More interesting/challenging/rewarding 4-man content.

[Defmetal]

I, like many people in this game, play with a core group of friends, and usually the people online to do something is about 3-4 before needing to resort to others for content. It occurred that there is virtually no rewarding 4-man content in FFXIV. Dungeons put you at 185 vs 210 gear. The bosses are easy, and no substantial reward. I assume many here would like it if we had content similar to nyzul isle for 4-man groups where you can log in with a small static and progress through interesting fun challenging content similar to raids.

A nyzul isle / assault / salvage system could be a rewarding way to add challenging content that small groups can enjoy that is maybe 1 tier below raid gear instead of 3.

Some of the reasons Nyzul was fun was that it was a 100-floor dungeon, with boss fights every 20 floors or so, and it limited your progression weekly. So in a given week you could only climb so high, but you'd have bosses waiting for you. The dungeons were randomly generated each time you enter (using existing floor schematics) so it never felt the same and you never knew what to expect.


For those who don't get it, these are FFXI references, and that was aimed at 6 people instead of 8, but similar systems could easily be adapted for 4. Dungeons are nice and fun, but they get old because you run the same 2 dungeons every day.... the lack of variety is lame as is the risk/reward. There is no risk and ... you don't want anything from the dungeons typically just the clear bonus.

Really, even a Savage Mode dungeon could be fun. Anything that is a difficult challenge for 4 adventurers to clear but comes with a reward to match. Currently none exist in game.

[Brannigan]

Honestly their whole approach to dungeons and gearing up is backwards. Tomestones are a good idea to help mitigate bad RNG while gearing... except you get top tier tomestones from bottom tier places, making the actual loot from those bottom tier places super irrelevant. Even on Heavensward launch, the dungeons were dropping i160 gear but the real prize was the tomestones of law to buy 170 or whatever.

It also really does not help that dungeons are tuned for people with no fingers and less gear. They released two "expert" dungeons in patch 3.1 that are ilvl 170 requirement when everyone has been getting free ilvl 200 gear for months. In that same patch you could go farm even easier content for 210 gear and just straight up *buy* crafted 185, so why are the dungeons tuned so low? Well, the answer is actually tomestones unfortunately. They want everyone to be able to cap. So they're the source of the problem. It can't be fixed in 3.0, but in 4.0 they could make it so:

Dungeons drop ilvl X gear, uncapped tomes (for miscellaneous items and old gear), and capped "dungeon tomestones" that can be used to but ilvl X gear. Maybe restrict the gear drops somewhat (3/week, 1/dungeon every few days, whatever)
24 man raids drop ilvl X+10 gear and items that upgrade dungeon gear to X+10
8 man raids drop ilvl X+20 gear, capped "raid tomestones" (basically finish half the raid per week to cap) that can be used to buy ilvl X+10 gear, and upgrade items to upgrade the raid tomestone gear to X+20.
New raid patch moves everything up by 20, sprinkle EX primals and exploratory gear somewhere between dungeons and raids.

Basically I'm just tired of dungeons being pushovers and dropping only glamour. Almost no one actually uses this gear. Make them take longer, be harder, and just require fewer runs to cap your tomestones of whatever.

[StrejdaTom]

FFXI references? How dare you!
Anyways yeah, I would love some more challenging content for 4 players. It doesn't even have to be savage/coil difficulty, something like Thordan would be enough (cannot be cleared on first run, but doesn't take months to finish).

[KeluBehemoth]

Won't ever happen. Have given up on the game

[Defmetal]

They could absolutely add fun 4-man content to the game. That has a purpose to it other than hitting your weekly cap. FF1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9 had 4-player parties taking down epic bosses. I'm not a fan of all the fun being locked to 8-man content. Just saying it would be nice of them to add some variety so that small groups can have a challenge too.

[Astrapls]

I'd love 4 man content with raid level difficulty. I'm a broken record in that regard, always going on about it.

It's very easy for me and my friends to have a group of 4 ready, but not so much a group of 8. At least, not 8 that could work well enough together to clear the highest difficulty content.

Doing T9 with 4 of us was a lot of fun, even if it was a little easy due to already knowing the ins and outs of the fight. Still, it shows that it is perfectly doable to scale even 8 man content to a 4 man party. Even if we just got one chest instead of two, I'd be happy with it.

Of course, I'd much prefer content made specifically for 4 player groups with difficulty matching that of the raid.

They'd have to really step up their game though, since cheap mechanics that one shot a party when a single player messes up would be less of an issue in 4 man content than 8.

[Alahra]

I wouldn't mind seeing some solid 4-man content that was a bit more difficult and intended less for the DF and more for pre-made groups. In fact, I would love it—but the trick would be finding a good place for it to fit into the gearing paradigm. Tomestones already exist that give max-item level gear, and they can't exactly remove the more DF-friendly dungeons at this point.

Using our current item levels as an example, I could perhaps see i200 or i205 gear dropping from a "Savage" dungeon, but no higher than that—and since the easier dungeons still effectively give access to i210 gear, I can't see that sort of content being very popular in the long run. They could perhaps put i210 gear in them, and I would personally be in favor of that (especially if they had unique, dyable models!!!), but I can't see the development team really swinging for the idea, especially when their staff is limited.

[KeluBehemoth]

It's a good idea but it will never happen.

Expect absolutely nothing but a copy paste of the exact same stuff we've seen for over two years.

[Toguro]

Yoshida has already stated in an interview that based on player feedback there is a chance of challenging 4-man content(Raids most likely) being created. But only with enough push from the player base.

I'm not sure if that was dropped in between that time though..

[Dzian]

Personally I'd love to see some really rewarding yet flexible content. OP used XI as a reference so I'll do the same.

One thing XI did right in many respects was the content design, things like ZNMs and Limbus for example. It didn't matter if you had 4 people or 14 people you could still participate and make progress in those pieces of content. Admittedly you may not have been able to drop omega with a group of 4 people but you could have at least worked on the next pop set or farmed some materials to upgrade your AF, Einherjar, Dynamis, Sky all the same, maybe not quite as flexible in numbers but by no means strict.

this was one of my biggest annoyances with 1.23 the number of times you had 6 or 7 people and new you could beat whatever content you were wanting to do but were stuck around for ages in the hope of an 8th person you didn't really need. = boring

in ARR I think the focus on 4 man contents pushed many of those groups apart as then you've got 6-7 people wanting to do something and only 4 can go...

So i'd love to see something like this in xiv