DPS Simplification - Just do Ultimates!

[Ayalu]

Do people actually miss old totorak?

Don't get me wrong, I do understand the want for deeper and more intricate dungeons, but that model is definitely not something that you want for dailies and repeatable content... Totorak was just miserable to go through again and again. Dungeons with more chaos and some randomized events or paths, sure, but mazes with keys to find and use? What a pain.

And I'm not even talking about the camera nightmare it was.

It was just a handy example of the dungeon simplification.
Of course one can do it way better than totorak itself. But "mechanics" can be a bit more interessting than "Dodge the orange glowing danger area"

Like Ramiee said V&C Dungeons could have been more puzzle dungeon and experiment for more interresting dungeon design than what they have been at the end. ^^

[Valence]

It was just a handy example of the dungeon simplification.
Of course one can do it way better than totorak itself. But "mechanics" can be a bit more interessting than "Dodge the orange glowing danger area"

Like Ramiee said V&C Dungeons could have been more puzzle dungeon and experiment for more interresting dungeon design than what they have been at the end. ^^

I do like the current Variant dungeons, they're chill to do solo on my own and if I want to figure out all the solutions on my own there is a decent amount of them that aren't that obvious. Now we can argue that we want more solutions, more paths, harder puzzles, easier puzzles and whatnot, and my main gripe with them right now is mostly that they always follow the same formulaic patterns, which is not always something you'd want for all your content imo, especially content like this, and that once you have done all paths, you're essentially done with it, which is a lot of development resource for now much replayability.

However in their current state, Variants are great and provide something chill and unique.

I'd definitely like however to get roulette/daily modes of those where the puzzles are removed, and where you'd get random path each time, which would really alleviate the heavy repetition of roulettes over time, while introducing some chaos and rng to make runs more unique from each other. And if more normal dungeons could also follow that pattern, that'd be dope.

I actually wouldn't mind that, I'm of the opinion that the original Blackrock Depths in WoW is still the best dungeon ever made in an MMO.

One big reason I can see it not work in XIV is simply the game's loot system.
BRD was so good because no matter what path you took there was usually something useful to get from one of the bosses, so your time was well-spent.

XIV on the other hand rarely has anything useful to gain out of dungeons besides the currency/exp at the end, the gear is almost always worse than what you already have and in general not very interesting, it's all just stat sticks.
When the only worthwhile thing to gain from a dungeon is the tomestones/exp on completion it quickly becomes a game of "how fast can I finish this?"

I understand that for a lot of people dungeons are chores that they want to finish as fast as possible, and that's probably a huge failing either on the community itself or the design of the game in general, but I do like dungeons and don't give a crap if the dungeon takes longer, actually if stuff doesn't melt instantly I can actually take advantage of my DPS job that can't always insta burst like tanks and healers. All of this even if today less so due to the abysmally bland battle system we have. I'd love more little random events and alternative paths (attributed at random, else the players would always assign one the meta path and never go for the others), but if I play dungeons and I don't think I'm assuming too much by saying this, a lot of people as well do it for the standard dungeon progress clearing trash and killing bosses.

If I want to find keys, solve puzzles and whatnot, I'll go play V&C instead. Puzzles where the solution is known and fixed are only fun the first couple of times and that's the huge weakness in the replayability of Variants. Puzzles that are randomized on the other hand are closer to deep dungeons than carefully crafted standard dungeons, which still doesn't fit the bill here in this particular case in my opinion.

I also have no idea what Blackrock is, I never played wow and do not intend to.