Dungeon improvements & suggestions

[ovIm]

Was it The Sunken Temple of Qarn? Where there was Wasp trash mobs that could 1-shot people if not deal with quickly?

The wasps were in more than just Qarn, but I think Qarn was the first one to introduce them. Qarn also introduced the "kill mobs on specific locations" thing which never got done again.
The level 40 guildhest "ward up" introduced enemies that had to die at roughly the same time (a mechanic that was, iirc, also never revisited)
And the Sil’dihn Subterrane had a puzzle where, when you killed a group of enemies in specific order, a special path was revealed.

Trash mobs can be more than just hp sponge obstacles, and CS3 has proven that they know how, too. They just need to be a bit more confident and don't let naysayers shun them away from doing new things occasionally.

[Shougun]

I'll bite !


Curious by what you mean by rogue like features? Can you provide an example?


Treasure-> if it can work as the participation collapses, sure (like it doesn't require 4 gods or you can never get a mount, cause it's a pure nude run or something lol).


--My thoughts on your three items:

Wonder: I think all content needs greater variance, starting with some mechanics... where possible.. taken off strict cadence (this is not going to always be possible without destroying the fight, don't do it then). Modify the trash pack make-ups and patrol patterns occasionally, including different mini-boss gimmicks (not complicated boss fights, but like one might draw in and toss, while another does high sustaining aoe damage that enhances each successful interruptible cast completed that cast faster and faster, etc). Add freak events that are even rarer and offer an extra drop treasure at the end of the dungeon. For example in the goblin dungeon there is a chance a group of goblins air drop while you're in combat, even during the boss fight (if you're not below 75% health). Those poisonous like theme'd zones may occasionally have thick miasma, which reduces healing received after taking avoidable damage (and can be lessened by jumping ). Make some of these path changing, like you enter the cave to see gunpowder trails- you notice and or already know that in some rooms that the slimes die in fire... Hmm. Leads to a mini-boss with the chance to either drop double boss chest (kill the final boss get double treasure), a unique chest with guaranteed minion / card / music (each person, game will bias to something you DON'T have), or add 25% bonus to the rewards of the run.

Totorak may have an eerie sound where those scorpion spiders start to spawn at the entrance and run to the players, increasing as the dungeon persists.. each boss increasing the rate further... to the point there are like 10-20 coming in endless waves (easy-ish to kill but their damage is not nothing). This may even include minor variations of boss mechanics (don't spend forever to make, but like the patterns can vary or they gain a new spell that functions differently), for example the gobbue that sucks you in may suck in an additional player or at lower health start to devour the hp (regenerate self hp) of the eaten player and RUN from the other surviving players. These new mechanics are not guaranteed, they just change things up (they also throw baby wrenches into addons, and maybe gives content creators more to talk about lol).

Add more potential events in later patches especially, like you can release as is, and every so often the dungeon gains newer potential tweaks. Yes, stop at a certain point lol, but at least a handful.

Fear: ...in short words (explained longer else where), reduce the power creep of gear by going horizontal-lite. If we go deeper, make savage tier gear in the same level of horizontal as the other gear with the pro being more damage BUT less defense (so mistakes are punished more, but your runs are theoretically shorter potentially and damage is a king value). This means dungeon / that kind of easier to obtain gear would tend to have more survive-ability (in that horizontal tier).

Return management choices. Like CC, or like "if I don't do this optional objective the boss will have two side cannons the whole fight and they hit like TANKS". Give TRASH skills that you memorize cause they'll ruin your day, and make you think twice about wall to wall pulls (and require more than just the tank to interrupt). The above sudden events and variations can add to this.

Treasure: Just add a glamour log... lol. I mean I know it's 'just' (not easy), but that would add huge incentive. Add minor variations to important content that is starting to dry up (internal metrics), don't do the dye thing WoW does but for example their top tier PvP / Mythic tends to have some extra minor features. Here you might think "oh cool a plant theme'd armor" and the variation added later has little flapping butterflies on blossomed flowers. Let players extract effects at the cost of X gear, for that glamour log. So you can apply fire to another sword, etc.

[Jeeqbit]

In one of the variant dungeons, there is a random chance for something different to happen. Yet I don't find that I care enough about the change. I think it would help to randomize the order of casts, but dungeon bosses don't typically have a lot of casts to begin with or they are in that order for a reason, so I'm not sure it would help shake it up much.

Player choice - well, variant dungeons showed what that would look like. Do you want to go left... or right? The regular dungeons that tried it like Sastasha, nobody explores all the different routes there (I only remember one tank doing it ever).

The best implementaton of content that induces fear of regular enemies in this game is Deep Dungeons and Field Operations, both of which left bodies everywhere when the wrong mob saw them. But this was primarily due to the fact neither of them necesarily had a tank. Although there were times in those two content types where the tank had to be "good" (tanking dragons, enemies with interrupts or mobs higher than the cap), having a tank still kinda makes it trivial for everyone else. You can say that about a lot of the game actually. If we just removed tanks it'd introduce all sorts of chaos and strategy.

Nevertheless, they did try "fear of enemies" with Criterion dungeons. In the first one, there are enemies that have all sorts of cleaves to be careful of, which make you want choose your priority carefully depending on which are giving you a hard time. Some of them also have interrupts. It was a while ago, but I recall there was also a section that involved sneaking around to carefully take out one enemy at a time, because if you got caught, it didn't go so well. It was a bit like Metal Gear Solid.

I can't imagine rewards mattering much. If there were any rewards people wanted, they'd do what they need to in order to farm them all in 1 day, then go to the forums and say "there are no rewards!"

Variants are a good example of choice rewards not mattering, since if you make all the different possible choices, you get different routes. Once you've got them all, it's done, and you go to the forums and say "there is no reason left to do this content!"

I think they could try to push Variants into an expert roulette of their own that gives as many tomestones as expert roulette. But the same problem needs to be solved with it as expert roulette: getting the same dungeon for 8 months or more is enough to cause physical nausea and it needs more variety in the actual amount of dungeons in it to be able to last that span of time.

[Ath192]

I think they could try to push Variants into an expert roulette of their own that gives as many tomestones as expert roulette. But the same problem needs to be solved with it as expert roulette: getting the same dungeon for 8 months or more is enough to cause physical nausea and it needs more variety in the actual amount of dungeons in it to be able to last that span of time.

Thats why I'm a proponent of making every dungeon a variant dungeon with a randomly chosen forced path at the beginning. Say you're dungeon design now includes 25 mechanics per boss, 5-10 variable paths and set of 10-15 different trash mobs each with a unique special ability.

At the time the dungeon finder pops, the dungeons goes RNG and "locks" into a random path, with random mobs and the bosses have a random set of their mechanic list. The dungeon will never feel the same thus keeping it fresh. It just has to be designed broadly enough that it always makes sense in the context of the MSQ.

[IceEyes]

One word, why any other system will not work in this game.

"Roulette".

U can`t make long, deep and hard dungeons because u anyway need a lot of stuff to do any day.
Players asked for simplifications because visiting them every day was becoming a routine.

The simplification and standardization of dungeons also led to the simplification and standardization of professions.
This suits the developer and the player. One likes to run around the most boring arenas, the other finds it easiest to create such battles.

I miss the days when I could visit a dungeon for a partial clear, for a different clear rating and then get a different reward, for crafting resources farm. With a deeper role-playing system, where things like ninja "hide" or magic "sleep" could be an incredibly useful option. But, I know that in this game we will never see this.

[MoofiaBossVal]

I enjoyed the boss fights of Variant dungeons and the Dawntrail boss fights. They are much more engaging than your typical dungeon boss fight. The Dawntrail dungeon bosses required you to anticipate what would happen next rather than just waiting to see the orange AoE and run out of that.

The biggest weakness of the dungeons is that they are boring outside of the boss fights. In contrast, the environments of WoW's dungeons are large enough that you can choose which trash mobs to avoid and which to engage (pre revamp Aurum Vale had this somewhat, with the first room), and terrain is more interesting such as whether or not the tank is going to park in the middle of a sludge river, or if he is going to try to push up back onto dry land (but will involve aggroing a difficult mob ontop of whatever else he has aggroed, so he might die). Or fighting mobs that have knockbacks while up on a bridge. Mobs in WoW dungeons have much more varied abilities, have abilities that must be interrupted, etc, and are generally more threatening and engaging to fight against. Whereas trash mobs in FF14 feel like boring filler.

There is also the expectations with which players enter dungeons. In FF14, most people queue for duty roullette and don't care about the dungeon experience. It is just a means to an end to get their exp or their endgame tomestones ASAP, which leads to the homogenization of the dungeons. In WoW, people PUG for M+ dungeons - and yes they want to do them fast to get score - but they are doing this dungeon content (as opposed to raiding or PvP, which are alternate paths to get the same rewards) specifically because they enjoy the dungeon experience of pathing through the levels, dodging mob patrols, fighting the dangerous trash mobs, etc. Variant dungeons not being in the duty roullete (that people just want exp/tomestones ASAP from) helps so that people go into that content with the intent that they really want to experience that dungeon's content, but again the experience outside of the boss fights is too shallow compared to WoW's. And Criterion ofcourse is really brutal with its one shot mechanics, feeling like raid prog where you die on a boss fight dozens of times and have to watch 1 hour+ long youtube videos, which is not very fun.

[BabyYoda]

Just for further explanations:

Wonder: is basically adding 2 type of event that could be cause by a player (which exist in variant dungeons) and other events happened randomly, different routes that changes the experience (no more illusion of choice).

Fear: rouge-lite/like is a game genre substance of RPG genre watch this video to explain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RERyFXXHjsU I would explain it in short give dungeons sense of danger

Treasure: If loot is valuable people will queue many times a week maybe days to just enjoy content that reward them for exploring and giving content a hard shake.

People who enjoy Rolette mainly want to dungeons to be as braindead as possible, I don't see the benefit of it tbh, if the game balanced because of a problem that devs create which is Rolette I believe there should be an another solution to increase player engagements without making content braindead

I would like to see "easy mode" for dungeons with trust for people who just want to skip content for story and playing with other 3 players online will give higher value items and points for people who want the "true dungeon experience".

[Mikey_R]

Fear: rouge-lite/like is a game genre substance of RPG genre watch this video to explain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RERyFXXHjsU I would explain it in short give dungeons sense of danger.

I don't think they were asking what a rogue like/lite is, but more, what mechanics do you want from those genres that could be implemented into dungeons to make them more interesting, ideally with examples of how it would be implemented.

[Shougun]

I don't think they were asking what a rogue like/lite is, but more, what mechanics do you want from those genres that could be implemented into dungeons to make them more interesting, ideally with examples of how it would be implemented.

Yeah, exactly this. I actually missed the response as I wasn't thinking it was to me, but since you caught it, that's what I meant exactly.

[Basteala]

Get rid of the arbitrary walls between 2 packs, or at least bring back "one of those pulls" ala Bardaam's Mettle or Mt. Gulg. Trash mobs in WoW were more stimulating. Raid trash mobs. From 2015.