Variant dungeon gameplay feedback

[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.