Duty Support has now killed every required ARR to SB dungeon

[FenyxRising]

Keeper of the Lake's last boss went from a crazy AoE dodgefest to a snoozefest
Castrum Abania's second boss went from the cool elemental mechanic to generic AoE attacks
The Aery's last boss no longer has Estinien's RP
Practically every boss now just jumps back to the center by itself invalidating the tank's role completely

Duty Support has now made every required ARR to SB dungeon a McDonald's hamburger, mass-produced, streamlined, and they all taste the same.

[Saraide]

That dumbing down is deliberate in itself. None of these mechanics were complicated. They could have made trusts be able to do them no problem. They chose not to.

[AmiableApkallu]

That dumbing down is deliberate in itself. None of these mechanics were complicated. They could have made trusts be able to do them no problem. They chose not to.

Alternatively, SE could have chosen to make encounters play out differently with players vs. trusts. There's already a precedent for this [minor EW spoiler]:

The Lv.89 Trial starts you out with two stacks of "Willful" if you do it with a trust. You start with none if you do it with other players.

[NekoMataMata]

That dumbing down is deliberate in itself. None of these mechanics were complicated. They could have made trusts be able to do them no problem. They chose not to.

Don't know why people call it dumbing down. Castrum Abania's second boss has more mechanics now I'm pretty sure. I do miss the elemental mechanic, but the changes as a whole on it are a weird outlier compared to the other two.

[Saraide]

Don't know why people call it dumbing down. Castrum Abania's second boss has more mechanics now I'm pretty sure. I do miss the elemental mechanic, but the changes as a whole on it are a weird outlier compared to the other two.

Whatever you want to call it, there is no way it was necessary to remove the elemental tower mechanic to accomodate trusts.

[Sove92]

Whatever you want to call it, there is no way it was necessary to remove the elemental tower mechanic to accomodate trusts.

No, it was changed because average df people can't read anymore nor use any sort of thinking ("hmm everyone went to that circle, nah it's probaly nothing"). You were typically hard carrying at least one player in that fight. If a mechanic isn't immediately apparent from a visual alone, it's too hard for a story dungeon, basically.

[ReynTime]

Imagine deciding all your level design should be made for your crappy bots instead of players...

Copperbell is a lot better now though.

Other than being more dungeons for players to do, the Hard dungeons didn't really bring a new form of content to the game. "Hard" was just a way saying "this is intended for level cap players".

I'm also curious about what you have in mind when you say a dungeon shouldn't just be "trash, boss, trash, boss". That's pretty much been the dungeon standard in every MMORPG I've played. Sometimes there were different routes to take but in the end they were still just "trash, boss, trash, boss".

Hard mode dungeons had different gimmicks compared to the originals. Tam-Tara hard has a very different direction compared to normal, Wanderer's Palace Hard doesn't feature stealth and has a different main mechanic etc...
And narratively they were interesting because it made dungeons feel less like they were frozen in time. It was cool seeing what became of them since your last time.

[Tanis_Ebonhart]

That dumbing down is deliberate in itself. None of these mechanics were complicated. They could have made trusts be able to do them no problem. They chose not to.

If it was easy and cost effective then they would have. Clearly that would be neither, so they did what they had to do.

And no. Shadowbringers dungeons are not "easy" for new players going through the MSQ.

[Boblawblah]

Different face, but the same ranting about things that they don't really care about vibe...Gaius?

[technole]

Yep, aside from much needed aesthetic upgrades, at the same time they smashed the hammer on anything that would make the duty support squirm. There was probably a development time and cost to this factor. Do we enhance the trusts to handle this and that, or just get on to the next 4 dungeons kind of planning.