Should dungeon difficulty be adjusted?Follow

Later on there are 8-man Dungeons as well, everything endgame is 8-man (outside of one or two really). Most of them through the duty finder as well.

The amount of monsters and stuff to do in most early dungeons dont warrant 8 people to enter. It will just make things chaotic.

Even if you yourself get instant queue's now, and your party of you and the DD's have to wait for one more person. It gets terrible later on, where you are one of the rare tanks or healers, you have 4 DD and you are still waiting 20-30 minutes for three more Tank/Healer jobs.

So really, if every instance was 4-man, and designed towards 4 people, i would be happy really.

That's an interesting take on it. That's good to know.

Yes it does.

So it's the same ratio at 4-man parties.

Long as the DF ratio doesn't change, it really doesn't matter if the dungeon takes 4 or 8 people. I see some insisting light party status be changed to 5-6 members with the inclusion of 1-2 DDs or 1 DD and the addition of a Support classification, but the first scenario just strikes me as making life more difficult for your healers while a Support role will suffer from the same issue of lacking bodies that healers and tanks do. I also want to say the current roles do blur the line a bit into support, as a THM/BLM casting Sleep is definitely support, or a LNC/DRG using their attack that has the added slow effect. I personally find this the better dynamic as it avoids the situation RDM had in XI where the job could've been so much more with its bag of tricks, but because a couple were so overwhelmingly needed, you'd get mocked for even daring to play otherwise.

Personally, I'd rather see the level capping on dungeons get removed, or least have the option to do them without. I know some would bemoan the preservation of challenge, but the real problem is X time from now when certain content isn't being done because most others have no reason to do it. The daily DF bonus they're presenting isn't a solution, either, and risks becoming a mandatory activity depending on the rewards associated. Building such a resentment from your players is not the way to go as the simple assumption people want to help lowbies is a farce. Some like to, yes, but many don't. This doesn't even tap into the set of players who loathe dungeons in general, who at present don't really have alternative options to AF+2 to chase.

Edited, Sep 23rd 2013 2:08pm by Seriha

Indeed.

It'd probably get worse actually, since I seriously doubt people are signing up for the DF in those proportions. (In fact, I'm sure of that because of the instant queues for tanks and healers in low level dungeons.)

Blizzard "solved" this problem by giving an extra reward to the role that's under-represented in the LFG pool, usually tanks. But my feeling then, as now, is that if you have to bribe people to play your game, there's something wrong there. It could be that people just don't want to deal with tanking or healing. It could be any number of things.

Oh, geez... that's so terribly watered down I don't even know what to say. How can people even stand to play games that can barely be lost?

So basically the solution to long wait times was to have the game match you up with strangers from across all servers. And now the solution to the shortened (but still inconvenient) wait times is to have the game assume responsibility for the major party roles. Instances get to be all-DD zerg fests where the players are automatically healed -- like corridor FATEs. It's like a contest to see just how mindless the MMORPG can become.

The problem is that you never have games developed with a balanced number of tank, healer and dps classes. FFXIV seems good, but realistically there's two tank classes (MRD then WAR, GLD then PLD), one pure healer class (CNJ then WHM), one healer with benefits (SCH), then everything else somewhere inbetween (feel free to correct me but this is my understanding looking up from where I sit right now, which is still very far from endgame).

I'm not saying that they need to make new classes, but when designing content, they have to realize that they will have limited healer/tank pools because people mainly gravitate to the damage classes. Therefore, the content needs to be rebalanced to either be more dynamically responsive, or able to be cleared with well-geared if not perfectly suited jobs.

Tank (2): WAR, PLD
Healer (2): WHM, SCH
DPS (5): BLM, BRD, MNK, DRG, SMN

It's pretty close to the 1:1:2 ratio for parties.

Thing is, the "number of classes" being balanced only matters when you have the same number of people playing all classes. This is never the case, especially with a new game.

See, that's what I am saying. Most often, you will be lacking a tank or a healer, because someone has to bite the bullet and play that role. Most would rather be banging out huge numbers rather than saying "Wow, look at how little damage I am taking" or "I am so cure efficient it's insane!" There are people who are like this, but they are a lot more rare to find.

They could just make the normal dungeons a 5 man party. 1 healer, 1 tank, 3 dps. That would probably cut wait times pretty significantly for DPS.

Edited, Sep 23rd 2013 8:42pm by DrCapricious

It would require redesigning the dungeon encounters, boss encounters, and loot distribution to account for a 25% increase in party members.

Also, MMOs with 5-man parties still have atrocious queue times for dps.

Beautifully said, and it saves me the time of writing something similar, so thanks!

Well, the classes are designed to excel in certain categories. In group play, cross class skills are meant to enhance the base functionality of theses classes and make them better at DPS/Heal/Tank. Although you can do it, the idea in group play is not for you to pick up random skills that detract from your core function. Regardless of how much fun you might have with them, that kind of thing does no favors to anyone when the content is challenging. You having slightly more fun isn't more important than playing the role for your team, unfortunately.

Ultimately this kind issue has been around ever since MMO's were invented (there's a great example already in this thread). People see a class and form an idea in their head of what they think it should be. Meanwhile the optimal role for the class isn't actually what the player wants it to be. The thing that needs to be realised is that you're more than entitled to muck around with setups out on your own, where they don't impact other people. Just for the love of god, be a team player in group content.