 50-60-70-80-90-100, so all the dungeons will be there restricted to their max level.

Though I would not be against if it was broken down to 6 separate roulettes for expansion for each maximum level range, the only difference the dungeons will be kept separated from eachother restricted to their expansion.

Buffing mob stats yes, but cranking up mechanical speed? Good luck with a game that's never been designed to handle this (and that would also make me stay the fuck away from those modes unlike the first one).

Still, I'm curious about that since their new statement of intent seems to be generating difficulty levels for everyone and not just specific audiences with every content they come up with. Dungeons so far have only been aimed at the baseline story level.

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Originally Posted by Valence

Buffing mob stats yes, but cranking up mechanical speed? Good luck with a game that's never been designed to handle this (and that would also make me stay the fuck away from those modes unlike the first one).

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Mechanics to me have become a formality than presenting actual test of skill, and its been that way for a very long time. Most of it has been a really long joke, and I don't understand their existence at this point aside from their use in things like extreme and savage which is actually put together properly. Overworld monster mechanics have the same problem which is just a formality, it worked at lvl 50 and lvl 60 but by the time you reach stormblood you should have a good understanding of dodging mechanics.

If its not your bag that's fine, but I see a system that has been neglected. Also It would just be optional things to do, I'm not forcing baseline skill players to be pitted into it, but it would be beneficial to the players that would want to up their game a bit making them better players.

The servers can handle it, they already do fast mechanical speed already in many battles. If what I'm suggesting is enough to choke their servers that would be something.

I assume the pink gear will have random secondary stats? As that is what pink gear represented.

I also have a question on difficulty. For most people, the gap between dungeons, trials, 8 man raids and extreme trials is not that big, so where is the difficulty of the hard and very hard dungeons going to sit specifically?

Then what is meant by max MSQ ilevel? If we were to use Meso Terminal as an example, the ilevel for entry is 720, I doubt this is what is meant, the gear is 735, so maybe 740? That puts it on par with crafted gear and normal raid gear, which would be easier to get. SO what niche is it filling that isn't already filled by something else.

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

I assume the pink gear will have random secondary stats? As that is what pink gear represented.

I also have a question on difficulty. For most people, the gap between dungeons, trials, 8 man raids and extreme trials is not that big, so where is the difficulty of the hard and very hard dungeons going to sit specifically?

Then what is meant by max MSQ ilevel? If we were to use Meso Terminal as an example, the ilevel for entry is 720, I doubt this is what is meant, the gear is 735, so maybe 740? That puts it on par with crafted gear and normal raid gear, which would be easier to get. SO what niche is it filling that isn't already filled by something else.

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MSQ ilevel of that expansion only, so basically any dungeons from ARR that wasn't lvl 50 will be lvl 50 for Very hard.

Pink Gear I'm just re-working for my purposes, but the secondary stat sounds interesting to try with again but I don't think would serve much purpose anymore since the game has changed alot since then.

The gear would just be alternative, but some people may want to save some gil or mix gear around with Green or Blue gear to try out different stat builds.

Very Hard would be close to extreme, that is where I would put it at. (I know this doesn't help the question much, but you made think about that hole).

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These are good questions, I didn't completely think about these issues.

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Originally Posted by Kaliesto

MSQ ilevel of that expansion only, so basically any dungeons from ARR that wasn't lvl 50 will be lvl 50 for Very hard.

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But, that doesn't answer the question. I understand that the gear level would be based on the expansion for the dungeon, but then what would the ilevel of the gear be? Just for ARR, the ilevel starts at ~ilevel 50 and goes all the way up to ilevel 130 (i135 for Zeta and Dreadwyrm weapons). The highest level dungeons in ARR drop ilevel 100 gear, the MSQ currently gives you ilevel 110 gear for free. But this is also why I didn't want to use past expansions as a reference as max ilevel gear is easy to obtain.

Which brings us to DT, currently, the highest ilevel gear we can get is ilevel 760, highest dungeon gear is ilevel 735, and we still have another tier of equipment to go in 7.4, which will bring the max to ilevel 790 for savage and upgraded tome gear, ilevel 780 for tome gear, ilevel 770 for crafted and normal mode gear and dungeon gear gear will be ilevel 750, with that going up to ilevel 765 in 7.5, where you also get the upgraded crafting gear and alliance raid gear at ilevel 780 and the normal raid ger being uncapped as well.

So really it is about what you mean by MSQ ilevel and what that relates to.

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Originally Posted by Kaliesto

Very Hard would be close to extreme, that is where I would put it at. (I know this doesn't help the question much, but you made think about that hole).

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I had a feeling the very hard would be below extreme, as you said, it is intended to be an extra leg up for more gear for the extreme fights, but I think the main thing that needs to be considered is what the ilevel of the gear is going to be and why I should spend time farming that over other methods, which could be easier to do and give the same, if not better, gear to use.

hmm that has given me something to think about, and I don't have a straight answer for that problem at the moment, but I'll throw something out there -

Maybe instead of pink gear variants, maybe we should go for hypothetical purple relic armor ilvl by ARR standards 130 (135 weapon), make the armor be ilvl 130 as the first step and make it into 135 as the second step.

But you need pieces from very hard dungeons to craft the armor itself.

This comes with a problem, very hard mode would have to be released much later to keep in balance with the game's future patches though this would not apply with ARR/HW/STB/SB/EW since those have been fully released patch cycles already.


Maybe we should make Green crafted/Blue Gear be the standard ilvl to get into the Very Hard Dungeons as the prerequisite (so in this case as you suggested would be ilvl 110 or higher).


Though if we do it like this the developers would have to stick to that, and cannot deviate relic armor into other systems...that is a bit of a con to that.


Hmm

Give me some time to think about this, and I'll revisit this unless the relic armor is a better alternative.

far as I know we don't even have relic armor except the weapons

Too many modes may become a problem with DF.

It's not that I don't want harder normal dungeons, but this sounds like a nightmare to implement with the ilvls and then I would have to sort through all the gear sets and my dresser is almost full too and I haven't gathered all the armors set for them to be unlocked.