People that say dungeons are too easy...

[Lium]

And there's the contrast: XIV has no difficulty levels beyond the normals. It's less of a steamroll than WoW's normals (minus the occasional over-/better-tuned Timewalking while leveling), but there's no other options.

This is partly true. But WoW dungeons from vanilla and TBC required CC, strategy good group composition and tanks would only pull a pack at a time. Sometimes you would even have to pull strategically or risk aggroing another pack which would result in a wipe.

And classic dungeons like Blackrock Depths and Maraudon could take hours to complete fully.

Wrath of the Lich King is what started the YOLO pull everything, with dungeons being super easy, barely an inconvenience. Players, similar to what is happening now in this community, began complaining that dungeons were way too easy. So Blizzard responded in the next expansion Cataclysm, by making dungeons a lot more challenging.

Everyone hated it.

So, they went back to the YOLO pull snoozefest and that's where they've been ever since. If you want a greater challenge, you have to run mythics. Maybe players here want something similar. I will say this may be a case of forum posters not being what the majority of the playerbase actually wants.

[HikariKurosawa]

If you dont use mitigation in ffxiv dungeons you die, it's weird that people act like you dont have to use cooldowns for proper pulls. Maybe people are pulling one pack at a time and wondering why it is easy?

[Jeeqbit]

If you dont use mitigation in ffxiv dungeons you die, it's weird that people act like you dont have to use cooldowns for proper pulls. Maybe people are pulling one pack at a time and wondering why it is easy?

We are talking about tank busters. Not trash pulls.

[Mayhemmer]

If you want a greater challenge, you have to run mythics. Maybe players here want something similar. I will say this may be a case of forum posters not being what the majority of the playerbase actually wants.

In theory, I would like the return of optional dungeons, and for said dungeons to be designed to be more challenging. But then, I'll just get told to go do criterion or something, which is besides the point and doesn't address the desire for more interesting dungeons.

Someone in another thread brought up the idea of "challenge" content, and maybe that's something they could do. Rotating challenge dungeons with interesting modifiers and increased rewards. Nothing on Unreal or Criterion levels, but more than what dungeons provide now.

[LioJen]

That's an interesting thought.
Dragon Quest XI has challenge modifiers you can manually activate, such as stronger monsters, party wiped out if protag dies (could be a randomly selected player every run that needs to stay alive). Tie increased rewards per each modifier activated and you could have some interesting content again. Would I be the only one tempted to run a dungeon with max difficulty if I could gain 2 levels from it instead of a fraction of one?

[Striker44]

And there's the contrast: XIV has no difficulty levels beyond the normals. It's less of a steamroll than WoW's normals (minus the occasional over-/better-tuned Timewalking while leveling), but there's no other options.

Except it does now. There are both Criterion and Criterion Savage.

This is partly true. But WoW dungeons from vanilla and TBC required CC, strategy good group composition and tanks would only pull a pack at a time. Sometimes you would even have to pull strategically or risk aggroing another pack which would result in a wipe.

And classic dungeons like Blackrock Depths and Maraudon could take hours to complete fully.

I think this is another "sign of the times" thing. Everyone was a lot newer at MMO's and dungeons back then. Theorycrafting was much less common, there were less abilities, less variety. Put simply, we as a playerbase were novices who sucked compared to now. Look at what happened when WoW "Classic" first released. People didn't play it "like they did" back in the Classic days. They played it with the current player mentality, experience, min-maxing, and skill. People also had time back then. Your typical gamer in the BRD/Mara days was a teenager or college kid with plenty of time on his hands. Fast forward to today, and those same human beings remain the primary MMO demographic...except now they have families, full-time careers, and nowhere near the ability to spend hours putting together a group to do one dungeon. The "newness" has worn off, and our lives are more complex. I think a lot of folks around here remember those days fondly but can't accept that time has moved on.

[Gemina]

God I wish this were the case. You can get hit by sooooooooooo much and live through it. The punishment only feels real after you have a few vuln stacks and even then a healer can just top you off with like 1 tap. In expert dungeons it's ironically worse because after you see a mechanic once, it's so telegraphed and scripted that you'll know exactly where to be to never ever get hit by it again. And if you don't know where to be, odds are the other people in your party will, so you can just follow them and be fine.

This is mostly accurate. I can't think any mechanic in any dungeon that one-shots you, and mechanics that used to do this have had their fights adjusted so they don't anymore. What I have noticed with dungeons is that they try to combine unavoidable damage with mechanics to dodge so that one or the other will kill the player if they are hit by both of them without healer attention. This is referring to only the non-tank jobs. Tanks can soak a ton of damage in dungeons, especially against bosses. Only large pulls threaten them and force them to use their mitigation to survive. They can solo a lot of bosses, particularly those that break off their autos for long periods of time to perform their mechanics.

I suppose answering the question of "Are dungeons too easy" can be answered by could they be made to be more difficult? What I think is that the earlier example of telegraphed attack in combination with unavoidable damage is fine. Because the threat level is there. Even if you are well aware of it, you still have to respect it otherwise you die. What I strongly dislike are mechanics that do not need to be respected and can be ignored. Examples of this are dungeon boss TBs, knockbacks that don't kill you if you fail it, raidwides that make healers laugh because how much they tickle, spread AoEs that don't kill both players if they stack them, tanks being able to survive a stack marker solo, etc. Simply put, a mechanic is not a mechanic if it can be ignored.

Another issue, which I pointed out in my recent thread about ilv sync is making once relevant mechanics irrelevant through ilv bloat. This issue is most prevalent in alliance raids. Even the current ones. ARs still count as dungeons, they are just 24-man dungeons. They are most certainly too easy and should be synced without question.

The most recent expert dungeon sets a pretty good bar. All three bosses have respectable mechanics that cannot be ignored, even the tank has to respect the majority of them. However, I think a tank can still solo all three of them if he never takes unnecessary damage, and that's something I strongly dislike, which is why I say tanks should not be able to survive a stack marker solo, and at least one boss in each dungeon should have them. If not all of them.

[PyurBlue]

If you dont use mitigation in ffxiv dungeons you die, it's weird that people act like you dont have to use cooldowns for proper pulls. Maybe people are pulling one pack at a time and wondering why it is easy?

It's dungeon dependent, but mitigation cooldowns are not strictly necessary. Tanks aren't even strictly necessary. I've healed through CDless tanks and DPS pulls in endgame dungeons.

The most recent expert dungeon sets a pretty good bar. All three bosses have respectable mechanics that cannot be ignored, even the tank has to respect the majority of them. However, I think a tank can still solo all three of them if he never takes unnecessary damage, and that's something I strongly dislike, which is why I say tanks should not be able to survive a stack marker solo, and at least one boss in each dungeon should have them. If not all of them.

It's not a bad dungeon, but I've been through clears with no healers without losing DPS to bosses since week one. It still seems a little low risk for the Expert category.

[Commander_Justitia]

Just to give an example.

Labyrinth of the Ancients was designed to be fought with ilvl50 gear or slightly above it. It gets synced to ilvl130.
I played it at ilvl130 back then, it was easy but still a (small) challenge, you had to do a few mechanics more.
Nowadays everything is so tuned up, that you could do a minilvl run, and it wouldn't feel much different than the ilvl130 run from back then. Tankbusters are barely taking away 5% of HP, if they aren't absorbed by the aoe shield from your healer. There is 0 engagement with the content necessary, other than to stand on a platform.

The other day I got the rabanastre 24 raid, people ignored the sand adds and like 17 died, well mostly. Some healers survived and managed to resurrect others, heal lb3 got ready minutes later right before adds spawned. People were having fun coordinating things, newbies got excited that we managed to recover it and to actually see a useful heal lb3 for once, heals were clutch, tanks could show off their mitigation skills etc. It is situations like that, that are fun.

Disregarding the stat adjustment, the game only got easier with time. It has become so easy that healers, don't really have to heal anymore in some dungeons. Mechanics that were shown by animations are now telegraphed. You could increase the damage of tankbuster by 200% and in most dungeons they would still stay above 50% HP without mitigation.

Maybe roulette should get a minimum ilvl option that will give 100% more exp and rewards for the daily. So people are slower, but can enjoy the content more like it was meant originally.

[Denji]

the dungeons aren't easy; the issue is that the bosses melt like hot butter in ffxiv at lower levels so that most of the time we never get to actually see all the mechanics unless something is seriously wrong.