Dungeon Plus |or| Boss Modes

[RopeDrink]

With the amount of dungeons FF14 has (most of which are of little relevance unless levelling or completing roulette's), I can't be the only one who would love for that big dungeon pool to come back into prominence in the form of difficulty up-scaling. I hate to take a leaf out of WoW's book but anyone familiar with Mythic+ will know the type of system I'm getting at.

If they didn't want to be seen as copying such a system, why not put the 20 bazillion dungeon bosses this game has to use in a similar fashion? Think of it like starting off with a random dungeon boss at standard difficulty. If slain, you're given another random boss, yet the difficulty peaks upward with each kill -- rewards given for the amount of bosses a team manages to slay before the inevitable wipe due to infinite difficulty up-scale.

In short, there's a wealth of dungeons in the game that only get re-played via roulette. I don't see why they can't recycle that content using more re-playable/relevant means.

[Mirch]

like some sort of arena with waves of bosses and some sort of leaderboard ogchamp:

[Dualgunner]

I like the idea of a Boss Rush mode. Maybe add in a limit of deaths a la Rathalos EX; something liberal, like 30 as a hard cap for how many deaths are allowed, that way people can't zombie through a ridiculous amount.

[Yui_Tenshi]

I like the idea. The only thing I can think of as to why it wouldn't happen is if people stop running Dungeons, leaving new players with longer Queue times.

[Kurando]

Sounds good. Perhaps if it were some kind of gamble challenge where with each victory you increase the potential reward at the end, but you can also back out after each fight if decide it's too much and take a lower reward instead. In a sense it'd be a bit like the Aquapolis/Canals where you gamble with the doors to proceed, except it's an ongoing Trials challenge or something like that...

[Lucke]

If they add something like that, it better be called the Battle Arena and it better be in the Gold Saucer.../wink

[RopeDrink]

I like the idea. The only thing I can think of as to why it wouldn't happen is if people stop running Dungeons, leaving new players with longer Queue times.

There is no reason why regular dungeons would be overly impacted, any more than any new content impacts non-relevant content - they would still maintain their currency rewards, journal relevance etc. The ONLY way they could be effected in a detrimental way would be if the new content-types shared the same reward as standard roulette's (which would make no sense seeing as the roulette-reward system couldn't really be applied to either suggestion's 'infinite' potential). The rewards for them would have to be its own exclusive incentive - and scale upwards based on progress.

Example:
Let's say they add a Boss-Rush mode.

A group of 4 players are formed and charged with killing as many (random) bosses as possible.
Said players are ported to the bosses specific arena and fights ensue as normal.
Bosses and players start at a specific (balanced) sync level and each death inflicted on the party goes towards a fail-cap of (say) 10 deaths.
When a boss is slain, the team is awarded a point and are ported to the next random boss, except the boss is now up-scaled by a specific margin (and continues to do this each and every time one is killed).
When the party is wiped entirely, or reach 10 deaths, that run is over and the overall score is used to judge a reward.

Content with infinite difficulty potential really should reward those who strive to go as far as possible, unlike roulette's where the only thing that matters is a single daily completion. As such, rewards could be pre-generated (like Khloe's Journal) and reward you each week for the highest boss-clear you completed, or any such system that wouldn't break current gear-tiers, because nobody will say this type of content should reward equal (or more) than actual raiding.

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In short, provided it has its own system of rewards, the effect on standard roulette's would not be very noticeable, especially if that content has a daily or weekly cap. The issue with capping such content is that if you get a troll-team who decide to screw you over and thus you lose your potential for that week/day. Even forcing the content to rely on PF for group-forming would not be a fail-safe. The first decision then would be whether they truly want to make a repeatable challenge with infinite difficulty potential (and worry about the reward system), or have it as a daily/weekly content-type that is safer but more restrictive (and more open to casual players).

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If they add something like that, it better be called the Battle Arena and it better be in the Gold Saucer.../wink

Considering every dungeon, trial and raid boss often have mechanics entirely dependent on their own individual arenas, the chances of this content getting its own unique arena is minimal without massive work on SE's part to incrementally add bosses each patch that has been fixed to work inside it. The only bosses that would work in a new/unique arena are any that do not already have arena-specific mechanics, which is actually very, very few (eg. the big Mammoth boss in that snowy Heavensward Dungeon I forget the name of), or the bosses in the Vault.

The easiest method of reaching all bosses is to have the team port to boss arenas with each success, but there are ways the lead-up to opening or accessing the content type COULD be done in a way where you are doing a story leading you to a virtual arena and that this is all some competitive game.

[PangTong]

I'm definitely for any sort of new content that isn't just mob/FATE grinding, and if it's some small-group stuff on the challenging side then all the better since the game is rather lacking in content for hardcore players to sink their teeth into. The biggest barrier I see to something like hard-mode dungeons or dungeons+ or boss rush or whatever, is that in order to really constitute a difficulty increase they would have to make boss mechanics more difficult to execute (i.e. not just increase damage), as most dungeon bosses are trivially easy for experienced players. If the system also included 50/60/70/leveling dungeons it would make the situation even more laborious since they'd have to either account for synced stats and skills or find a way to make those dungeons work at level 80. The amount of work required wouldn't be small so I think the XIV team will (unfortunately) just end up going for more accessible forms of content again.

[Bright-Flower]

I always wanted harder dungeons, but the boss rush mode idea could be even better. A chain of boss fights, perhaps a mix of old fights but tuned higher. Not to say savage difficulty but enough to make them more challenging.

[Dreggit]

Since a lot of dungeon bosses are fairly easy I wonder if it's be possible to have 2 bosses spawn at the same time and have it randomly seeded so no two runs would be exactly the same