Thread: Your biggest fears for 4.0

Originally Posted by Munba

Really hope they change the dungeon concept, as they hinted in keynote, because having always 20min long dungeons (with only one path) to repeat becoming so boring now. They seem like a 'running route' rather than a real dungeon to explore..

The issue I had with that part is that you need to be REALLY careful implementing dungeons in that style. While I personally wouldn't mind a bigger dungeon (Blackrock Depths and the revamped Karazhan come to mind) with an increased reward, without other gameplay aspects keeping advancement on a leash you'd probably get tanks pulling entire rooms of trash to get AoEd down. The increased reward would thus make all other content not worth doing because you'd likely be able to cap tomestones faster with the big dungeon. If you don't increase the reward on a bigger dungeon, you make that dungeon not worth doing (see: Occulus during WotLK).

The focus should be on introducing different dungeon content. Have one be a sort of free-roam zone where you can kill the first three bosses in any order you want to unlock the fourth boss. Have one dungeon require some back-tracking in order to advance. Make another one a coliseum fight where you fight only bosses and no trash. Make another take place on a moving train. Make another a descent down a big pit where your stopping points are to fight some trash and a boss mob.

The mentioned 3.5 dungeon that'll take place on top of an airship sounds like a step in that direction.

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As for me, what worries me is what the devs are planning for the battle system (I'm hoping they'll go into more detail on this as we move forward instead of release only a vague video with pretty special effects). Suffice to say, the move to HW has left me with shaky faith in the devs, specially taking into account some of the design decisions they made for certain jobs.

Originally Posted by Duelle

The mentioned 3.5 dungeon that'll take place on top of an airship sounds like a step in that direction.

Do you have any source on this? I've tried google and can't seem to find anything.

I'm perified that:

> At around level 65, I'm going to run into another tribe of poxy Moogles.
> At about level 67-68 ish, I'm going to stumble across another hamlet which Rowena is going to develop into a city state superpower over the course of 5 patches.
> When I hit level 70, I'm going to be farming the same two dungeons for yet more Allagan tomestones (for it is always tomestones).
> A new series of boss fights raid will be introduced every even patch and a new 24 man flustercuck raid every odd patch.
> There will be a new relic quest line just repeats the same grind of old content but with the added morality choice of whether you kill off the anima you helped create, you monster.
> People will still not know how to Heavy Thurst with the new simplified battle system.

TL : DR - Shake things up, please

Originally Posted by Vaer

I'm thinking it was during the Live Letter at Fanfest. They were talking about the 24 man raid coming in 3.5 and one of the battles will be a battle you fight while flying on an airship.

I see thanks for the info, i wonder if that's anything like Alexander Turn 2 and Turn 11 where there's something else to do other than dodge and kill stuff (would be nice something different and dynamic), still A11 it's pretty much just get in and out of Airship, A2 we had something to do while driving the mount.

Originally Posted by Crysten

> When I hit level 70, I'm going to be farming the same two dungeons for yet more Allagan tomestones (for it is always tomestones).

And hunts, on HW launch lvl60 was farming tomes and hunts for the gear, was pretty frustrating even tho i got to most hunts in time.

Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

I wonder if it's unreasonable to expect that SE would take the same thorough look at their dungeons as, say, WoW has when creating and adjusting the dungeon timers for their mythic+ runs, varying from dungeon to dungeon... or similarly, in applying differing rewards for each dungeon to match the time and effort necessary to complete it.

That would require them first creating dungeon tiers like WoW's normal vs heroic vs mythic, which I find unlikely given how they implement hard mode dungeons.

It would require a change in the reward structure as well, with tomestone gear being the first casualty by either notably nerfing it (to the level of the class order hall sets relative to raid gear) or outright removing it from the game.

That just might be something they're not interested in doing. I imagine a lot could be done through minimum or "dungeon" ilvl scaling, to keep the expected times and rewards around the same band, rather than needing readjustment over time as larger pulls become safer, where the rewards rather than the completion time scales with your (excess / amount reduced in sync) ilvl, or some similarly universal adjustment to mitigate need for manual/individual effort-to-reward balancing, but beyond that... I'm not sure SE will even make the attempt, or even if it'd really be worth it for them to do so?

The problem with ilevel scaling or capping ilevel is that you defeat the purpose of getting gear, which is to get stronger. I guess the third option would be weakening the gains in power from ilevel jumps (so ilvl270 gear is not notably weaker than ilvl280 gear), but I'm sure that'd lead to people complaining about how their gear is not making them notably more powerful when they upgrade one piece.

While I'd love a true exploratory dungeon, let's face it, "dungeon" itself has a new connotation compared to D&D days -- which even then may have been mixed between 'exploratory' and 'survival grinding'.

I guess I look at it differently. What I was thinking is that you're in a jungle or something with three bosses, a big tiger, a big gorilla and a giant worm. To get access to the last boss of the instance you have to kill those three bosses, but the ordered is not decided for you and instead they can be tackled in any order you want. If you want an idea of what the instance would look like, I'd point to The Black Morass from TBC; just bigger and without the portals and time-traveling dragons.

Originally Posted by Fevelle

My biggest fears are the changes to the battle system. I fear they will change it too much and make FFXIV another generic action-MMO.

You might want to be specific, since the word generic seems to mean nothing these days aside from "something I don't like that I'm trying to make look bad".

Originally Posted by Brannigan

I really hope they don't continue the Heavensward gear progression trend of releasing normal mode/crafted gear that outclasses the previous savage gear.

This is sort of inevitable because of ilevel jumps. Crafted gear should be able to allow someone to leapfrog having to do older content, but materia and overmelding has sort of messed that up a bit. Granted, I don't think crafted gear should be of higher ilvl than past tier gear. The Midas Savage sets were all i240, and I think that heavy metal/star velvet stuff should have been i240 to act as a starting point for those that don't want to grind lore tomestones or raid.