Variant dungeon gameplay feedback

[Deo14]

Everyone is aware of the issue with lacking rewards, for both Variant and Criterion (granted, Criterion is worse, but both are pretty terrible). However, this feels like Berserk's 2016 adaptation - animation was so insufferable, that people completely ignored everything else. Yes, animation was miserable and biggest outlier, but on top of that, it also broke possibly all rules of filmmaking, sound design was atrocious, skipping Lost Children arc was executed terribly, but it also did few things right. But nobody was talking about this stuff, all conversations ended on how terrible the animation is. I feel like V&C is somewhat similar to this, with it's terrible rewards being equivalent to Berserk having terrible animation. Which is why I want to focus on actual gameplay aspects.



Dificulty

People asked for midcore and difficult 4 man content, and we got piss easy, savage and ultimate difficulty. Where's the middle ground? Why does everything need to be either too easy or too hard? Why is there savage, and even more savage version? Why is the gap between Variant and Criterion so massive? Can't we just have story difficulty (current variant), midcore difficulty (EX difficulty, keep paths as variant, but ramp up numbers, faster and harder mechs, dps check, etc.) and savage?



Criterion

At 9PM today, 2 days after patch, PF had 1 group for variant, 2 for criterion, and 0 for savage criterion. One of the criterion group wanted 650 ilvl, which is currently impossible without clearing some savage raids. It's not like PF is dead for other content, there's 132 parties, only 17 of them are ERP ads, and afformentioned 3 for V&C. Then I checked at 11:30PM, and there is only one savage group with 650. So for the rest of this review, I'll just talk about Variant, because I don't really have much to say about criterion.



Bosses

Boss' mechs are fun, but they're definitely very "gotcha". I've ran most of paths in groups, and I've wiped 3 times in clearing all 12 paths plus few duplicates combined. All 3 wipes were on the same run, on the same mechanic, which we didn't understand. On 3rd wipe, I realized how the mech works, and then we cleared without a problem. I would appreciate mechs which are harder to execute, something that doesn't just test if you know what the mech does, but something that checks if you remember right order (there are some of them to be fair, but you don't need to remember all 4, you just remember 1 or 2 and the rest can be deducted, because it's all so formulaic), something to test reactions, something which is harder to resolve, stacking mechs and similar. Even better, make a gradual enrage and make boss keep increasing its speed the longer the fight goes on.

There is just 5 bosses, 4 of them final, so everytime you do any of 12 paths, you'll fight that one, same ninja. Sure, environment and half the mechs are different, but it still feels very same. They could add another one, and make middle path be a duo boss with these 2 or something.



Trash mobs

Instead of being walled and being able to pull only 2 packs like in dungeons, now you're forced to pull single pack only. Mobs are same as any dungeon, there's nothing special about them. There is one pack which consists of only 2 mobs, so you do ST rotation instead of AoE, that's about the wildest the gameplay can get.



One and Done Aspect

All the NPC slowdowns are annoying. It really feels like this was made for running each path once and then never seeing this content again. Which is shame, because why bother making something like this, just to make players forget about it in a week? This is still MMORPG, replayability should be one of the top priorities. You need player engagement, otherwise players will have no one to play with. Making content simply soloable to offset this problem is such an bad solution.



Variant Actions

Variant actions are just like Scions - they're not there to make things interesting, they're there to make everything convenient, simple and to make things go smoothly. They're nowhere near lost actions or logograms, they do not offer anything interesting or creative. In fact, if you're running solo, each role has only 1 pair that makes sense. It makes no sense to pick ress or provoke when you go in solo, so healers are stuck with Spirit Dart + Rampart, Tanks with Spirit Dart + Heal, DPS with Heal + Rampart. That heal is just so overpowered and has no drawbacks, so everyone picks it, which goes back to the difficulty. If you have means to spam strong heal without any limitations, then a difficulty might as well not exist. Sure, you can get oneshotted by some mechs or by too many vuln stacks, but those are extremes. It's the same as playing dark souls, but you have infinite number of estus and it doesn't even lock you in animation whenever you drink it. But to be fair, this applies to most of normal content. As long as 1 healer in party knows what he's doing, you can clear anything eventually.



Map and Visuals

Area is beautiful. Nice colors, nice vibe and atmosphere, it feels very spacious even though we're on rails. Much better than Sildihn, which was just another depressing cave. I like that from one path, you can see the temple from the other apth. Music is nice, even though final boss music seems somewhat off. I'm not musician, but I think it's just that there is multiple stormblood songs stitched together, with pretty fast transitions. If music switches to something else, but boss doesn't do anything special, it feels odd.



Story and Lore

Lore/story could be summed to good old saying "show, don't tell". I had no idea in any path what the story is supposed to be, only in path 12 it was something something guy trapped in a crackpipe. All the story is written in a journal after you've done it. I've read those short stories and they're nice and sweet. They have some reference to Four Lords, about one of the Zenos' katana, lore to bosses, area and so on. But there was at least 5-7 of japanese words and I had no idea what they meant. This might be english vocalization issue, but I really don't know what ascetic, onmyoji, dogu or biwa means. Some explanation would be nice.

But credit is where credit is due - path 12 is amazing. The vibe, the map, and boss fight is really fun and pretty fast paced.

[hydralus]

The rewards for variant seem decent enough. 15 minute solo runs for tomes and unique loot, both random and guaranteed, isn't too bad.

[Koros]

They really need to make trash mobs interesting. Job design being complex made even trash mobs interesting in HW, but now it's mindnumbingly boring with nothing to occupy your mind.

[Shurrikhan]

Midcore difficulty, more interesting trash, and few more bosses would do wonders.

Ideally, I'd have liked to see Variant Actions wholly reworked, but... that be a pipedream probably not worth the effort.

[Gullis]

An inbetween between savage would be nice. I don't get why they made savage and savage +

[AwesomeJr44]

Dificulty

People asked for midcore and difficult 4 man content, and we got piss easy, savage and ultimate difficulty. Where's the middle ground? Why does everything need to be either too easy or too hard? Why is there savage, and even more savage version? Why is the gap between Variant and Criterion so massive? Can't we just have story difficulty (current variant), midcore difficulty (EX difficulty, keep paths as variant, but ramp up numbers, faster and harder mechs, dps check, etc.) and savage?

When they announced Criterion, I was under the impression that standard Criterion was going to be an EX difficulty version of the standard Variant dungeon, and I think that would have been the best way to implement it. Why is Criterion a) savage difficulty when people clearly wanted it to be midcore and b) mainly a boss rush with a couple mobs in between some of the bosses? It's not interesting and it honestly could have had a lot of potential if done right.

Trash mobs

Instead of being walled and being able to pull only 2 packs like in dungeons, now you're forced to pull single pack only. Mobs are same as any dungeon, there's nothing special about them. There is one pack which consists of only 2 mobs, so you do ST rotation instead of AoE, that's about the wildest the gameplay can get.

One and Done Aspect

All the NPC slowdowns are annoying. It really feels like this was made for running each path once and then never seeing this content again. Which is shame, because why bother making something like this, just to make players forget about it in a week? This is still MMORPG, replayability should be one of the top priorities. You need player engagement, otherwise players will have no one to play with. Making content simply soloable to offset this problem is such an bad solution.

Honestly, I'd rather they stop having the NPCs come with us into the Variant dungeons if it means keeping the slowdowns and forced 1 pack pulls. Having NPCs like Hancock there is alright for the first time experience, but if I'm going to clear this at least twelve times, stop stopping me every minute so that Hancock can catch up to us or comment on some random thing in the area. Let me keep going if I want to keep going. Let me pull 2 packs of mobs if I want to.

[Raikai]

The only thing that bothers me is STILL the reward system from the Criterion version.

So, this is midway the raid patch - most of people are already done with Savages and are probably just re-doing them for alt jobs - why can't we have a gear system for Criterion, then? Heck, don't even need to be gear specifically designed for that (althought it would be nice), but at least the augmentation tokens. You'd suddenly see a big influx of people trying the Criterion modes for that to gear alt jobs or to catch up.

[caffe_macchiato]

I will give credit to Square Enix for making the Variant dungeon. This is how dungeons should be designed from the get-go, but at least they did it. It's challenging while solo, not so much in a group.

Problem is, no one's interested in it. There are rarely any parties for either Variant or Criterion dungeons. The playerbase just simply isn't interested anymore. Meanwhile, 20,000+ people are busy fiddling with their large honker mods at any given time. It's either that or raiding. The whole reason for this game's existence seems to have changed in the past couple of years. Sad, but everyone seems to love it. FFXIV has stopped being a game outside of raiding.

[Kaliesto]

I will give credit to Square Enix for making the Variant dungeon. This is how dungeons should be designed from the get-go, but at least they did it. It's challenging while solo, not so much in a group.

Problem is, no one's interested in it. There are rarely any parties for either Variant or Criterion dungeons. The playerbase just simply isn't interested anymore. Meanwhile, 20,000+ people are busy fiddling with their large honker mods at any given time. It's either that or raiding. The whole reason for this game's existence seems to have changed in the past couple of years. Sad, but everyone seems to love it. FFXIV has stopped being a game outside of raiding.

This game has been gradually transforming into a glorified Second Life or whatever social game with no skills required.

[Wilford111]

V&C review

Thank you for summing up my exact thoughts on V&C dungeons. I feel like this thread deserves more attention because you hit the nail on the head.

Between this, Island Sanctuary, Eureka Orthos, and the relic grind, Endwalker is shaping up to be a pretty lackluster expansion. I'm so sad to see it