Fixing The Praetorium

[ZhenyaOkami]

Barely anyone does it for poetics. We do it for the bucket load of exp.

This. I used to not like the MSQ roulette for a long time, because of the boring not skipable cutscenes. But nowadays I don't care. I go into it, play on my phone, make a tea etc. during the cutscenes, do the quick fighting when cutscenes are over and enjoy the amount of exp in the end - even on a high level. That's it. Of course there are lots of other ways to get exp, but in my case, I'm fine with having the opportunity of an easy (but long) way to get a bunch of exp.

[Reinfeld]

In one of the live letter Yoshi addressed the dungeons and said they've floated the ideas of changing them to 4-man dungeons or adding trusts, but they don't have any solid plans or even complete commitment to changing it. Ultimately, if they nerf the dungeons it shouldn't make too much difference to first-timers and we'd probably see a reduction in rewards if they lowered the time commitment.

[LalaRu]

...but they don't have any solid plans or even complete commitment to changing it...

Didn't knew you are a project manager at SE. Good to know. Help them!

[Reinfeld]

Didn't knew you are a project manager at SE. Good to know. Help them!

Just going by what I remember of the Live Letter response. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That was the gist of his answer to Praetorium complaints.

[hynaku]

Only change they need to do is quit pausing the talking in cutscenes and speed them up. Also if you undersize it make it so can't skip cutscenes. Why you even forced to watch them in undersize when you get no exp. or tomes from it.

[Samsta]

The ultima weapon HM doesn't have the first part though, so the transition would be weird if the dungeon ended after gaius. I am in the camp of being sad that these dungeons turned the way they did because I like the idea of longer 8 man-dungeons. Obviously not with so many cutscenes though. The design of the both dungeons themselves are a mess though, they have these really weird pathways and enemy groups are all over the place, it just reeks of realm reborn when they didn't quite know what to do. Like the last part in meridianum, where you are supposed to avoid the big magitek guys while turning of the searchlights, the whole path and area design is just clunky and really bad, I have no idea how to do it the legit way, the team is supposed to jump from the first tower to the ground? Just cutting the cutscenes and pruning the maps themselves would do a lot. I am fine with them splitting the ultima fight to it's own trial and include both phases in it, lower it's ilvl scaling and add maybe a mechanic or 2 to make it actually relevant.

The fight itself always felt really lackcluster to me, not just because of the difficulty, but the attacks themselves are super meh, like the hardest part of the fight are actually outside threats (magitek beams/airships crashing) and not anything the ultima weapon does, he just shoots a laser to the ground that's super easy to avoid and throws like 1 primal mechanic without any threat to you in the beginning, fuck that, make him have cool and crazy abilities with nice visuals that actually require some form of thought, hades is a good example of this, they really nailed the last bosses after arr. Like they could easily make him shoot out fire/wind/earth aether as a raidwide aoe damage and have aether diffused laser beams that inflict different things, it doesn't have to be super hard, but just make him do something that feels it's ultima weapon, not this big robot that shoots a lame laser to the ground.