tl;dr: this got longer than expected. Expert Roulette used to be 3 dungeons, now 2, would like if 3 dungeons again. Rambling to follow.
When I started playing in Stormblood, Expert Roulette was 3 dungeons. The Burn, St Moc's Hard, and Ghimlyt Dark. This was (and remains) the roulette I ran most often, since it gave current tomestones and decent gil. I imagine it's the same for a lot of people.
For the last few patches, though, the roulette has been two dungeons, which feels... far, far less interesting. It seems that you can scarcely go a day without seeing one of them, and it's not uncommon to get the same one two or even three days in a row. This is mind-numbing, even by roulette standards.
Obviously, the roulettes aren't the greatest or most diverse content in the game. Never have been, not intended to be. That's fine. What gets me is the (what seems like a) disproportionately massive reduction in variety when you take it from 3 dungeons down to 2.
I really quite like dungeons in this game. It's one of the reasons I still do the roulette, instead of going to hunt trains or some other way to cap tomes each week. I really liked both Heroes' Gauntlet and Matoya's Relict when they came out, but by now they've become desperately rote. I basically have my rotation mapped out like a Savage fight just through muscle memory. By the time a dungeon falls out of the roulette after two patches, I'm glad to see the back of them.
Having just one more dungeon in the roulette at a time, I think, would go a long way towards mitigating all this. You'd see each dungeon 33% less, and there'd be more variation. Currently when you queue up, you know it's going to be either the dungeon you did yesterday, or the other one. With 3 dungeons in rotation, there's a real possibility that you might get one you haven't seen for a couple of days, and that makes all the difference.
I'm not sure what the actual solution to this is. Obviously adding more dungeons per patch would be the best-case scenario - an extra dungeon every other patch would make for a clean 3 per roulette - but with the allocation of workforce and budget in ShB, Mr Yoshi-P has made it clear that's not happening. It's also the reason the roulette dropped to 2 in the first place, so I don't really see them reverting that.
The other option would be to include 3 patches worth of dungeons, but then you run into gear level limitations. Anamnesis requires 440 to enter and syncs you to max 500, meaning it and the uncapped Relict would be significantly easier than Heroes' Gauntlet, with its slightly tighter ilevel restriction (460-500). This sort of thing could encourage people ditching to avoid the 'harder' one (because there truly is no limit to how much effort some people will put in to stay 'casual'). It would also mean that you have each dungeon in the roulette for three patches total, which doesn't sound super fun.
I don't know, in short. But as someone who is pretty chill about the game and tends not to step into anything harder than the odd Extreme trial, dungeons are pretty much my main content right now. The designs of the dungeons themselves are in a pretty good space - there's things that could be improved, but generally I don't have any complaints - but the Expert Roulette is a bit sad right now.
submitted by /u/peaceloveandgames
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When I started playing in Stormblood, Expert Roulette was 3 dungeons. The Burn, St Moc's Hard, and Ghimlyt Dark. This was (and remains) the roulette I ran most often, since it gave current tomestones and decent gil. I imagine it's the same for a lot of people.
For the last few patches, though, the roulette has been two dungeons, which feels... far, far less interesting. It seems that you can scarcely go a day without seeing one of them, and it's not uncommon to get the same one two or even three days in a row. This is mind-numbing, even by roulette standards.
Obviously, the roulettes aren't the greatest or most diverse content in the game. Never have been, not intended to be. That's fine. What gets me is the (what seems like a) disproportionately massive reduction in variety when you take it from 3 dungeons down to 2.
I really quite like dungeons in this game. It's one of the reasons I still do the roulette, instead of going to hunt trains or some other way to cap tomes each week. I really liked both Heroes' Gauntlet and Matoya's Relict when they came out, but by now they've become desperately rote. I basically have my rotation mapped out like a Savage fight just through muscle memory. By the time a dungeon falls out of the roulette after two patches, I'm glad to see the back of them.
Having just one more dungeon in the roulette at a time, I think, would go a long way towards mitigating all this. You'd see each dungeon 33% less, and there'd be more variation. Currently when you queue up, you know it's going to be either the dungeon you did yesterday, or the other one. With 3 dungeons in rotation, there's a real possibility that you might get one you haven't seen for a couple of days, and that makes all the difference.
I'm not sure what the actual solution to this is. Obviously adding more dungeons per patch would be the best-case scenario - an extra dungeon every other patch would make for a clean 3 per roulette - but with the allocation of workforce and budget in ShB, Mr Yoshi-P has made it clear that's not happening. It's also the reason the roulette dropped to 2 in the first place, so I don't really see them reverting that.
The other option would be to include 3 patches worth of dungeons, but then you run into gear level limitations. Anamnesis requires 440 to enter and syncs you to max 500, meaning it and the uncapped Relict would be significantly easier than Heroes' Gauntlet, with its slightly tighter ilevel restriction (460-500). This sort of thing could encourage people ditching to avoid the 'harder' one (because there truly is no limit to how much effort some people will put in to stay 'casual'). It would also mean that you have each dungeon in the roulette for three patches total, which doesn't sound super fun.
I don't know, in short. But as someone who is pretty chill about the game and tends not to step into anything harder than the odd Extreme trial, dungeons are pretty much my main content right now. The designs of the dungeons themselves are in a pretty good space - there's things that could be improved, but generally I don't have any complaints - but the Expert Roulette is a bit sad right now.
submitted by /u/peaceloveandgames
[link] [comments]
Continue reading...