Dungeon improvements & suggestions

[Jeeqbit]

In one of the variant dungeons, there is a random chance for something different to happen. Yet I don't find that I care enough about the change. I think it would help to randomize the order of casts, but dungeon bosses don't typically have a lot of casts to begin with or they are in that order for a reason, so I'm not sure it would help shake it up much.

Player choice - well, variant dungeons showed what that would look like. Do you want to go left... or right? The regular dungeons that tried it like Sastasha, nobody explores all the different routes there (I only remember one tank doing it ever).

The best implementaton of content that induces fear of regular enemies in this game is Deep Dungeons and Field Operations, both of which left bodies everywhere when the wrong mob saw them. But this was primarily due to the fact neither of them necesarily had a tank. Although there were times in those two content types where the tank had to be "good" (tanking dragons, enemies with interrupts or mobs higher than the cap), having a tank still kinda makes it trivial for everyone else. You can say that about a lot of the game actually. If we just removed tanks it'd introduce all sorts of chaos and strategy.

Nevertheless, they did try "fear of enemies" with Criterion dungeons. In the first one, there are enemies that have all sorts of cleaves to be careful of, which make you want choose your priority carefully depending on which are giving you a hard time. Some of them also have interrupts. It was a while ago, but I recall there was also a section that involved sneaking around to carefully take out one enemy at a time, because if you got caught, it didn't go so well. It was a bit like Metal Gear Solid.

I can't imagine rewards mattering much. If there were any rewards people wanted, they'd do what they need to in order to farm them all in 1 day, then go to the forums and say "there are no rewards!"

Variants are a good example of choice rewards not mattering, since if you make all the different possible choices, you get different routes. Once you've got them all, it's done, and you go to the forums and say "there is no reason left to do this content!"

I think they could try to push Variants into an expert roulette of their own that gives as many tomestones as expert roulette. But the same problem needs to be solved with it as expert roulette: getting the same dungeon for 8 months or more is enough to cause physical nausea and it needs more variety in the actual amount of dungeons in it to be able to last that span of time.

[Ath192]

I think they could try to push Variants into an expert roulette of their own that gives as many tomestones as expert roulette. But the same problem needs to be solved with it as expert roulette: getting the same dungeon for 8 months or more is enough to cause physical nausea and it needs more variety in the actual amount of dungeons in it to be able to last that span of time.

Thats why I'm a proponent of making every dungeon a variant dungeon with a randomly chosen forced path at the beginning. Say you're dungeon design now includes 25 mechanics per boss, 5-10 variable paths and set of 10-15 different trash mobs each with a unique special ability.

At the time the dungeon finder pops, the dungeons goes RNG and "locks" into a random path, with random mobs and the bosses have a random set of their mechanic list. The dungeon will never feel the same thus keeping it fresh. It just has to be designed broadly enough that it always makes sense in the context of the MSQ.