Please go back to 2 new dungeons per patch.

[Valence]

I'm fine with 1 dungeon per patch, but it needs to be more than a simple corridor. They tried some things with variants. Some of it was good, a lot of it wasn't. They should take some lessons from the variants and try it with dungeons.

Maybe give dungeons 3 paths. Easy/Medium/Hard. Easy would be the equivalent of Endwalker dungeons in difficulty, but would drop very little loot. A good option for everyone who has the dungeon on farm and just wants tomestones. Medium could be what we got in Dawntrail in terms of difficulty and drops the amount of loot we're seeing now. Hard would be tuned a little bit less than extreme. Mobs would Require CC and it's common to die from boss mechs a few times, but there's extra loot and special stuff like orchestrion rolls and minis have their drop rates increased. This would be the equivalent of 3 dungeons in 1, with most/all assets reused and the only major changes being mechanical in nature.

IDK though. I'm just spitballing but Dungeons need a change from being the same thing over and over with a different veneer.

I agree because I have the exact same idea about it, but without the difficulty differences. This would just result in the expert daily to run through the easy path because people can't be arsed to have fun in dungeons and just want their tomes. I think all paths should be similarish but chosen at random by the roulette. If anything, dungeon difficulty should go up (and I'm not speaking about the bosses, they have already done this with the Fair or Valley), and duty support should have decreased damage and threat for the msq dungeons.

[Fatch38]

I'll be frank: copy wows dungeon design.
FF14 has better raids by far imo, but wow's dungeons are the best in the market. Please look at them for ideas

thing is gameplay isn't the same, here we don't have much crowd control, and in wow dungeon gear is relevant to char progression.

[Doragan]

I agree because I have the exact same idea about it, but without the difficulty differences. This would just result in the expert daily to run through the easy path because people can't be arsed to have fun in dungeons and just want their tomes. I think all paths should be similarish but chosen at random by the roulette. If anything, dungeon difficulty should go up (and I'm not speaking about the bosses, they have already done this with the Fair or Valley), and duty support should have decreased damage and threat for the msq dungeons.

What if we get a path rolled at random at dungeon start? Kinda like Matoya's Relict, but actually bringing you to different places. Could that work?

[Moqi]

Dungeons are useless for gear but more variety is always good, and I'd love to have more difficult, optional dungeons. I also feel like they made the world feel less empty. There are so many interesting locations in early maps that got turned into dungeons while the latter ones get more and more empty. We are missing so much lore and storytelling from the lack of dungeons.

[Loggos]

HM dungeons from Norvrandt would go so hard. Just think about it.
Thank you.

Holminster Switch, Mt. Gulg, Amaurot, Akademia Anyder, Matoya's Relict or The Twinning hard-mode? Yes please! That would be so epic.

[Vyrerus]

Heh, we should go back to 3 dungeons per patch. Never shoulda left it, really.

But you know, at the time they cited they were working on other content to give us, and that other content turned out to largely be glorified fate farming with a a few twists.

And that became their mantra. "We're making different and new content, so that's why we're sacking the amount of dungeons!"

Except, you know, the reduction in amount of dungeons starting in HW wasn't really explained that way.

The fact is, is that the XIV team has been getting downsized in all the ways that matter for years. Oh, sure, the credits sequence gets longer and longer on each expansion, but surely you've started to notice that they're crediting like PR people and social media managers and crap like that with no real increase in actual development staff.

It's all classic misdirection, and they're really seeing how long the game can last and expand with minimal investment. Keep in mind, too, that any time they do make something new they go onto reuse/recycle it with a new coat of paint. Also though, keep in mind that they used to incorporate unique mechanics and monsters even in trash packs in dungeons, and they've long since stopped doing that in favor of "streamlining" everything. Streamlining including just shitting out the dungeons with no bells or whistles.

I'm sure you've all seen it, if you've been around awhile, but you go into a dungeon with some newbie to the game. Like a started in Shadowbringers Baby. You go do a dungeon like Sohm Al Hard Mode or Amdapor Keep Hard Mode and they ignore the extra stuff you can do with pulls because power creep has made them matter far less. You know, putting vuln up on the entire trash pack by positioning them on the steam vents, or sprinting through the slapping vines to position the monsters under the vine, so they die faster. Quite a few dungeons had unique things like that, along with winding paths and elevators and falling chutes and differing terrain. Sure, sure, they were still ultimately hall way simulators, but they still gave you the feeling that you were in a unique place that was part of a larger world and not just Instance #86, the one with flame boss.

People have also said for years that they want more "midcore" content like Extremes or more bosses for each Savage tier, but the problem with that is that they have a limited scope on new mechanics that they invent, and because of the introduction of Ultimates, they will always save their most difficult/interesting mechanics for an upcoming Ultimate, causing the quality of Savage and lower to be worse than before Ultimates existed.

You can see this proven by their "streamlining" of mechanics as well, with things like the group stack markers becoming uniform over the years, and now even being made a mainstay in Hall of The Novice.

Anyway, I do like the idea about having the Expert roulette just scale up every dungeon in the game. They've proven that's viable through re-releasing old Extreme fights as "Unreal." It's likely the only practical solution for giving us more variety in Expert roulette, though I guess they haven't done it yet because they're still invested in the idea of all of the other roulettes, and it steps on the toes of High Level Roulette in particular, which is already a roulette that includes every previous level plateau dungeon (50/60/70/80/90).

[Avoidy]

I'll start by how things were, and how things are now.

During ARR, we had 3 dungeons per patch, and patches dropped around 3 months of each other.

In Heavensward, it went to 2 per patch. Same amount of time.

In Stormblood, it went to 1.5 (2 every even patch) -- It started to get a bit samey and boring, but I dealt with it.

Shadowbringers onwards (to today), it has been one single story dungeon per patch. The time between patches went to 4~ months.

Laying it out like this really puts things into perspective. They've been lowering the bar this whole time, trying to find the limit of what they could produce while still maintaining subs. And like Vyrerus pointed out above me (in great detail; this thread is full of good reads), it isn't as though we got anything cool for this reduction in content, either. There was a promise of good things, but in the end it didn't pan out and the bar was allowed to drop even lower.

In ShB, during the covid lockdowns, they essentially got away with a year of no updates. Granted, it was because of the pandemic, but I do wonder if Square's takeaway from that experience was "oh wow, these people will literally pay monthly for nothing" instead of "these lockdowns are exceptional times and shouldn't be considered normal going forward," because almost immediately after that we got these "4 month" content cycles that realistically become 4.5 months with even less to show for it. If the trend continues, we'll be looking at a nearly 6 month wait for maybe one dungeon? Oh! Or maybe it'll be a single variant dungeon every other patch cycle. People will defend it, of course. "It's a variant dungeon, so it takes more time to implement," they'll say. lmao

[Turtledeluxe]

Heh, we should go back to 3 dungeons per patch. Never shoulda left it, really.

But you know, at the time they cited they were working on other content to give us, and that other content turned out to largely be glorified fate farming with a a few twists.

And that became their mantra. "We're making different and new content, so that's why we're sacking the amount of dungeons!"

Except, you know, the reduction in amount of dungeons starting in HW wasn't really explained that way.

The fact is, is that the XIV team has been getting downsized in all the ways that matter for years. Oh, sure, the credits sequence gets longer and longer on each expansion, but surely you've started to notice that they're crediting like PR people and social media managers and crap like that with no real increase in actual development staff.

It's all classic misdirection, and they're really seeing how long the game can last and expand with minimal investment. Keep in mind, too, that any time they do make something new they go onto reuse/recycle it with a new coat of paint. Also though, keep in mind that they used to incorporate unique mechanics and monsters even in trash packs in dungeons, and they've long since stopped doing that in favor of "streamlining" everything. Streamlining including just shitting out the dungeons with no bells or whistles.

I think this is the heart of the issue. It's just that DawnTrail, absent the usual art direction/cutscene quality/dialogue/storytelling/bosses/music, has made it apparent to a broader range of players (even down to casuals) that there's a skeleton crew behind the curtain. You can't deny it any more. SHB and EW did a lot of heavy lifting through their presentation and storytelling.

It just goes to show critically and commercially, XIV is downbad if it isn't skating by on story. I'm not saying jobs and encounter design were flawless in either xpac, but SHB and EW were tolerated more for the aforementioned reasons.

[Alice_Rivers]

It's also a bit telling that they had to pull in another studio's staff to do the lighting update for them. I don't remember if they did the graphics themselves or not.

[SacraAnima]

I've just realized, since they stated that the 7.1 dungeon won't have the same novelty or difficulty as Strayborough or Tender Valley due to them being story dungeons; we won't be getting any other challenging dungeons this expansion. That's really sad to hear and cheapens the hype that those two expert dungeons were able to generate. Back to hand holding it seems. The worst part is, those dungeons aren't game ending, no one would be hard stuck on those if run with Trusts who run directly to the safe spots as they do. Hopefully Criterion pops off, I guess.