Where do dungeons fit in this game SE?

[Rainsworth]

Dungeons pretty much are worthless in this game. Outside the daily DR, the only reason to do them is to SR for tomes. The gear (if your even lucky enough to get it to drop) is so laughably outdated it's pointless. Literally every dungeon since 2.1 that was added was obsolete in it's rewards the second it hit, and you only ran them to try and grind out tomes.

Dungeons are great for lvling and drop crafting mats. You're supposed to work toward gearing up for CT2 and coil so it is normal that you will not get BIS gear there. For those like me who hates Hunts, it is a great alternative for farming soldiery and mythology stones.

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Variety is ALWAYS a good thing. There's no argument against that. Also, you didn't expect dungeons to drop BIS gear did you?

edit: actually I'm just repeating what other people already said in this thread lol! The purpose of dungeons is pretty obvious to see.

[JonBigwood]

Hi. I see what you mean about dungeons in end game. For a high ilvl player the Expert dungeons are too easy (though in DF you can find vote abandons) and the loot is not important except for retainers, alt classes, gil, etc. The tome farm is the big goal. A good thing is that you easily cap the soldiery tomes, so there's no need to grind and repeat content if you don't like to.

I would have liked the new Expert Dungeons to be a bit more difficult. Maybe have better drops too, but that would be a conflict with Syrcus Tower, that has a weekly cap for loot. Soldiery tomes are a good reward.

Balancing the difficulty is not easy, look what happened with Pharos Sirius when launched, it was a bit too difficult compared to the similar dungeons and people didn't want to do it. The best players will always find a dungeon a bit easy if more average players with the same ilvl are able to win.

Dungeons have to be easy enough so that you can reasonably expect to win with a duty finder group. There's sort of a gap between instances that are a bit too easy and those that practically require a Party Finder or static group and a lot of practice like Ex Primals or T5 and higher.

There's also the need that new players have to be able to eventually catch up (with effort and time) and don't have an eternal disadvantage compared to the ones that started to play some months before. Adding too quickly new higher gear and putting high ilvl requirements could make more difficult to catch up, but of course it can be fine tuned with time.

Probably with time and more new dungeons the difficulty may be set in more number of steps and hopefully new more difficult dungeons with better drops may come.

On the other hand, there are lots of things to do and different ways to obtain the things you need, which is fine.

[DishSoap]

I agree with the OP dungeons aren't really that important. Sure you CAN grind dungeons for tomes and you CAN grind them for vanity but really that's not that great of a thing. Getting mats from dungeons isn't a very stable way to get them since everyone is going to need on them. I'd thing dungeons would have a greater impact if the gear you get from them was seen as more than "vanity" if it was actually useful but that's not the case, I think this problem has less to do with dungeon themselves and as more to do with the easy of access of i90 gear.

[Warlyx]

for crafting mats , because thats what the only thing that drops there nowdays

[Dimitrii]

for crafting mats , because thats what the only thing that drops there nowdays

Yeah the rng in this game seems so broken. Past couple days of DF expert dungeons I've seen an average of 1 gear drop per run with the rest of the loot being crafting materials. And yesterday I did Stone Vigil and it dropped no gear at all lol. But then again it should be expected when most crafting skills that supposedly have a 90% success rate actually only succeed about 75% of the time in my experience (Especially love the failing a 90% success rate move 4 times in a row. That never gets old)

[Sonofbaldo]

I think the OPs problem with dungeons is they are inherently pointless as far as the world is concerned. Sure they drop shinies for people but thats all they seem to be. A funnel for the game to throw shinies at you. There's no depth to these dungeons at all. Why are they there? Why do I need to do them? What difference is there if I do them or not? (aside from shinies)

I know they all have their own mini-stories but that gets thrown out the window with having to skip cut scenes and the sheer amount of times you constantly repeat each one. That completely negates any real meaningful purpose for them other than shinies.

I could be wrong but that was always my problem with this game. Every thing is so rapid fire and quick that you never get a sense of why you have to do these things, other than its required to get certain shinies. That problem plagues the entire game really.

If its time to get i100 gear and the full set was buried in a series of story driven adventures that required a couple of weeks for the average player to achieve I think that would give more of a sense of scale and accomplishment that repeating the same tired areas does not. You could leave dungeon spamming for tomes and desynths or what not...but doing it to gain ilevels definitely falls flat.

People will still repeat those story driven adventures to help friends or other players but it would be by choice because they enjoyed them...not because they have to or they're just trying to quickly farm shinies. Especially if there's a decent gil reward for doing so.

Personally if XIV ever wants to be anything more than the fluff Care Bear world it is, it has to get rid of cross-server Duty Finder. Perhaps if a community actually needed people to step up and help each other there would be more of a sense of community and the majority of End Gamers wouldn't just log on, do their dailies, and log out. Perhaps they would be more excited to assist FC/LS mates in their needs since it would take more effort than just having duty finder pick random people from any world and thrust them together where they can all act like brats without any form of consequence. If you were stuck relying on people in your own world, and reputations could actually develop...it would add yet another dynamic that a MMO should have and that XIV sorely lacks. An actual server-wide community with actual consequences for your actions.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

You made some good points. Not all I agree with, but they are no less good points.

Anyways, my answer is a lore-based one. If you don't care about the lore, then really what I'm going to say is a moot point, and this would be the time to stop reading here.

Now then, you're primarily an Adventurer, right? I mean, sure, you're a now-famous, primal-killing, case-solving, craft-making, high-ranking Grand Company Officer/Scion/diplomat/Warrior of Light, but still essentially an Adventurer at the core, right?

Dungeons are adventures. They're the stories you tell/are told in. The stuff of legends. Rumors on the streets of Ul'dah and drunken tavern tales in Limsa Lominsa. They are one of the reasons your character is so famous and prestigious in Eorzea. They are what made you. Dungeons are the road you traveled to greatness.

If the experience of the game overall is the forest, dungeons are some of the trees. Don't miss the trees for the forest.

[ZephyrAM]

Dungeons, in basically every MMO I've ever seen, are a prequel to raids. They're easier, they're smaller, and they give weaker gear. This is what they do, they help new 50's gear up to actually attempt higher stuff, they help players gear their alts, and they help bridge the gear gap at each new large update.

The problem isn't that dungeons are pointless, the problem is that Hunts seem to outweigh everything else on the reward scale. This wasn't an issue until Hunts appeared, as you couldn't get myth or gear through any other means. Dungeons dropped gear and tomes, which you used to buy better gear before moving into raiding. FATE's sure as heck aren't useful toward that end, neither is crafting, nor treasure hunts... etc.

Dungeons are still right where they belong, once SE fixes the progression ladder.