8 man "nightmare" dungeons

[Shurrikhan]

I figured unique Materia could increase multiple stats, or even offer new abilities or offer permutations to existing ones.

This could fill in the end game niche without stepping on the toes of actual gear progression.

First, having uniquely powerful materia would mess with "actual gear progression". Moreover, I'd keep things simple where possible; avoid overcomplication. I think it's fine, for instance, if progressively difficult nightmare runs give progressively higher chances for (or move you nearer to your next weekly guaranteed drop of) something, say, just 5 ilvls above the pre-tier BiS and may hit 5 ilvls short of post-tier BiS by the time most raiders are farming the last floor of that raid. Mostly, you just want to avoid it being a way for raiders to get ahead on their mains or it providing so much random but rare junk that it badly devalues other means of, say, acquiring non-craftable vanity items. But you don't need to offer power in some totally unique way. You want the gameplay to be the point, and the rewards merely (or just short of) commensurate to the gear and skill required.

Speaking of keeping things simple, the basic idea of a dungeon getting harder as you go already seems pretty great for midcore side-content, especially if you plan to shake it up further with little added challenges. I feel your greatest strength in that concept is that you can use the Nightmare stacks to naturally fit reward to difficulty. For instance, maybe you could have a bar you build to acquire additional treasure chests and each boss and mob type would give a certain amount multiplied by your level of Nightmare at that time (with nightmare gradually increasing or fading with mob count, etc., so it doesn't oblige cheese strats like pulling the whole room before finishing off the first pack just to get more reward from them). In this way, even against normal, relatively weak mobs, less skilled/geared parties could pull smaller and be challenged while more skilled/geared parties could just pull larger, and each would be rewarded proportionately: the greater the nominal danger, the greater the reward.

For more core content, especially if the gap between early- and late-dungeon difficulty is fairly wide, I suspect having only a small span of a dungeon that actually suits the difficulty you want -- before that being too easy and thereafter like testing the hardness of one's skull against concrete -- could be irritating. However, having some initial difficulty modifiers available, such as to just increase all nightmare (and thus difficulty and reward) from the very start, could easily fix that. That be your first step towards "M+" territory, but I don't see why that should matter; what works, works. We needn't avoid whole spans of content over a stigmatized potential (and highly vague) affiliation.

[Deliciou5]

Edit:I mis-read her post and i was being an idiot.

[SweetPete]

8 man dungeons sound fun but I really want 4 Man unreal dungeons. However it seems the devs only give us one choice. Either a new ultimate or harder dungeon. People always scream ultimate. I don’t think we’ll ever see harder dungeons as long as ultimate raids exist.

[Shurrikhan]

I removed that part of my second post very early this morning because i didn't think the reward structure for end game gear that square enix would make would have anything to do with whether my idea was good or not.

How did you quote something that wasn't there? Did you have the forum post open all day?

It was simply a pinned tab, mate. They don't auto-refresh. That or you didn't change out that part as early as you thought you did.

I am confused why are you making the same talking points about my idea as the other trolls in this thread did? Alt account?

I'm not. I'm one of the people who responded to said "troll" in defense of your post.

Pretending my end game content shouldn't effect other piece of end game is very bad talking point, since square enix has successfully done this many times in the past with other forms of alternative content every expansion.

There's no pretense, it's not a bad talking point, and XIV has never allowed alternate content to compete with raid gear at the time of that raid gear's release.

Moreover i don't determine the reward structure Square enix does, it makes little difference to my idea to talk about end game gear balance since i trust square to do a good job and it wouldn't be based on any of your excessively verbose hypothetical nonsense.

I never said you determine the reward structure. You don't "determine" squat. But concept which match themselves to the existing (trends in) reward structure are more viable than those that are not, and if you're not aiming at all for viability... why place your idea on a public forum. The devs aren't going to look at it until it's (done some equivalent of having) been retweeted ad nauseum, so the only value you're going to get from this place is constructive feedback.

Ideas on this forum aren't meant to be 1 to 1 implementatation if they ever did use it..its simply there to inspire them to make meaningful content that people would enjoy.

You were given constructive feedback as to what seemed really good about your idea and what you could do to improve it further. If you're only response to informed feedback is that 'it doesn't have to be implemented exactly as I've stated anyways'... why put it on a forum? If you've zero desire to revise or flesh out your concept (a rather good one at its core, I think)... why is it here?

[Shurrikhan]

8 man dungeons sound fun but I really want 4 Man unreal dungeons. However it seems the devs only give us one choice. Either a new ultimate or harder dungeon. People always scream ultimate. I don’t think we’ll ever see harder dungeons as long as ultimate raids exist.

"4 man unreal dungeons" was the mobs-synced-up (rather than players level-synced down) and slightly difficulty-spiked version of dungeons?

[Deliciou5]

It was simply a pinned tab, mate. They don't auto-refresh. That or you didn't change out that part as early as you thought you did.


I'm not. I'm one of the people who responded to said "troll" in defense of your post.


There's no pretense, it's not a bad talking point, and XIV has never allowed alternate content to compete with raid gear at the time of that raid gear's release.


I never said you determine the reward structure. You don't "determine" squat. But concept which match themselves to the existing (trends in) reward structure are more viable than those that are not, and if you're not aiming at all for viability... why place your idea on a public forum. The devs aren't going to look at it until it's (done some equivalent of having) been retweeted ad nauseum, so the only value you're going to get from this place is constructive feedback.


You were given constructive feedback as to what seemed really good about your idea and what you could do to improve it further. If you're only response to informed feedback is that 'it doesn't have to be implemented exactly as I've stated anyways'... why put it on a forum? If you've zero desire to revise or flesh out your concept (a rather good one at its core, I think)... why is it here?

My apologies i read your first paragraph and you discussing materia and end game gear balance and after that i rolled my eyes and didn't take the rest of post seriously.

So i am sorry for that i just assumed you were trolling.

Maybe ill write up a more appropriate response later.

[Shurrikhan]

My apologies i read your first paragraph and you discussing materia and end game gear balance and after that i rolled my eyes and didn't take the rest of post seriously.

Nw's. It happens.

[Deliciou5]

First, having uniquely powerful materia would mess with....

My idea never really considered the gear level since i never thought of end game progression happening for nightmare outside extra materia and tomestones you could get. Otherwise the gear dropped would be dyeable glamour which would be a valuable reward to people.

Not sure if it's a good idea to discount a proper alternative end game reward like materia.

My original idea was maybe that you could get advanced materia such as having 2 stats on it instead of it one.

So when you fit the idea into a structure of end game it would be parallel in progression to 24 man raids but unlike 24 man instead it would have some more unique materias you couldn't get anywhere else such as maybe a materia that would enhance your crowd control spells, or materia that gave you old abilities back to classes(aero3).
TBH many players i know doesn't really much care for a deterministic approach to gear progression so potentially having some end game materia that granted new abilities or permutations wouldn't exactly be a bad thing esp if you could trade this rare materia on the market board.

Of course if they added new types of materia then they would also need to make slot removal of materia easier when switching out abilities.

But i digress since in a way i kinda agree with you that we should keep it simple in terms of rewards which is why i removed the mention of materia in the original posts.

Speaking of keeping things simple, the basic idea of a dungeon getting harder as you go already seems pretty great for midcore side-.....

I wanted to design nightmare stacks to be something that still allows players to make progress slowly by doing small pulls and also reward players who are more coordinated, even after doing a large pull with nightmare stacks you would still need to fight smaller groups from a mass of enemies in order to avoid wiping the party.

I wanted high amount of treasure finder stacks to be something that allows you unlock unique rewards that are exclusive to this mode for those are skilled while giving players many chances to wipe on bosses without feeling too guilty.

For more core content, especially if the gap between early- and late-dungeon difficulty...

Making it so you can just click on nightmare for all current dungeons like you would min ilvl would actually fit in line with more of what i imagined of most of the best rewards being mostly mounts/aesthetics since you would just have access to all dungeons at once without it directly impacting end game too heavily. Each dungeon can have exclusive mounts/aesthetics you can unlock but also a larger pool to draw from as well that all dungeons would share.

I think maybe certain items that fit within end game such as 24 man materia trade in catalysts or end game tokens could drop off the final boss chest if you have enough treasure finder stacks could be good as well since beating the final boss would be no small feat.

[ReiganCross]

I don't really know what is wrong with acquiring matching BiS gear from someplace aside from Tomestones and Raid. I mean, Tomestone is just boring grind anyways, and it's matching power levels with the toughest Raids in the game. Hard content deserve to dole out powerful rewards.

You can just make the reward match the levels but give them a different stat distribution, like Augmented Cryptlurker and Edenmorn does right now. If anything that would make the content relevant and would make building more interesting with more optimization options.

Failing that you can AT LEAST make the items match the Extreme weapons levels. I hate the idea that a dungeon would somehow be considered inferior because the loot will just be undergeared by the time the raid comes out and it would need to be sustained by some form of totem grinding bs, but at least it would be something.

[MicahZerrshia]

Basically this but with a few tweaks and hopefully set back into the 75 era? https://www.bg-wiki.com/ffxi/Categoryynamis

I would LOOOOOOOOOOOVE it. And it would be an amazing way to introduce job specific relic gear instead of just weapons