My Eureka Concept

[KaldeaSahaline]

Imo, it mostly comes down to splitting the task in seemingly authentic ways, or rather to tasks that can be readily, recognized as having intuitive and authentic partitionable needs. A single boss can rarely provide that. But a boss pack? Or a boss with meaningful adds? Further mechanics atop that? And then some more (with each added party)? Now you have some leverage to stand on, design wise.

You still run into my issue though. How do you successfully tune this content to be as engaging as I am going for, with respect to such a large group? It's like world bosses in WoW or normal mode raiding. You just brute force them. There's no real mechanics or coordination required because if there was suddenly its mythic raiding and pugs aren't clearing it. It's simply do X DPS and Y healing throughput and step out of glowing circles/lines.

Splitting the raid by having "boss packs" or adds is still functionally identical to current 24 man raids, which you know I'm not a fan of.

Is this do to scaling formulas, or just your typical leniency (nothing to specifically require two tanks, which would otherwise prevent those mob packs being faced during group-splitting anyways)?

Leniency.

I'd just like to eventually see compositional flex applied to just about anything and everything, and feel like this range of content (serious enough to entice try-hards, aware-and-adaptive players, and high skill-gap, but not so far as to be crushingly fixated upon and meta-ruled over near its top and sheeped after at its lower levels) would be absolutely perfect for it.

I've mentioned I'm a fan of the concept of flex, it's just way above my paygrade to visualize and work out mechanically. Trust me I've tried

This just sound like a terribly frustrating idea, especially given your example of the area's size (Azys Lla is a pretty big zone). There'd be nothing fun about getting a boss spawning on the other side of the map.
You'll either have to just have a set objective that enables for the entirety of the instance timer, or decrease the size of the map.

I meant "land mass size" of azys la, not the empty areas in between. I.e. if you grouped all the land masses together and cut out the stuff in between, that large. Which isn't very big.

As for boss spawns, one spawning on the other end is part of the gameplay. You can spawn a new boss while that one is up. and have as many up at a time that you spawned. This means that if a particular boss has too hard of mechanics, you can leave it and spawn a new one. Unlikely on lower difficulties due to breadth of mechanics, but possible on higher.

Why is it that a DF group gets a total cost of 1600 tomes? That seems like a silly "incentive" to get people to use the PF. Just leave it at 100 tomes per person, the same as the total cost of a PF group.

Excellent catch. This is not intended. When I originally designed this content it was for 4m not 8, but ran into issues making it as engaging for tanks and must have forgot to fix that. It 100% should be 100 tomes a person, a fairly trivial cost. I will update this.

What's the point of setting the difficulty, when you have to rely on RNG to even start it at the difficulty that you want your group to tackle it at? Just give players the freedom to set the difficulty.
If you really want to have some way of "unlocking" higher difficulties, perhaps some type of attunement would be better. Like clearing the last savage turn of the current raid to permanently unlock the highest difficulty.

Good feedback. My goal for setting the difficulty was:

1) I wanted it to cost an "enhancement" slot meaning that is one extra "buff" you can't have going in.

2) I don't want people simply spamming the content back to back. Ideally I envision a world where you do all forms of content in a supplemental fashion hence the cost, and the need to accrue these items (again not rare, just not 100% drop and can be crafted).

3) The other reason was limiting the difficulty that DF could queue for. This can still be done by simply removing the option of anything higher than 1 star in DF, but hindsight

I can already see the PF comments. "LF x MORE FOR EUREKA - MUST HAVE 1 HOURGLASS OF TIME TO JOIN"

At which point, you might as well just set it to a normal instance timer.

There are 8 people and 3 enhancement slots. While your situation surely will exist in some form, it's also not hard to get a few people with them, or buy them, or have them. It's not like you need 1 from every person, and hell one person could supply all 3.

The monster stuff seems okay, though it might be tricky to pull bosses from other types of content, while retaining the possibility of each having 15+ mechanics.

Agreed.

Rather see a 4 man or solo for relic stuff, 8 man is just too much and would be too close to raiding, which would turn me away from relics. Just force people to pick up 1-2 sets of trash at a time, none of this speed running nonsense that the game has been infested with since ARR.

If you can find a way to make solo content in this game engaging let me know. I haven't found it. Citing specific examples of how you would design it would go a long way.

I long thought about 4 man (this concept was originally 4 man), but found that you are simply limited on breadth of mechanics and it was really hard to make tanking engaging as a 4m party.

You would be turned away from relics because of the number of people in your party? You do 24 mans don't you? You do your trial roulette right? Or do you strictly only do expert dungeons? This seems like irrational bias, but I'll let you clarify your statement before making any judgment.

I'll again pass on paying to get into a dungeon, so will a lot of others that don't want to mess with getting tomes. I barely do dailies for tomes to get 330 gear as it is.

Speaking strictly for myself, I play the game roughly 3-4 hours a week. I am capped on every single tome in the game. I have nothing to spend them on. The good news is that if you do it via PF, you don't need any tomes if someone wants to pay your way for you.

Again too much of a raid like system for my taste, remember this needs to be accessible later on after the expac is long over, raids like coil are still today unsync'd pretty hard to solo.

They could simply scale the content into new expansions rather than abandoning it. May I ask what your aversion to raid content is? What specifically about 'raid content' bothers you?

POTD 2.0 for relics, with an added time deal? uh, no...

I like these ideas for non MMO rpgs other than the time and payment to get in, they would work well in that setting, or you know POTD like system it would work without the relics.

Yes, time is important. I understand people don't like pressure, but a degree of pressure is needed to reach the level of combat engagement I am going for.

I've mentioned I'm not opposed to pulling relics out of the concept (it was merely a vessel to attach the concept too), but I am genuinely curious what you think a good relic content structure would like.

You and I very clearly have different concepts of what qualifies as engaging gameplay and that's ok and a good thing to build a healthy discussion on.