Dungeon design is just so boring and formulaic [Spoilers]

[Gameovers]

And you know what. I hate this question NOT because I -hate- wow. Not even close. I hate this question because we already HAVE this. Deep dungeon!!!! Lets update and better what we have. Deep dungeon is literally the answer to this, the issue is it's not updated to keep players coming back but it has what people want. So I say lets make SE update our Deep dungeons for more floors, more designs, more traps and modes of play.

[Azuri]

The last thing deep dungeons need is more floors. You can argue the fact that there are so many is the whole reason why they are so unpopular. I would rather see all of the early boring slog (1-170 in PotD and 1-70 in HoH) completely cut out and we have three well designed sets of floors with a bit more variation.

[ArkenaeuxBelmont]

It would be at odds with the dungeon design, but I personally don't see anything wrong with just making content more enjoyable and preventing players from rushing roulettes. There is another thread about cheating the raid roulette, and my position is pretty much the same there. The point of a roulette--of randomly replaying past experiences with random cross-sections of the community--should not be rushing content, it should be enjoying content. If the overall game and how players play it is literally spending as little time as possible in large portions of the game, then either the game itself is boring or poorly designed in a way that defeats itself.

Tell me though, because I am missing your logic. How would it be a *disaster*?

The problem with what you're saying is, you want to prevent the rushing of roulettes. That will never happen. The more SE tries to put in blockers, like MSQ roulette with unskippable cutscenes, the more the majority of the playerbase plays "gotta go fast" with the content.

The solution isn't to revamp what is already there. It's to create a new layer in addition to. Deep Dungeon Delves with branching paths, exploration, rewarding taking your time with harder trash that you can't wall to wall pull. Rewards of glams/housing items/mounts/minions, with no XP reward or tomestones of poetics available.

People rush dungeons for 2 reasons. XP and tomes. Remove those and offer other rewards, and create a dungeon more designed to be explored rather than run along the treadmill from point A to point B, and people would take their time for fear of passing up missable chests and loot.

Simply put, the current design of dungeons does not lend itself to anything other than the rush mentality. Even if there are those of us who don't enjoy that playstyle and wish for something different, the dungeon design ITSELF supports it. Wall to wall, boss, wall to wall, boss, rush as fast as possible to finish, get the XP/Tome rewards and move to the next roulette.

Remove XP/Tomes, create a dungeon that supports the slower playstyle, and suddenly the design concept supports the playstyle.

[xenahawk]

I know i may get beaten up over this but personally i like the simple layout of dungeons. As a former wow player i HATED having to do dungeons because of how toxic others can be and some of the toxicity in the dungeon would be due to avoiding having to clear certain mobs so personally the basic design of one linear path and a couple mobs out of the way is well a bit refreshing. I dont really even hesitate to queu up for dungeons in this game.

[Makeda]

Regarding M+ from WoW:

Hard pass. This is one of the major reasons WoW is so toxic.

That noted, something similar would be nice. I would look for Guild Wars 2 Fractals for inspiration instead. The main difference is they don't punish people for failure - so folks play them more cooperatively. Fractals came before M+, but the basic concept is similar: Dungeons you can "farm run" at increasingly greater difficulty.

Where fractals differ is:
1. Not hooked to a timer.
2. No 'key loss' on failure.
3. The thing that lets you run harder and harder ones only drops in them, and is only useful for them - so there's no need to run them to be ready for other content, or run other content to be ready for them.
4. They're tied to a set of dailies that change daily that help guild groups in choices - but this is a loose guide of small enough rewards that people are very willing to 'go off the rails' and run different ones.

9 pages later I notice my typo.

That should have said "help guide groups in choices". Not guild.
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I see the thread has now noted Deep Dungeons.

Yes that would be nice, if they had more variety to them. They're very repetitive and the boss fights are severely undertuned so that you can essentially run them regardless of roles.

Deep Dungeon is the near opposite of what people who love small group dungeons would want.
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I still say, the best model to look at copying is Guild Wars 2 Fractals. Note that the actual 'Dungeons' of Guild Wars are famously bad... but the Fractals were made by a different team, and the newer ones yet a third team - and I'd say... any fractals that came out AFTER their expansions show how to do this concept right.

We thought we were getting it here, years ago, when the hard mode dungeons came. But that turned out to be something else.

Still, we have the seeds of it there. Take each old dungeon and make a 'part 2' - have that part 2 be scaled UP to whatever is the current top level / tomestone (but NOT raid) gear. Have everyone iLevel sync when they run these.
- Then add in a mechanic like 'agony' from Guild Wars 2. It is basically a dot applied to everyone that slowly drains your health, and the amount of the dot gets higher and higher - and a special 'crystal' would cancel it. The gem being crafted by getting Hydalen shards in these dungeons.

Then you add in a couple special effects that rotate around. 3 or 4 of them, and you start with none of them, you hit bracket 2 you have 1 of them, and so on... these would be things like "trash mobs have double health" or "bosses do double damage" or "players electrocute each other if too close or too far away" and so on...
- This concept exists in Fractals, and was copied by WoW in M+.

Then the reward for the place... is just titles, leaderboards, cosmetics, minions, chocobo barding, etc. The title could even end with your current top completion.

And like Fractals - failure just means run it again. No penalty.

This could even be made as content where Blue Mages could be scaled to work in them... hint hint...

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Ps: Regardless of what you may think of the rest of the game, if you really like or liked Mythic+ Dungeons in WoW at one point, but can't stand the current state of that MMO, try the Fractals in Guild Wars 2. It's very different from the rest of that game and kind of a 'breath of fresh air' after the toxicity of Mythic+.

[ArkenaeuxBelmont]

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I see the thread has now noted Deep Dungeons.

Yes that would be nice, if they had more variety to them. They're very repetitive and the boss fights are severely undertuned so that you can essentially run them regardless of roles.

Deep Dungeon is the near opposite of what people who love small group dungeons would want.
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Apologies, the discussion about Deep Dungeons wasn't about using the current ones to provide a different style of content. It was about using the template of what's currently there for a smaller scale, more free form exploratory dungeon with other rewards involved. Rewarding exploration with hidden chests, trash packs that weren't meant to be mass pulled and had mechanics, etc.

I'm definitely all for another form of dungeon content such as Fractals. Personally I'm just tossing out all different various avenues of directions they could take optional dungeon content.

[xenahawk]

I know i may get beaten up over this but personally i like the simple layout of dungeons. As a former wow player i HATED having to do dungeons because of how toxic others can be and some of the toxicity in the dungeon would be due to avoiding having to clear certain mobs so personally the basic design of one linear path and a couple mobs out of the way is well a bit refreshing. I dont really even hesitate to queu up for dungeons in this game.

[Raoabolic]

Sadly, people tend to be hypocritical in nature. They want a complex dungeon but then they get upset when they have to explore or possibly have to backtrack ala toto rak or Quarn (god help you if you forgot the tablets). Granted, not everyone is like that but there is a sizeable amount of people who play this game that are and SE isn't going to upset the majority to appease the minority. I was a lot more vocal for this but at this point it would be like complaining about the cash shop. It's better to enjoy what you have and duck out when it's gotten too much for you.

[Makeda]

I know i may get beaten up over this but personally i like the simple layout of dungeons.

Yeah.

Let go back to the days when WoW was seen as great and look at one of the old dungeons. Maraudon. It had multiple different paths and none of them was the "correct" one. You could just go in and do these bosses and rooms, or those, until you'd had your fill and left.

A full clear could take more than 6-8 hours. Which I know from experience.

That's great in 'table top RPG' design. But in MMOs where players want to play in shorter stretches of game time, an 8-hour dungeon is just not viable. Thus why that place was sliced into 3 pieces, which don't even total the original whole when put together.

Modern WoW dungeons are just as linear as FFXIV ones - but this is because they're all designed to be used for M+. So they're not only linear, they're set up to be speed run with no breathers anywhere. Part of the design is actually to use scenery in some places to trick you into looking at it and thus blow your ability to meet the timer... Rather than backdrop designed to set a mood, there's stuff designed to bait you off focus.

[OskarXCI]

The reason dungeons are designed as they are is because people will optimize the fun out of everything to get their reward faster, so why bother adding alternate paths if people are just going to take the easiest one and leave the rest unexplored, if dungeons were super intricate and hard to navigate with lots of possible paths to get to each boss people would complain because they just want to get to the boss, kill it, get reward, and leave, having to do any thinking in the process of getting to the boss is a no-go.

More or less.

There's a reason why they only do one dungeon per patch. I rather they spend the resources on making more Adventuring Forays like Eureka and Save the Queen/Bozja.

As for Deep Dungeons, I wish there was more of a money incentive to keep doing/attempting the premade exclusive floors.