Suggestion - (Optional) - High difficulty, High rewards Dungeons

[Kyux]

The primary reason stated that this won't happen is because it puts so much stress on the healer. i.e. difficulty in these dungeons is far more disproportionate than 8 man content. What I have suggested in the past is 5 man dungeons that are made up of 1 tank, 2 healers, 2 DPS, which would take the stress off a single healer and allow content to be more flexible.

Well, the goal would be to have everyone learn to work together, use the marks and available abilities, for planning the pulls, dimishing the damage that the tank takes with binding, sleeps or other CC available, etc.

Simply pulling away and relying on the healer to carry the entire team wouldn't work.

Adding more people could be a good idea too!

[Miracle_Diva]

So...
Palace of the dead\ Heaven-on-High solo?

[Insertcoins]

We have that. It's called Deep dungeon

[YojimboM]

It's not Deep Dungeon, and I can only assume the fascination the community here has with thinking that's the same thing is that they've never played other MMOs. It's not about healers not being able to keep up, either, "more challenging" doesn't mean artificially inflated damage. It means more using your brain and using utilities rather than directly beating enemies to death as the means of progressing the dungeon.

I used to play LOTRO, Rift, and SWTOR and I've always really missed that era of MMO dungeon design. LOTRO in particular had great dungeon design, most trash pulls had some kind of mechanical difficulty to them and it was rare that you got to face pull your way through most of an instance. Everything in the dungeons there felt dangerous, not just more enemies to be bunched up and beaten down. There were frequently enemies that were in stealth who would sneak up on party members and hit them with a high damage attack or even stun them for extended periods of time if you weren't careful, wandering captain enemies that would call for reinforcements and buff their allies around them to obscene levels if you didn't deal with them smartly, and environmental hazards like traps or poison.

Bosses could really use some extra thought too, the formula has gotten extremely stale at this point. One of my favorite bosses in LOTRO involved having to lure him into pools of oil and then set him on fire to hurt him, but he would also start setting the party on fire as well so you had to all run into water spouts periodically. Another one involved needing members of the party to put out burning books while fighting the boss and dealing with adds running in trying to burn down a library, and your rewards afterwards were directly linked to the number of books you saved. It was all just really creative interaction with the environment and enemies that made every fight feel special in some way, instead of copy-paste mechanics and AOE markers that everyone's seen before hundreds or thousands of times.

In the past SE has attempted to break out of the formula but it was always very brief and on-off, like Stone Vigil Hard's second and last bosses which were interesting and chaotic with that old-school MMO feel. A lot of ARR's hard mode dungeons had some attempts at being creative in them and you can tell that SE hadn't determined their formula yet and were being innovative and experimental instead. At some point, probably around the start of HW, they started killing all of that off in the regular dungeons, though. They kept experimenting occasionally, like a7s had some interesting mechanics around the arena and a8s was an all-around amazing fight, but those were only savage at that point. I'm not sure what motivated them to stop trying to break the formula but I'd say it's the general mentality of SE as a company: they are very stubborn and averse to risk.

[Kyux]

It's not Deep Dungeon, and I can only assume the fascination the community here has with thinking that's the same thing is that they've never played other MMOs. It's not about healers not being able to keep up, either, "more challenging" doesn't mean artificially inflated damage. It means more using your brain and using utilities rather than directly beating enemies to death as the means of progressing the dungeon.

That is a great part of what I would mean yes ^_^

[rance-sama]

We got those. They're called Dungeon (Hard).

[YojimboM]

We got those. They're called Dungeon (Hard).

I hate to break the illusion, but "(Hard)" is codeword for "flipped assets".

[miraidensetsu]

We got those. They're called Dungeon (Hard).

Why not Dungeon (Extreme) or even Dungeon (Savage)? You do have Trial (Hard), Trial (Extreme) and Trial (Savage).

[RyuDragnier]

We had that before. It was called pre-nerf Pharos Sirius. People would literally not run it because they were so afraid of actually doing mechanics.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

We had that before. It was called pre-nerf Pharos Sirius. People would literally not run it because they were so afraid of actually doing mechanics.

And Amdapor Keep. I remember people failing not just the Demon Wall, but even the first boss. Mechanics were "difficult".

Just look at the Ivalice raids. Probably the hardest set of "casual" content we have yet. I hope that trend continues with the NIER raids. It'll have glamour people want, would be interesting to see if people would learn to do mechanics for glams.