Expert Dungeons

[Packetdancer]

Or if they can't do that, just adjust their pattern of how things expire out of Expert. If they set a hard number of the dungeons always included, then it will help maintain that variety. So for this they could retire Dead Ends and leave the rest which gives a nice 50/50 balance of slightly older and much newer.

That would put only Dead Ends in the level 90 capstone roulette, however. And while it's sad when a roulette has only two options, a roulette with only one option fails to be a roulette at all. And Dead Ends does need to be in a roulette, or else people just now catching up to story will hit a wall at the end of Endwalker.

The issue, honestly, is that since you need to retire more than one thing into the capstone roulette for capstone roulette to be, y'know, a roulette... we have three dungeons that were around since the expansion launched, which means it makes sense for three to be retired. But that leaves only two in Expert.

What I might do if I were the designer -- and keeping in mind my previous point about why they probably split things up that way -- would be that if there's no viable way to have more than one dungeon per story patch, wait one patch longer. Yeah, it means you end up with five in expert for one patch (and presumably a much less efficient queue for folks doing the level 90 dungeons for the first time, as previously mentioned), but then with 6.3 you can retire the first three and have three in each, and then keep three in expert through the rest of the patch.

I suspect there's elements I'm not seeing which would make this less ideal, though. (Probably in terms of what the pattern of players running dungeons -- and what dungeons need specific people being matched in -- that SQEX has actual concrete data on and we don't.)