Some of my own personal feedback on the game

[Bonoki]

EO was dead on arrival for several reasons.

All of which can be mostly summed up to rewards like anything else in this game.

-EO doesn't have a quick leveling method attached like the previous two did. Even if it did, the difficulty spike makes it hard to farm especially solo.
-The rewards themselves are all pretty meh in general.
-Nothing notable or worth lots of money from the highest tier of sacks.
-Lower-tier sacks are mostly all the same things that fill the sacks from the last two deep dungeons.
-Mixed opinions on the titles. Some have argued that EO has the least attractive titles of the three.

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Now that we discussed the rewards, let's discuss the tedium of the actual content.

EO is in my opinion, more difficult than the other two but for the wrong reasons. Some would say that it's easier than the other two because everything is "Just do mechanics". Whereas the other two are cherry-picking mobs while you mitigate yourself from dying to autos. The mobs in EO don't hit very hard but they do often have one-shot run ending AoEs. Some of them start as early as the first set of floors! Normally this wouldn't be a bad thing if it wasn't for the fact that everything in EO is a damaged sponge. Again starting with the first set of floors. It can take 40mins to close to the whole hour for every set of floors while playing solo. This makes the early floors even more boring than in HoH. At least you can speedrun a bit and feel like a powerhouse before things get tougher. But in EO solo, you have to go slow and steady immediately. I have had several runs end on just 21 - 30 due to a minor mistake that ended my game didn't want to go back because it takes nearly an hour just to do the first 20 floors. It's boring because it drags out. Then you start to turn your brain off and wanna netflix and chill the first 20 floors but then die again because you zoned out. Challenge is a good thing, but the first 30 floors being damaged sponges wasn't a good move. Sure the first 30 in HoH are boring too but it feels more engaging because you can speedrun. EO just feels like you're auto-attacking things for the first 20 floors. It takes too long to get interesting. Then the dread monsters were a good idea that was poorly executed. Killing them generally isn't worth your time or a promander unless it's convenient.

What Deep Dungeon needs is more variety which makes it different from the others. Have a new-looking floor layout every 10 floors that isn't just a color reskinned. Looking at caves almost every time they do caves. The boss fights were a lot more fun this time at least though. But the biggest thing is that we need different Glooms and positive effects that we aren't used to seeing. New pomanders, like a lot more. Like I should go into Deep Dungeon with an entire brand new kit of pomanders to find. Not just three of them swapped out. Deep Dungeon itself needs to have a more creative layout design too. Instead of being boxes on a grid, they should layer on top of each other once in a while connected by stairs. Or have some of the room filled with water that transitions into swimming animation to act as a sort of danger to the player since they lose the ability to do actions in the water. Maybe add a different type of chest like Bronze, Silver, Gold, and include Platinum. Even if Platinum did something basic like give you the benefits of all three in a single chest. (Potshard + Increase Aetherpool + provide a pomander).

I also think it'd be cool for solo play if bosses had two chests that spawned after a boss that dropped chests that won't turn into mimics to ready for the next set of floors. Like if we beat the level 20 boss, then two additional Gold Chests appear before leaving the duty. Something like that.

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As far as engaging though, I can't see much that can improve with DD to do that. We have several communities and streamers dedicated to Deep Dungeon. They have entire careers around it and even speed-running them. No matter what SE does, DD will always get optimized in the first two or three days as a result. We're never going to get that Necromancer moment back that we use to have in Heavensward. The community is way to good at the game now for that to ever be relived.

[FarelTheGecko]

I think a lot of discourse comes from different groups of people.
- some people want the content to be most challenging
- casuals want things as easy as possible
- and in-between is the midcore group

We all want something specific, and in the end its not possible to please everyone. However in my opinion, the midcore base has been left in the dust in particular this expansion. EO is a few notches too challenging, and even if people disliked Eureka and Bozja, the relics were content that kept us busy for a long time. Grindy as it may have been, it was a different thing to do. Bozja felt like it did plenty of things to make it easier to deal, with certain steps having alternatives outside of the fronts, for those who really didn't want to deal with it (later they threw that out the window, but hey, they considered it at least). But I'd even take the HV/ARR rekucs over the Manderville weapons. At least it'd be a concrete goal to aim for. It was something to say "I worked to get this", and feel proud of it, as opposed to "Eh, the tomestones just came together without looking"

[Bonoki]

I have been thinking about it more and will continue to do so, but I think Deep Dungeon could benefit from difficulty filters. For example,

-Deep Dungeon
-Deep Dungeon (Savage)

Deep Dungeon is easier and savage is harder of course. Possibly locking the titles and Gold sacks in Savage with an increased rate of potshards, aetherpool, ect; whereas normal mode can be far more beneficial for generic Aetherpool and Potshard farming at a slower rate but faster to comb through floors.

This is just a general proposal and other things can be worked out around it. The main problem is that the "Savage" rewards may not be good enough. We see this problem with Varient/Critrieon already. For that reason, maybe we shouldn't do this afterall.

[Colt47]

Endwalker was very weird as an expansion, since the way it progressed as gear level increased felt more like the extreme ends of the spectrum in difficulty just kept increasing. They had everything about right at the start of it with the first savage tier and the earlier extremes. Then they introduced the side content with variant dungeons and criterion dungeons, which ended up being the poster child of the two extreme ends of content since just about everything else followed suite. They had more ultimates released this expansion than any other, the difficulty of savage was all over the place which was kind of a weird experience to be frank. The extreme fights felt like they kept rotating between being unfair body checks and rick rolls. And then Island Sanctuary got introduced which was basically like Warlords of Draenor with the mobile phone log in and zone out thing, alongside Eureka Orthos that ended up feeling more like gambling than actually learning anything due to the enemy mechanics.

The end result was that either someone was into the savage content and smashed their face into a wall, or was part of the patch player group that clean sweeped the super easy content, unsubbed, and then played Darktide or I guess Palworld now while waiting for the next set of content to drop. Criterion didn't even have a shot at surviving as a real thing and probably will go down as being as bad as Diadem 1.0.

[AyumiCosplayGlam]

What it boils down to is that Square Enix cannot identify what is the difficulty most people enjoy and what the average player skill is.
This has been a glaring issue for a while now but they got away with it so far because:
A: people had a huge backlog of stuff to do from earlier expansions and fill the void when we had bad patch
B: Aside from a few occasions, things have been falling under the "too easy" category (although too easy is still better than too hard because its at least more accessible)

Endwalker was full of inconsistent difficulty from day 1.
-Infamous MSQ quest which was too hard for a lot of people.
-The lvl 85 crystalmommy trial is to this day has wipes or almost wipes more often than not.
-Extremes are all over the place, sometimes its way too hard, sometimes its just something that exists i guess.
-Island Sanctuary is full casual, its progression is timegated heavily to stretch it out as much as possible.
-Ultimates, same difficulty issues. You just cannot say with a straight face that UwU and ToP are both ultimate levels of difficulty, you just cant.
-Variant/ Criterion again, same thing. Variant is just a chore you do 12 times almost falling asleep by the end and Criterion is just way too big of a jump in difficulty and its not even rewarding in top of that.
-On Eureka Orthos i cannot really say much except you either fall asleep or you are dead because a mob turned around and cleaved.
-Alliance Raids...something is just absolutely wrecked that thing. I am not kidding, i actually have to try dying in all 3 wings of the alliance raids now, it wasnt hard to begin with and now as we got more item levels, we dont even see half of the mechanics anymore. As much as i hated how just 1 troll could cause wipes over and over with the scales in Aglaia, its just sad that we dont even see the scales anymore.

Square is either under or overestimating the playerbase and that is the sole reason why people say there is no midcore content, because there is none.
You either fall asleep or drop dead instantly.

There is no something like Bozja, that requires enough time invested and is engaging enough, it forces you to pay just enough attention while also not overly punishing and gives decent rewards.

[OdinelStarrei]

What it boils down to is that Square Enix cannot identify what is the difficulty most people enjoy and what the average player skill is.
This has been a glaring issue for a while now but they got away with it so far because:
A: people had a huge backlog of stuff to do from earlier expansions and fill the void when we had bad patch
B: Aside from a few occasions, things have been falling under the "too easy" category (although too easy is still better than too hard because its at least more accessible)

Endwalker was full of inconsistent difficulty from day 1.
-Infamous MSQ quest which was too hard for a lot of people.
-The lvl 85 crystalmommy trial is to this day has wipes or almost wipes more often than not.
-Extremes are all over the place, sometimes its way too hard, sometimes its just something that exists i guess.
-Island Sanctuary is full casual, its progression is timegated heavily to stretch it out as much as possible.
-Ultimates, same difficulty issues. You just cannot say with a straight face that UwU and ToP are both ultimate levels of difficulty, you just cant.
-Variant/ Criterion again, same thing. Variant is just a chore you do 12 times almost falling asleep by the end and Criterion is just way too big of a jump in difficulty and its not even rewarding in top of that.
-On Eureka Orthos i cannot really say much except you either fall asleep or you are dead because a mob turned around and cleaved.
-Alliance Raids...something is just absolutely wrecked that thing. I am not kidding, i actually have to try dying in all 3 wings of the alliance raids now, it wasnt hard to begin with and now as we got more item levels, we dont even see half of the mechanics anymore. As much as i hated how just 1 troll could cause wipes over and over with the scales in Aglaia, its just sad that we dont even see the scales anymore.

Square is either under or overestimating the playerbase and that is the sole reason why people say there is no midcore content, because there is none.
You either fall asleep or drop dead instantly.

There is no something like Bozja, that requires enough time invested and is engaging enough, it forces you to pay just enough attention while also not overly punishing and gives decent rewards.

I think you can isolate this even further down to mechanics taking a much higher priority to job complexity. I still think the sweet spot for difficulty is TEA, because you could have complex jobs dealing with a (somewhat) complex fight. Now the jobs are completely ruined, but the fights are gone on the complete other side of the scale. Things like TOP might be out of line, and I really hate saying that, but it's true. I am starting to think that fights that are like TOP are so overboard they are creating mini-Gordias situations by imploding statics left and right and are stratifying the raid scene. Like in a "If you aren't overperforming, you're absolute trash." kind of way, there's no middle ground, because that's how the late endgame fights are being designed, be perfect, or be dead. It just burns people out too fast. Maybe my experiences post-DSR have been just really bad and I'm an outlier, but I've got too many stories of people dragging themselves through the game equivalent of shattered glass just to get a clear. I don't even put up with it anymore. Think of it from a newer player who just killed Zeromus EX, and wants to get into the Savage Tier.

They walk into P9S, and while they don't have a hard DPS check, they DO get fairly strict positioning requirements, swaps, memorization, flexes, and TWO limit cuts. Assume they are playing SMN or something and everyone is just saying "Why are you struggling, your job is so easy you should have plenty of brain power for this."


Meanwhile the core game stagnates. Encounters have way too much weight on the scale of combat enjoyment now, which is why when you get something like Abyssos, the entire tier becomes a toss up, or the 24-man, people just fall asleep because they're completely unengaged, things die before what few mechanics even happen. What an embarrassment.

Jobs should be more fun to play, move some of that fight punishment to job punishment, and fights might wanna ease off on the body checks and highly rehearsed synchronized swimming. Blows my mind we have fights like P7 and P8 exist in the same tier, when we got Barb in that same patch.