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.
Continue reading...
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.
Continue reading...