Suggestion - (Optional) - High difficulty, High rewards Dungeons

[Kyux]

Hey! I have just recently come back to the game. I have noticed alot of changes (some good, some bad) and there is something I would like to see in the game. A challenging environment to level up my new classes or lower levels disciples of war and magic.

So, I was just wondering if anyone else would be interested in harder low/mid/high level dungeons. (Accessible by roulettes)
These could be similar to the primals higher difficulties.

Higher Difficulty Dungeons

Those dungeons would require:

• Careful pulls
• Crowd Controls (Binding monsters, Silencing/Stunning at the right time, sleeping etc)
• Managing resources and cooldowns
• Using different tactics depending on the group of enemies you engage.
  (This could bring back some uses for low level food, potions and buff or debuff potions.)

Why:

• Those dungeons would be meant for people who are looking for a good fun challenge while leveling, instead of having to wait all the way up to the endgame content.
• Getting a sensation of accomplishment and receiving a good reward for it.
• Helping some players who are willing to tackle these challenging difficulty to get better and attuning for more challenging part of the game.

Rewards:

• Would simply be way higher EXP and gils than normal. Since those dungeons couldn't be rushed, it would need to be a substantial amount.
• (Maybe also some little achievements or special pets, mounts, piece of fashion garment to attract some more players?)

Difference:

• There could be:
• Some additional monsters.
• Additional skills for some monsters, like more frequent status effects and debuffs (poison, paralysis, etc) or heals. - Giving some uses to those antidotes and other potions.
• Special monsters patrolling.

Daily Roulette:
In order to prevent that from splitting up the dungeon community too much, a daily random high difficulty dungeon could be added.


I think it could be a great change from the current way of grinding levels in roulette, which is currently pretty straightforward.

I personally would like to see something like that appear in the future and would like too hear the thoughts of others on the subject! ^_^

[Lambdafish]

The primary reason stated that this won't happen is because it puts so much stress on the healer. i.e. difficulty in these dungeons is far more disproportionate than 8 man content. What I have suggested in the past is 5 man dungeons that are made up of 1 tank, 2 healers, 2 DPS, which would take the stress off a single healer and allow content to be more flexible.

[Miracle_Diva]

So...
Palace of the dead\ Heaven-on-High solo?

[Hawklaser]

The primary reason stated that this won't happen is because it puts so much stress on the healer. i.e. difficulty in these dungeons is far more disproportionate than 8 man content. What I have suggested in the past is 5 man dungeons that are made up of 1 tank, 2 healers, 2 DPS, which would take the stress off a single healer and allow content to be more flexible.

As a healer, I don't think it would put undue stress on the healer unless they had it drastically tuned incorrectly. More healers want to heal more, and not be green dps. In current content, so little healing is needed or is scripted to the point an ok healer ends up with a lot of downtime to just DPS.

Have you not seen all the threads about healers DPSing? People don't want healers to DPS, but they also don't want the healer sitting around doing nothing. These "hard" dungeons would be a good place to try finding that correct balance without messing it up in the normal ones. As we all know how touchy people are about challenging content if its required for progress.

[Insertcoins]

We have that. It's called Deep dungeon

[Mikhaill]

What I have suggested in the past is 5 man dungeons that are made up of 1 tank, 2 healers, 2 DPS, which would take the stress off a single healer and allow content to be more flexible.

For this point here...We're already thin with healers, especially with the boring changes that have been made.
We would be waiting years for a second healer.
I say add another DPS into that.
(In general tbh, would help the DPS. I think the 1-1-2 thing is kinda odd.)

[ksuyen]

As a healer, I don't think it would put undue stress on the healer unless they had it drastically tuned incorrectly. More healers want to heal more, and not be green dps. In current content, so little healing is needed or is scripted to the point an ok healer ends up with a lot of downtime to just DPS.

Have you not seen all the threads about healers DPSing? People don't want healers to DPS, but they also don't want the healer sitting around doing nothing. These "hard" dungeons would be a good place to try finding that correct balance without messing it up in the normal ones. As we all know how touchy people are about challenging content if its required for progress.

Not for levelling dungeon which the OP mention. Your argument is valid for end game, when most healers get all their healing sets and better gears.

[YojimboM]

It's not Deep Dungeon, and I can only assume the fascination the community here has with thinking that's the same thing is that they've never played other MMOs. It's not about healers not being able to keep up, either, "more challenging" doesn't mean artificially inflated damage. It means more using your brain and using utilities rather than directly beating enemies to death as the means of progressing the dungeon.

I used to play LOTRO, Rift, and SWTOR and I've always really missed that era of MMO dungeon design. LOTRO in particular had great dungeon design, most trash pulls had some kind of mechanical difficulty to them and it was rare that you got to face pull your way through most of an instance. Everything in the dungeons there felt dangerous, not just more enemies to be bunched up and beaten down. There were frequently enemies that were in stealth who would sneak up on party members and hit them with a high damage attack or even stun them for extended periods of time if you weren't careful, wandering captain enemies that would call for reinforcements and buff their allies around them to obscene levels if you didn't deal with them smartly, and environmental hazards like traps or poison.

Bosses could really use some extra thought too, the formula has gotten extremely stale at this point. One of my favorite bosses in LOTRO involved having to lure him into pools of oil and then set him on fire to hurt him, but he would also start setting the party on fire as well so you had to all run into water spouts periodically. Another one involved needing members of the party to put out burning books while fighting the boss and dealing with adds running in trying to burn down a library, and your rewards afterwards were directly linked to the number of books you saved. It was all just really creative interaction with the environment and enemies that made every fight feel special in some way, instead of copy-paste mechanics and AOE markers that everyone's seen before hundreds or thousands of times.

In the past SE has attempted to break out of the formula but it was always very brief and on-off, like Stone Vigil Hard's second and last bosses which were interesting and chaotic with that old-school MMO feel. A lot of ARR's hard mode dungeons had some attempts at being creative in them and you can tell that SE hadn't determined their formula yet and were being innovative and experimental instead. At some point, probably around the start of HW, they started killing all of that off in the regular dungeons, though. They kept experimenting occasionally, like a7s had some interesting mechanics around the arena and a8s was an all-around amazing fight, but those were only savage at that point. I'm not sure what motivated them to stop trying to break the formula but I'd say it's the general mentality of SE as a company: they are very stubborn and averse to risk.

[Hawklaser]

Not for levelling dungeon which the OP mention. Your argument is valid for end game, when most healers get all their healing sets and better gears.

You realize the only reason healing is any kind of stressful in a leveling dungeon is due to the wall to wall pulls? And the only reason those get stressful for decent healers is usually due to someone being undergeared, not aoeing and the mobs take too long to die, or not using their cooldowns. Decent healers still end up with tons of downtime to just spend DPS'ing in leveling content too. Every boss in the leveling dungeons is scripted and the damage is predictable, coupled with a much larger room for error with people messing up the mechanics.

And people even complain about when the wall to wall pulls don't happen as it makes things take a few minuets longer. The community adopted the wall to wall pulls, which likely stresses the bulk of new healers out way more than any single mob pack pull or boss in the game ever will.

So pray tell, what exactly does leveling dungeons have and endgame content doesn't that makes it worse? Excluding the wall to wall pulls.

[Kyux]

The primary reason stated that this won't happen is because it puts so much stress on the healer. i.e. difficulty in these dungeons is far more disproportionate than 8 man content. What I have suggested in the past is 5 man dungeons that are made up of 1 tank, 2 healers, 2 DPS, which would take the stress off a single healer and allow content to be more flexible.

Well, the goal would be to have everyone learn to work together, use the marks and available abilities, for planning the pulls, dimishing the damage that the tank takes with binding, sleeps or other CC available, etc.

Simply pulling away and relying on the healer to carry the entire team wouldn't work.

Adding more people could be a good idea too!