I forgot this dungeon existed until today when a Roulette slotted me into an already-in-progress run. They were 16 minutes into the dungeon and hadn't cleared the very first room; three tanks before me abandoned and ate the penalty the moment they saw which run it was.
Does anyone have good memories of this place? I haven't done it in over three years but still almost reflexively dropped the party. I swear the experience is so negative scientists use Aurum Vale to test for clinical anxiety.
So I did the run, mostly because I figure one good deed is worth a lot of chocolate cake later. It was just as awful as I remember. But thinking it over afterwards I might know why the experience is so bad: Everything about Aurum Vale is the opposite of the normal FFXIV experience.
Broadly speaking there are a several categories of things I enjoy about the game: Skill/Experience, Challenge, Teams and Job Roles, Equipment, Mechanics, Loot and Visuals. Aurum Vale breaks nearly everything in all the wrong ways.
• Skill/Experience
Players spend a lot of time learning skills, abilities and synergies between actions. There are whole groups that argue endlessly about damage rotations and methodology. It is an intense, in depth topic that changes over time. But Aurum Vale removes all of that by awkwardly level capping at 49.
Suddenly tanks are missing enmity generation tools, DPS get weird half-rotations and Healers are stuck with a limited toolset. Lower level content is always an exercise in remembering how to do things but the Vale is on a whole new level. Which is bad, because...
• Challenge
...the difficulty is top of the chart for that level range. Most dungeons progressively ease in mechanics one at a time until the final area. It is a teaching progression: One enemy will demonstrate an AoE or pull-in, then later a debuff mechanic shows up or players are taught to use environmental objects. Then at the end everything will come together for a "final test" or boss that sums up what the dungeon's theme was.
But Aurum Vale takes the idea of a learning progression and slam dunks it into the trash: The very first room has wandering, linking monsters. Pools you can't stand in. Cramped movement and bad camera angles. Enemies that pull in, then AoE. Long range attackers grouped together with short-range threats. Environmental hazards that throw people around. None of this is "learning friendly" and a one-second mistake often leads to a party wipe. All of this in the first minute or two!
This leads to frustrations because...