People that say dungeons are too easy...

[EgilTheStressedMage]

Clear it in twenty minutes. There’s your DPS check, I’m not spending over a half hour.

[Oizen]

All I really want from them is to be more than a long hallway where you grab 2 packs of mobs, hit a wall, do it again, fight a boss and repeat that 2 more times.

[Sacae]

My hot take here is that the dungeons feel dumbed down because they require the trust AI to be able to do them, so you will never get interesting mechanics with trash before bosses. Even bosses have a hard time surprising you because it needs to be doable by the AI itself.

You cannot have an adventure without stakes, and gameplay wise the stakes are always to lose or wipe, but nothing Endwalker from the 2 years I've been playing has been threatening, maybe I saw a couple of wipes at the beginning of Smileton but after 6.1 it never happened again.

Some of the design decisions this expansion feel like a response to what the devs think the players find fun. People figured weird openers to have a 6 min buff aligment? Well let's make a 2 min buff aligment so everyone can do that easily. People liked wall to wall enemies and had to do some work not everyone could do to kill big amounts of mobs? Well let's do without aggro and make AoE as simple as possible so everyone can do it, cuz that's what players find fun right?

Nah, you have prey mechanics and healing down tethers in Amaurot, and that can be done with trusts. Amaraurot actually had pretty interesting trash for dungeons.

Sohr Kai has those fans that give you haste after you kill them. Exploding enemies like the ones at the beginning of Thalalia or the adds in Sephirot EX could easily be done with trusts; they don't aoe anyway. Trap enemies, like in Shisui, mimics like in Lost City of Amdapor, more debuffs, like Misery from the Gremlins in Holminster Switch, environmental hazards, like in Lost City of Amdapor, the first part of Dead Ends or the last part of Tower of Babil, enemies that spawn adds, like those gate things in Alzadaal's Legacy, miniboss enemies like that ghost thing in Sirensong Sea that you used to have to interrupt, or endlessly spawning enemies until an objective is fufilled, like the balloons in Xelphatol. Every expansion has had at least one dungeon with something to make trash interesting. They just won't do it consistently for some reason.

As far as boss attacks that can one-shot, the one I see most often is the final boss of Grand Cosmos. That one hits hard, mortal flame can easily put parties in a bad place if they're not coordinated or paying attention to wear the fires are hitting. That's a great fight.

Also, not a mechanic that'll kill you, but the debuffs you get from island hopping in Hullbreaker Isle's Kracken fight are a great idea. Give resources to the player that they must use, but give them downsides that the players will have to manage at the same time. Zombie/Mega Death is another good example of that.

[Volgia]

Nah, you have prey mechanics and healing down tethers in Amaurot, and that can be done with trusts. Amaraurot actually had pretty interesting trash for dungeons.

Sohr Kai has those fans that give you haste after you kill them. Exploding enemies like the ones at the beginning of Thalalia or the adds in Sephirot EX could easily be done with trusts; they don't aoe anyway. Trap enemies, like in Shisui, mimics like in Lost City of Amdapor, more debuffs, like Misery from the Gremlins in Holminster Switch, environmental hazards, like in Lost City of Amdapor, the first part of Dead Ends or the last part of Tower of Babil, enemies that spawn adds, like those gate things in Alzadaal's Legacy, miniboss enemies like that ghost thing in Sirensong Sea that you used to have to interrupt, or endlessly spawning enemies until an objective is fufilled, like the balloons in Xelphatol. Every expansion has had at least one dungeon with something to make trash interesting. They just won't do it consistently for some reason.

As far as boss attacks that can one-shot, the one I see most often is the final boss of Grand Cosmos. That one hits hard, mortal flame can easily put parties in a bad place if they're not coordinated or paying attention to wear the fires are hitting. That's a great fight.

Also, not a mechanic that'll kill you, but the debuffs you get from island hopping in Hullbreaker Isle's Kracken fight are a great idea. Give resources to the player that they must use, but give them downsides that the players will have to manage at the same time. Zombie/Mega Death is another good example of that.

I agree those mobs are fun (I think to mention two others, the fairy dungeon in ShB with the trunks that tankbuster) but they have been absent for the past 4 patches. It would have made the last stretch to Zeromus so much more epic if the last dungeon felt more difficult than the everything that came before it. I feel like it's just lazy design at this point? I don't know. I'm so unsatisfied with the state of dungeons at the moment.

[Deceptus]

Also, I mean, what can you do to a dungeon to make it harder?

"Tankbusters" that actually take more than 25% of the tanks total HP unmitigated

Frequent small aoe damage (think Barbariccia)

Big enemies that hit REALLY F*ing HARD in trash packs that have to be focused down first or CC'd and moved away so the group aoe don't hit them (requires DPS with CC to actually think instead of hurr durr flare goes BOOM)

Lots of ways.

[fumofu]

Make all content difficult and I'll leave the game. I don't play this game for content like ex trials, savages or criterion. This content is completely irrelevant for me. Don't forget, FFXIV is supposed to be a theme park - there should be content for everyone. You get your hard content, I want to get my easy content. Everyone who says dungeons should be hard - are complacent. I don't see easy content as a 'steping stone' to harder content. I like it how it is and it should be kept like that.

[PyurBlue]

Make all content difficult and I'll leave the game. I don't play this game for content like ex trials, savages or criterion. This content is completely irrelevant for me. Don't forget, FFXIV is supposed to be a theme park - there should be content for everyone. You get your hard content, I want to get my easy content. Everyone who says dungeons should be hard - are complacent. I don't see easy content as a 'steping stone' to harder content. I like it how it is and it should be kept like that.

For the most part I don't think people want to take away easy content. The issue is that almost anyone playing this game will have to play through dungeons. If they could be avoided, or if there were alternatives there would be less complaints. It's also not a binary divide between Savage and dungeons, some people want something in between as well.

[Boblawblah]

For the most part I don't think people want to take away easy content. The issue is that almost anyone playing this game will have to play through dungeons. If they could be avoided, or if there were alternatives there would be less complaints. It's also not a binary divide between Savage and dungeons, some people want something in between as well.

They stop asking for easy content to be harder. Ask for totally separate content that is midcore.

[PyurBlue]

They stop asking for easy content to be harder. Ask for totally separate content that is midcore.

I often comment about the consequences of changing the game on different player demographics. I'm not aiming to take anything away from you. It needs to be recognized that dungeons are a common content for all players though. When a there is a very wide range of player types in the same content, you might expect a large range of opinions on that content, and such is the case with dungeons. It still doesn't mean that dungeons as they are have to be replaced and I'd be very happy with a new alternative that with a higher difficulty curve, but with very real limitations on the developer side of things, I don't think it's unreasonable to at least propose rebalancing dungeons. If you disagree, voice your opinion or suggest your own ideas. My opinions are no more valuable than anyone else's.

[Boblawblah]

I often comment about the consequences of changing the game on different player demographics. I'm not aiming to take anything away from you. It needs to be recognized that dungeons are a common content for all players though. When a there is a very wide range of player types in the same content, you might expect a large range of opinions on that content, and such is the case with dungeons. It still doesn't mean that dungeons as they are have to be replaced and I'd be very happy with a new alternative that with a higher difficulty curve, but with very real limitations on the developer side of things, I don't think it's unreasonable to at least propose rebalancing dungeons. If you disagree, voice your opinion or suggest your own ideas. My opinions are no more valuable than anyone else's.

The problem I have with rebalancing to suit the midcore players is that for them to feel like they're getting a good challenging experience, you'd have to make dungeons 5 times harder than they are now, which would absolutely destroy your casual playerbase (people like me). When I hear people unironically saying that Sastasha is the same difficulty as The Dead Ends I shake my head because for someone like me, although I can get through both of them, from my point of view, they're night and day in terms of difficulty. I can't even imagine what the difficulty would be like if it suited the midcore population. I'd simply stop doing dungeons unless there was a very easy mode difficulty.

edit:

That said, I do appreciate people better than me but not wanting to get into hardcore raiding feeling like they don't have appropriate content to do. I do hope SE puts in some scaling content that the midcore people can chew on for a while.