The Dead Ends: The Dungeon that gives unending despair

[Wolwosh]

Thats because they level their way to 80 doing 50 alliances

[Kuroka]

The question I have is...

Is it players being genuinely mindboggling bad, or players just not caring whatsoever.

Yes.

I recall that run as GNB where the healer managed to die while we only had an reaper and nin with us... multiple times, was fun doing about 30% of the last boss alone lol


I really look forward loosing that dungeon as the sync just kills it even more... and ive seen it too many times - I REALLY miss gettin two ex dungeons per patch...

[RobynDaBank]

It's really impressive how many people get to 90 and learn absolutely nothing at all about playing their job or role.

I was watching a friend try P1S practice today. SGE in the group was spamming Prognosis, raw. No CDs like Pneuma, Physis or Panhaima. Both healers didn't pop Lucid Dreaming until they were at 400 MP. No joke.

[Liam_Harper]

The question I have is...

Is it players being genuinely mindboggling bad, or players just not caring whatsoever.

They definitely don't care.

They have no reason to. The game goes out of it's way to make sure that you don't have to put in effort to beat things. Players tend to try to find the easiest route to their goals and it becomes tempting to put in the bare minimum. If the bare minimum is constantly lowered, that's what we become used to.

I'll admit, first time I went into the Dead Ends, I didn't even have Esuna on my bar and it took me a few runs to even realize you could use it on the first boss. Why? Because I literally hadn't needed Esuna in over 3 months.
Same with healers who just spam Medica II. It works in most things so they think, "why bother learning an entire oGCD kit"? Or dps who are missing half their kit. Nothing they've done has dps checks and no one will see your damage so why bother with a perfect rotation.

Ideally all endgame dungeons would be Dead Ends difficulty or a little harder so that's what we become used to.

[Violyre]

I just find the Dead Ends so miserable from a lore perspective. Like, I know that's sort of the point, and it kind of works at that place in the story (though I don't like how it bounces from one story to another and none of them are personal to us) but it is just miserable to experience over and over.

I personally found that each of the stories were a bit more personal to us lore-wise than they are at first glance.

A realm where the world is being toppled by disease and soon will cease? How could you not think of some place like The Inn at Journey's Head and the plight of the First before we come along?

A world where one group is trying to subjugate everyone under the banner of peace by any means necessary, and those who fight against them! Are we talking about some alien world or are we talking about the War with Garlemald (not including the whole "it's actually an Ascian plot bit.)?

A world that has no war, no disease, but ends up bored in their perfection? The sounds like The World Unsundered to me!

[Darthgummibear]

It's really impressive how many people get to 90 and learn absolutely nothing at all about playing their job or role.

Well they are now going out of their way to simplify legacy content so expect it to get worse.

[Sebazy]

PeaceKeeper is my favourite dungeon boss in recent years. Ra-La's not awful either, just a bit slow paced and never really picks up.

Obviously the iLvl sync is an 'issue' and that stops people from curb stomping it like other dungeons, but I think the long trash pulls need to take some of the blame too. With quicker trash I think it'd be a pretty decent dungeon all told.

[EagleDynamics]

It's a long shot to hope for this but we can still hope. There's a lot for SE to fix in terms of balancing dungeon and boss difficulty, and I'm not sure if we'll ever see that.

since square just got to fixing arr dungeons itll probably be a long time before we see any fixes to other content. i wouldnt hold my breath for it either.

[Amarande]

Thats because they level their way to 80 doing 50 alliances

That's probably the big elephant in the room, TBH.

Most of the smart means of leveling in this game unfortunately come with the side effect that they lack an important element of leveling, namely actual character progression.

The sanest way to level jobs (especially alt jobs, which most players are probably doing at this point in the content cycle) is via roulette, and roulette actually skews AWAY from learning your character progression because the highest level eligible duties, the ones that would actually exercise your whole kit, are the ones you usually get least often. Frankly, the skew is bad enough it even almost defeats the purpose of roulette existing in the first place (I mean the whole idea of offering roulette rewards is to provide a steady pool of players to fill in whatever others are specifically trying to queue for, but a lot of roulette-enabled instances still have uncomfortably long waits, like the Ivalice raids for instance still are chronic long waits because of the many factors that result in Alliance Roulette mostly pulling people into Labyrinth and Syrcus).

So you gain abilities you should be learning to use as you level, but instead where are you? Labyrinth of the Ancients, Fist of the Father, and Sastasha or some other ARR dungeon. Over and over again. Occasionally you get Sohm Al. Last time I was doing leveling roulette much I hardly ever saw Stormblood dungeons, let alone Shadowbringers ones (it could be people were using Trusts often enough for ShB that simply not enough folks were queuing those dungeons to pull rouletters in).

That's on top of the fact that optimal rotations keep changing as you level, so I'm not even sure how much benefit it would be to consistently get to use still-incomplete kits anyway. Few classes seem to have an organic progression of "okay you got this, so just slot it into the rotation here" - Black Mage comes to mind (and this despite people actively complaining about the BLM rotation shifting at every level), maybe Machinist, but I can't think of much else offhand (compare how free SAM felt at 70 to how stilted at 80). And the community in this game frequently treats people who try to learn but skillcap below full optimization nearly as badly as ice mages and 1-mashers, TBH, so I'm not even sure just how hyperbolic complaints about skill even are usually ...

[Ath192]

You know what would be cool? You know how squadrons in your GC have to complete a special mission to move on to the next tier? You should have a challenge to complete to be able to move on to your next 10 levels or so with mid tier difficulty. Could be solo and the encounters could be designed to force you to use your new skills and CDs.

If you buy a level skip you’d have access to complete them all in a row of course.

I remember XI had Matt at level 55 iirc to raise the level cap. Although… he was something else on red mage but I’m sure designers can come up with a fair challenge that teaches players.

The role quests are too bland and don’t fulfill this purpose atm.