Remember the guildhests?

[Valence]

Beyond having obviously been designed back in early ARR as tutorials of sorts and a lot of the earliest ones are just in and out, I do feel they're a glimpse of what the game could have been about: adventure, RPG little missions with a lot of flavor, and very different things to do to complete them (and not just dunk on a boss in a circle arena for hours).

And, well, I guess that's not the game we've been getting and that's that, but it still did occur to me that if the MSQ was actually structured around those types of designs as solo duties (and not, once more, "go fight a boss in the middle of a circular arena and do DDR"), it could bring a lot of freshness to the game. It could also steer the MSQ from getting bogged down too much into traveling between NPCs and talk to them back and forth ad nauseam. Sure, we've had some duties like In From the Cold or some of the Thancred infiltration missions, but they've been far and few. People will obviously say that it may actually wall some players and I do agree, and that's why "very easy" mode should be able to be done close to doing them in god mode (it hurts nobody).

Heck, imagine you could do those in groups with friends? There is so many new players that start playing XIV with their friends and progress together and yet nothing beyond dungeons allows them to do that. This could also alleviate the problem of people being walled by such duties if they can be helped by friends to do them.

In any case, I strongly urge people to take a look back at guildhests and some of the encounter designs they had. You'd be surprised of the flavor they can have.

[Kranel_San]

Guildhests could still be revived by doing two things:

1): Make the roulette rewards worthwhile
2): Introduce new guildhests that teaches players new mechanics (This could be a grounds for the devs to test out new mechanics and how the playerbase perceives them, without it being involved in high-end content)

[Jeeqbit]

I have thought they could make guildhests really cool and challenging, with each one being unique. My main ideas are replicating all the trailer fights. The morbol guildhest is essentially the fight from the 1.0 trailer, but compared to that trailer, it's pretty underwhelming. Now if they removed the morbol's aggro list and upped the damage it would get chaotic with the Morbol moving around a lot and casting Bad Breaths from random locations in random directions.

[ovIm]

Beyond having obviously been designed back in early ARR as tutorials of sorts and a lot of the earliest ones are just in and out, I do feel they're a glimpse of what the game could have been about: adventure, RPG little missions with a lot of flavor, and very different things to do to complete them (and not just dunk on a boss in a circle arena for hours).

I definitely agree with your stance on them. And if you look at other dungeons in the base ARR, it all somewhat came together. The guildhests taught you to pay attention to a couple of things during encounters, and help you prepare yourself for what is to come. They also had some interesting mechanics going on in some of them, and looking back, i recon that if they had better rewards, they would have been more popular.
As it stands, they still show parts of the game that I fell in love with all those years ago.

[Ryvick]

They purposely killed this off in Heavensward when instead of picking them up and dropping them off near the location you perform them at, they instead had you pick them up and drop them off alllllll the way in Ishgard. Making a <5 min turnover rate into something moronically longer.

[Jeeqbit]

They purposely killed this off in Heavensward when instead of picking them up and dropping them off near the location you perform them at, they instead had you pick them up and drop them off alllllll the way in Ishgard. Making a <5 min turnover rate into something moronically longer.

We are talking about guildhests. Not guildleves.

[Aidorouge]

As one of those weirdos who still does 10 guildhests a week and to this day still watches people fail on "Hero on the Halfshell" or has timed out on "Ward Up"... I do feel like SOME guildhests could use them refinement even as they add new ones because while I do enjoy the more "puzzle elements" and quick group play of guildhests and would like to see more (especially as learning tools for later content), it still sucks being put into fights where it only takes one person to cause a failed duty for everyone else because they literally refuse to listen.

Multi-player optional solo/MSQ duties is also an amazing concept I'm not sure why it wasn't an option in the first place. I can't count the number of times I've had to see parties disband because "whoops, solo duty" only to then re-group after, and keep in mind some of these solo duties are LOOOOONG.

Worse case scenario, just turn people into intangible/invisible witnesses (ala the Fall Guys event, so we know they have the technology) and let them follow along, or if there's NPCs present, give them the choice to "role play" them like some solo duties already do for the player doing them. Or if two people need to do the SAME duty anyway, let them both partake and get progress credit.

Hell, it would sure as hell give New Game+ a lot of new life if you and friends can relive moments while BSing with each other, or even just showcasing how some scenes change based on your job/race/dialogue choices versus theirs. Or Twelve forbid, let your friends take control of an ENEMY mob or boss to fight AGAINST you for further shenanigans.

[Underscore]

They need to go back and rebalance guildhests.

The enemies die so quickly the whole thing usually takes about 20 seconds to complete.

[Godzillaxpowerrangers]

Pepperidge farm remembers.

[XtremePrime]

I don't know if guildhests are necessarily needed to be fixed if used for their current purpose, which is to be tutorials about mechanics. Those can nowadays very easily be reworked to use duty support for a single player to learn.
It would be neat if they were repurposed as mini-dungeons of sorts, maybe give junior content developers as Square a way to make lots of just small adventures for parties of four players to go on