square please challenge us a little

[Nalien]

I don't want more challenging dungeons, I just want interesting dungeons...

Level design in this game has really taken a step back IMO, 2.0 showed promise, there was nothing amazing on offer, but there was potential there... Everything since has just been a steady decline downhill IMO... At least, in terms of gameplay... Spectacle? Yeah, new dungeons only continue to impress, but that's a fairly shallow complement... I can be amazed at the vista a new dungeon provides for me a few times, but ultimately I'm running the same corridor every time... XIV should honestly be receiving the same complaints XIII got, IMO...

Right off the bat, I know someone is going to think; "But people just rush to the end, nobody ever did the side rooms in 2.0 dungeons!", and there is a degree of truth in there... People did generally just take the most direct route to clear a dungeon, but does that mean dungeons should be designed around that concept? It is partly a failing of the designers to begin with, people skip a lot in dungeons because... Well, what's the reward? A potion? Some gear nobody cares about? No sh*t people are going to skip that... There is just no reward for exploration in this game... You can see this even with the content that was apparently designed with exploration in mind... Diadem? It is more rewarding to sit and grind the same enemies over and over, SE did nothing to encourage exploration with Diadem... Same for Palace of the Dead... Sure, it's a new layout each time, but there is still no reward for exploration... There's no secrets to find in Deep Dungeons, we've just got a Roguelike map with none of the Roguelike secrets... There's nothing to discover, just the same chests every floor with the same bosses every ten... Random little secrets would be a great addition to all content, IMO... I've long since figured Treasure Maps and Hunts should be incorporated into dungeons... Treasure Maps can provide nice additional tomestones, and Hunts kinda flip-flop between being worthwhile or not, opening a chest in a dungeon, only to get a map that causes some brief backtracking for additional rewards? That would break up the monotony of these things so much...

That's not even half my problem with dungeons though... They've basically completely dropped any puzzles from these things... Qarn is perhaps my favorite dungeon, and the puzzles there aren't even anything to write home about... There was an effort though, and they didn't halt progression too much, unless you really messed up (and if you mess up a puzzle as basic as "Kill head on switch", who's really at fault here?), and the riddle based ones didn't even require you to brain, you could brute force them if you didn't care... Why didn't we ever get more of that? It adds depth to the dungeons IMO, and with a more open ended level design, you can even make such things purely optional... Options are the key here, I want options, I want to do Xelphatol and have options in how I clear it...

Which brings me to bosses... When was the last time you beat the same boss, two different ways? Usually, I'd say any second method comes about as a detriment to the content... Skipping mechanics entirely, simply because you're over geared, doesn't please me in the slightest, at least not with the rate this game hands out gear... You know what does though? Skipping mechanics because I'm skilled... Teratotaur is perhaps my favorite boss because of this... Throw the right Jobs at him, and you do the entire fight without once having to worry about Doom, provided you know what you're doing... You're not over geared, you're not just brushing off the mechanic because it does nothing to you now, you're actively using Stun/Silence/Pacification to avoid that mechanic, and that is a rewarding experience... I can't think of many other encounters that give you that kind of flexibility... Partly I think this is due to just how standardized boss encounters have become, from a level design perspective... There's only so much you can do with the static circle we get for every single fight... I'm going to reference Majora's Mask for a second, because I remember Goht being a fairly unique encounter... Why not do something similar? Have a donut shaped arena, with the boss rolling around... Throw in a mechanic to slow him down so you can attack (tank has to stand in his path to stop him, pots that put Toto-Rak goo on the floor to stop him, etc.), or *gasp* make use of Jobs with Heavy effects! That's all healers, by the way, so don't give me any crap about "Not every Job has one!", although I'd rather mechanics like that be Job dependent... It's not a case of "You can't beat this without this Job", it's just a case of particular Jobs resulting in you tackling the instance differently, which I think is a good thing... It adds variety...

I'd also love to be able to straight up skip trash packs... I think there are some Job mechanics which allow for that, though we might need some adjustments to facilitate this kind of design... Hide, Sleep, and Bind specifically annoy me... These should allow for interesting ways to tackle content, yet they never do... They're all functionally redundant, everything sees through Hide these days, and Sleep just gets flat out resisted, along with so many other interesting effects... If these aren't going to be useful on trash packs, what are they meant to be useful on? I get them not working on bosses, but I miss how these things worked in earlier dungeons... Wanderer's Palace, we'd skip a few mobs before the second boss, we'd flip the switch and bind the enemies to lock them out of the boss so we'd lose hate... That would have been great level design, if it was intentional... It was more of an exploit though, and subsequent dungeons have gone to great lengths to standardize the runs... We're not allowed to tackle content in different ways, regardless of what Jobs you bring, ever run must be the same... Let different Jobs bring different methods to the table, it would help immensely to spice up these currently monotonous hallways... Hide really, really gets to me though, why even have a stealth mechanic if it's not going to be possible for me to skulk off to help my party move through the dungeon? Haukke Manor let me do it, I could use Hide, go grab a key, and we could skip stuff... It was interesting, and by no means a "must have" to do the dungeon, but it made two runs of the dungeon feel unique... That kind of stuff should be built upon and balanced, not condemned in favour of an entirely linear experience...

Rewards are also kind of the issue... That's a whole 'nother topic on itemization though, or this games lack of it... For dungeons though, we're there for the tomestones, and those just magically appear in our inventories... There's vanity fluff, but that's generally too rare to really consider IMO... I actually liked the Zodiac Braves quest, just because it added new rewards to the dungeons, suddenly I wasn't doing Snowcloak for the same tomestones every time, I was after a special drop... The rarity of those was also a bit messed up, but overall I liked the structure of those quests... It provided new value to old dungeons... Can't say the same for Anima quests, I get the point behind giving us options for obtaining all this stuff, but for me it's just created a shallower questline that I don't care to repeat...

The worst part is, this long rant? Isn't even exclusive to dungeons... Diadem and Palace of the Dead suffer for many of the same reasons, and raids are just a scaled up version of dungeons...

[Moomba33]

The main problem I have with Hullbreaker HM is that the first boss is basically just a bunch of trash mobs. I like the second boss and found the final one ok.

As for dungeon design in general I like a lot of the lower level ones more than high level ones. Haukke Manor is my personal favourite. It's not super intricate or anything but I like that it isn't a straight run through and there are some optional rooms with crafting items and equipment.
Incentivizing exploration is a problem though. A majority of groups do just take the direct path through even in cases where detours don't take much extra time the most amusing to me being how often the final room of Haukke HM is skipped. There are 2 unguarded treasure chests with free gear for seals/desynth and yet most of the time I get that dungeon the group just kills the boss and leaves leaving me to go pick up the chests after they've left.