Harder dungeon mode

[Sylvain]

As the title says, could we have a mode for harder dungeon.

The game has a lot of content but for people who mostly enjoy raiding, the game becomes stale and dry very fast. You either play a lot and clear everything in a few days/weeks, or play a few hours a week, and clear everything in a few month (2 for my group basically, and god we had tons of issue with non-existent healers).

I'm not really asking for savage like dungeon (altough that could be interesting), but just something hard enough to kill time between patches release and just do something other than the same boss over and over during raid night. Just something between an expert snooze fest and E4S/Ultimate.

I believe dungeon with Ex-trial difficulty would be great. Not really hard but challenging enough to make dungeon less of a weekly burden.
Dungeon are really good looking and you can see the developpers take great care in their developpement, but let's be real, people only do them to cap their weekly tomestone, because they're not interesting content (beside the very first time)
Many dungeon are also totally forgotten because you'd only do them while leveling, which is a shame because some of them are very good looking and could have interesting boss.

I'm not expert but between developping all the art asset, new models, even animations sometimes and design when creating a new dungeon, or simply doing some number tweak, offering a "Ex-Dungeon" mode shouldn't take all that much time. It doesn't have to be with the same new dungeon. It could be an old one just synced up to max level with harder boss and trash (don't forget the trash...). And harder is more than just "more hp n damage"

Many people refer to HoH or PotD but these are not proper hard dungeon. They have their own "deep dungeon" system, with unique items that not everyone enjoy. And more importantly, there's only 1 wave of such system per xpac. Many people want to do a proper dungeon, not going through 50 floors of square tiles making their way through a horde of overtuned monster whose only strenght is having over the top damage. It is hard, but boring.

I do not know what kind of reward could be granted for accomplishing those Ex dungeon. Gear would probably be a bad idea as the game already has loads of way of acquiring those so perhaps just glamour / pet / mount would be best.

I know it's been asked quite a few time and their answer is usually along the line of "we'll do something when we find a good system", but sometime I have the feeling it will just not happen. And it's a shame, because sometime I do feel like too much effort are put on the first experience and the replay value is just an afterthought, but that shouldn't be. Creating content takes a lot of time and it must have replay value.
Dungeon and 24man raid are fun the first time, then they're not because they're simply too easy (arguably 24man is really hard for a decent portion of the population... but they're still done once a week without much effort required).

If an idea has enough thumbs they look into it, so here I go with yet another attempt to get loads of thumbs up for "Ex-Dungeon"

[WalxAtNite]

It could be fun. So, so many people have asked SE for something similar to M+ in WoW, and while the dev team has been pretty clear about having no plans for such a thing, I believe they may have mentioned something about increased difficulty.

What about a timed mode? Extra chest at the end if you finish it within a specific amount of time? That could be fun. (Of course, it would be an alternate mode so that people who don't want it aren't forced to run that fast.) Just an example. There's several things that could be done to make dungeons more interesting, I think, without falling back to the M+ model or something like it.

[Sylvain]

It could be fun. S.

Time mode, bonus objectives mode wtih funny objectives like wotlk (altough that might require more work as the game can't track some things)

I don't necessarly want a M+, but definitely something.
More chest wouldn't cut it tho unless these chest would reward special unique items like maps do.
More dungeon items won't be interesting.

[Kurando]

Aren't most dungeons more difficult if you just set it to minimum ilvl? Granted they are still pretty scripted so if you know what to expect then there is little challenge but a lot of complaints of something being too easy is often down to overgearing.

[WalxAtNite]

Aren't most dungeons more difficult if you just set it to minimum ilvl? Granted they are still pretty scripted so if you know what to expect then there is little challenge but a lot of complaints of something being too easy is often down to overgearing.

This with a hard time limit and mayhaps some new mobs tossed in would be perfect.

[Sylvain]

Aren't most dungeons more difficult if you just set it to minimum ilvl? Granted they are still pretty scripted so if you know what to expect then there is little challenge but a lot of complaints of something being too easy is often down to overgearing.

No they're not, because the mechanic are the same.
As you said they are scripted and the script is quite simple.
The only difference is that your healer can't aoe as much during pulls and that dps will do less dps (and healer will heal a bit more)
But having minimum ilv doesn't make the encounter harder. Just longer

We did these dungeon right after leveling 80 with less than 430ilv. Having 460 just made the run faster and smoother and more forgiving whenever you feel like not moving. But it's not really easier because there was already little to no challenge.

As a healer, having heal twice as much doesn't make the encounter challenging if I ha e 30s to fit that extra healing.
As a dps, the boss having no enrage means that no matter how bad I perform, it Wil die


You can't make current dungeon harder by lowering your gear, you can only lower it enough to the point you can't survive any attack (at which point it isn't hard, just impossible to do) as long as you can survive the boss attacks (which requires very little gear) there isn't much of a challenge except maybe for the healer who would need to start managing his mp properly. (and spam à lot more heals)

[Shurrikhan]

Honestly, when leveling with friends, especially those trying newly to get into the game, I just really wanted to see the leveling dungeons beefed up to just... not being able to invalidate/cheese every boss mechanic via sheer dps and healing throughput.

Duoing/trioing or running at minimum item level made for a decent challenge at times, but besides that, unless we purposely sabotaged ourselves, it felt pretty hard to get anything approaching a challenge out of the fights. I felt so bad that they'd never even gotten to seen the original Pharos Sirius or Amdapor Keep fights back at their minimum ilvls, which otherwise would have been almost exactly what they were looking for.

[KageTokage]

I kind of wish dungeons had mobs like the HoH/PotD ones that tend to have more unique mechanics instead of generic cone/circle AoE number who-knows-what.

[Marc-Vigar]

I think SE made a big mistake with dungeons.

If a group of full lvl 80 want to queue for a dungeon, the dungeon should sync up to our level, not viceversa.

Some low level dungeons have very interesting mechanics which are sadly ignored because you can faceroll and beat it with the current sync system.