The Dzemael Darkhold one of the new “Dungeons” in FFXIV. I’ll admit I was excited about this and I still am, personally I love it. But at the same time I can’t figure out if SE made this dungeon as a joke or not. Most of my linkshell’s problems have been on the final encounter in this dungeon, Batraal. Now I’ve raided in a lot of mmorpgs, and this fight in particular is a very old-school type. Tank picks up boss, rest of the party deals with additional enemies then engages boss. Adds will spawn 3 different times based on Batraal’s hp. After the second wave of adds though ghosts will appear around Batraal, similar to the Voidslave fight before Batraal.
Now I have to admit these ghosts are very cleaver, it’s like a new way to say “Don’t stand in the fire.” That’s a reference to bad players that stand in the wrong place. What I don’t understand is, how do you expect melee characters to get to Batraal and engage it if there is no open areas to stand in? O you want our tank to move Batraal out of the ghosts, right that’s not a problem, except for the fact the AI in this game would rather stand still and hit you with a ranged cleave ability that does more damage than his melee abilities, and it’s not a small amount it does an incredible amount of damage to the tank and anyone else that stands in the way. You want me to level Archer? I don’t remember that being in the requirements of entering the dungeon (I think that’s the joke). Didn’t this game sell based on the fact that you can do/play whatever you want on your one character? Obviously I’m not saying take in 8 mages but give us some flexibility on the dps jobs at least. I can understand needing 1-3 INCLUDING the mage jobs at ranged but I’m not having fun with 4 archers in my party. This was a problem in FFXI aswell, RDM, BLM, BRD, don’t have it? Get out. Please fix this, and think about player diversity before making encounters like this. Making it impossible to melee isn’t cleaver or cute.