8 man "nightmare" dungeons

[Deliciou5]

First, having uniquely powerful materia would mess with....

My idea never really considered the gear level since i never thought of end game progression happening for nightmare outside extra materia and tomestones you could get. Otherwise the gear dropped would be dyeable glamour which would be a valuable reward to people.

Not sure if it's a good idea to discount a proper alternative end game reward like materia.

My original idea was maybe that you could get advanced materia such as having 2 stats on it instead of it one.

So when you fit the idea into a structure of end game it would be parallel in progression to 24 man raids but unlike 24 man instead it would have some more unique materias you couldn't get anywhere else such as maybe a materia that would enhance your crowd control spells, or materia that gave you old abilities back to classes(aero3).
TBH many players i know doesn't really much care for a deterministic approach to gear progression so potentially having some end game materia that granted new abilities or permutations wouldn't exactly be a bad thing esp if you could trade this rare materia on the market board.

Of course if they added new types of materia then they would also need to make slot removal of materia easier when switching out abilities.

But i digress since in a way i kinda agree with you that we should keep it simple in terms of rewards which is why i removed the mention of materia in the original posts.

Speaking of keeping things simple, the basic idea of a dungeon getting harder as you go already seems pretty great for midcore side-.....

I wanted to design nightmare stacks to be something that still allows players to make progress slowly by doing small pulls and also reward players who are more coordinated, even after doing a large pull with nightmare stacks you would still need to fight smaller groups from a mass of enemies in order to avoid wiping the party.

I wanted high amount of treasure finder stacks to be something that allows you unlock unique rewards that are exclusive to this mode for those are skilled while giving players many chances to wipe on bosses without feeling too guilty.

For more core content, especially if the gap between early- and late-dungeon difficulty...

Making it so you can just click on nightmare for all current dungeons like you would min ilvl would actually fit in line with more of what i imagined of most of the best rewards being mostly mounts/aesthetics since you would just have access to all dungeons at once without it directly impacting end game too heavily. Each dungeon can have exclusive mounts/aesthetics you can unlock but also a larger pool to draw from as well that all dungeons would share.

I think maybe certain items that fit within end game such as 24 man materia trade in catalysts or end game tokens could drop off the final boss chest if you have enough treasure finder stacks could be good as well since beating the final boss would be no small feat.