More to dungeons :o

[Nalien]

I still say slap Hunts and Treasure Maps in dungeons. Entirely optional things, that spawn optional bosses which are worth doing...

Rather than trash chests giving you Glamour Prisms, they could for example sometimes give the party a map and new objective. Suddenly you're backtracking to dig up a Treasure Chest for your standard Treasure Chest rewards. Perhaps occasionally slip in a Hunt level enemy instead of a regular one. Somewhere you could skip if you don't want to bother, but something random to break up the monotony of running Neverreap a hundred times. One run you could be doing Neverreap as normal, the next maybe a Hunt level monster is mixed in, so you do that pull slower and deal with a "miniboss", then next time maybe you find a Treasure Map in one of the standard chests, so your party goes "Hey, lets go back and find this!" so you can all get some extra rewards.

Maybe even mix it up a bit with the complexity... Have a part of the dungeon that is blocked off, either a locked door, or some rubble, that usually you cannot get past. Then one run you find a key, or bomb, and you can explore that section for some rewards.

Honestly, it's a shame they streamlined dungeons the way they did... Sure, nobody ever did the side rooms in Sastasha, you know why? The rewards were not worth it. Slap a Treasure Chest with some Poetics or Law in one of those rooms, then suddenly people are considering it.

I'm guessing you miss Final Fantasy XI's maps, like this one:

Eh, I'm more a fan of some of the things XI did with its maps, rather than the maps themselves (which all too often were just large sections of empty space that nobody ever visited). Stuff like the maze in one of them, which changed layout on an hourly basis. I'd find something like that much more enjoyable than the current "Stop pulling here, the path is blocked until you kill stuff" thing XIV does. You'd have to go through a maze, it would have dead ends, and extra monsters you'd want to avoid pulling. Rather than having to stop, because the map tells you to, you'd want to stop, because you don't want to get lost in a maze mid-pull and pull a whole bunch of extra enemies. I mean, arguably you'd still have to stop, but you'd have to stop and think, rather than stop and derp.