Dungeon improvements & suggestions

[Evergrey]

I remember reading about that when I started tanking in ARR and the guides saying to mark enemies 1, 2 and 3.

I still have my 1, 2, 3 keys on the hotbar since ARR for old times sake, like a little memento.
Yes, there would be people who didn't care much about killing mobs in a certain order and used AoE's instead.
I remember I had to spam the cone AoE as a WAR to build aggro.
And with skills costing Stamina back then, making sure to keep aggro without a real Taunt skill (early on at least) meant that I spend a great time just building aggro to make sure no mob would break and attack someone else.
Which now when I'm saying this reminds me that the 1, 2, 3 was also helpful for the tank to make sure that people stayed on 1 enemy to not spread out the aggro, making it more difficult for the tank to manage the aggro & Stamina consumption.

[BigCheez]

While dungeon bosses have been good, the trash is still trash. They need to change up their formula for the trash between bosses, because just bulldozing through random groups of enemies no matter how big the group is is getting stale. They've made some interesting trash pulls in like alliance raids, and variant, and criterion dungeons, so I would like to see some of those design philosophies carry over to regular dungeons. I think forcing players to change up their tactics a will lead to more memorable dungeons, but not like how Origenics was handled.

Another thing that will make dungeons better is dyable gear. Just please stop with the undyable dungeon gear.

The annoying thing is that they have done interesting things with trash mobs in the past and just decided in Ew that they weren't going to do that any more for some reason.

[Evergrey]

The annoying thing is that they have done interesting things with trash mobs in the past and just decided in Ew that they weren't going to do that any more for some reason.

I can't remember all encounters, but one I do remember one specific that I liked.
Was it The Sunken Temple of Qarn? Where there was Wasp trash mobs that could 1-shot people if not deal with quickly?

I enjoyed it simply because it added a priority list of targets making those engagements "feel" different than others.
It was a pretty simple yet effective way to add a new way to tackle a trash encounter.

[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.

[CaedemSanguis]

they should add more randoms trash mobs with actual mechanics (kill this one first cause enrage, this one will do a spread/share, this one needs to be silenced, this one will have X/Y/Z mech)

they should make bosses with only "execution type" mechanics, and if they do "dance type" mechanics it should be very creative (no aoe/share/spread/rotating aoe/bump/etc)


the should make more open dungeons, with incentives to do side quests/paths in the dungeon

[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".

[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.

[Purrnauskis]

Making them actual dungeons without arbitrary walls that just NTR you from having any actual fun

[Valence]

Boss fights are the same old boring.