Dungeons we need to talk dungeons

[Kacho_Nacho]

For those who don't think players will laser focus the quickest and most optimal route well... I hope you get to keep your innocence. The reality of it is that optimal and speed is the name of the game these days.

Thanks! I enjoy my innocence and don't want just anyone to take it from me.

Optimal and speed may be the name of the game now; but, it doesn't need to be in the future. It's all in how you design the reward structure.

If you are reward exp and gil for completing the instance, players will want to complete the duty in the least amount of time.

However, if you place rewards throughout the instance, with the addition of obstacles in the party's ways, and offer no duty completion bonus, then players will be more inclined to search throughout the dungeon.

[Vrankyl]

However, if you place rewards throughout the instance, with the addition of obstacles in the party's ways, and offer no duty completion bonus, then players will be more inclined to search throughout the dungeon.

Unless they make these kind of dungeons a completely separate type of content from the current ones I don't see this happening. The reason this is done is to reduce the amount of people that bail midway through a dungeon. If people want the rewards they have to finish it. Nor would just splitting the tomestones up fix it either, since people would just focus on other content that can be reliable completed with a pug. As I stated, harder dungeons are a nightmare with pugs as the ARR dungeons proved.

[Nishira]

Such an interesting topic, I’ve wondered about this myself a number of times throughout the years. How can you entice players to see a dungeon run that may take a while as fun again? It used to be, what happened that dungeons can take 15 min max or people will start complaining? It’s odd to me.

Maybe design it the other way around. The longer you are in it while you clear more, the more interesting the rewards. If you clear it the fastest way possible in 20 min the rewards won’t be great. But if you are ok with spending an hour or two, the rewards get good. Maybe clearing a certain part triggers an event in another part. Maybe make it unpredictable, have different combinations of bosses, events etc so that one run will be very different from another. Some of the groundwork seems to be there with PotD and map instances, perhaps build on that.

It doesn’t have to be super difficult as long as it asks for some strategic play. Bring back a sense of the holy trinity mattering. I think that way it would be great fun for those players who like dungeons to be an adventure, and don’t mind spending some time in there. I’d reward it differently than roulettes, it’d be bad if it ‘had’ to be done. In that sense it’s probably too costly to develop because not everyone would be in it. But one can dream

[Mikey_R]

I also love Aurum Vale.

It's a real shame that dungeons have become so linear and streamlined. For whatever reason, the development team appear convinced that the best way forward is to avoid any optional paths or objectives. I don't think it's true that players would only ever focus on the quickest, most efficient route to completion. It's just a matter of making it worthwhile to go off of the beaten track. Maybe that means a chance of a rare enemy appearing, or a treasure chest full of gil that disappears if a randomised puzzle isn't solved correctly. There's a lot of things that could be done, really - and many other MMO's have embraced such design choices.

How many times have you cleared out all the side rooms of Sastasha, Haukke Manor, taken both paths for Toto Rak, avoided as many enemies as possible in Aurum Vale etc.

People will just go in and out as quick as possible. Even if you add 'puzzles' to solve, look at Wanderer's Palace. People worked out which Tonberries held the oil, fast tracked to them to open the way forward, this was even at the start of 2.0 where the side chests had a material required to craft the base relic weapon. It didn't help that there was no roulettes at the time, so you had to run WP/AK 10 times a week just to cap tomes, however, the relics were still on par with the coil weapons and much easier to get.

However, dungeons should be harder, even just from a stat stand point. The levelling dungeons have a much smaller stat gap between minimum ilevel and max ilevel, which keeps them reasonably challenging, however, the stat gap between minimum ilevel level 80 dungeon and max ilevel 80 dungeon is so high, you are basically just overgearing it. The first thing they can easily do is make this stat gap smaller, so you overgear less. There are potential issues this could cause, but lets not let this get too long.

[Roda]

I think this thread could've been combined with the other one on the first page. but w/e

IMO the 4 player duties and also the solo MSQ duties should be conditioning players to be able to do the "harder" content. We shouldn't be dumbing these down to appease a tiny fragment of the player base that want everything handed to them as long as they press 1 or 2 buttons to avoid getting kicked for inactivity.

Also this.

We also need progression and gameplay based tutorials. Someone shouldn't be asking me how to get into savages and also "what is ogcd weaving" in the same breath. Skill acquisition and class / job quests should teach you basic game mechanics before you get into expansion content, and should not let you progress unless you can do a very basic thing. (like a milder form of fighting game combo training) The MSQ where you take minfilia's dagger needs to have you equip an item with materia slots and force you to go to a materia melder in a city to get your own gear melded, not just have some random goblin tell you that materia exists in their weird gobbytongue.

Proper tutorials, and casual scenarios where you can put your skills to the test is how you solve skill-based accessibility blocks


If some still think that's too demanding then trusts and very easy mode exist to carry them. Now more than ever is the perfect time to give the dungeons more teeth.

[Steelbreaker25]

Whenever I see this request, I have to wonder what people mean by "harder".

Are we talking harder, longer boss fights akin to trial fights or alliance raid bosses, with a lot of precision mechanics and instant death mechanics? The problem this runs into is the game is largely built around the 8-man party, with at least 2 party members with raises. Even competent players can die due to mistakes or lag or DCing or whatever, leaving a party of 4 SOL if the healer dies and there's no RDM or SMN. I've had otherwise pretty routine dungeon bosses wipe simply due to the healer dying due to a mistake, and not all tanks can self-sustain themselves. Look at the one four-man extreme trial we have in Rathalos EX. They had to introduce specialty mechanics to compensate for no raises. The alternative would be to give more classes raises, but seeing as SMN came very close to losing their raise in 6.0, that seems like an unlikely direction they'll go.

Mob packs are tricky, because we don't really have hard mob pulls in this game. The best example I can think of is the long pull after the second boss in Anamnesis Anyder, but that's not really difficult, it just takes a marginally competent tank/healer duo to manage. Without adding a bunch of randomized nonsense, they can only increase difficulty of trash by adding more mobs or by making them hit harder, but that just boils down to more of the same things we already have. I can't really say I get a great deal of joy out of trash pulls, personally.

The only ways I could think of that wouldn't be completely annoying or tedious is either to make 8-man dungeons, which wouldn't really replace the current system at all and would be it's own duty type, or to add a logos/lost action system, but I feel like before too long those will be solved systems, essentially removing the difficulty with cheese strats, because that always happens.

[LioJen]

I agree that mandatory tutorials go a long way to improving the average player. In many games you cannot progress to the next area until you complete the actions correctly and at least know what the buttons do. I would have loved for a real extended tutorial on how cooldowns and mitigations are supposed to be used, since this was my first MMO and the FF games in general are as far away from MMO gameplay as you can get.

Job quests would have been the perfect place for these, especially the ones that grant you a new ability. So far what I have found is that they give you a random fetch quest, give you three mobs to kill, then reward you with a new ability at the end. The quest has NOTHING to do with the ability itself, they do not show you how to use it or give any lore behind it, they do not even give you access to it until the quest is done. What a waste. The tooltips are not exactly comprehensive and some of them are just wrong.

But then again, the devs change each job's tool kit and even entire identity so often that they would have to remake half the tutorials every other patch

[RitsukoSonoda]

I agree that mandatory tutorials go a long way to improving the average player. In many games you cannot progress to the next area until you complete the actions correctly and at least know what the buttons do. I would have loved for a real extended tutorial on how cooldowns and mitigations are supposed to be used, since this was my first MMO and the FF games in general are as far away from MMO gameplay as you can get.

Job quests would have been the perfect place for these, especially the ones that grant you a new ability. So far what I have found is that they give you a random fetch quest, give you three mobs to kill, then reward you with a new ability at the end. The quest has NOTHING to do with the ability itself, they do not show you how to use it or give any lore behind it, they do not even give you access to it until the quest is done. What a waste. The tooltips are not exactly comprehensive and some of them are just wrong.

But then again, the devs change each job's tool kit and even entire identity so often that they would have to remake half the tutorials every other patch

Definitely in regards to using job quests as tutorials would run into issues. With the older jobs it would be due to changes made over time. However newer jobs have a much smaller quest line due to starting like 10 lvls behind the cap before the expansion was launched that added them. Back in ARR for example jobs had skills learned from lvl progression that were flagged as cross class and usable by other jobs because players had up to 5 empty slots they could assign one of these cross class skills to. However they changed it to what we have now because some of these later skills were so useful on other jobs that players started considering a job "gimped" if they didn't have them. Or Machanist I think has been overhauled in it's mechanics on every expansion resulting in skills and overall gameplay changing dramatically. SMN seems to be going through a large change with Endwalker as well. I may end up making another alt soon just to see how different the game is from a fresh start with all the changes that have happened over the years.

[Artemiz]

I like the idea of more 8 man dungeons, leveling and tome farming dungeons. It would help DPS queues a bit as you could have 5 or even 6 DPS per tank and healer if tuned right. Have more adds on boss fights and stricter DPS checks to keep the DPS jobs busy. Can have more interesting mechanics with more players as well.

[kaynide]

I’m not against optional side content dungeons, but I also think SE has the numbers and understands the development time versus average player time engaging the content. I believe they are trying to make side content that a) has more lasting use than a single dungeon and b) can be as future proof as possible and c) is not tied to leveling specifically (once people level the jobs they like, a lot just stop doing certain content).

Just me personally, I found for xp/hour the 50/60/70 roulette was the worst performer, as a result I rarely ran those dungeons. I would not be surprised if others think similarly and that the devs saw a need to make something that offers something other than xp but also a time sink a la Eureka or Bozja or even Blue Mage.