State of the Game: Savage+ Dungeons and End Game Leves

[Delmontyb]

And as I said earlier before people decided to nitpick the point I wasn't making, this will come at a cost. If implemented, it would likely come at the cost of no additional primals or raids during a patch cycle that would normally have it. So let's put the question to the floor.

"Would you rather have all the old ARR content revamped like Mythic+ in WoW, and have patch 5.0 pushed off to 2020?"

That cost would be a fixed cost, and most of that cost has already been completed due to the fact that these systems exist, just in part and not connected. On top of that, if we had to sacrifice one primal on one patch, that would be more then worth it, as this system could add value to all the other primals that don't ever get run after players are done with them. Thus it takes the whole game, and adds a dynmaic coat of paint that doesn't then require lots of development time after.

So to answer your question, yes, I would rather them make interesting systems and add more replay value to those systems, and delay 5.0.

[SinisterJoints]

This generally won't work. The problem is the same as soloing challenge floors in HoH or POTD; the game can't really scale difficulty slowly, and you'll quickly hit chokepoints. You'd get maybe two or three instances people can do, and then the fourth one people would have to pick certain dungeons that are even possible to do, where the boss just won't instawipe you or the mobs won't if they get boosted enough. Fifth would need cheese comps like how rdm is only one that can solo, unless it just ends up being heavy rng in terms of pomader drops or conditions that can apply to a floor.

They are better off just making single dungeons or trials they can hand craft to a specific difficulty.

It would work quite well honestly. I don't know why you think it wouldn't. All savagry content has the same standpoint. Groups can either do it, or not do it. Some take longer to learn and complete while others do not. You don't need pomanders in the dungeon or crappy HoH conditions. That's why HoH is difficult, the conditions that come with each floor. Either you have a pom to negate or you suffer. If you negate, the floors are cake.

And scaling up the mobs would take MINIMAL effort to make as apposed to sapping even more dev time to make new content entirely.

tldr -- I disagree with you lol

"Would you rather have all the old ARR content revamped like Mythic+ in WoW, and have patch 5.0 pushed off to 2020?"

Insert hyperbole? Don't over exaggerate just to make your point feasible.

[Remedi]

I will agree, that does not sound fun, but it is entirely possible to mix it up.
A few challenges presented weren't merely just HP with standard comp but non-standard comps such as 4 BRD. Just doing 4 BRD in a normal dungeon on sync sounds like a riot and a good challenge to me. To aid with things like this, make a potion specifically used for these challenges that work like Eureka Sustain. It would be an interesting balancing act of dropping aggro to another BRD to wait out the potion CD, rotating the boss' aggro to make sure no one takes lethal damage.
Add some randomly spawning wandering mobs that are legit dangerous a la HoH and PotD to keep the group on their toes and wary of what they are pulling and where. Make some mobs in a pack tanky, but make one do massive AoE damage so it's nearly mandatory to focus that one down first. Add a Namazu Sticky Whisker that can drop down from the Heavens during a boss and if you don't kill it fast enough, it can either give the boss a random buff or start spawning an army of Namazu adds.

If you are worried people would just drop out if RNG does not smile on them, make the reward weekly and if you Vote Abandon or leave, then you are locked out of the weekly reward and/or a big hit to your leader board ranking. Timing out would only not lock you out if you say... reached second boss or something.

Clearly, these are all ideas with little refinement because I am spit balling right now, but it goes to show that there is things that work with FF14 that could be used. The game is stiff, but it does not mean they are missing out on a ton of things they could do with their own combat system.

I'm not saying that improvments cannot be made, I'm saying that slapping a +5% health and dmg to mobs even with the floor effects of deep dungeon will become very boring without a real goal in it also you risk to ppl asking themselves why would I plat a game with a worse system than another one?

AND PLS NO NAMAZU!! XD

[Bourne_Endeavor]

"Would you rather have all the old ARR content revamped like Mythic+ in WoW, and have patch 5.0 pushed off to 2020?"

If it meant an overall more engaging experience than a paint-by-numbers reskin of Stormblood, yes. Certainly better than mindless dungeons that don't even require healing (Hi, Swallow's Compass) or trials laughably simple (Hey, Lakshmi). Of course, you're just exaggerating to a hilarious degree. All the same, I would prefer they try something different come 5.0. Stormblood was played punishingly safe in virtually all aspects.

[Tsumdere]

I'm not saying that improvments cannot be made, I'm saying that slapping a +5% health and dmg to mobs even with the floor effects of deep dungeon will become very boring without a real goal in it also you risk to ppl asking themselves why would I plat a game with a worse system than another one?

AND PLS NO NAMAZU!! XD

Oh, yeah. F' that. I do want more than an HP buff. I have no idea how Mythic+ works, but from the sounds of it is really is just an HP/DMG up buff which really doesn't change the way you have to approach the dungeon or anything. That does sound boring.

And yes. Always Namazu. If it's not Namazu, then evil moogles. This must be done.

[Remedi]

Oh, yeah. F' that. I do want more than an HP buff. I have no idea how Mythic+ works, but from the sounds of it is really is just an HP/DMG up buff which really doesn't change the way you have to approach the dungeon or anything. That does sound boring.

And yes. Always Namazu. If it's not Namazu, then evil moogles. This must be done.

It's more than that mythic plus increaes dmg and heal of enemies, but also gives some affixes to the dungeon, like more enemies, enemies casting dodgeable lava spouts to ranged players (as in far away)
BVut also it's the very nature of wow dungeons that helps with this, wow dungeons have many trash mobs in there and most of them are skippable also you have dungeons that are open zones.
Also mobs skills are more varied. Here on FF14 you get mobs using some easy to dodge aoes, while on wow mobs might create bubbles that heals friendly mobs and dmg players or zone that give you a dmg buff but negate your healing, which creates some interesting strategy, also some mobs might go and alert some other packs.

All of this together makes the mythic+ more enjoyable but this enviorment is what FF14 lacks, also most jobs here are one trick pony.
In my opinion first they need to rework the dungeons at their core then they can think about mythic+ or whatever However we need to be mindful that if they follow the mythic+ formula they are in the risk of going too much close to wow, which is a problem in itself because even after 15 years wow is the top dog of the MMORPG genre for most and the comparison will kill FF14 period.
You risk of going into the territory of ppl saying why should I play this game that does what wow do but worse?
As such FF perhaps need to think about their take on the problem and consider that wow took like 3 tries (and about 5-6 years) to nail it

[Tsumdere]

It's more than that mythic plus increaes dmg and heal of enemies, but also gives some affixes to the dungeon, like more enemies, enemies casting dodgeable lava spouts to ranged players (as in far away)
BVut also it's the very nature of wow dungeons that helps with this, wow dungeons have many trash mobs in there and most of them are skippable also you have dungeons that are open zones.
Also mobs skills are more varied. Here on FF14 you get mobs using some easy to dodge aoes, while on wow mobs might create bubbles that heals friendly mobs and dmg players or zone that give you a dmg buff but negate your healing, which creates some interesting strategy, also some mobs might go and alert some other packs.

All of this together makes the mythic+ more enjoyable but this enviorment is what FF14 lacks, also most jobs here are one trick pony.
In my opinion first they need to rework the dungeons at their core then they can think about mythic+ or whatever However we need to be mindful that if they follow the mythic+ formula they are in the risk of going too much close to wow, which is a problem in itself because even after 15 years wow is the top dog of the MMORPG genre for most and the comparison will kill FF14 period.
You risk of going into the territory of ppl saying why should I play this game that does what wow do but worse?
As such FF perhaps need to think about their take on the problem and consider that wow took like 3 tries (and about 5-6 years) to nail it

Interesting. I do wish we had harder dungeons in line with what WoW has as I do believe FF to be way more pleasing to the eye and have a better story so I will never switch, but I (along with many others) crave something a little more challenging than the dungeons we have now. I think the problem is not that they can't do the things WoW does with dungeons, is that they won't because they cater to the lowest common denominator of ice mages and such.

I guess this wraps back around to people just wanting harder dungeons and harder 4-man content.

[Remedi]

I think it's more the fact that FF14 dungeon team has always sucked in creating interesting level design, than catering to the lowest common denominator.

The problems in dungeons were reflected in raids layout too tbh

edit: I mean where are the healer type mobs? The nuker types? stealthy assassins? Mobs in dungeons really only autoattack the tanks and throw some telegraph here and there. We really need more variety in enemy types.
The fact taht they are making us have 10 role actions in 4.4 is a good thing if they reflect the need of interrupts and other things in the game

[KisaiTenshi]

If it meant an overall more engaging experience than a paint-by-numbers reskin of Stormblood, yes. Certainly better than mindless dungeons that don't even require healing (Hi, Swallow's Compass) or trials laughably simple (Hey, Lakshmi). Of course, you're just exaggerating to a hilarious degree. All the same, I would prefer they try something different come 5.0. Stormblood was played punishingly safe in virtually all aspects.

Exaggeration seems to get the point across, but some of you are still nitpicking the point not being made. Any "retooling" of old content, means everything that goes into it gets rebalanced. There's no point making a "challenge" mode that is just 10x the HP, and utterly devoid of anything new.

It may surprise you to know that I would rather have an entirely different kind of combat content designed, rather than, as you put "reskin stormblood". Because the storyline is fine as it is, what is a problem is that the content is not engaging once it's been cleared. The MSQ content should offer a reasonable challenge, not just a low bar to jump and then oops, a boss with 1000x the hp.

The game already contains mechanics that we've seen in PotD/HoH, that suggests they can do things to the content already (eg the miasma on some floors, no auto-healing, ambush spawns traps, etc), but I'd suggest that applying PotD mechanics to the other game content is probably the opposite of what should be happening.

Let's say, for example, each ARR dungeon gets two challenges, a level 60 and a level 70 mode. Both modes level and ilevel sync you to minimum ilevel for the content as the basis for the challenge, and the existing monsters are levelsynced to 60 or 70 as well. This means that you get to use your level 60 or 70 skills, but the monsters also get to use theirs. So that means that all the ARR monsters will suddenly have mechanics that were only see in "reskins" of their monster type. From that, each dungeon contains extra chests that contain one-time use pomanders to buff the party. So you only get a reward for NOT using the pomanders. If you only want the clear, grab the pomanders and reduce the difficulty, but if you wipe you have to start over.

[Tsumdere]

I think it's more the fact that FF14 dungeon team has always sucked in creating interesting level design, than catering to the lowest common denominator.

The problems in dungeons were reflected in raids layout too tbh

edit: I mean where are the healer type mobs? The nuker types? stealthy assassins? Mobs in dungeons really only autoattack the tanks and throw some telegraph here and there. We really need more variety in enemy types.
The fact taht they are making us have 10 role actions in 4.4 is a good thing if they reflect the need of interrupts and other things in the game

Perhaps it's a bit of both? There is definitely community push back when something is a little harder than normal - see Aurum Vale, Royal Menagerie, Steps of Faith, and to a lesser degree, The Vault. Those are all (or were) dungeons and fights that were definitely much better designed than a large portion of this game but were hated by a lot of people. I see dungeons like Aurum Vale and The Vault and I see that spark of creativity in the dungeon creation team, but everything else falls flat.

I also hope that the opening up 10 slots paves way for CC having meaningful effects in this game. Such as... CCing the army of Namazu.