Variant/Criterion Dungeons are a huge success!!

[PangTong]

The problem is that we can't really have that experience right now, because they've removed all of the buttons involved in that "dungeon experience." Why do you need CC when raid bosses are immune to it? I mean, look at the sheer breadth of control effects BLU has access to - it's absolutely possible, but they don't want to put it into the game because normal dungeons aren't designed to be remotely challenging, and they'd have to add a bunch of buttons that are otherwise useless in raids if we wanted something even vaguely like WoW's mythic+ dungeons, or even old-school MMO dungeons where CCing monsters was important.

Moreover, that kind of skillset isn't present in players anymore, anyway. WoW flirted with making heroics actually challenging several times, and most of the time it was a failure because the majority of players simply did not have the skillset necessary to handle that kind of content. And rather than accept the need to learn new skills, they pitched a fit until Blizzard nerfed them. The same thing would happen here, but probably even worse because of how trained this playerbase is to expect "free" victories.

If it's separated into its own difficulty like Criterion is then it's not a concern. Criterion is already far, far harder than what a typical roulette player can handle.

As for things like CC, between stun, interrupt and sleep there is actually a reasonable amount of CC between the roles. Not that CC even need be the primary challenge of a hypothetical hard dungeon. Even just things like routing, mob positioning, target priority, and overlapping mechanics already give quite a bit of fresh gameplay that otherwise isn't really represented in FF14. And heck, we already have a type of "harder" content that ISN'T boss-focused and where CC sees use: Deep Dungeon. A difficult dungeon experience that is quicker and more focused than something like deep dungeon is absolutely something the game is capable of having with the current combat system.

[Gserpent]

Deep Dungeon is a pretty poor example, considering that literally only 10 floors out of 200 on PotD are considered actually difficult. And even then, it's almost entirely due to having to manage proper pulls and deal with potential bad RNG, not the actual monsters or mechanics.

Still better than literally anything else they've done with non-boss monsters in dungeons, though. Even Criterion mobs aren't particularly interesting or difficult.

[Vivian_Vex]

Agreed.

We asked for harder dungeons and all we actually got were small scale Savage progression raids. Which is nice, but it's not a dungeon. It seems odd that they keep giving us more aoe tools in our toolkit, things like Shoha II, Orogeny or updates to existing aoe and the only thing we really get to use that toolkit on is leveling dungeons and faceroll Experts where it's mostly irrelevant what buttons you press.

I don't think we were really looking for more progression raids. There are people who will enjoy it because it's smaller scale and it fills a niche (that's a good thing), but most of us have our Extreme trials, Unreal, p5-8S statics and Ultimates and that's a good fill of raids. Yet any real dungeons are sorely lacking in this game. I won't speak for everyone, but personally I'd really like to have that authentic dungeon experience, and not just 3 corridor 3 boss bland facerolls.

Because who plays dungeons for the trash mobs? Trash is nothing more than a break between bosses, which are the real meat of the dungeons.

[Gserpent]

Because who plays dungeons for the trash mobs? Trash is nothing more than a break between bosses, which are the real meat of the dungeons.

Only in this game.

[Absurdity]

Only in this game.

Not even in this game. While trash mobs have 0 mechanics they somehow still manage to be more difficult than the boss that has maybe 3 mechanics, all of which have a 3 hour telegraph and hit like a wet noodle.

[Gserpent]

Not even in this game. While trash mobs have 0 mechanics they somehow still manage to be more difficult than the boss that has maybe 3 mechanics, all of which have a 3 hour telegraph and hit like a wet noodle.

Only when you pull as many as you're allowed to pull. Trash monsters do so little damage, in single pulls, that you can do a dungeon with 4 DPS. That's probably by design.

Compare this to, for example, Mythic+ in WoW, where the trash is just as relevant (sometimes even moreso) than the bosses, subject to which affixes you get that week. There are some significant problems with M+ from an overall design perspective and the issues with scaling at higher key levels (tanks getting literally one-shot *through* the best mitigation tools available is definitely a thing, and not fun or interesting), but as a basic concept... man, this is how dungeons are supposed to be.