Linear, linear, linear

[Shurrikhan]

And your suggestion in its place was? Oh, right, nothing, because you realize my point still 100% stands that it is likely impossible to find something in a dungeon reward that would have staying power in encouraging people to explore non-linear paths.

Literally anything that has at least faintly greater reward-efficiency to the average dungeon-runner than not doing them. So far, we've seen them only been a penalty to rate of reward.

Sadly, the moment they removed EXP from trash was the final nail in the coffin of ever making dungeons at least a little non-linear.

Largely this.

EXP will affect every Leveling Roulette runner who isn't already level-capped on their job (i.e., the vast majority of those likely to end up in, say, leveling dungeons), whereas actual gear drops basically only affect those between the x5-x9 levels for whom that dungeon is still current (over the course of an expansion, probably a third or slightly less of players in a given Leveling Roulette dungeon). Granted, they could provide experience by other means at points along side-paths, such as by having an optional mini-boss or just having an exp reward from a side-objective, and in-dungeon FATE, or even from opening a chest, but that would require thinking several orders of magnitude too far out of the box, I guess...

Tomes are about as broadly useful, as they'll affect all but those already capped on relevant Poetics gear.

Do you know why they're linear?

Because players wanted them that way.

Players want to be rewarded and generally dislike backtracking or otherwise clunky and half-assed tack-ons.

The connection between that and specifically linear dungeons is pretty damn tangential, with its correlation dependent on the XIV devs'...

1. failing to give doing side-paths decent reward-efficiency and
2. failing to make the side-paths themselves interesting or to reconnect by any means other than back-tracking.

That being said...

Linear isn't as much of a problem as Formulaic.

I don't hate linear dungeons, I hate the fact dungeons in this game are 2 pulls, wall, boss, repeated 3 times, and have been for nearly 10 years.

Fully agreed. While I'd love to see some path variance, even if the particular route is forced as to keep things at the now-traditional 'just press W' pace of XIV's "Dungeons", just for more views into the pretty set pieces / reskin of the dungeon and to lets its novelty last a little longer, I don't really mind that XIV "Dungeons" are just, at the end of the day... hallways. But they do at least need more varied things to do over that hallway run.

(However, I still do want a new content mode that salvages "Dungeon" assets to create more freely explorable still-combat-heavy areas. Not for every dungeon, but at least for the ones that already seem pretty fit to that purpose.)