Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[Maltothoris]

Been a while since I've done one of these but bumping this back up the front page and making sure that this stays visible.

[ForsakenRoe]

And more, I'd say we need some manner of chaos and rng. Perhaps some segments have a chance to yield specific mobs, or akin to budget variants, sometimes the left path is open and not the right path for the mid section, and sometimes the other way around. Maybe if *things* happened randomly here and here in every dungeon run we'd be less bored "oh, we're going left this time huh? Nice, haven't seen that one for the last five runs".

I had an idea for this, with the advent of 'story NPCs are in the dungeon with you sometimes', let's take Tower of Babil for an example. The dungeon has you along with Magnai, Sadu, Lyse and others for the train part, then you immediately split off into three different groups. I'm not suggesting necessarily three paths to go along, that'd be a lot of extra work for the devs, but we could have RNG decide that one of the three NPCs comes with us, and that affects something about how the dungeon is tackled. For example, let's say there's a quadruple-pull possible. Magnai might use his crazy AOE Holmgang to lock down half of the mobs, so that you're effectively 'tanking' only 2 of the 4 packs, but you're able to hit all 4 packs at once and clear the pull faster. Sadu, meanwhile, relishes in the thrill of combat, and so she would speed up the pull in a different way, by doing crazy amounts of damage, or perhaps doing the ritual to summon the instant-kill meteor on the quadpull (if you can live long enough to complete said ritual, maybe 15s). Then Lyse might instead notice a keypad to disable the lock on a secret passage, and after a few seconds get angry with it, punch it and break it open, allowing you to skip the pull entirely. Three different ways to approach the task of 'get through this corridor' but each is tackled slightly differently on each run.

The same 'RNG modifies the run slightly' idea could then apply to a Trust run, by modifying the mechanics of the bosses (and perhaps specific trash mobs) a bit. Take Tower of Zot. If you go in as a tank, you'd have a healer and 2 DPS as your trusts. With you, the player, being the tank, the enemies could modify to have more of a focus on Tank related things. Enemies could have moves which latch onto a certain target, until Provoked, which would force them to redirect the attack to the Tank that Provoked. They could have moves which can be interrupted or stunned, reinforcing the idea of Low Blow and Interject being 'actually useful moves'. They could have more skew towards using Tankbusters, to show 'hey you need to use CDs on these', but in a way ideally that says 'don't blow everything at once, ration your CDs out'.

Then for a run where you're the Healer, all of that is either disabled or handled automatically by the Trust Tank. Instead, you as the Healer would have to worry about things like 'more debuffs to Esuna', situations where you would need to Rescue (eg one of the NPCs has a super-Heavy and cannot get to safety to dodge an AOE, but you can Rescue them to get them there in time), more 'you need to be full HP to clear this DOOM' type things to force more healing, or perhaps some adds get summoned which self-destruct upon not moving for X seconds (ie if they're in range to attack you), and so using Repose to put them to sleep means they detonate out of range.

As DPS, it'd vary depending on the role I'd expect, Casters should probably have different things added to 'deal with' compared to Melee. Eg maybe a mini-DPS check could occur at some point (enemy puts up a shield ala Cruise Chaser, maybe), and that phase tries to make it hard for you as a DPS. As a Caster, it'd be hard if there's constant AOEs spawning all over the place to move out of (unless you're SMN). As a Melee, making it so you can only attack the shield from one side (eg the front as with CC) makes it harder, as if an AOE appears in the small window of 'I can actually do damage from this side', you might have to disengage from the enemy to dodge the AOE for a GCD (not-100% uptime for melees, shock and horror). I dunno what would 'test' a Phys Ranged because of their 100% mobility, perhaps something could be done where orbs need to be intercepted by running into them to delay the chargeup of the enemy's gauge for its 'big flashy finisher move', forcing the PhysRanged to make use of their mobility (if the player is not PhysRanged, presumably the DPS-Trust would handle it or there'd be less/no orbs)

Something like that

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

[...]Then for a run where you're the Healer, all of that is either disabled or handled automatically by the Trust Tank. Instead, you as the Healer would have to worry about things like 'more debuffs to Esuna', situations where you would need to Rescue (eg one of the NPCs has a super-Heavy and cannot get to safety to dodge an AOE, but you can Rescue them to get them there in time)[...]

Funnily enough, none of the NPCs from trust, squadron, and duty support could be Rescue'd as far as I can remember. They'll just DODGE your rescue lmao. I remembered this specifically because I tried to make Thancred run faster to pull next mob XD

[Deceptus]

Funnily enough, none of the NPCs from trust, squadron, and duty support could be Rescue'd as far as I can remember. They'll just DODGE your rescue lmao. I remembered this specifically because I tried to make Thancred run faster to pull next mob XD

Yep, found that out as well because I tried to do the exact same thing.

[Maltothoris]

That is pretty hilarious there. Yet another reason you really don't want to do trusts with healers cause one of your role actions that don't even worse at with it.

[Allegor]

I think it would be great it if the devs pushed themselves a bit more with with dungeon design instead of just defaulting to the usual formulas. I think the bullet hell hallway from The Puppet's Bunker is one of the best unconventional trash "pulls" in the game, and we need more weird trash pulls like it.

I think dungeons exist solely because they're a staple of the mmo genre, because in all honestly they just feel like glorified MSQ solo duties (and they ARE if you use trusts). I don't expect dungeons to become a competitive form of endgame content rivaling raids like WoW's mythic+ system, but come on now, they can put a little more effort on light party-based content.

[Maltothoris]

And when they do try to do something different, they themselves don't seem too sure and there isn't any effort to try and make it permeate at all. Variants and Criterions being the latest examples of this.

[ty_taurus]

Feels like the calm before the storm now. Everything that can be said has been said 1000 times over. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for this livestream in 5 days

[Niroken]

Feels like the calm before the storm now. Everything that can be said has been said 1000 times over. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for this livestream in 5 days

I personally cannot wait for the "you won't know how it plays out until you actually play it" comments.

As is tradition.

[Crushnight]

I personally cannot wait for the "you won't know how it plays out until you actually play it" comments.

As is tradition.

Ah the beginning of the cycle at the start of the expansion, wake me up when we get to “it’s only been a week” and “just wait for x.1 they will surely fix then”