Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
Aye. Some good, some bad, but mostly just sad in that they double down on "Dungeons should only ever be hallways with interchangeable trash and largely the same basic DDR mechanics on bosses."

Just imagine if they had instead gone the other way, fleshing out those dungeons' currently lackluster unique aspects instead of axing them outright. Imagine if Copperbell went the other way, with significant use of Duty Actions, or if Totorak actually used its unlock mechanic to allow for multiple paths through the dungeon and some (pseudo-randomly placed) trash packs were hard enough to encourage unlocking more ways around them, or if Brayflox actually allowed you to build up a small squad of saved Gobbies so that you could challenge otherwise overly difficult optional bosses, etc., etc.

Just the fact that nothing of that sort has even really been attempted since ARR Hard Mode dungeons and now the outlying elements are taking their purposeful disuse as excuse to be pruned is... pretty disappointing, to say the least.
Well, the "hallway" approach is largely because of us (the players). They made dungeons with various branches, side paths, etc., and what did we do? Ignore all of the side paths and choose whichever branch was fastest.

Remember that the dungeons we're talking about here are now introductory ones, too. Having "significant use of Duty Actions" in one of the very first dungeons a new player will ever encounter probably ends up being very bad design. Low-level dungeons should be simple and about getting people used to playing in a party. It felt strange seeing what used to be a sensible progression of difficulty become odd ebbs and flows between expansions now that we go from 1-90 instead of just 1-50. Things that were designed as "endgame" before with more mechanics in mind are now very much "early game" instead and were adjusted accordingly.