So whatever was the story of the missing Deep Dungeon for Shadowbringers?

[Jeeqbit]

The vaguely come up with a plan for all the expansion's patches sometime after the .3 patch of the previous expansion, and they simply did not plan on another deep dungeon because they thought people didn't really care about them that much. Most likely they noticed a massive drop in activity in Heaven-on-High compared to Palace of the Dead, or something like that, because of how more people have access to POTD than HoH. Remember that back then, trying to get the Necromancer title in POTD was not as big of a thing, and you only started really seeing people showing off the title after streamers started doing it and created interest in it some time before Endwalker.

Deep dungeons were part of the "try new ideas to keep things fresh" part of the content cycle, so once people seem bored of it they try something new and so instead we got the firmament events, ocean fishing and bozja CEs, two bozja CE raids, an extra extreme and bigger raids such as DR/DRS.

[Ranaku]

ARR/HW - Palace of the Dead
SB - Heaven on High
SHB -????
EW - Eureka Orthos

I always thought that was odd, I read rumors there was suppose to be one, but I don't know if it is a fact or not.

Bozja which gave us:

- two new zones

- countless fates

- an insane amount of rewards from glam to armor to many mounts and whatnot

- 3 extra raids, 1 savage version, 1 extra trial

And while you can argue that we also got a deep dungeon when Eureka came out in stormblood, Eureka was not even close to what Bozja offered. No matter if you liked that specific content or not the amount of time you could sink into it was crazy.

[dspguy]

ARR didn't have POTD, that was 3.35 with the first 50 floors, and 3.45 released the last 150 floors, so they started in HW.

3.35 patch notes with POTD right up top: here
3.45 patch notes, POTD under the relic step quest under "Quests": here

Right you are. Faulty memory on my part. I was pretty sure I remember running PotD floor 50 shortly before I had to evacuate for a hurricane in 2015. Turns out, it was 2016 - so HW.

Yeah, then the missing deep dungeon for ShB is a bit weird.

[rainichan]

Right you are. Faulty memory on my part. I was pretty sure I remember running PotD floor 50 shortly before I had to evacuate for a hurricane in 2015. Turns out, it was 2016 - so HW.

Yeah, then the missing deep dungeon for ShB is a bit weird.

No worries! That was also some years ago lol... so I get it.

My only guess is they had other things they wanted to do and no time to do everything, so things got cut unfortunately. They found that they were popular though with everyone asking about DDs and Hildibrand constantly. I wouldn't mind some First lore though, so perhaps in the future.