Variant/Criterion Dungeons are a huge success!!

[Zolvolt]

I've only cleared t he first boss of criterion and mostly finished the second boss and I could not be happier with the difficulty and the boss prog. This is so much fun.

[Super_Smiley]

I also want to add, can we get a certain action to reduce emnity? After playing on SMN I have actually worry about emnity, since certain skills have emnity attached to them. Like maybe a smokescreen action. Of course this for situations where you have no Tank in the party, and you don't want to the tank boss.

[Listrella]

I would go as far as to say that they should replace expert with variant dungeons, they have so far been a vastly more interesting experience. Will they eventually get boring? Sure, there are only so many variations you can get, but atleast you get any variation at all and that's already a big improvement over the normal dungeon experience.

at the least it'd be nice if the variant dungeon was included in expert roulette.

[Super_Smiley]

at the least it'd be nice if the variant dungeon was included in expert roulette.

I feel after we get more Variant Dungeons we can get a proper Variant Dungeon Roulette, that way everyone wins.

[Akonyl]

I hate to the the guy to ask for more once we're given something good, but as someone who's cleared criterion+criterion savage, I'd like a similar challenge with solo players. My main issue with PotD and HoH solo as "hard content" is that the difficulty is largely from sunk cost, where a single run can cost you multiple hours if you wipe, which is no fun to me.

A solo variant (or wipeless criterion) run can be 15-25 minutes though, which is a huge benefit when it comes to small-form hard content. It would be cool to see even lower-party-member form content though like a solo criterion dungeon (which gave maybe 1 variant action to equalize dps/survivability among roles), so that there was a way to run hard content solo that could be attempted/learned in 20 minute bursts, without losing hours if you failed.

Even without that though, Criterion+Savage are great, I just wish the rewards were maybe a little better / gave more tomes or something.

[PangTong]

While Variant is fine (though a bit more railroady than I'd like), my issue with Criterion is that I think it puts too much emphasis on the bosses. Instead of feeling like a dungeon, it just feels like 3 raid bosses that have to be cleared consecutively in the same lockout. There's only two trash sections, you clear them out quickly, and the high damage forces you into single pulling anyway so there's not much new gameplay there.

Single-target boss fights are what FF is designed for and what it's designers are good at. But with Criterion I was really hoping for a brand new take on higher-end content, a whole new STYLE of content that utilizes the battle system in ways you don't normally see in the highly scripted raid boss encounters. A hard DUNGEON, not just a raid but with 4 players.

I was hoping for something where things like routing, enemy management, CC, and risk-vs-reward plays are highlights. You can pull another pack of trash and save some time, but this increases the amount of mechanics the group has to handle, as well as putting more burden on the tank and healer. Instead trash in Criterion is just tuned to deal ridiculous damage, forcing you to single pull and treat each trash mob like it's own mini boss encounter. Not that time saving is even really a consideration, since the time limit only applies in savage and the majority of time is spent on bosses anyway.

[Gserpent]

I hate to the the guy to ask for more once we're given something good, but as someone who's cleared criterion+criterion savage, I'd like a similar challenge with solo players. My main issue with PotD and HoH solo as "hard content" is that the difficulty is largely from sunk cost, where a single run can cost you multiple hours if you wipe, which is no fun to me.

A solo variant (or wipeless criterion) run can be 15-25 minutes though, which is a huge benefit when it comes to small-form hard content. It would be cool to see even lower-party-member form content though like a solo criterion dungeon (which gave maybe 1 variant action to equalize dps/survivability among roles), so that there was a way to run hard content solo that could be attempted/learned in 20 minute bursts, without losing hours if you failed.

Even without that though, Criterion+Savage are great, I just wish the rewards were maybe a little better / gave more tomes or something.

I don't think it's being ungrateful to ask for/expect improvements to existing content. I know there's a very small minority of players that are diehard fans of PotD/HoH and don't want them changed at all, but the vast majority of players seem to not really like them much, only engaging with them for the XP or items, not out of enjoyment.

I think they could do a *lot* better with those systems, and as you've said, the way criterion and variant dungeons feel, it feels like a possible path for them to take.

[Arohk]

If they are a huge success, why are there so few groups for it in the party finder?
It is clearly not the difficuly, because you can find a lot of groups for ex trials or savage raids and ultimates, but for criteon , there is almsot no one searching.

[Liam_Harper]

While Variant is fine (though a bit more railroady than I'd like), my issue with Criterion is that I think it puts too much emphasis on the bosses. Instead of feeling like a dungeon, it just feels like 3 raid bosses that have to be cleared consecutively in the same lockout. There's only two trash sections, you clear them out quickly, and the high damage forces you into single pulling anyway so there's not much new gameplay there.

Agreed.

We asked for harder dungeons and all we actually got were small scale Savage progression raids. Which is nice, but it's not a dungeon. It seems odd that they keep giving us more aoe tools in our toolkit, things like Shoha II, Orogeny or updates to existing aoe and the only thing we really get to use that toolkit on is leveling dungeons and faceroll Experts where it's mostly irrelevant what buttons you press.

I don't think we were really looking for more progression raids. There are people who will enjoy it because it's smaller scale and it fills a niche (that's a good thing), but most of us have our Extreme trials, Unreal, p5-8S statics and Ultimates and that's a good fill of raids. Yet any real dungeons are sorely lacking in this game. I won't speak for everyone, but personally I'd really like to have that authentic dungeon experience, and not just 3 corridor 3 boss bland facerolls.

[Gserpent]

Agreed.

We asked for harder dungeons and all we actually got were small scale Savage progression raids. Which is nice, but it's not a dungeon. It seems odd that they keep giving us more aoe tools in our toolkit, things like Shoha II, Orogeny or updates to existing aoe and the only thing we really get to use that toolkit on is leveling dungeons and faceroll Experts where it's mostly irrelevant what buttons you press.

I don't think we were really looking for more progression raids. There are people who will enjoy it because it's smaller scale and it fills a niche (that's a good thing), but most of us have our Extreme trials, Unreal, p5-8S statics and Ultimates and that's a good fill of raids. Yet any real dungeons are sorely lacking in this game. I won't speak for everyone, but personally I'd really like to have that authentic dungeon experience, and not just 3 corridor 3 boss bland facerolls.

The problem is that we can't really have that experience right now, because they've removed all of the buttons involved in that "dungeon experience." Why do you need CC when raid bosses are immune to it? I mean, look at the sheer breadth of control effects BLU has access to - it's absolutely possible, but they don't want to put it into the game because normal dungeons aren't designed to be remotely challenging, and they'd have to add a bunch of buttons that are otherwise useless in raids if we wanted something even vaguely like WoW's mythic+ dungeons, or even old-school MMO dungeons where CCing monsters was important.

Moreover, that kind of skillset isn't present in players anymore, anyway. WoW flirted with making heroics actually challenging several times, and most of the time it was a failure because the majority of players simply did not have the skillset necessary to handle that kind of content. And rather than accept the need to learn new skills, they pitched a fit until Blizzard nerfed them. The same thing would happen here, but probably even worse because of how trained this playerbase is to expect "free" victories.