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.

[Shurrikhan]

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

I don't mean to discount it generally; rather, I just don't think it's a good idea to make that unique to a piece of side-content, or even to have it be the first place in which we see that end-game reward. Were interesting materia already pervasive, I'd love to see perhaps some unique (and potentially even faintly, faintly more powerful than elsewhere) version of that thing, but I don't think we should feel compelled by rewards to play the content. Abnormally strong materia would be of consequence to everyone and the fact it's materia (i.e., has a high chance of being destroyed when moved) would add some less-than-fun considerations of hording and upkeep. More importantly, though, materia is iconic to the franchise. Making a single piece of side-content the sole way to acquire an iconic element would give vibes similar to Eureka being the only way to get (the dyable form of) ANY artifact gear (of any expansion, rather than just the dyable form of Stormblood's).

And to be honest, though I'm sure having skills slottable via Materia would warrant complaints as to "illusion of choice" or "adding to the time it takes to have a seemingly functional character", the idea of having a slightly more wind- or storm-centric WHM, and that naturally (i.e., in the course of nightmare dungeon progression) advancing to those materia taking on additional "nightmare" effects, etc., is intriguing to me. Such just has to fight against structural constraints, just as virtually all complex power-effecting progression does. It would suck, for instance, if we had to potentially destroy materia just to swap to a different ability more suited to our content. Hell, if we were to commonly alternate between content types with opposed BiS materia, it'd already be a hassle just to swap between them, however freely. Eventually, you could end up with the "perfect" solution, whereby materia is specific to job and content type and is swapped automatically, or you have Material Palettes (similar to Glamor Palettes) and you can swap out those automatically in accord with certain conditions, etc., etc. But it'd still be a lot of extra investment just to put that power or cool factor you want in an iconic form, rather than just offering it up as Duty Actions or the likes of Lost Actions.

But I digress; the materia idea is long replaced.

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

Last note: Perhaps I read too much into that, but consider: unless you would otherwise overcap your first-priority secondary stat, a single-stat materia of equal total stat gain will always be better than a half-and-half or equal-thirds or the like.

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.

Given the shift to 8-man, in place of 4-, I'm not sure that would be as possible to just click as an additional option as a simple "Undermanned" (or the aforementioned "Minimum Item Level") option would be. But, regardless, I'm not sure I conveyed my point clearly.

By early- and late-dungeon I wasn't referring to, say, ARR or HW vs. Stormblood or Shadowbringers. I was referring instead to when you first start into the dungeon vs. the time by/at which you'd be fighting the last boss. You mentioned before that you expect the difficulty of the dungeon to rise over time, if I recall correctly, and not just in consequence to pull size or the like. If so, the dungeon would get harder over time. The larger that gap, the wider an audience the extremes (the very beginning, or the very end of a speedrun) could appeal to, but the narrower the portion of the nightmare dungeon that would appeal to any given group would be.

My assumption (perhaps faulty) is that you wouldn't be able to just toss in a 'nightmare' mode into any old dungeon (due to its being 8-man), nor that you'd necessarily want to. That seems more the territory of far more simplistic concepts like "unreal dungeons", wherein they'd be synced up (rather than down) and beefed up to be of similar engagement given our skills acquired since the dungeon's original level. Nightmare dungeons seem far more a labor of love, the selection of which would be slowly added to: the likes of visiting an Diablos in an aetheric prison (in which we've trapped him to use as a conduit in whatever "fight fire with fire" plan against the Ascians or by which to discover the means of the end of worlds or whatnot), and then taking any of many portals or mirrors into a tormentuous dreamscape, each, for a selection of dungeons.

If we could have dungeons be both 4-man and 8-man, instead of just 8-or-less (Praetorium, CM) OR 4-or-less (everything else), then yes, a toggle would obviously be better. If not, though, you might want to consider specifically how you want to leverage a rotation of nightmare dungeons or the fact that their parties would basically have to be premades.