Variant and Criterion dungeons can be the new and better hard mode!

[Eisi]

Ok so we get five throwaway dungeons and three trials per base expansion. They did hard mode dungeons back in the day which reused environments, they weren't actually any harder however, just more boring one and done content, at max you would soullessly grind them because of perverse incentives.

Dungeons are not good at being evergreen content, but criterion dungeons potentially are! With the right reward structure yada yada.

Let's say they design Siege of Doma in Stormblood with Variant dungeons in mind.

You do the normal Doma dungeon during the MSQ with all the action and the spectacle, normal route, other paths are blocked and irrelevant.

However at maxlevel for patchcontent they can reuse the same environment and alter and expand it a bit - for example the palace is now sunken after the events of MSQ - for a variant dungeon!

So you go back there to secure some family heirlooms and items of cultural importance or whatever, it's low stakes and chill and focuses on the city and Doman history. You can redo the prior path but instead some gates won't be blocked, you can just sidestep the palace for example and explore more of the exterior, take a hidden underwater passage, monsters have taken root, one boss could be a crazy lone ninja fighter, one a half broken garlean piece of tech, one some sort of kami from a trinket like Susano or Tsukuyomi.

And then of course you design criterion and criterion savage on top of that.

Now you don't wanna creatively hamstring yourself by not being able to design unique variant dungeons anymore or having to return to a dungeon. But in general this I think would be a good way to save some workload. To be honest I consider one and done dungeons a bit of a waste of resources.

I know assets are reused anyway but being able to reuse an entire environment (you can change the atmosphere a lot by just altering the music, skybox and ambient lighting btw!) could be super beneficial.

Generally speaking almost everything in the game is better than dungeons. Trials are better, deep dungeons are better, variant dungeons are better, raids are better. Dungeons suck. And it doesn't matter if you call them hard when all they effectively are is more dungeons. However reusing assets is good if you can save work. If they can be reused for more interesting content, I would adore. Goes for the maxlevel dungeons as well btw.

[Payadopa]

I wouldn't mind seeing this. Everything that's not a regular XIV dungeon is good in my book. And if it saves time be reusing assets I don't have a problem with that.

[SaltyDaddy]

They did hard mode dungeons back in the day which reused environments, they weren't actually any harder however

Well, not quite true. You say it now. But back then you had much more to do at lvl 50 than now. Game was played differently and some mechs were actually harder and quite deadly for some.

But otherwise true. I wish they would push more into 4 man harder spammable content, that isnt Deep Dungeons.

I said many times, I wouldnt mind even just scalling old dungeons to lvl 90 for expert roullete, but I guess they just dont want to bother with balancing. Its content that is dead for you, if you have everything at 90 and you do not do mentor (Which I do, but most dont)

[Jeeqbit]

Ok so we get five throwaway dungeons

8 actually, at least two of which are optional and used to fill Expert roulette.

They did hard mode dungeons back in the day which reused environments

Sort of. The environments have enough changes that you can't quite say they just reused it in a lazy way. Sometimes we go through different sections of the dungeon that we didn't previously as well.

they weren't actually any harder however, just more boring one and done content

People used to say that Amdapor Keep was hard because of Demon Wall. The big pulls in ARR were always rough, and still can be if DPS is low but obviously we kill them a lot quicker than we used to because of potency and battle system changes and syncing down (which we didn't in ARR). Higher level food also provides an advantage because of how it syncs.

• Stone Vigil HM can still give people trouble with the pulls or the second boss.
• Wanderer's Palace (both versions) have bosses that I've seen give people trouble not to mention how many people have died to tonberries or pulling too much or pulling into pink areas.
• Tam-tara HM has some pulls that could cripple you with status effects and I would often see wipes to all of its bosses, and the last boss of Haukkee Manor HM.
• Pharos Sirius would wipe at various locations from the pulls, to crystals, to bosses and it is only the gradual difference in average damage output that this happens less often.
• The last boss of Copperbell Mines HM, Brayflox HM, Hullbreaker Isle and very rarely Sastasha HM would wipe.
• The second boss of Qarn HM often would as well because there is an adds check and a DPS check to interrupt the needles cast and a cover mechanic.

If these things aren't a problem now it's because the damage of an average DPS that doesn't know what they are doing is higher. High damage parties were always good but you didn't always get those in the past, when jobs were more sophisticated and there hadn't been years of stat, potency and scaling changes.

As we moved into Heavensward, the hard mode dungeons were just normal dungeons. Maybe that is in part that we had more utility than in ARR, such as Clemency and Equilibrium on PLD and WAR. The sync was also very poor. I was farming dungeons like Hullbreaker HM, Gubal Library HM and Sohm Al HM in 270 with strength melds and destroying those dungeons which were designed for 200-230. Lost City HM I remember the trash hitting hard before we got into the final tier, but that's it.

They could make it even simpler by reusing all of the dungeons exactly as they are and just adjusting them to remove telegraphs, rescale health and damage output to be more devastating. But they went with making entirely new ones only.

[Ravenblade1979]

so, set everything to min ilvl automatically. problem solved.

[Eisi]

8 actually, at least two of which are optional and used to fill Expert roulette.

Yeah it's 8, I have no idea why I thought only 5 . Even more work for stuff that's one and done!

Sort of. The environments have enough changes that you can't quite say they just reused it in a lazy way. Sometimes we go through different sections of the dungeon that we didn't previously as well.

Yeah that's the kind of stuff I'm talking about. This is how you could expand a normal dungeon into a variant dungeon.

snip

Thanks for the additional info Jeeq!

What I mean is if they wanna keep doing dungeons and they wanna keep doing variant dungeons, they can have overlapping resources. An expansion of Qitana Ravel as a Variant dungeon for example. Or Anamnesis.

Sidenote: if Panda is here to stay as a structure I'd love to actually go in there too, preferably as a Variant Dungeon, but I guess there are no assets yet other than boss arena stuff.