Praetorium - Worst Experience Ever

[AduroT]

They at least need to change those two teleports in Prae to require a key that drops from the last killed trash mob so you can’t just skip all of them. That’s the biggest new player trap right there.

[KageTokage]

Praetorium really is just an artifact of poor design that only got a couple band-aid fixes applied to it to make it slightly tolerable for new players. Ideally, it would've been better off turned into a solo duty with how cutscene heavy it is, perhaps with the actual players replaced by a squad of NPCs from your respective Grand Company.

I did it before the era of the MSQ roulette improvements (But before the forced cutscenes) so I was lucky that people actually waited for me to watch everything.

[Tsaranoga]

what to do:

What NOT to do:

1: Expect anyone to care that you are new.
2: Expect anyone to offer some guidance (especially true for mentors).
3: Ask for help/guidance = get everyone to start joking about it (doesn't help).
4: Realise there is nothing you can do, and just hope there is enough time for the automatic teleports.
5: Boring, dull, Not interesting, why am i even here?
6: The end.

[LaylaTsarra]

They at least need to change those two teleports in Prae to require a key that drops from the last killed trash mob so you can’t just skip all of them. That’s the biggest new player trap right there.

That would fix most of it and honestly it wouldn't take much longer to actually kill those mobs instead of by passing them. Sounds like a pretty easy dev fix to me.

[Refth]

Think of it as a rite of passage for your (hopefully) long journey ahead in FFXIV.

Everybody has a similar experience when running Prae for the first time. It gets much better.

[kelevra13]

If you are one of the people who blitz through content when new players are in the party, without a care for their experience, you are ruining that experience. And if support cannot help roll me back, I will not be continuing my sub.

I was one of the new players that just followed everyone that blitz through this dungeon. I did not read or watch anything before Castra and Praetorium, but I just followed how everyone else in the party moved and stopped and fought when they did. The cutscenes are unskippable, so the the party would chat during them. It was fun. I told them I was new, and they said welcome to cutscene hell. They also told me to enjoy and not to rush the story.

I'm sorry to here that you had a bad time. However, most if not all the players that have gone through these two rush them because of how long they are. There are tons of unskippable cutscenes, and these players probably want to get the most out of their free time. They may have other things to do outside the game. In other instances, in my experience at least, the rest of the party waits until new players finish watching the cutscenes before engaging.

As stated by the previous posts, find a party or an FC and tell them how you'd want to play it out. Because yeah, that's Praetorium, and SE probably won't do anything more about it.

[LalaRu]

Just to add, today you are asked to teleport to the fight, so you cannot be so much lost in the place, even if you forget to get the magitek key you still can tag along.

Maybe OP wanted do fights as they are "real" ones, but current IL won't allow it, it needs be dealt with it. Maybe a FC run on "minimum il" may satisfy that need.

And yes, SE learnt from that and all future things have a "story mode" and a "pro mode" version of it, so you are safe from that point onward.

[StriderShinryu]

Not too sure what to say as, as some of the others have said, it actually used to be a lot worse. You will be able to run it again any time you want because of the XP boost older players get for running it daily, but that also means you'll always be doing it with others who have done it 10s or 100s of times. And, even if you end up with a good group, yeah, there's no way to get that first experience back.

I guess the only thing I can suggest is if you're in a Free Company/Guild to ask others there to run it with you. Tell them what you just posted here and see if they want to do it as a slower run.

It would be nice if they did a "solo" version of these instances for the early game rework that they're doing but I'm sure if they were going to we'd already know about it.

[Awha]

You can run it again you know right? Very dramatic for no reason.

[Voidedge_Ragna]

The problem lies in the Meta and what players think of as Meta.

Why do players run MSQ Roulette? EXP and/or Tomes, if they see "new player" their happy for the bonus tomes, but since the dungeon is kind of wonky scaled ... you can likely do it with 4.
MSQ Dungeons were back in the day done as Ilv 50 (fresh in relic gear) BUT, they scale to 130 ilv which creates a problem similar to Cape Westwind, where you outscale content so hard zero f's are given.

The Duality of MSQ is something that can not be fixed w/o major adjustments here is why ...

First Version: All can skip cs, rewards are fairly low but the runs are fast.
Result: New players were legit rushed and did see nothing from the Dungeon

Second Version: CS are now unskipable, Reward was slightly upped but not worth it.
Result: New players were waiting for up to 5-6h to get a queue.

Third Version: Reward was upped to a point its not only worth it, but stupid to miss out on.
Result: Loads of players do it but want it done fast.

There are unwritten rules when you join DF, as you can not declare what you want to do in the run before joining it you are expected to do what the Meta expects. Like you can not queue in and now go "this is a RP run lets take our time" i mean you can, but the result is likely not in your favor. If you want to do runs your way, PF it and/or ask your FC/Friends.

So here we are ... at a Duty that has 8 slots, requires 4 ... which is so long and stale that players zone out ... but has rewards so good you kind of need to do it, this is why noone cares in there.
If you are left behind, the game will throw you into the boss fights, it also does not help that there are skipable things.

MSQ is just bad design, they learned from it ... you either accept it or you dont.