Dungeons should be more dynamic/difficult!

[LennaLuxie]

I've thought about this a long time and FFXIV's dungeons could really use some consideration. First of all, 2 dungeons is not enough for "expert roulette." The music and design of the hw dungeons is great but this pattern of trash-trash-boss x3 is so stale. When you do get to the boss, the mechanics are never such that if you ignore them it's a wipe. And why does it have to be 3 bosses every time? The low level of difficulty and predictability to all the current dungeons is just bad. It's boring for the players that want a challenge, it's boring for the players that want to grind tomes and everyone in between. SE has put all this work into dungeons like vault, sohm al, library, and the aery that are left by the wayside bc "expert roulette" is limiting ppl to 2 dungeons that give esoterics. SE puts all this work into making beautiful dungeons that don't get run at all bc ppl need to grind out eso's and that is crazy.

I suggest that SE take all the dungeons from HW release and make hard modes of them with better loot, possibly i190 with the final boss dropping i200 loot.

In wow, heroic mode dungeons fill that slot that gives dungeons a good challenge and dynamic mechanics.
Examples of great wow dungeons to consider:

Caverns of time COS: Your character gets transformed into a different playable race and you play the entire dungeon as that race. You travel through a deserted city and zombies/undead spawn randomly as you walk through. This dungeon is rly dynamic but it never felt gimmicky at higher ilevels or with repetition like steps of faith.

Halls of stone: This dungeon on heroic mode was so hard that the 2nd boss was a wipefest the first week or two it came out. Waves of adds would spawn and you had to kill them before they overwhelmed the party and heal through the damage of other mechanics. I wanted the epic dagger that dropped at the end of this dungeon so bad that I dragged my main raid group guildies to this dungeon after wiping with pugs on the 2nd boss and we still couldn't kill this boss the first week or two this dungeon came out!

The oculus: The last boss fight of this dungeon was with the players on flying drake mounts with different roles, one tank role, a healer, and dps drakes. It was hard and took practice to master the fight. You had to fly around the sky, dodge orbs and kill the boss using your drake's role abilities.

Blackrock: A huge cavern dungeon with huge rooms the size of bahamut's arena in t13 that were filled with packs of mobs that had to be pulled correctly or wipe if too many got pulled.

Utgarde keep: There was a gauntlet style boss in this dungeon that spawned waves and waves of dragons with frost breath and aoes, you had to work your way down the hallway and at the end was the real boss, a viking type of guy. It was a tough boss fight and lots of pugs would wipe more than once on this fight.

Gundrak: The first boss in this dungeon was so hard when this heroic mode came out that groups would go in here and wipe again and again and again.

People say sometimes the reason SE doesn't make hard dungeons is bc no one wants to do hard/long dungeons as it is, and how everyone just would do whatever dungeon could be speed run most efficiently. The way to have ppl want to run different dungeons is to create another gear set that is split between the end bosses on the different dungeons instead of this one green set that drops in both dungeons. So for example, I main mnk, I would want my i200 helm from the end boss in vault hard mode, my chest from sohm al hard mode and etc. The gear should be itemized differently than eso gear. EVERYONE would want to run these dungeons for a chance at options/different stats on gear and saving eso's to spend differently if you got a drop. Players could get so much mileage out of hard mode dungeons and it could be done with content that currently is irrelevant for everyone at level 60. It's a huge void that this game is missing. One last wow comparison/food for thought: I realize wow and ffxiv may not have the same resources in this dept, however when looking at the sheer numbers and facts, by the end of ONE expansion cycle (wrath of the lich king exp) wow had added 16 dungeons with a normal mode AND heroic mode. I love ffxiv but it's hard to continue overlooking this glaring lack of content. I'm not saying we need 16 dungeons with normal and hard modes but 4-8 might be nice. Then you can actually call it an "expert roulette." I'm sorry for all the wow examples and comparison but I felt it was necessary to make the point.

Thanks for reading!

[pushin_tin]

Last time SE tried to make content that required the playerbase to actually be able to play well, this happened:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...Steps-of-Faith

[RayneBoemir]

The only thing I will give you is the Occulus last boss on HM every time I would go on there someone would drop. It wasn't that it was extremely difficult it's that it would actually require coordination. Same thing as the old Steps of Faith in that gear doesn't matter as much and you have to do the mechanics correctly or it's a failure.

I do have to say that we need a variety of content like an Occulus type dungeon making use of flying mounts or something same dungeon design gets very old fast, and them making you repeat the same 2/3 dungeon for tokens is horrible.

Instead I propose that all dungeons should be synched to your item level making things equally difficult the better your gear is while also changing things a bit in how dungeons are designed (shortcuts, timed, extra treasure, optional extremely hard bosses, unique ways of handling bosses) and dungeons actually drop gear that isn't obsolete. These dungeons; however, should not be tied to the story or roulette.

[Tint]

i remember the old pharos sirius. i LOVED it. my favorite dungeon. but all the people left at the entrance and then came the nerf :/

the people didn't even unlocked the dungeon so it was impossible for them to get there via roulette. that is btw the reason why you now have to unlock all the dungeons to be able to do the roulette.

same could be said about amdapor city and steps (i hate the old steps, not because it was hard, but because it was really annoying as a healer xD i was just standing there, playing bait for the adds while all the people running out of healrange and die c.c i prefer t9 over steps o.o/ )

[Mikedizzy]

I hope that they are someday harder but I will not be holding my breath.

[MXMoondoggie]

I'd rather them not make super hard content for EXDR I just want to farm without dealing with morons who can't handle simple mechanics. People just cry about it like they did with SoF,WoD,KoL etc when those came out people were whining that they actually had to do more than stand still and hit things.