What are you guys hoping for in the new "Criterion" dungeons?

[Martynek]

I have issues with these, personally.

• That the difficulties levels were particularly fine/granular?
• That there was a timer?
• That failing the timer dropped one's keystone to one level easier instead of throwing you again and again at the challenge you'd just failed?
• That the affixes rotated weekly?
• That there were seasonal affixes?
• That Tyrannical and Fortified affixes could sometimes overly swing the needle between either trash or bosses feeling like pushovers?
• That you could only enter the dungeons through keystones, forcing one to play more than just the fastest/easiest/most lucrative dungeons and slowing BiS acquisition?
• That certain specs were considered less meta and might be held to higher scrutiny in terms of achievement points or item level?

But to elaborate on some of the particularly bad parts:

The timer would clash directly against XIV's instance design. XIV's instance timers are very forgiving, and there's no cost for failure but "wasted" time. You keep food buffs through death, cooldowns reset, etc - Everything about the game encourages you to keep on trying, keep on pushing til you get there. Making it 90% through a dungeon then getting kicked out or auto-failed due to the timer just doesn't fit.

In the same vein - Key bricking is an utterly repulsive idea. The idea that something actively discourages you from playing the game (Because you or someone in your group might play badly, and you'll be punished with a downgraded keystone) is baffling to me. Again, generally XIV's design is that you waste nothing but time (and a pittance of gil in repair costs) for failing, so you're always encouraged to keep trying.

Keystones at all, really. Instead of forcing people into certain dungeons in order to progress your key, put gear with different substats behind different dungeons.
As an example, Dungeon A drops Crit+Det earrings, helmet, and bracelets, but Ten/Pie/DH+SkS/SpS gloves and boots, while Dungeon B drops Crit+Det gloves, rings, and necklaces, etc.
This way if you want a full set with optimal stats, you'll naturally run each different dungeon because it has the loot you want, rather than because word of god demands that you will play X dungeon now if you want to keep progressing. Alternatively, the casual player that doesn't care as much for optimisation will be able to play whichever dungeons they like.

Grinding up your key level each week instead of just picking the difficulty you want to play is a needless waste of time.

Seasonal affixes artificially created FOMO. You can never go back and play BFA dungeons with BFA affixes. Hell you can never go back and do BFA M+ at all, but that's another topic. In a lesser sense the same is true of a weekly rotation of affixes, they should either be chosen as part of picking a difficulty level or randomised upon entry.

With all of this in mind I don't think any incarnation of Mythic+ in FFXIV would be acceptable unless it only vaguely resembled the core concept of "Dungeons, but with scaling difficulty".

[Shurrikhan]

With all of this in mind I don't think any incarnation of Mythic+ in FFXIV would be acceptable unless it only vaguely resembled the core concept of "Dungeons, but with scaling difficulty".

To be fair, I think that is how most people use the term outside the confines of WoW itself, except perhaps also with the idea that...

• its difficulty may involve altogether new gameplay concepts or considerations, such as by allowing for CC, greater apparent "intelligence" from mobs, greater and less scripted healing checks, more use of utility, etc., and/or
• it may have granular reward tiers able to compete or nearly compete with raid tiers at its highest difficulty levels (e.g., 5 under on Savage patch, to matching on Alliance Raid patch as the dungeon difficulty cap increases), for those who just don't much care for super-scripted 8-man content.

I have issues with these [aspects], personally.

• That the difficulties levels were particularly fine/granular.
• That there was a timer.
• That failing the timer dropped one's keystone to one level easier instead of throwing you again and again at the challenge you'd just failed.
• That the affixes rotated weekly.
• That there were seasonal affixes.
• That Tyrannical and Fortified affixes could sometimes overly swing the needle between either trash or bosses feeling like pushovers.
• That you could only enter the dungeons through keystones, forcing one to play more than just the fastest/easiest/most lucrative dungeons and slowing BiS acquisition.
• That certain specs were considered less meta and might be held to higher scrutiny in terms of achievement points or item level.

My own $0.02 in response:

• I'm not sure what's so bad about having finer / more granular difficulty tiers. It made progression far less frustrating, allowed people to find a "sweet spot" for what kind of challenge they wanted to take on, etc. What would have been improved if there had been only, say, 3 (rewarded) difficulty tiers instead of 15?
  
  
• I actually like there being a timer, so long as rewards are involved. It keeps players from feeling obliged to bash their heads against the same fights for 90 minutes in order to squeeze out that bit of extra ilvl. I feel like 25-45 minutes is the sweet spot for these experiences, and having that timer puts a just enough (however slight) a risk to challenging that upper extreme to keep the typical run less frustrating.
  
  
• Agreed on this one. At lot of times a failed run was no indicator that a keybearer lacked the skill to do that run (only that they'd taken on a poor hand). I'd much prefer that the keystone just stay at its earlier level, though able to be degraded at player choice (in addition to the dungeon rerolls for a given key). More that though, I'd prefer to get rid of the keystone system as a whole. It wasn't terrible, but I do think it gave a net negative experience compared to just allowing us to enter whatever dungeon we like at whatever difficult we like (or have some minimum achievement score for).
  
  
• I, too, would prefer to be able to control the affixes, rather than their being rotated weekly. I'd still take weekly rotations over their being randomized at entry, though, because those affixes sometimes took a fair bit of pre-planning.
  
  
• I actually liked the Seasonal affixes, on the whole, even if I'd liked to have tweaked how certain ones were handled (e.g., the ability to manually summon Pride at variable HP and buff duration on kill, as to take some pressure off the tank-as-leader). I could see why one wouldn't want them to be attached to each and every run above a certain difficulty level, though.
  
  
• Agreed. I had typically hated the Tyrannical/Fortified swing, too, though that swing has gradually lessened (and thus, imo, gotten better) and so I don't typically mind it much now.
  
  
• Same. Scrap keystones.
  
  
• I feel like XIV actually tends to exclude over much smaller performance gaps than WoW has ever done, and that this was often overblown (I had no issues getting groups as pre-buffs Holy Priest, Survival Hunter, or other as-far-from-meta-as-possible specs), but yeah, class/job/spec exclusion can suck.

Keystones at all, really. Instead of forcing people into certain dungeons in order to progress your key, put gear with different substats behind different dungeons.
As an example, Dungeon A drops Crit+Det earrings, helmet, and bracelets, but Ten/Pie/DH+SkS/SpS gloves and boots, while Dungeon B drops Crit+Det gloves, rings, and necklaces, etc.
This way if you want a full set with optimal stats, you'll naturally run each different dungeon because it has the loot you want, rather than because word of god demands that you will play X dungeon now if you want to keep progressing. Alternatively, the casual player that doesn't care as much for optimisation will be able to play whichever dungeons they like.

This seems a little odd, though. There's only really one job that gets stat choice in this game, BLM. For all others, by the end of the first Savage tier or so, Crit is king. Stat choice is a myth. If you then stick the best secondaries behind certain dungeons, those are the only dungeons you'd really reward.

I'd far rather (A) keep dungeons' drops at roughly the same value --apart from whatever might result from Gear Effects, if XIV were ever so bold as to add them-- and (B) just offer little challenge bonuses, such as lore tidbits or bonus quests that take you from one dungeon to another (perhaps even opening up a bonus boss) --and/or (C) something the likes of rotated Light bonuses-- in order to shake up what would otherwise be narrowly pursued BiS farms.

[Martynek]

This seems a little odd, though. There's only really one job that gets stat choice in this game, BLM. For all others, by the end of the first Savage tier or so, Crit is king. Stat choice is a myth. If you then stick the best secondaries behind certain dungeons, those are the only dungeons you'd really reward.

I'd far rather (A) keep dungeons' drops at roughly the same value --apart from whatever might result from Gear Effects, if XIV were ever so bold as to add them-- and (B) just offer little challenge bonuses, such as lore tidbits or bonus quests that take you from one dungeon to another (perhaps even opening up a bonus boss) --and/or (C) something the likes of rotated Light bonuses-- in order to shake up what would otherwise be narrowly pursued BiS farms.

I'm well aware of "Crit is king", hence in my example full Crit+Det would require running a mixture of all the various dungeons on offer. Sorry if I was unclear and you interpreted it as "each dungeon drops a specific stat combination for all slots", I think I worded it badly.

[Shurrikhan]

I'm well aware of "Crit is king", hence in my example full Crit+Det would require running a mixture of all the various dungeons on offer. Sorry if I was unclear and you interpreted it as "each dungeon drops a specific stat combination for all slots", I think I worded it badly.

Ahhh, gotcha. Alrighty then.

And, no, no, while the latter was indeed how it seemed to me, I had perhaps over-assumed as well. My bad there.

Could I ask you to expound a little bit more, though, on your preference not to have finely selectable / granular difficulty levels? That, above all, still confuses me.

[Martynek]

Could I ask you to expound a little bit more, though, on your preference not to have finely selectable / granular difficulty levels? That, above all, still confuses me.

It's not really a major thing, just something I'm personally not fond of. I think it's a poor middle ground between fully affix-based modular difficulty settings and fewer, more thoroughly tested difficulty tiers. Definitely wouldn't be a deal breaker to me either way though.

[Shurrikhan]

It's not really a major thing, just something I'm personally not fond of. I think it's a poor middle ground between fully affix-based modular difficulty settings and fewer, more thoroughly tested difficulty tiers. Definitely wouldn't be a deal breaker to me either way though.

Ahhh, I get you what you mean, I think.

And I could see that. I don't really feel like the difficulty tiers lack for "thorough testing", but arguably some of those levels would otherwise be a little redundant (with 1-3, 4-6, 7-9, and 10+ all forming just 5 core difficulty tiers, simply with scaled up dangers for further control over severity) if we had full control over the number and selection of affixes (which, again, is my preference, too).

If we just had just... 5 ranks and full and stackable control over our affixes/"trials of"/etc. then we'd probably be fine. It'd probably feel a little less... gimmicky, I guess, even if it might be slightly less intuitive in getting a sense of one's progress; though, making that progress less (falsely) seem linear may actually be a good thing anyways.

Anyways, thanks again for taking the time to lay this out concretely, instead of this just being left at a mostly overlapping "M+ is good!" vs. "M+ is bad!"

[Teno]

I have issues with these, personally.


But to elaborate on some of the particularly bad parts:

The timer would clash directly against XIV's instance design. XIV's instance timers are very forgiving, and there's no cost for failure but "wasted" time. You keep food buffs through death, cooldowns reset, etc - Everything about the game encourages you to keep on trying, keep on pushing til you get there. Making it 90% through a dungeon then getting kicked out or auto-failed due to the timer just doesn't fit.

Deep dungeon is exactly that and the closest thing to mythicals, and it's even got a leaderboard with a decently large community (would be larger if not for the tedious and lengthy early floors). It's a race against the clock, with one chance only (save for the limited and strategic raisings), you have to fully utilize how mobs and aggro types work in this game and it's overall a very different playstyle than traditional dungeons, who are dungeons only in name. Pomanders could even count as reverse affixes, since they buff you or debuff enemies instead. Enemies don't have complex mechanics but they OS and the accumulation of everything makes it super challenging.

I'm hoping that while waiting for the new deep dungeon, we get something in between deep dungeon and regular dungeon in terms of "feel" and gameplay, with savage being closer to deep dungeon solo in difficulty.