The dissonance of design in Deep Dungeons

[Valence]

This thread is probably going to sound peculiar but I do believe that thinking about what prevents me to fully enjoy deep dungeons, which have been a generally beloved piece of ff14 content since their introduction, is the dissonance between job and pve battle design and the actual deep dungeons.

Deep dungeons do not rely on long winded dances or rotations to keep up while completing mechanics. They do rely on something close to your classic RPG dungeon where progressing through is threatened by traps, patrols, unsuspected enemies or groups of enemies. Killing most enemies doesn't take a full rotation to do. It's more about fragmented little encounters, some of which can be lethal, some of which can snowball or turn very wrong, but except for bosses (which are the least interesting part of deep dungeons in my opinion and just feel like normal bosses), it's all but about using your pve kit with an actual rotation.

But that's where it starts feeling like the design of deep dungeons don't quite mesh with the rest of the pve systems, because said pve systems aren't designed with something like deep dungeons in mind. They're primarily developed to fit within the narrow frame of pve standard dungeons and raid/trial bosses (especially the latter, thus why AoE in dungeons is underdeveloped in comparison as well).

What matters in deep dungeons is crowd control (which is useless in standard pve), defensives, different types of damage profiles, and generally since everything is at least semi random, you end up with different situations and contexts where parts of your toolkit aren't back up online, but some are, perhaps you need to kite something or crowd control, perhaps you need to heal, point being that what you'll end up doing especially when playing solo is improvising and adjusting a lot, and this is why I do feel that the pve job sets we do have do not feel like they fit the model completely there.

This made me think of pvp, and if you remember up until mid SB, pvp jobs were just based on the pve sets and just added a couple of pvp specific "role actions". Then it was changed so that pvp could benefit from designs that were specifically addressed for it and not just came copypasted from pve. Now you'll tell me "oh but I know you, you're going to praise pvp job design again and you're just omega biased", and perhaps I am, but I also do feel that deep dungeons at their core share a lot more with pvp than with classic pve that is especially those days just a DDR ballet with long winded rotations and bloated toolkits to make up the full music sheets for it. Realistically deep dungeons could benefit more, in my opinion, from sets similar to pvp sets, with a lot more unique effects and identities for each job precisely because nothing is really scripted in stone with only damage as a metric. Why do pvp sets work well in semi random contexts? Because they're not about memorizing long winded motifs applied on top of mechanics, they're about making the correct decisions at any instant to face different threats that do require different solutions and answers.

Do I want them to make yet another set of actions specifically just for deep dungeons? Probably not, especially since pvp already has another one of its own. But I can't help but wonder how much more enjoyable deep dungeons could be with actual kits designed for that type of gameplay, and I do genuinely think from my experience since their introduction back in HW, that this specific piece of content has always been almost universally beloved by the community with very little negativity about it.

[Mawlzy]

Hmmm. Interesting ideas. I've been playing some Bozja and HoH recently, largely because what else is there to do.

In deep dungeons specifically, I see your point about the PvE kit being a bit incongruent with the engagements. I usually run WAR and MCH which are my PvE mains, and PCT because it's sort of OP. I hadn't been conscious of the main point you raise, but I think what I'm doing in practice is basically using a subset of the PvE kit (already trimmed by level cap). Standard PvE rotations/openers are pretty much irrelevant, as you say.

Agreed developing DD-specific kits is likely not the answer, which is why I mentioned Bozja. Maybe the way to make DDs feel more unique is to incorporate something like Lost Actions? The pomanders sort of work like essences, so it wouldn't be a huge lift for the devs since they have the framework already.

[Valence]

Maybe but the problem is that the pve kits we have are too bloated and too long winded already. The only way to make them more suited to the whole thing would literally be to have them as pvp toolkits, really. Lost Actions while interesting don't add anything to address that problem. If anything Lost Actions suffer from the same issue in that they're just complementary to the base pve sets, come on top of it without truly changing the way a rotation is played, and when you're not literally running delubrum bosses, you're left like in deep dungeons, or even fates or on the overworld, with kits that just do not belong to the same game. If anything, really, the outlier is... standard pve design and trial bosses, which belong to a different genre/game.

[Mawlzy]

Maybe but the problem is that the pve kits we have are too bloated and too long winded already. The only way to make them more suited to the whole thing would literally be to have them as pvp toolkits, really. Lost Actions while interesting don't add anything to address that problem. If anything Lost Actions suffer from the same issue in that they're just complementary to the base pve sets, come on top of it without truly changing the way a rotation is played, and when you're not literally running delubrum bosses, you're left like in deep dungeons, or even fates or on the overworld, with kits that just do not belong to the same game. If anything, really, the outlier is... standard pve design and trial bosses, which belong to a different genre/game.

Would certainly like to see some button compression.

[Arohk]

Would certainly like to see some button compression.

You see, i am always saying the jobs are button bloated, there is no real reason to have seperate AOE skills that do the exact same as your sigle target skills but look different, there are now a lot of abilities that do damage +40% damage to nearby enemies insead of having an alternate AOE version.

If this were the case for all abilities there was more room for self sustain or crowd control abilities in the toolkit.

When i comes to deep dungeons, how is someone without and Interrupt able to deal with Mimiks? You are guaranteed to get hit by Infatuation Accursed Pox.

[Mawlzy]

You see, i am always saying the jobs are button bloated, there is no real reason to have seperate AOE skills that do the exact same as your sigle target skills but look different, there are now a lot of abilities that do damage +40% damage to nearby enemies insead of having an alternate AOE version.

If this were the case for all abilities there was more room for self sustain or crowd control abilities in the toolkit.

When i comes to deep dungeons, how is someone without and Interrupt able to deal with Mimiks? You are guaranteed to get hit by Infatuation Accursed Pox.

Agreed.

This of course reflects a bigger issue in PvE and the job kits. The player subset that drives job design is the high-end raiding community. They lobbied for the two-minute rotation. They are the ones who live and die on the damage they inflict as a % of a theoretical maximum. This has produced job homogenization and a dungeon design where the devs counter player ability with faster mechanics, and in which the safe spots have gotten progressively smaller. I have never come across such unimaginative PvE, and it's doubly infuriating that it basically came out of the demands of the noisy players.

We don't need ten different buttons to inflict damage on the boss, unless one believes the zenith of PvE design is hitting those buttons in the correct order over and over again. Dynamic fights in which the player has to react to mechanics in ways other than running to a safe spot are far more interesting.

What makes all this doubly bizarre is the devs really like emphasizing crowd control and DoT in PvP, where it is far less interesting since it is now players who are getting mired in molasses.

[Valence]

You drag mimics to a wedge/corner, and when they start casting you just break LoS, which is the same than you do with a lot of other mob lethal abilities. Infatuation is also a long cast.

Anyway, having played PCT quite a bit in there now, I feel that it's probably one of the best suited job toolkit design for deep dungeons unironically, with all of its adjustable moving parts (and of course repainting between every fight...). I haven't tried VPR but I'd assume it's actually very similar. See, this can be definitely put on a scale depending on the job, and some jobs like BRD will just want to gouge their eyes out with how the songs work for example. It's with that type of content that you can see how all the thought process for job design in XIV pve is fully focused around standard pve duties (trials, dungeons less so), but not on everything else: overworld/fates, deep dungeons, diadem/eureka/bozja, questing, etc...

[Arohk]

You drag mimics to a wedge/corner, and when they start casting you just break LoS, which is the same than you do with a lot of other mob lethal abilities. Infatuation is also a long cast.

that never worked for me, they just cast with infinite range and through walls.

[Valence]

Maybe I'm mixing it up with other mobs.

[Arohk]

Maybe I'm mixing it up with other mobs.

i just tried it out, you can't los the mimics, they hit you through walls.