I'm not excited about the future patch at all. Just one dungeon?

[Nalien]

Finally, did dungeons play an enjoyable part in that? If not, could they easily play an enjoyable part in that?

During 2.0 and 2.1? Yes, actually. Then SE started streamlining them into oblivion. Their difficulty was greatly reduced, their layout became a universal straight line, basic objectives were completely gutted. Find the key to open the door? Optional paths for additional loot? I'll admit, both of those were never solid in 2.0s timeframe, but that was very much an issue with how it was handled. Side paths, for example, were never worthwhile because the loot from dungeons is just worthless. Put something different down those paths, and suddenly it becomes much more viable to do them. Treasure Maps, Tomestones, substantial amounts of crafting materials, there's plenty they could add these days to make such paths worthwhile, but in ARR people didn't care about getting an extra X-potion (yes, I shit you not, that was actually often the reward for doing optional paths in dungeons before they were gutted from the game) so I guess the whole idea was bad...

Sad thing is, they got this right in 1.x with your Job gear and Relics. Once upon a time you had to go into Cutter's Cry (and other dungeons) as part of the quest to get your Job gear, it wasn't a case of "Clear Cutter's Cry" to finish the quest, you had to actually find the gear in the dungeon and interact with it or a chest (I forget which). That made dungeons a whole lot more interesting to do, IMHO.

Now, I get why they removed that kind of gameplay, but I completely disagree with the reasoning. This is an MMO. Part of that means socializing with random people. If "Can we go down this route so I can get X?" is too big an ask, or heck just using the Party Finder to organize a specific run of a piece of content... Well, I know that's too much of an ask for people these days, that's a large part of why the MMO genre is a stagnant mess. Still, SE could easily work in a system that encourages helping such people. We already have the first time bonus, right? Make something similar. Someone has a quest where they need to do an optional path in a dungeon? Clearing that for them earns you all extra rewards. Then it's not a case of helping them out "wastes my time", it's a case of saving you time because you earn a bunch of easy extra tomestones. Personally I don't need that incentive, because breaking up the monotony of the usual dungeon run, actually talking with people in a dungeon, that's it's own damn reward in this game.

Like one of the final ARR Relic quests, where you had to do a bunch of dungeons to get key items? If instead of it just being a "Clear this dungeon" thing, and instead they added new paths to dungeons and the key items were at the ends of those? That would have been amazing IMHO. That would have got me excited to run the same old dungeons again, that could break up monotony on the roulette when you get that dungeon and someone needs that path... But no... It's 2019 and gamers only care about efficiency, anything that slows down a dungeon run is bad and therefore SE has to streamline everything down to a dull 10 minute dash on the Tomestone Treadmill... I swear, people don't actually want to play this game, and SE doesn't want to make a game for people to play... It's all about maximizing idle time in Limsa...