square please challenge us a little

[Mugiawara]

I agree. The dungeons are fine at the difficulty they are now.

If you want harder go do savage raids and extreme trials.

4 man dungeons honestly need a tweak somewhere.
All of them are face roll easy. I'm glad 24 man ones
are starting to get a bit more difficult, VA2 is so damn fun, and still to this day
people kinda have difficulties but it's fun to recover and win at the end.
I don't wanna block out more difficult content just because everyone thinks
DF is all THAT bad. I did most of my content in DF and prefer to.

Well, if that's the case, then let's ask for Dungeon Extreme Mode. Turn that sumbitch up to 11! Sastasha EX, Haukke Manor EX, Wanderers Palace EX, etc. I can get behind that. Keep adding HM, but maybe start adding EX as well.

Could make new dungeons that is actually hard instead of revisiting the same old dungeons over and over in 10 different levels.

[Nalien]

I don't want more challenging dungeons, I just want interesting dungeons...

Level design in this game has really taken a step back IMO, 2.0 showed promise, there was nothing amazing on offer, but there was potential there... Everything since has just been a steady decline downhill IMO... At least, in terms of gameplay... Spectacle? Yeah, new dungeons only continue to impress, but that's a fairly shallow complement... I can be amazed at the vista a new dungeon provides for me a few times, but ultimately I'm running the same corridor every time... XIV should honestly be receiving the same complaints XIII got, IMO...

Right off the bat, I know someone is going to think; "But people just rush to the end, nobody ever did the side rooms in 2.0 dungeons!", and there is a degree of truth in there... People did generally just take the most direct route to clear a dungeon, but does that mean dungeons should be designed around that concept? It is partly a failing of the designers to begin with, people skip a lot in dungeons because... Well, what's the reward? A potion? Some gear nobody cares about? No sh*t people are going to skip that... There is just no reward for exploration in this game... You can see this even with the content that was apparently designed with exploration in mind... Diadem? It is more rewarding to sit and grind the same enemies over and over, SE did nothing to encourage exploration with Diadem... Same for Palace of the Dead... Sure, it's a new layout each time, but there is still no reward for exploration... There's no secrets to find in Deep Dungeons, we've just got a Roguelike map with none of the Roguelike secrets... There's nothing to discover, just the same chests every floor with the same bosses every ten... Random little secrets would be a great addition to all content, IMO... I've long since figured Treasure Maps and Hunts should be incorporated into dungeons... Treasure Maps can provide nice additional tomestones, and Hunts kinda flip-flop between being worthwhile or not, opening a chest in a dungeon, only to get a map that causes some brief backtracking for additional rewards? That would break up the monotony of these things so much...

That's not even half my problem with dungeons though... They've basically completely dropped any puzzles from these things... Qarn is perhaps my favorite dungeon, and the puzzles there aren't even anything to write home about... There was an effort though, and they didn't halt progression too much, unless you really messed up (and if you mess up a puzzle as basic as "Kill head on switch", who's really at fault here?), and the riddle based ones didn't even require you to brain, you could brute force them if you didn't care... Why didn't we ever get more of that? It adds depth to the dungeons IMO, and with a more open ended level design, you can even make such things purely optional... Options are the key here, I want options, I want to do Xelphatol and have options in how I clear it...

Which brings me to bosses... When was the last time you beat the same boss, two different ways? Usually, I'd say any second method comes about as a detriment to the content... Skipping mechanics entirely, simply because you're over geared, doesn't please me in the slightest, at least not with the rate this game hands out gear... You know what does though? Skipping mechanics because I'm skilled... Teratotaur is perhaps my favorite boss because of this... Throw the right Jobs at him, and you do the entire fight without once having to worry about Doom, provided you know what you're doing... You're not over geared, you're not just brushing off the mechanic because it does nothing to you now, you're actively using Stun/Silence/Pacification to avoid that mechanic, and that is a rewarding experience... I can't think of many other encounters that give you that kind of flexibility... Partly I think this is due to just how standardized boss encounters have become, from a level design perspective... There's only so much you can do with the static circle we get for every single fight... I'm going to reference Majora's Mask for a second, because I remember Goht being a fairly unique encounter... Why not do something similar? Have a donut shaped arena, with the boss rolling around... Throw in a mechanic to slow him down so you can attack (tank has to stand in his path to stop him, pots that put Toto-Rak goo on the floor to stop him, etc.), or *gasp* make use of Jobs with Heavy effects! That's all healers, by the way, so don't give me any crap about "Not every Job has one!", although I'd rather mechanics like that be Job dependent... It's not a case of "You can't beat this without this Job", it's just a case of particular Jobs resulting in you tackling the instance differently, which I think is a good thing... It adds variety...

I'd also love to be able to straight up skip trash packs... I think there are some Job mechanics which allow for that, though we might need some adjustments to facilitate this kind of design... Hide, Sleep, and Bind specifically annoy me... These should allow for interesting ways to tackle content, yet they never do... They're all functionally redundant, everything sees through Hide these days, and Sleep just gets flat out resisted, along with so many other interesting effects... If these aren't going to be useful on trash packs, what are they meant to be useful on? I get them not working on bosses, but I miss how these things worked in earlier dungeons... Wanderer's Palace, we'd skip a few mobs before the second boss, we'd flip the switch and bind the enemies to lock them out of the boss so we'd lose hate... That would have been great level design, if it was intentional... It was more of an exploit though, and subsequent dungeons have gone to great lengths to standardize the runs... We're not allowed to tackle content in different ways, regardless of what Jobs you bring, ever run must be the same... Let different Jobs bring different methods to the table, it would help immensely to spice up these currently monotonous hallways... Hide really, really gets to me though, why even have a stealth mechanic if it's not going to be possible for me to skulk off to help my party move through the dungeon? Haukke Manor let me do it, I could use Hide, go grab a key, and we could skip stuff... It was interesting, and by no means a "must have" to do the dungeon, but it made two runs of the dungeon feel unique... That kind of stuff should be built upon and balanced, not condemned in favour of an entirely linear experience...

Rewards are also kind of the issue... That's a whole 'nother topic on itemization though, or this games lack of it... For dungeons though, we're there for the tomestones, and those just magically appear in our inventories... There's vanity fluff, but that's generally too rare to really consider IMO... I actually liked the Zodiac Braves quest, just because it added new rewards to the dungeons, suddenly I wasn't doing Snowcloak for the same tomestones every time, I was after a special drop... The rarity of those was also a bit messed up, but overall I liked the structure of those quests... It provided new value to old dungeons... Can't say the same for Anima quests, I get the point behind giving us options for obtaining all this stuff, but for me it's just created a shallower questline that I don't care to repeat...

The worst part is, this long rant? Isn't even exclusive to dungeons... Diadem and Palace of the Dead suffer for many of the same reasons, and raids are just a scaled up version of dungeons...

[Moomba33]

The main problem I have with Hullbreaker HM is that the first boss is basically just a bunch of trash mobs. I like the second boss and found the final one ok.

As for dungeon design in general I like a lot of the lower level ones more than high level ones. Haukke Manor is my personal favourite. It's not super intricate or anything but I like that it isn't a straight run through and there are some optional rooms with crafting items and equipment.
Incentivizing exploration is a problem though. A majority of groups do just take the direct path through even in cases where detours don't take much extra time the most amusing to me being how often the final room of Haukke HM is skipped. There are 2 unguarded treasure chests with free gear for seals/desynth and yet most of the time I get that dungeon the group just kills the boss and leaves leaving me to go pick up the chests after they've left.

[Kurogaea]

Please square please challenge us a little with the great gubal library hard mode do not make it like Hullbreaker hard total faceroll i loved the original hullbreaker i also loved the original great gubal library (should of been a 60 dungeon) we can be challenged its ok we dont need our hand held anyone agree?

I agree. I haven't read all the responses yet but I already see some mentioning about being matched with random players. The thing is, we're all random players. Meaning we're all not completely brain dead to the point we're incapable of reasonable thinking skills. Can we read a piece of paper and recognize a blatant clue that was colored red. A colored switch aligned with 2 other switches of different colors, would we be able to find out which is the right one to press after seeing the beautiful painting mostly painted in a very warm color palette with the eye catching object that seems to be protruding from the painting with a similar brighter shade of the button (keeping color blind players in mind). How about the floating robot that seems to be reviving the other enemies, would it not make sense to kill it before it brings them back to life?

These are the things most of us are claimed of being too stupid for. If your playing this game your most likely well above your 20s or at least 15, and I know the most simple minded kids who play Tomb Raider and solve puzzles like its nobody's business. There's plenty of examples of common sense in these games. If you don't the the sense to solve most of these, there's no way you survived some of those hard questline missions that required you to think on your feet. (oh crap these guys are getting healed!? I better kill them faster so the healer cant heal the, durrr...When its easier to just kill the healer.

What it comes down to is people are lazy. Actually more hypocritical in a sense. You play an MMO built on RNG and Grinding at its core, yet time is your main complaint where everything you do takes up your time. DF takes time. Raiding takes days of planning and schedules. I don't need to speak more on it because its just plain stupid.

I'm done talking about that, but in case "challenge" was referring to mechanics of enemies being raid tier than I would disagree. Mainly because raid boss ability conveyance is non-existent until you die multiple times. That I would disagree with. Other wise, deeper, more detailed (NOT GRAPHIC-WISE DAMMIT....looking at you arbortorium or h/e it's spelled) and fleshed out dungeons with actual challenges other than flatout steam rolls and Hullbreaker's obvious guantlet style :/

[Kurogaea]

I agree. The dungeons are fine at the difficulty they are now.

If you want harder go do savage raids and extreme trials.

And btw, THESE ARE NOT DUNGEONS. They are giant boss fights that require frequent trial and error with perfect synchronized coordination. In other words, synchronized dances. Coil is no different aside from from T3 I think with the hoops and jumping, that takes simple attention to objects.

[loreleidiangelo]

I asked SE for optional difficulty settings of dungeons in another topic for challenges. Current default difficulty of dungeons are like you can drop your notebook on the floor and randomly jump on keyboard and you will still clear it.

This is the same company that "can't afford" to give us more than two endgame dungeons per patch...what makes you think they'll give people the option of taking the stairs when the "ilevel escalator" design model seems to be so popular?

[SpookyGhost]

"Please, SE, remove labirynth and puzzles from dungeons, we cannot speedrun everything!!![...]

That wasn't the problem with Lab. The problem was getting 24 people to coordinate. Look at Ozma, he doesn't even require much coordination and people can't do him properly.

Anyway, the speedrun mentality will never go away unless they make it go away. It's always better to get things done as quick as possible and when everything is exactly the same every time you go in a dungeon then you're going to feel more inclined to zoom through.

[Deceptistar]

If the hard gubal isnt challenge enough just make your own :3

Challenge: Complete Nid EX with 7 newbies.

[Kurogaea]

If the hard gubal isnt challenge enough just make your own :3

Challenge: Complete Nid EX with 7 newbies.

Not a dungeon. Also if someone asked they want more story in the game that doesn't have any would you say go to the forest and make your own? If the game was like ffxiv, that'd be really, really, pushing the point of being flat-out rude.

[Deceptistar]

Not a dungeon. Also if someone asked they want more story in the game that doesn't have any would you say go to the forest and make your own? If the game was like ffxiv, that'd be really, really, pushing the point of being flat-out rude.

What are you prattling about...
Hullbreaker Isle (Hard) is a dungeon...
The OP is talking about the how easy the hull breaker hard mode was, which as of now is pretty much a face roll even tho its 'Hard'.
And the fact that they dont want a gubal hard face roll again.
They didnt say they want more story ingame. They only said they enjoyed it.
read properly pls