Palace of the Dead (PAX)

[Vydos]

I'm honestly being VERY and EXTREMLY skeptical of this new content. The big promising content in the past were always announced as something neat and awesome. But in reality it ended being something simple and brainless.

Alliance raid: You'll all enter these large places where everyone will have to work together to clear it.
Me: Oh sweet, this is going to be awesome. A giant dungeon to run and explore with an alliance! What is that? Crystal tower?! Oh damn, can't wait to climb that tower
Reality: *throws in dungeon timer* Follow path A -> Fight trash in specified closed space -> Keep following Path -> Fight boss -> zone in to the next place....rinse and repeat


Diadem: We'll let you venture the open sky of heavensward on airships. Landing on random generated islands where you can do whatever you want! And find all kinds of hidden treasure and difficult NM's!
Me: Oh sweet! I can see it already, flying around with my FC/party members on our special crafted airship. Floating around in the sky like ffxi airship travel. Running and goofing around on the ship itself. Until we find some islands to explore with god knows what on it! Adventure! Ahoi!!!
Reality: *throws in instance timer* Instanced zone with always the exact same layout. Enjoy your 5 seconds cutscene where you simply are able to stare at said airship. Run around like zombies, killing stuff for said chests to pop. What was that? Adventure? Exploring? Chilling with friends? Hah! Good one, now go farm stuff in a brainless manner like you're always used too.


Yes, I'm still somewhat bitter about that. And I honestly hope, like REALLY hope that I'm so wrong on this new promised content. Because I wouldn't end up being surprised that this promised randomness will be very limited.

[StouterTaru]

We should lose all our current gear in there and have to find and obtain our gear as we ascend floors. Either that or weapons and gear have their stats reset and level using some sort of innovative system on each floor

My money is on the level/ilvl capping standard. First floor caps you at 20 (or whatever starting level, I'm guessing low since it's in an ARR zone), and each floor progresses.

The ilvl cap for the deepest level will be reachable in 6 month old gear, so like PvP "ilvl won't matter."

[Tanathya]

Snip

Couldn't have said it better myself. Hope I'm very wrong about what I feel it will be, but three years of the same content doesn't speak very well about their job. I'd rather stay negative about the whole thing and be surprised than be positive and hyped and be let down. Again.

[Vydos]

Couldn't have said it better myself. Hope I'm very wrong about what I feel it will be, but three years of the same content doesn't speak very well about their job. I'd rather stay negative about the whole thing and be surprised than be positive and hyped and be let down. Again.

You're thinking just like me. I'm also staying negative on it as to not get dissapointed too much if it ends up being bad. And ending up being surprised if it turns out great.

[LineageRazor]

I'd really like to see SOMETHING unpredictable in this game. Pretty much every scrap of content we have now, once you learn it, it's the same every time you do it. Once you've overcome the challenge, there's no longer any danger; just an endless, repetitive grind. Nyzul Isle was great that way; most of the time, floors were pretty easy, but every now and then you'd run into one that was just plain unfair - and I loved rising to the challenge of it. Maybe we'd succeed, maybe we wouldn't. Succeeding was a thrill, a real sense of accomplishment. And failure? Well, there's always next time.

The advertisement that this content is going to include randomly constructed dungeons gives me SOME hope, but the fact that they're hyping up the casualness of it makes me nervous. If it's easy, either the rewards will be terrible - or they'll be good but you have to grind for months to get them. If the former, it'll be a novelty that loses folks' interest in short order, much like the Diadem is now. If the latter, it's just another in the pile of easy-but-long grinds that the game already offers; nothing new at all.

My hope is that even if the dungeon starts off casual and easy, eventually as more and more of it is added in future updates, it'll grow some teeth. When it does, I hope that the difficult doesn't come from anything you can prepare for. I want to see enemy ambushes out of the blue where you're suddenly fighting with everything you've got to survive - and, thanks to the randomness, survival is not necessarily a given, no matter how good you are. I DON'T want to see another scripted boss, where everyone needs to dance perfectly to avoid a wipe. We have enough of those.

It's tough to build up a lot of enthusiasm for this... The Hunt and the Diadem were such woeful disappointments. I've seen a lot of great ideas in this thread on how it could be made awesome (and a lot of ideas that were not so great - but interesting, at the very least!). Hopefully, SE will rise to the occasion, and provide something truly unique to this game.

[Caitlyn]

Crystal Tower was ok. Sadly it was nerfed, so you can rush trough CT1 - CT3 in no time. But still its a nice 24-man dungeon. I would love to have an option to visit crystal tower unsync ^^.

Diadem was not that good. I ve expected much more, but at the end, it was mindless dinosaur grind at the bottom isles. Nothing to explore, because its still the same map for all difficulties. SE have to rework this from scratch. Make it smaller, but random. Give players something unique!

Palace of the Dead. I m very excited. But I m skeptical, too.

[Terribad]

Eh, this could be really good but knowing Yoshi and friends, they come up with good stuff then brainstorm on how to ruin it.

I also have a feeling it's going to be faceroll easy.

[Thayos]

Yes, I'm still somewhat bitter about (the Diadem).

SE's mishandling of the Diadem was, in my opinion, the single-biggest mistake this dev team has made. This game's only real endgame is a hardcore raiding system that's only completed by <1% of the playerbase. This game NEEDS a more accessible endgame in a bad, bad way. Too many people get bored and leave, or they just unsub until the next patch. There's really no excuse for that.

Rather than hope people keep coming back, why not just give them in-game goals? Grinding tomes eventually becomes pointless if there's no reason to have the gear.

[Kaurie]

SE's mishandling of the Diadem was, in my opinion, the single-biggest mistake this dev team has made. This game's only real endgame is a hardcore raiding system that's only completed by <1% of the playerbase. This game NEEDS a more accessible endgame in a bad, bad way. Too many people get bored and leave, or they just unsub until the next patch. There's really no excuse for that.

Rather than hope people keep coming back, why not just give them in-game goals? Grinding tomes eventually becomes pointless if there's no reason to have the gear.

In my opinion it was how they 'fixed' diadem and other mistakes. They keep on acknowledging mistakes, but then their fixes have nothing to do with the problem and they keep on making more of the same. It just shows they have 0 idea of what was actually wrong in the first place. That, to me, is the biggest mistake. Diadem was a failure for sure, but losing all confidence in the dev's ability to learn, adapt and deliver is what is going to lose my sub.

My view on every single Live Letter since Heavensward hit:
Yoshi: We understand that you do not like this content because of X. In order to tackle this, we are going to increase X and you need to git gud. For new content, we are adding more X, because we know that you all hate it so much, but this time it is in a very unique experience - where in order to get X you need to do X 3 times, stand on your head, count backwards from 100 while also singing the alphabet backwards at which point you'll have 0.1 X's.

[MagiusNecros]

Couldn't have said it better myself. Hope I'm very wrong about what I feel it will be, but three years of the same content doesn't speak very well about their job. I'd rather stay negative about the whole thing and be surprised than be positive and hyped and be let down. Again.

Well. If you have promises in one hand and bullshit in the other. What are you really holding on to?