Quote Originally Posted by lolnotacat View Post
One thing that has become a pretty common complaint is the 1 dungeon per patch cycle we've been dealing with for years now. It's really stagnated the game in terms of midcore content, especially considering how all dungeons are linear smash-fests with the same enemies and overall design with different veneer and bosses with the same mechanics, just slightly shuffled.

The boring, copypasted design of dungeons has even become worse with the introduction of duty support. Because of the limited ability of the NPC AIs, the mechanics have to be dumbed down as possible.

Suggestion:
I would love to see the return of hard mode dungeons to go along with the story dungeons we currently have. These dungeons could be a fair bit different from the story dungeons.

1. More difficult. This creates an expectation of something players would have to work through, with the expectation of the occasional death or wipe.
2. No Duty Support. This would allow for novel mechanics which are things the AI can't handle.
3. A testbed. Because this is designed with novel mechanics in mind, these dungeons can be used to find out what works and doesn't and can be applied to future content.
4. Testbeds mean that not only dungeon bosses and mechanics can be different, but layouts, mobs, puzzles, etc... The sky is the limit. One dungeon can entirely be a gauntlet of endless mobs that require CC. Another can be an updated variant system. A third could be a large heal check like Dreamwalker in Icecrown Citadel.
5. Increased rewards. Even if the drops are just loot we get from current dungeons, with increased drop rates to correspond with the difficulty, people would likely be happy to run them if they were fun/interesting. Even if they aren't, it's not a big deal if they're looked at as a testbed and a learning opportunity.
5. 100% Optional. The final piece is making these dungeons completely optional so less skilled players' progress isn't gated by them. Unlocking them could be done by a simple sidequest and they could be added as an additional option to duty roulette, so players can find groups.

I know it will never happen, but I can dream.
You can thank the managment of Square for putting money in Forspoken/FF7R/FF16 instead of feeding their (currently) only profitable product.

Imagine how the game would look like if those millions were spent on improving FF14.