why is castrum and praetorium not an instance

[Enkidoh]

Most of Meridanium and Praetorium's cutscenes can be viewed in the Unending Journey (although they're scattered between 'main scenario' and 'duties'), plus a number of small scenes don't appear. A little known aspect of it is also your party appears beside you and even have little gestures and movements in the background when actually viewing the scenes as part of the dungeons, while in the Undending Journey naturally this doesn't occur, so a lot of context is lost.

The problem is, SE underestimated human nature being selfish and impatient, and thought that players would patiently view each cutscene at the same time. Sadly this did not turn out to be the case. Luckily SE listened to players and thus later dungeons like Heavensward's final dungeon are structured much differently, but it still leaves CM and Prae like this.

As others have already stated, try running it undermanned with a couple of friends and ask if you can watch the cutscenes.

[bswpayton]

Most of Meridanium and Praetorium's cutscenes can be viewed in the Unending Journey (although they're scattered between 'main scenario' and 'duties'), plus a number of small scenes don't appear. A little known aspect of it is also your party appears beside you and even have little gestures and movements in the background when actually viewing the scenes as part of the dungeons, while in the Undending Journey naturally this doesn't occur, so a lot of context is lost.

I heard they fixed it in hw but why make players that are new , have to make the choice oh should I make my party happy are should I do what I want and get left behind , they could easily make it a solo thing and it wouldnt be an issue

[Leknaat]

As others have already stated, try running it undermanned with a couple of friends and ask if you can watch the cutscenes.

^ So much this.

I get that SE was trying to make it a memorable experience. I think they regularly underestimate how willing people are to grind/farm till they puke/are sick of the content and reach the point where they ruin it for everyone else because they're sick of grinding it.

I remember timing it once. Praetorium took like 3x longer with the cutscenes (I know I'm overexaggerating but it was slow lol). I know one time we left the 2 people watching the CS's behind... and we destroyed the dungeon with 6 people and were exiting around the time they'd reached the 2nd boss cutscene they might have made it to the third boss cutscene. It was extremely poor design on SE's part and I am baffled as to why they put so many long CS's into an instance instead of making it a more intimate solo experience. CM was a little CS heavy (I have no idea why you would NEED a cs showing lamps being turned off instead of just leaving it as a message lol)

Funny story, once I was running Praetorium with my FC (so they could enjoy the CSs and see the fights) back in 2.x before the undersize option and other changes... we had a random WAR that didn't want to watch the CS's. He tried to pull early once but since we had the other tank and 2 healers we didn't budge. So he left... 30 mins later after the abandon debuff he ended up queueing back into our group... lol we were at like the 2nd or 3rd to last fight so... he decided to not take another 30 min penalty and finished it with us.

I've also been in parties the other way where they had both tanks and healers but the ilevel bloat had made Praetorium a joke so the dps beat the first Prae boss without any tanks/heals. So yeah undersized party is the way to go.