A better idea for dungeons besides speed run.

[fusional]

which is fine, but i haven't seen any solid suggestions on how to make content more challenging without having any kind of time factor involved. most of the things i've seen suggested would only make the game even easier than it already is.

[Rydin]

which is fine, but i haven't seen any solid suggestions on how to make content more challenging without having any kind of time factor involved. most of the things i've seen suggested would only make the game even easier than it already is.

Fusional... not even this:

I'd love it if there were bosses in the dungeon that could be skipped altogether.....
And the 5th chest was obtained from killing all bosses

For instance, In Cutter's Cry... You have to kill the Myrmidon Princess and the Chimera within an hour....
What if the Myrmidon King/Queen was an optional boss... one that you could skip altogether... but killing it got you that 5th chest

[fusional]

Fusional... not even this:

i'm not really sure that would make anything harder, though? we already have to kill them and it's already really easy. unless i'm misunderstanding?

[Enfarious]

i'm pretty sure pre-tp/mana burn setups, most people actually had to push pretty hard to beat Ouryu and Bahamut v.2 as quickly and efficiently as possible, as the time allotted allowed for only minimal mistakes if you expected to recover and finish.

dynamis and limbus were a bit different since you generally weren't going out of your way to "speed run" it, but you were certainly rushing to farm as much as possible before time expired. (and one could argue that if your end goal was to farm dynamis lord or attestation NMs, you were most certainly rushing to burn through as fast as possible)

people want an already easy/casual game to be even more easy/casual. where's my content, bro?

Are you really so stuck on speed runs being good that you can't offer up a suggestion? I've yet to see anything in this thread other than, "Stop trying to make it easier" comments, give a little back with all this negativity please.

In Dyna and most of the other EG content yes there was a time limit, but rarely if ever did you simply rush to the boss and try to clear in 5 mins, there were things that you either had to do period, or like in dreamworld dyna wanted to do to make the boss more handleable. Actually I think the only place you ever were going for raw "gitterdone" was Nyzul, all the others you farmed for one reason or another, the goal was never to get in and get out so you could go back in again, what with the 72hr cooldown, or max 4tags and what have ya. The flaw in these isn't simply that they were designed with little imagination, it's that after the lack of imagination they said hmmm... how's that 5th chest drop, eh just base it on time we need to get these dungeons in place tonight.

Could try a gauntlet type dungeon.

-Have reasonably sized dungeon maps that you work your way through, at the end of each map there's a boss.
-Once that boss is defeated you have the option to continue or take the reward.
-If you choose to proceed you'll be randomly teleported to one of the different maps and everything increases in difficulty.
-Continue to work your way through the floors defeating each boss, progressively getting more and more difficult.

Conditions for Winning:
-For each boss kill you obtain one chest (Up to 5) which can be obtained by choosing to receive your reward instead of continuing in the dungeon.


Conditions for Item Drops:
-The first chest will always be the chest that holds the rarest items in the dungeon so it will be possible to obtain them with one boss kill, however the chances of obtaining the gear will be next to nil .01%-1%.
-Beating subsequent bosses will drastically increase the drop rate of the rarer items and even lowering the drop rate of other possible drops in the process giving players more incentive to try and go as far as they can.
-Continued progress past the 5th boss can still further increase drop rates, but not the number of possible chests

Conditions for Loss or loss of rewards:
-If time expires all rewards and progress is lost.
-If the party/members are defeated or forced to return, players will be penalized and be reduced one boss win lowering chances of rewards.

I'm just throwing out some rushed ideas though, they're far from a perfect. It could let those speedsters have their fun by going as far as they can to improve their chances at getting the items, but still let the slower, more casual, or less experienced players enjoy the dungeon and still have a chance to be rewarded for their efforts.

Nyzul ^^
and I said something not so dissimilar from Dyna a ways back too ^^

[fusional]

Are you really so stuck on speed runs being good that you can't offer up a suggestion?

we call this a straw man fallacy. feel free to quote where i've ever said speed runs are "good" or "hard" or anything similar.

and as they say- the burden of proof is on the prosecution. i didn't make the thread, so the responsibility to make the best suggestion isn't even mine. i'm simply here to point out that the suggestions we ARE getting WON'T solve the problem/s unless nobody cares about difficulty being gunned down in the crossfire.

i'm simply trying to remind people that we already have a ton of really easy, casual content in the game. we don't really have any hardcore content. speed runs aren't difficult, but they're the closest thing we currently have to hardcore content.

if you take that away, then what? where's my content? how will this be resolved?

[Enfarious]

we call this a straw man fallacy. feel free to quote where i've ever said speed runs are "good" or "hard" or anything similar.

and as they say- the burden of proof is on the prosecution. i didn't make the thread, so the responsibility to make the best suggestion isn't even mine. i'm simply here to point out that the suggestions we ARE getting WON'T solve the problem/s unless nobody cares about difficulty being gunned down in the crossfire.

i'm simply trying to remind people that we already have a ton of really easy, casual content in the game. we don't really have any hardcore content. speed runs aren't difficult, but they're the closest thing we currently have to hardcore content.

if you take that away, then what? where's my content? how will this be resolved?

Ok perhaps I could have said it differently, "Do you actually feel that speed runs are good, and that nothing better can be suggested?"

Or perhaps it's more that you will shoot down anything and everything.

End of it all, I just wanted to see you perhaps say something more than, "Stop suggesting lame ideas that'll make things easier." and instead offer up a way to make things better.
Just maybe dial back the "That idea sucks." and dial up a little "That's not bad, maybe with a little of this it'd be better."

How's that one go?
If your not a part of the solution ... Your a part of the problem...?
Yeah that's about it I believe.

Never did anyone say take away content either, every suggestion was in the name of improving on what's in place. Would some suggestions make things easier? Yes, have you not mention the horridly low drop rates in other posts? Yes. If this isn't enough to prove that your on the wrong side of the fence atm I don't know what is.

I'd rather not throw sticks and stones though, I'm far more interested in having a second FF MMO that is truly fun and engrossing.

[Enfarious]

If there was an optional boss in say Cutters, Not the princess... but something else... since it's optional, you can make it as hard as you want... people wont need to kill it to get the clear... but you will need to kill it to get the 5th chest... and SE would essentially let the difficulty of the Boss match the epicness of the 5th chest drop

but then shouldn't the rewards line up with the difficulty? ie: the hardest boss should drop the best stuff (body pieces). but everyone wants the best stuff. so everyone will want to farm the optional boss, making it seem less optional.

i mean, i would personally be totally fine with it, because if it's hard enough it makes the stuff it drops even more rare, because not as many people will be able to farm it (at least at first). but certainly the community would be extremely upset about it (the same people who still call ifrit/moogle difficult).

square basically only has two options- either they try to find some kind of tentative balance between easy and hard stuff , or they have separate easy and difficult content altogether. they're currently trying to use the former, and the result is both the people who want easy/easier content and the people who want hard/harder content are unhappy with it.

so it seems the only thing they can really do to appease both sides is to have the easy and difficult content be different.

WoW sort of did this by having regular and hard/heroic versions of each raid or boss. the bosses drop the same loot either way, but if you did the hard/heroic version you get a buffed version of the regular item, and that was what set the rewards apart.

other than that, you could also dial it back to TBC-era WoW where there were different tiers of raid progression, and each subsequent tier was harder, with improved loot. the top guilds push all the way to the end tier and farm it, and other girls maybe only got through the first couple.

it seemed fair to me, but naturally people complained a lot and felt entitled to the same loot/opportunities that the top guilds had, and so blizz changed it in recent patches to be more casual-friendly. and it has alienated quite a lot of their hardcore playerbase.

i mean, if Player A is able to complete a raid/boss Player B can't come anywhere near matching, why should player B still be entitled to the same or similar stuff as Player A without all the investment or execution?

so that's the challenge Square faces, and what the community has to keep in mind when making suggestions about this sort of thing. you have to keep every demographic in mind and make sure there's something for everyone, rather than just having everyone making suggestions that fall in line solely with their own gaming preferences.

and i'm being a negative nancy about it because most of what i'm seeing is "well i don't like speed runs for X reasons so here are some suggestions i would personally think is fun, without really caring about the implications it would have on other players with different and/or more demanding expectations"

I agree on the certain drops from certain boss tiers, if you do the tier 1/2/3 your only get head/hands/feet, tier 4 for legs, and final for body type deal, that way it does have a progression, you can't just pop in kill the first and pop out again. In this case the bosses also need to scale up. But the drop rates still need to not suck across the board, who really wants to fight the same boss 500 times, didn't we get enough of that in Abyssea, or FFX coliseum when you decided you were gonna rebuild the entire sphere grid for fun.
New nerfed Dreamworld Dyna does this, you have the option of going in w/o access to subjobs for higher droprates and better drops, or w/ them sacrificing droprates. There's alot of other ways to acommplish the HQ raid w/o it being a timer. Level Caps for the pt you can run as a 40 for a very hard run but substantially increased droprates/quality, 45 for mid range, or 50 for easymode.

[AlphaDragoon]

i'm simply trying to remind people that we already have a ton of really easy, casual content in the game. we don't really have any hardcore content. speed runs aren't difficult, but they're the closest thing we currently have to hardcore content.

if you take that away, then what? where's my content? how will this be resolved?

If they take that away, they could make real difficult content that relies on strategy and good party makeup, not class stacking and running from mobs? Oh no.

As for how they can make it difficult without having speed runs, they could do a number of things. Just as an example, as people have already said on this very thread they can make optional bosses within dungeons that are required to unlock the higher level chests. Or make conditions on the boss, like a boss with multiple body parts (that could require different strategies to kill, such as one being resistant to magic and another to physical attacks) that you have to take out before killing the boss himself to get the full clear.

Speed runs are just the easiest and the lamest way to add artificial difficulty and they need to stop relying on it.

[fusional]

As for how they can make it difficult without having speed runs, they could do a number of things. Just as an example, as people have already said on this very thread they can make optional bosses within dungeons that are required to unlock the higher level chests. Or make conditions on the boss, like a boss with multiple body parts (that could require different strategies to kill, such as one being resistant to magic and another to physical attacks) that you have to take out before killing the boss himself to get the full clear.

Speed runs are just the easiest and the lamest way to add artificial difficulty and they need to stop relying on it.

it sounds like you and i have vastly different ideas of the word "difficult", as i still can't understand the implied difficulty in killing parts of a boss before killing the boss. i can switch targets, i can hit buttons. that's supposed to be hard? please. i've experienced plenty of what you're talking about in other FF titles, and it was never hard then. it's supposed to magically be difficult now?

as far as optional bosses go, what's the point unless they're harder? and if they're harder, what do you say/do about all the people who will be predictably upset about being unable to kill them and therefore unable to access some of the same loot as other players? do you just say "suck it up, princess" and ignore them? (i'd be all for that, but given the direction the game has taken thus far i STRONGLY doubt that would ever happen)

and hey, protip: class stacking is for people who are tired of running the same instance 400 times for loot with a 1% (or less) drop rate and just want to get it over with as fast as possible every single time. that doesn't mean everyone has to do it and certainly doesn't mean it's required to finish a speed run. this has already been proven quite thoroughly.

the fact that you list "running from mobs" makes me question whether you've even experienced AV/CC. so i'm guessing you heard some other people who haven't done AV/CC talking about DH and assuming AV/CC speed runs would be the same, and then you're just parroting what they said?

because, yeah. you only "run from" or sleep like 2 small packs of diremites in AV (or you can just kill them), and there's only one pack of mobs in CC i can recall avoiding off-hand. you kill so many damn mobs between the two of them (yes! even on a speed run! GASP) that it's actually a pretty damn awesome way to spiritbond.

the bottom line is: yes, this stuff is too easy. and yes, i want it to be MUCH harder. however, no- your suggestions don't sound terribly challenging at all. and no, i don't really trust your judgment regarding "difficulty" in the first place. sorry.

[SwordCoheir]

Nyzul ^^
and I said something not so dissimilar from Dyna a ways back too ^^

Kind of like Nyzul yeah, only its a linear goal that actually progressively gets more difficult and doesn't throw groups of random objectives, mobs, or restrictions at you.

Taking my suggestion a bit further, you could throw in different modes for various levels. Like it could have a level 20, 30, or 40 Dungeon range and give different rewards for the various levels providing more content for players (especially lower level content).