More Variant Dungeons in 7.0? REALLY?

[CidHeiral]

Some accessories would be nice. Maybe slightly worse stats than the top tier accessories, but with a special stat boost when you're in a party of four or less. Criterion BiS.

This is an interesting idea. I think alternative gearing may be what a lot of people are looking for, but I have yet to see anyone else explain what rewards they want beyond just complaining that they don't like the current ones.

[SamSmoot]

Variants for the mounts are dead to me, since the mount requires running many exact paths through them, something that will take forever in in random PUGs. If I was in an organized group that could clear all the paths one at a time, it might be different.

[Silver-Strider]

Varients are fine, although I wouldn't be opposed to them dropping gear, even if it's run of the mill Dungeon green loot, if just for Glamour Purposes.

Criterion and Savage should absolutely drop Raid Equivalent gear. Maybe not BiS but considering their difficulty would 5 ilvl below the current raid gear drops but with 5 Materia Slots guaranteed be too much for the Savage drop to have?

[Renathras]

Let's be honest with ourselves here: Reward Structure is trash in Variants. Either they beef it up and give us more stuff that's worth doing it for aside from Materia and an outfit/mount, or it's going to more dead content.

Honestly, it wouldn't even have to be huge things, just things people want. For example, what if you could buy the Mandarium Ores with those currencies (at a slightly faster rate than if you were spamming dungeons for the tomes)? This would give people a reason to do them, like how Eureka had PotD/HoH drops for the relics (just no more random low % chance here, you'd just buy them with the potsherds). That would already give people a reason to run them if they want to work on more Relics/quicker Relics.

It would also make the Relic grind a bit more interesting since you'd have these additional avenues you could use. It's so odd that this new content for the expansion has NO tie to the Relic weapons. Even just having the Mandarium Ores (updated with each Relic step to include the latest one as well) in their shops would make it worth doing. At this point in the game, no one needs more Materia. I've done enough Hunt Trains I have close to 2000 of the grade 9 and 1500 of the grade 10 turn-in items, and another roughly 50-100 of each Materia between Expert chest/random drops and having bought a bunch in the past with the cracked clusters. Even people who don't do Hunts often, you have PvP Wolf Marks as another source and extracting from all the gear you've worn over the course of the expansion.

I know Materia is their go-to "extra thing people can buy", but at this point, I can't imagine anyone that actually melds their gear ISN'T already drowning in Materia (or has the money to buy what they need from the MB anyway), certainly not that they'd run C&Vs over and over to buy more.

EDIT:

Varients are fine, although I wouldn't be opposed to them dropping gear, even if it's run of the mill Dungeon green loot, if just for Glamour Purposes.

Criterion and Savage should absolutely drop Raid Equivalent gear. Maybe not BiS but considering their difficulty would 5 ilvl below the current raid gear drops but with 5 Materia Slots guaranteed be too much for the Savage drop to have?

So the revival of the ancient concept (Vanilla/BC WoW era ancient, so from the 00s) of "Dungeon Sets"?

Might be worth looking into, but raiders tend to get ants in their pants about anyone else having gear at all close to theirs, and only grudgingly accept it at the very end of an expansion after all content has been released and cleared in the form of the final Relic weapon update, which had to be lower ilevel than their Savage weapons all the way until then otherwise they'd have been even more upset.

[Silver-Strider]

Might be worth looking into, but raiders tend to get ants in their pants about anyone else having gear at all close to theirs, and only grudgingly accept it at the very end of an expansion after all content has been released and cleared in the form of the final Relic weapon update, which had to be lower ilevel than their Savage weapons all the way until then otherwise they'd have been even more upset.

Seems a bit aggressive considering that anything outside of week 1 clears is irrelevant to the raid community and that their gear advantage typically disappears by next patch when the final alliance raid starts giving out weekly coins to upgrade Tombstone gear. It's not like it doesn't take them 8 weeks to get their BiS anyways and half of that might just be from Tombstone gear as well, depending on the class, which everyone will have access to. The upgrade mat for the armor will release in another 8 weeks when the latest Alliance Raid drops with the coin needed to purchase upgrades so it's not even that substantial a time frame to be uppity about. Hell, the raid community sure as hell would not complain if they could have a viable alternative to gearing out a secondary job while gearing out their main for reclears, or even using Criterion Gear as a better stepping stone towards their BiS during that 8 week frame, especially when several members in a static are trying for a Twine because the Tombstone gear is better than the Raid gear.

It seems like a non-issue really.