Yuweyawata Field Station is so wrong

[Mawlzy]

you're not understanding what i'm saying and how it relates to the original topic, which is exclusively about the difficulty of the dungeons.

you're saying you want more interesting mechanics. i understand that. but you're not understanding that the devs aren't putting those more unique mechanics in the dungeons because then people come into the forum and complain that it's too difficult. so everything gets simplified to what we have now in normal dungeons, which is a very slow very telegraphed ddr, which you yourself even admitted was easy... yet people still complain it's too hard because it's too fast.

so again, this is what you need to understand. if you want more unique mechanics, you have to accept that the dungeons will be more difficult. let's be real, half the healers in duty finder don't even know you can esuna debuffs with a blue bar above them. half the tanks are too scared to pull more than a single pack at max level. half the dps players don't even use their damage buffs. how do you realistically expect things to go if the devs give in and add dungeons with unusual mechanics? read this thread. people don't even like dungeons at the low difficulty they are now. you cannot have a dungeon be both very interesting and very simple. it simply does not work that way. people can't read slow ddr mechanics, but you expect them to be coordinated enough for a group mechanic? half the time in df people try to drop aoes on me because they don't understand basic spreads. if the grand cosmos had come out this patch, people would have been on the forums complaining about the mechanics being hard to read, especially on the first boss with the brooms.

and there is a dual track difficulty already. you have duty finder, or you have trusts.

This simply isn't true. The people who want to maintain the design philosophy but ramp up the speed are invariably raiders.

Casuals like quirky mechanics precisely because they shift the emphasis away from faster DDR.

But sure, I'm fine with your final point. Make the NPC-based dungeon options simpler, so that player light parties can have harder content. Now everyone is happy. Er... okay, less miserable.

[Alice_Rivers]

This simply isn't true. The people who want to maintain the design philosophy but ramp up the speed are invariably raiders.

I feel like we're seeing two diametrically opposed visions of "raiders", most of the people I see on these forums who are clearly raiders and who complain about fight design being boring do so on the basis of it's always "find the safe spot" (more recently I am among this number), certainly it being slow DDR doesn't help matters but there are only so many flavours of DDR you can take before it becomes boring - A lot of people I see in the raiding community are beyond this point and want something new. I fail to see why everything has to be casuals vs raiders... Two minute meta? Sure some raiders support that at the highest levels, but again most people I talk to in and out of game casual and raider alike find it bland and restrictive, tank/healer balance? That seems to be drawn along tank/healer/developer lines not casual/raider I don't even see a clear casual/raider divide on dungeons being boring or too hard, if anything raiders tend not to care because this isn't their content, most raiders just blitz through it to get to raids and get tomes for gear, really couldn't care less if it's easy or not.

So rather than scapegoating an irrelevant part of the community, maybe try finding a banner you can get everyone behind like "Dungeon fights suck! They're boring and repetitive!" I doubt you'd see much resistance to that.

[Mawlzy]

I feel like we're seeing two diametrically opposed visions of "raiders", most of the people I see on these forums who are clearly raiders and who complain about fight design being boring do so on the basis of it's always "find the safe spot" (more recently I am among this number), certainly it being slow DDR doesn't help matters but there are only so many flavours of DDR you can take before it becomes boring - A lot of people I see in the raiding community are beyond this point and want something new. I fail to see why everything has to be casuals vs raiders... Two minute meta? Sure some raiders support that at the highest levels, but again most people I talk to in and out of game casual and raider alike find it bland and restrictive, tank/healer balance? That seems to be drawn along tank/healer/developer lines not casual/raider I don't even see a clear casual/raider divide on dungeons being boring or too hard, if anything raiders tend not to care because this isn't their content, most raiders just blitz through it to get to raids and get tomes for gear, really couldn't care less if it's easy or not.

So rather than scapegoating an irrelevant part of the community, maybe try finding a banner you can get everyone behind like "Dungeon fights suck! They're boring and repetitive!" I doubt you'd see much resistance to that.

That's fair, and I apologize. I shouldn't put all the raiders in the same bucket, particularly given it's a community I completely avoid. In the past I've been told I have no right to an opinion on dungeon difficulty until I clear an ultimate, or something equally irrelevant, hence the assumption.

Happy to get behind that banner.

[Valence]

Frankly reading all of this, this doesn't seem to be so much of a difficulty issue rather than clicking with a specific type of gameplay or not.
For instance I never cared about dungeon difficulty because I don't find this modern type of gameplay encounter loop engaging whatsoever, so if you make it resident sleepers it can even have the benefit for me to be less annoyed by it. I'd probably care a bit more if it was an encounter design I'd actually enjoyed, and if the battle system was engaging enough to be carried by difficulty.

[Alice_Rivers]

In the past I've been told I have no right to an opinion on dungeon difficulty until I clear an ultimate, or something equally irrelevant, hence the assumption.

Yeah, I don't understand why people insist on making this argument either, it happened regarding healerstrike stuff too. If you didn't clear an ultimate then you were too noob for these people to have an opinion and if you did clear an ultimate then you were clearly too hardcore to have a valid opinion.

[MorticiaFhey]

This simply isn't true. The people who want to maintain the design philosophy but ramp up the speed are invariably raiders.

ok well as someone who has been raiding since shadowbringers, i do not necessarily agree with this. i would personally prefer the sorts of quirky mechanics we got in shadowbringers dungeons because they were interesting and different and shadowbringers dungeons are still some of my favorite ones in the game. but realistically, they are probably not going to bring those back.

also the "faster ddr" probably applies to raids and trials rather than dungeons, let's be real. like you admitted, the newest dungeon is not fast at all. dungeons are already very basic story content. the devs aren't going to make them any harder than they already are, or any easier than they already are. the design philosophy now is the the middle ground between difficult and easy. considering the amount of work the devs have already put into reworking older dungeons to fall in with the new philosophy and to add trusts, they are not going to go back again to cater to a very small portion of the playerbase.

[Mawlzy]

ok well as someone who has been raiding since shadowbringers, i do not necessarily agree with this. i would personally prefer the sorts of quirky mechanics we got in shadowbringers dungeons because they were interesting and different and shadowbringers dungeons are still some of my favorite ones in the game. but realistically, they are probably not going to bring those back.

also the "faster ddr" probably applies to raids and trials rather than dungeons, let's be real. like you admitted, the newest dungeon is not fast at all. dungeons are already very basic story content. the devs aren't going to make them any harder than they already are, or any easier than they already are. the design philosophy now is the the middle ground between difficult and easy. considering the amount of work the devs have already put into reworking older dungeons to fall in with the new philosophy and to add trusts, they are not going to go back again to cater to a very small portion of the playerbase.

I don't think either of us know what fraction of the player base is happy with the current state of dungeons. And please let us not base the discussion on the single data point of Underkeep. We're agreed it is bizarrely easy.

A lot of my motivation for pushing this idea is a reaction to the statements from SE indicating that the monothematic design philosophy they've converged on is going to be continued and deepened in 8.0. That design is plain boring, and I would rather be bored for 20 minutes than 30 minutes.

[Valence]

We had quirky mechanics in shb dungeons? You mean like the grand cosmos flower seeds? It was just a more tedious way to deal with a targeted cross AoE marker...

[Mawlzy]

We had quirky mechanics in shb dungeons? You mean like the grand cosmos flower seeds? It was just a more tedious way to deal with a targeted cross AoE marker...

I thought that and the furniture with the final boss was quite fun, but rather limited compared to ARR obviously.