Bring back crowd control. Bring back branching dungeons. Bring back ADVENTURE.

[Alucard135]

There is a solution though: no rewards for dungeon completion. Take the reward - and split it around the dungeon onto all of the bosses AND trash mobs.
- Now you can add in as many optional paths as you want, and the more of them people do, the more 'loot' they get.

So kinda similar to PoTD and HoH. BA also had a similar thing where people would search the 6 rooms for the portal and chest. It also had the group branch out for the first part to deal with two bosses at the same time.

[Feronar]

For single-player games, branching open-layout dungeons are great. However, unless they are procedurally generated (I.e. PotD or HoH), they are pointless in repeatable group content, especially if the group is auto-matched. For the first day or so after release, people might explore but the community will very quickly settle on a standard path that everyone is pressured to stick to, and deviating from that path will get you labeled as "bad".

[Shurrikhan]

"Give us back branching dungeons so people will find the most expedient route through them and berate you if you want to go explore the other way!" >.>

Yeah... I want more methods to handle pulls and a greater need to pick one such method and execute it well, but... branching dungeons can only ever be excess aesthetics, where the choice between paths is largely made for the player due to obvious conditions in the dungeon (e.g. this pillar falls instead of that one, leading to that platform, or you see rain clouds that will = lightning blasts as you try to take the mountain pass instead of going through the mines), or else you just end up with player conflict. If the dungeon's going to take long enough regardless, then you can offer mixed signals to argue over, but it should never come down to just to my "This way's (always) faster," to your "No, this way (always) is."

[NessaWyvern]

tether was useless and nobody used it other than you so they said we're getting rid of it.

Thus making HoH solo even harder, as tether was actually used for that as well.

[linay]

Increase the difficulty and/or require crowd control, I don't really care, but never ever bring back multiple branches for dungeons, EVER! Thank you very much for your consideration.

[AngelCheese77]

There is Crowd Control in FF14, but since many DPS have AoE attacks, it's just easier to grab a whole bunch and burn them down all at once.

Only time I've really used Sleep was during the class quest for THM ...

[hynaku]

just give us a Maze dungeon with only one monster in it and that be the boss at very end of it.

[Rufalus]

It evolved into an almost arcadey action game where dungeons are meant to be fast gauntlets of weak enemies in a straight line and the raids are single-room boss fights. They are good at doing what they do but I am there with you in wishing for something a bit different. I feel like they are close to the limit now in finding different ways to dress up the same formula. Almost all of the 5.1x series PvE is plugging more linear scripted battles into the duty finder. Does the BLU update count as non-linear content?

I've been around for years and now wishing more than ever for the patch structure to be shaken up and resources redistributed, but subscriber numbers have been growing which sends the message to just keep doing more of the same. Season 5 feels a lot like Season 4 so far (in gameplay, not storyline). Baldesion Arsenal was an interesting idea (albeit a pain to get inside) but they don't seem to attempt making unique challenges like that until nearer the end of each 2-year cycle.

[Reinfeld]

No one makes use of, or cares about the few branching paths we already have. Some games can support that design style through the addition of mini-bosses who drop relevant gear, but I just can't see SE creating a dungeon with meaningful branching paths.

[Melichoir]

Different branching paths in a dungeon could be interesting if it was meaningful. GW2 did this a bit so itd offer more bang for your buck. The catch though is people eventually learn which is the quickest path and just auto select into that. If you wanted meaningful different paths, youd have to incentivize each path, or create difficulties within paths that favor certain compositions - something SE probably doesn't want.

As for CC, reason why we get less of it is it requires team coordination to be functional. I remember in WoW how infuriating it would be to CC something like using polymorph on a mob only to have it come out of polymorph cause someone sneezed on it or were to busy slamming their face into the 1 button to notice CC was happening. Dungeons that required it also were slower affairs, as youd have to mark mobs up to show who gets CCed and who doesnt. Again, team coordination issues. If they wanted to reincorporate CC, some things need to be done. First and foremost, CCs like Sleep need to be changed where a mob breaks out of sleep when a certain percent of HP is lost while under sleep status. It could be 10%. they also become CC immune to that effect if they take that much damage while slept. Should allow for better use of CC to get in free damage and act as mitigation, while also allowing for people time to react to a sleep effect if they are throwing out CCs.

But these things arent gonna be implemented I suspect. As pointed out, people seem to like whats going on, so why change it?