Increase Difficulty of Dungeons

[LalafellDown]

We should get a notorious monster that spawns on a random boss fight at a random time that has to be killed quick while still dealing with the main boss mechanics. Killing the notorious monster will give a XP buff along with loot for every player. Not killing the monster wipes the party.

[DrWho2010]

imo aren't those just gimmicks? and not really thoughtful lasting design?

[Ultimatecalibur]

imo aren't those just gimmicks? and not really thoughtful lasting design?

Gimmicks can be good as long as they change up optimal completion strategy and are varied enough. For most modern dungeons the optimal strategy is to grab everything you can, pull them to the end of the area, group them up and then burn them down without factoring in what they can do.

For example, consider how a pull would be effected if a long corridor had one or more bombs or slimes that started casting a wipe causing self-destruct 30s after being aggroed after which they respawn.
How do pulls change when there exists a terrain effect or enemy ability that gives a long lasting damage resistance buff that can be removed by another terrain effect?
What happens when there is a stationary monster or object that spawns more monsters?

[Puremallace]

So the main issue anyone notices when playing FF14 ESPECIALLLLLLY if you pushed high keys in WoW is that you can flat out ignore boss mechanics and the lack of interrupts/cleanses being that important in instance content. Easiest way to solve that is to increase the damage and health so that you see the mechanics. Mythic plus added a scaling to not only that but various gimmicks thrown in.

Personally give us the WoW beta Mythic plus system with in game leaderboards. Allow people to design their own dungeons. Slap it right in the duty options as a way of modifying any dungeon on the list. If they want to toss a lot of achievements on there and maybe a side currency for some cosmetic vendor. The most major mistake is Blizzard made Mythic more concentrated around gear and some arbitrary RNG loot piece at the end of the week.

So if you start in their latest expansion you will never experience the Mythic difficulty from the last expansion because there is no ilvl sync mechanic. It can easily be put into FF14 in a FAR FAR FAR more expanded fashion and done right.

Duty Example:
The Wandering Palace
Difficulty: Savage (All mob health and damage increased by 25%)
(Selecting Savage difficulty reduces the time allotted to 30 minutes to get the max currency reward)
Select any modifier (Currency reward increases with more modifiers) and (Ultimate achievement runs grant exclusive titles and mounts for maximum difficulty)
Start duty

If you give players the system they will take it and run with it to create an entire new end game content. If you make it in game with achievement, cosmetics and leaderboards then you do not need to worry about outside things like RaiderIO ruining the experience for new people.

[ItMe]

imo aren't those just gimmicks? and not really thoughtful lasting design?

A lot of different ideas are being pitched.
What is this in reference to?

[DrWho2010]

allow people to design their own dungeons? now every dungeon is "The Thousand Catboi Penis Dungeon". plz no.

[Metricasc]

the only argument i would have to make for tough dungeons, is that only if its not for leveling or tied to MSQ progression, (which sadly rules out all the level 80 dungeons so far), i would generally love to see some more challenging dungeons thrown into the mix overall since i find dungeons to be very easy in a way that it allows bad habits to be fostered, but i can understand that its best to make the tougher dungeons optional and slightly increase the difficulty curve of more later level dungeons overall.

[Jirah]

Look no further than the 80s dungeons. Aumurot being the only good one. Twinning has nice trash in the last room, Academia, Anyder, and Cosmos is so routine and trivial you can do it in your sleep. And these are the “endgame content?”

Bosses are usually ok the emphasis needs to be on the trash and have DPS matter more with mid pull mechanics. Tons of examples include past dungeons idk why 80s are the easiest ones.

The issue being YoshiP doesn’t want the single healer to be freaking out (PTSD from a newbie party in Longstep/Aurum Vale where the tank tries to drag the whole room) and that’s fair but at the very least make pulls interesting instead of the AOE fest.

[Nyxheart]

Honestly i think they should unnerf ARR dungeons as a start and maybe tweek it a bit in some areas to make some things a bit easier bit not by that much. Early ARR dungeons made you learn mech at a decently graduale rate imo. By having people learn earier in game that YES you need to learn mech and actually do them I believe we would have less issues with people late game not understanding they need to be done and more cohesion between the players in general. This also means it wouldnt be a shock to new players when things go from obserdly afk easy to the normal difficulty that anyone whose played through the game when they had that more gradual learning curve expect, dodging, positioning, kiting, needing to follow mech in general used to be taught in dungeons to a minimum requrement degree and just isnt anymore. I think it's lead to a larger gap between apsolute casual and extreemly hard core and increasing an anomosity between the POVs in general. No amount of skill gap closing will fix that issue and just increasing the health of something only makes things tedious when the actual fun part of doing intressting things with mech is all but removed. Also it would be nice if the brought back the optional areas in dungeons too. It can potentially give a challange, makes dungeons less one dimentional, and yet still allow for streamlining through a dungeon if desired, expecially if you dont need everything like gear from that instance. Are there flaws to that, sure, but i think it would be better than the one way or nothing direction weve been stuck following for years now. And i do think other fresh ideas would be nice too. No matter what you just cant please everyone at the same time.

[Talking_Citrus]

I like your ideas, Nyxheart. Theme park or not, fact is if you don't accurate follow the correct formula (ie responding correctly to specific mechanics or unexpected situations like pulling pats etc) you should get punished. There should be consequences for not being careful. Unfortunately, that idea seems to have been abandoned across the board in all the biggest MMORPGs... If you could name one that was still punishing, had a decent story & world building I'd be on it in a hot minute. This is more of a short rant but feels to me like mmorpgs have turned into online single-player focused experiences that friends can enjoy together and people can power trip on with no effort. "Play it your way" is good and all, but if your way is to try to speed run everything, spam click through dialogue and afk during mandatory cutscenes you're just playing the wrong genre, there are no two ways about it.

Not every game is meant for everyone, and that's fine. The sad thing is though, it feels like this entire genre has slid from its original idea of socially focused role playing experiences that felt rewarding both through the connections you made with other people and the struggles you overcame in PvE (be it dungeons, just normal quests or end game content - it all used to be challenging in the early days. Think of vanilla WoW before the Pre-BC nerf patch or Everquest).

Now, I don't even know what I'd call it but absolutely none of that remains. Social aspects? Fuck social elements when you can just click a button and have 4 people magically appear like AI would. Why would you even talk to them? You can just do the same thing for your next run. No need to get along and run more dungeons together, fuck these guys and just get new ones. Challenge? Like many of you have pointed out, if there's any challenge at all now it's stacked at the endgame with a seeming disregard for the fact that endgame will always only be a FRACTION of the available content, every expansion further increasing the problem of a game full of completely pointless content if you the systems in place don't allow for a level 30 (for example) dungeon to feel how it SHOULD feel for level 30 players even if a SINGLE group member is downscaled.

It's just sad to see what was such an awesome genre from which I have so many amazing memories has gone so far in a different, completely unnecessary direction, to chase the money. Yeah, they're all businesses and businesses aim for the fattest bottom line, but I miss the days when games were made with passion, for people who were passionate about games. Now it's just such a bland commercialized experience, it's unrecognizable. Only reason I find myself playing mmos at all anymore is every couple years I'll give it another go in hopes that there have been enough tweaks to provide a passable experience, but I feel like what old school mmo players learned an mmo was is just dead.