Next Exploration Area

[Valence]

With Eureka, I hated having to spam kill mobs to spawn the FATEs. Having to level up some arbitrary elemental level. Having to spin the wheel for bonuses and resistances. Having to farm items to make buffs. The buffs themselves were great, but the gambling aspect of it was terrible. Also, level loss and experience loss in general. It's terrible, and I don't care if it was meant to replicate 11. 11 sucked. There I said it.

In Bozja, it was fixed mostly. The experience loss was still there and the arbitrary leveling and the gamble buffs, but most of the annoyances were fixed, and yet it still sucked. It was bland and boring. The instanced dungeons were toxic as hell.

I've been asking that question to myself for years between both eureka and bozja. Eureka had incredibly tedious and annoying systems to deal with, but still provided some sense of progression with elemental level and a serious lethal threat level that forced people to move in groups else you'd die, or you could actually move around on your own, express your skill that way, and try not to die stupidly. It truly put the v into Player versus Environment. But you couldn't progress with your friends well if they were a different level. Everything was tedious. Bozja on the other hand streamlined a lot of the tediousness but removed all progression feeling and most of the threat on the maps, which made everything boring and barely more interesting that normal maps on the overworld: you had mobs moving around, fates, and hunt mobs, just a little more dangerous. That was it. Both shared however the tedium of grinding mobs to spawn NMs/CEs. The only saving grace of Bozja was that we had actual story every levels, and it also had CLL and Dalriada. I'm purposely not counting Delubrum because Delubrum was not bad, but a lot more standard pve in comparison.

It's like SE is properly unable to make overworld content actually engaging, and if they want to introduce progression through an area they just utterly fail at it and have given up on the idea. It's been 4 exploratory areas since the beginning, and not a single one proved engaging beyond their endgame for eureka and bozja.

PotD gives me new floor layouts and whatnot every time I run it. That doesn't make each run any more "fresh" or "interesting" than the last; it's still the same, basic experience.

CLL and Dalriada are mostly just the usual dungeon sequence of trash mobs and dodge-the-AoE bosses. Their only "new" schtick is making everyone split into parties at a few points in the run. (And it wouldn't surprise me if that's actually "new to FFXIV but old hat in other MMOs".)

Because PotD only got half of the formula right: the mobs tend to be interesting, and some of their mechanics and counters have a good, solid base, but it doesn't push it far enough to make you feel good about countering them when they do matter, and they're too static and predictable beyond the few patrols. This combined to the fact that potd has no environment design to accompany this means that it's still very similar to what you have on the overworld of exploratory zones where it just boils down to dodging mobs or pressing two buttons to kill one that you couldn't dodge or have to kill. Orthos made it even more bland because they removed most of what made potd fun to replace it with modern mechanics with AoEs and shapes.

CLL and Dalriada had absolutely unusual environment layouts, trash mobs were varied, had actual unique profiles and mechanics, and different from each other, and the dungeons had actual objectives to complete, and some of them were semi randomized. The progression through certain sections and hallways like in Dalriada notably had to have multiple groups coordinate between each other and the amount of casualties this caused into the lazer corridors was absolutely humongous. If that's normal dungeon design to you, then I don't know what to tell you. Even some bosses had more things to do than just fighting them. However, if we want even more, sure, I'm down for it, far from me to disagree.