Dungeons we need to talk dungeons

[Steelbreaker25]

To suggest any which will inevitably be shot down by the stagnating crowd, one needs to understand the dungeons best attitudes are explorative content and teamwork. With these fundamentals you can have a lot of avenues.

Midpull mechanics, Example being but not limited to like stack markers doing a pull so your not just grabbing a crowd and spamming your aoe. Ghmliyt sorta does this.

Unscripted mechanics, have it randomize to adjust not to order but to familiarity so you need to watch which action is a tank buster which action is raid wide and which action does unique stuff

Telegraph thru mob action, example would Be skalla where the final boss does actions similar based on its anatomy like slashes and beams

Hazards and traps. I think Hullisland had bear traps and Dona castle had turrets to walk around with your trash, so you needed to dance around it if you carried it further. Autumn vale had vents and poisons so you couldn’t just stand still

Key hunting, Totorak and Hakkue manor had these while one is universally hated and the other is a joy to do more so since it’s the first dungeons to do as jobs

Roaming hostile mobs, again hakkue manor did this and to lesser extent long step and greater extent crowds of roamers like vale. This would require The Tank to actually watch out and either collect them or take the mobs away from others

Intractables, like the cannons in Stone vigil where you needed to use outside means to destroy the boss or mobs

Prioritized mobs, this one is for the DPS, have them focus on vital mobs like the retrain collar in Baelsar’s wall, the final stingers in quarn or the Banish III casters in Pharos

Hazardous Dots, like the frostbite in The Burn, or several poisons from Ampdapor. As healers and when everything is fine, that should be a nother thing to watch out for and keep in check it or your making your job more difficult.

Open areas, long step dark hold and vale work against the W2W boring tactic due to their respected rooms. This would complete flip the monotony.

Sad thing is these have all been done before and the best suggestion the hyper casuals have in this thread is play something else and let the bland content rot.

I don't see how any of those things are super interesting more than once.

[Roda]

To suggest any which will inevitably be shot down by the stagnating crowd, one needs to understand the dungeons best attitudes are explorative content and teamwork. With these fundamentals you can have a lot of avenues.

Midpull mechanics, Example being but not limited to like stack markers doing a pull so your not just grabbing a crowd and spamming your aoe. Ghmliyt sorta does this.

Unscripted mechanics, have it randomize to adjust not to order but to familiarity so you need to watch which action is a tank buster which action is raid wide and which action does unique stuff

Telegraph thru mob action, example would Be skalla where the final boss does actions similar based on its anatomy like slashes and beams

Hazards and traps. I think Hullisland had bear traps and Dona castle had turrets to walk around with your trash, so you needed to dance around it if you carried it further. Autumn vale had vents and poisons so you couldn’t just stand still

Key hunting, Totorak and Hakkue manor had these while one is universally hated and the other is a joy to do more so since it’s the first dungeons to do as jobs

Roaming hostile mobs, again hakkue manor did this and to lesser extent long step and greater extent crowds of roamers like vale. This would require The Tank to actually watch out and either collect them or take the mobs away from others

Intractables, like the cannons in Stone vigil where you needed to use outside means to destroy the boss or mobs

Prioritized mobs, this one is for the DPS, have them focus on vital mobs like the retrain collar in Baelsar’s wall, the final stingers in quarn or the Banish III casters in Pharos

Hazardous Dots, like the frostbite in The Burn, or several poisons from Ampdapor. As healers and when everything is fine, that should be a nother thing to watch out for and keep in check it or your making your job more difficult.

Open areas, long step dark hold and vale work against the W2W boring tactic due to their respected rooms. This would complete flip the monotony.

Sad thing is these have all been done before and the best suggestion the hyper casuals have in this thread is play something else and let the bland content rot.

All of this is great, but we gotta make the point that without mechanic layering those mechanics can become mindless gimmicks (like snowcloak's frost). Having to think about how ro deal with one mechanic alone, another mechanic alone, and how to deal with both of them happening at the same time breaks up the monotony of "I guess I'll heal a little harder"

[Jirah]

Totorak is a very poor example. "More enemies to pull at once" is not variation either, it's still the same boring formula with enemies that hit like wet noodles.

There's so many ways you can spice up dungeons so they are a different experience between runs without just having hallways with nothing in any of them like totorak. Don't know why you even brought that place up, it's entirely an example of how *not* to do it.

I really struggle to call any dungeon boss 'interesting', either...different strokes on that point.

Totorak had some interesting ideas but poorly executed due to the boring environment and leden debuff and boring bosses. The venom sacks trained you to use ranged attacks as melee, and the interactables in the keys made the dungeon more unique. Sadly Totorak biggest issue is, the level was too low to fully embrace the ideas and also this was the 4th dungeon overall. Mechanics need to be revisited and more mobs won’t fix anything, as seen in relict where it has a lot of mobs doing single digit damage and generic cone aoes

[Jirah]

Call me the minority, but I enjoy dungeons the way they are. They're good for leveling, getting tomes and other sundry items, glamour farming, generally derping around with friends, and *practicing mechanics*. I think this last one is most important. Dungeons give us the opportunity to practice mechanics on various classes before going into the 8 and 24 player content where they actually matter.


I agree that the two-packs and a boss recipe gets boring, but anything will be boring after a while. Larger dungeons with more varied pathways will not only get boring, they'll get *tedious* after a while, leading to the old Aurum Vale syndrome. Roulette dungeons are pretty much the best of a bad situation so the best we can do is put our heads down and get them done with as little fuss as possible for those weekly tomestones.

This is bar none the worst attitude to have about MMO content, let’s all just say “that’s just how it is” like it will never get better and without it even improving a sliver. For god sakes this is 80s content we don’t need hallways tutorials unless you unsynched all the content and got carried by the harder trials like Castrim Flu, and Dancing plague. If you need to improve basic mechanics I suggest play Sastsha not all the 80s dungeons, worse is that some of the ARR ones are harder which undermines the whole “they are there for new players to not be intimidated by a aoe” debacle

Players in the game have a serious issue with being overly coddled. Last I checked this isn’t a kids game

[Mindiori]

Players in the game have a serious issue with being overly coddled. Last I checked this isn’t a kids game

Yet we both know, that because this style of laughable laziness and meaningless existence is the majority by way of peoples tendency to be exactly that, lazy; they are the loudest financial voice. In many respects they have destroyed the genre with their own selfishness - whilst claiming that our 'minority' should be ignored. Almost laughable in its irony, considering the 'hurr durr equality' trend they try and argue when it suits them. If anything is tedious its their disingenuous motives. Which really equate to being mentally unable to handle anyone being able to do something they can't. You oft say I am prone to exaggerate; but as you can see - I do so, usually to offset their own. Something which when unchecked, often tends to set the narrative.

I accept that to compromise with what they cite to be 'casual'; some middle ground needs be found. I do however take disagreement as you know by now - the notion that casual = entertained by braindead rubbish. Which isn't anything more than again, agenda driven mental gymnastics. Something's relative worth, is often established by comparative norms. So having things easy - serves no purpose. Except as experience has shown, to create an unnecessary gulf between the tiny fraction of things requiring a brain and those that don't. Which in turn worsens the scenario I believe.

If the game needs be repeatedly dumbed down to account for the bottom tier and skip-pot users; one might begin to question why the early game should even exist anymore. Or how it can be justified to play with so little through so many levels. Presumably a vast amount don't. Seems we have the usual 'the only game is endgame' going on - when the actual bar to most content in terms of skill, is basically just being able to click one button. Not exactly the height of feeling with regard to accomplishment or worth is it.

[RitsukoSonoda]

Yet we both know, that because this style of laughable laziness and meaningless existence is the majority by way of peoples tendency to be exactly that, lazy; they are the loudest financial voice. In many respects they have destroyed the genre with their own selfishness - whilst claiming that our 'minority' should be ignored. Almost laughable in its irony, considering the 'hurr durr equality' trend they try and argue when it suits them. If anything is tedious its their disingenuous motives. Which really equate to being mentally unable to handle anyone being able to do something they can't. You oft say I am prone to exaggerate; but as you can see - I do so, usually to offset their own. Something which when unchecked, often tends to set the narrative.

I accept that to compromise with what they cite to be 'casual'; some middle ground needs be found. I do however take disagreement as you know by now - the notion that casual = entertained by braindead rubbish. Which isn't anything more than again, agenda driven mental gymnastics. Something's relative worth, is often established by comparative norms. So having things easy - serves no purpose. Except as experience has shown, to create an unnecessary gulf between the tiny fraction of things requiring a brain and those that don't. Which in turn worsens the scenario I believe.

If the game needs be repeatedly dumbed down to account for the bottom tier and skip-pot users; one might begin to question why the early game should even exist anymore. Or how it can be justified to play with so little through so many levels. Presumably a vast amount don't. Seems we have the usual 'the only game is endgame' going on - when the actual bar to most content in terms of skill, is basically just being able to click one button. Not exactly the height of feeling with regard to accomplishment or worth is it.

The issue is that the lazy gamers are actually the minority. However like most people of that mindset that want things without working for them they expend as much or more effort and energy in whining and complaining about why they shouldn't have to work than they would have by just doing it. It's like children in a store. A majority of them are well behaved. People tend to only notice the obnoxious one screaming at the top of their lungs throwing a fit because they want something and their parents aren't giving it to them. The problem is how the situation is handled. All of this dumbing down easy mode stuff SE has been doing to this game is about the equivalent of the parents of said screaming child giving them the thing they wanted because they don't want everyone in the store looking at them which is basically rewarding bad behavior.

[Ath192]

I also want to make a point that FFXI is about to celebrate its 20 year anniversary and in large part that game is alive because of how difficult it was, and the bonds the players formed with each other to overcome obstacles and work together.

[Artemiz]

I also want to make a point that FFXI is about to celebrate its 20 year anniversary and in large part that game is alive because of how difficult it was, and the bonds the players formed with each other to overcome obstacles and work together.

FFXI is still going thats for sure but even at its peak it was never anywhere near as popular as FFXIV is. Its very different in many ways but in my opinion one of the reasons its still going is the complexity of the gearing and its horizontal gear progression. There is almost always something you need, for one gear set or another.

Also, imagine how many people have quit due to its difficulty level, I've long ago lost count of how many people I knew who quit over farming kitty pants alone.

Almost all of the hardest content is now merc'd, and has been for years now.

[RitsukoSonoda]

I also want to make a point that FFXI is about to celebrate its 20 year anniversary and in large part that game is alive because of how difficult it was, and the bonds the players formed with each other to overcome obstacles and work together.

IMO it's not the game's difficulty that has kept FFXI alive. It's more that it's an MMO that still has a majority of staple or classic RPG mechanics in it. They took a majority of what you would expect in a single player offline JRPG at that time and made it an MMO. Hence it's style of classic FF Menu based interface. It had that vibe of being an FF game you could play along with your friends. For the most part I'm sure it's had a stable player base the entire time because it also essentially had long term goals players could aim for where as most if not all of the current "top" MMOs have frequent player activity fluctuations due to lulls in content to keep players entertained or active as it generally only takes a few days to finish everything in a content update and then it's just a question of how much they want to repeat the content to obtain loot. This isn't to say FFXI didn't have repetitive content elements either. However the game did offer a number of options for "endgame" gear ranging from crafting, hunting NMs and HNMs, doing side quests, Dynamis, Limbus, etc... For an extremely long time the game kept with a sort of horizontal progression where expansions and updates just gave players more options to play around with gear wise without invalidating the gear the player had already obtained.

[Artemiz]

There is a reason dungeons got easier, it's because if you make roulette content too difficult then people bail at the start, or fight amongst each other when the wipes start. This game has been there, seen it and done it. For the record, the toxicity very rarely comes from newer or "casual" players who are struggling, it almost always starts when an experience player loses patience with someone for not one shotting everything below savage content.

As for players bailing it was a big issue, especially on pre-nerf Pharos Sirius. Nothing more annoying than waiting in a 20 minutes queue to then zone in and the tank just bails.

SE know what level of difficulty the DF can support without too many problems and for many it's a bar that's too low, that's unfortunate but it's the reality. the 50/60/70/80 and expert roulettes are arguably the biggest bone of contention but they also have to be the easiest because players doing those roulettes get salty very fast if they take longer than absolutely necessary. Even now, with them as fast and easy as possible people manage to fall out the minute the tank doesn't W2W pull.

It would be nice to have more challenging dungeons but they wouldn't be in the DF and as such would probably be a waste of development time. They would almost certainly be better off using that time to make more dungeons like we have now that would be done by everyone.