Wisdom of Nym: Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward in review – expert dungeons

It’s benchmark time, friends! I have, no the surprise of no one, already run the benchmark and played around with the character creator (I scored 11,000 or so on max settings, so I’m not worried). So that’s all the more reason to focus on this week’s look across the whole of Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward and look at what went right, what went wrong, and why Palace of the Dead is such a cool addition to the game.

Seriously, if I haven’t mentioned this lately, I really like Palace of the Dead and I can’t wait for our next deep dungeon. It’s a really cool addition.

We’ve also got a roundup of all of these columns at the end, if you need to catch up, because fitting in a rundown of everything was getting increasingly difficult as I’d been doing these in-review columns for more than a month now. Last week, I talked chiefly about leveling dungeons and the zones we ran through along the way; this week, it’s time to start talking about things at the top. Start, naturally, with the expert-level dungeons.

Expert-level dungeons

We wound up with far fewer expert dungeons with this expansion, with only 12 compared to the 17 of the base game. This was compounded by the smaller roulette sizes; while Expert roulette usually had three dungeons in 2.x, Heavensward always had a two-dungeon rotation. The result, unfortunately, was that the dungeons started feeling stale a bit faster.

Of course, it also bears noting that the game gave us 12 max-level dungeons to play around with over two years of updates, so that’s still pretty great. It was just a little smaller than we had grown accustomed to. I still wish that the Expert roulette would expand a bit further by not immediately knocking down the older dungeons from the rotation, but that seems unlikely to happen now.

Mechanically, the bosses of the Expert dungeons were easily on par with or better than the stuff we saw in the base game; in fact, the design in general retained the high level of quality we saw all the way through. Most of the mechanics were also comprehensible in the heat of battle, avoiding instant failure states if you went in blind, and some of them (like the first boss of Xelphatol) really challenged the way that you already think about fighting bosses. All very, very good things.

Really, the biggest issue that the dungeons had was one borne out of escalating gear bonuses and design issues. When it came to clearing trash, this expansion created a player culture of grabbing everything up to the next barrier, waiting for it all to slowly die from AoE damage, then doing the exact same thing up to the boss. It’s a great and efficient use of pulls if you have the right party (say, DRK/WHM/SMN/MNK) but it became the “expected” course of things, which means that every dungeon wound up becoming an ersatz run of Wanderer’s Palace at launch.

Is this a problem? To an extent, yes; it means that tanks are encouraged not to pay attention to party composition but just go through the same motions every time, while it encourages some pretty inefficient AoE spam from jobs which aren’t very good at it. But it’s also a natural consequence when tanks increasingly have so much health that more incoming damage is basically irrelevant.

Where tanks used to switch to Strength to provide more efficient DPS when they had passed a certain point, now it’s just all Vitality, all the time. That was a necessary change when it was made, because the number of tanks stacking STR far before they should have even considered it was frankly ridiculous… but it led us to the point where even Dark Knights are huge damage sponges. This is, I suspect, also why so many of the Expert dungeons have gateways every other pull or so, something to force a certain chokepoint and encourage groups to not just AoE everything down.

So it’s kind of a problem, because it results in some pulls having little to no identity. But it’s largely a subset of the numerical inflation we’ve seen with this expansion, which is something to be addressed overall. And some pulls (like the last pair in Xelphatol) use this to great effect; players need to have more reason to consider why they’re pulling in certain patterns, rather than removing the option outright.

But when the biggest problem with dungeons is “well, some of this setup encourages sub-optimal pulling patterns,” the dungeons are pretty dang great. If I have time, I’d love to rank our Expert dungeons from this expansion; as it stands, I’ll just happily say that I enjoyed the lot of them, and I really like fighting their bosses. Even when people get sloppy.

Palace of the Dead

Ah, time for me to gush about Palace of the Dead again. The whole Deep Dungeon format is one of those great parts of the expansion that I hope gets brought forward, and I suspect it will; it’s just too solid to be left to the wayside. It’s simultaneously good leveling content, good max-level content, and it offers progression while also making itself just fun to play. I heart it.

The last 100 floors make for a good challenge for people who just enjoy, well, challenge. The first 100, on the other hand, are just fun to clear on whatever, and you can quite comfortably stop there if you want to. Plus, no matter where you are, it encourages using abilities you might otherwise have forgotten, drinking your potions, keeping a close eye on your own status and group composition, and so forth. Add that to the various incidental NPC cameos throughout and the sheer fun of being able to wear whatever you wish, and…

I could keep gushing about it all day, really.

Of course, there are downsides to it, starting with the fact that the save files always feel a bit too narrow to really use. Having two slots can sometimes feel painfully restrictive, and since you have to frequently delete and restart, it can be frustrating to just start again and again. I also wish there was a slightly gentler curve to the in-palace leveling system, simply because the progression is part of the fun; when you’re already capped midway through the 40s, you lose out on part of what makes it fun long before you’re actually at the end.

Still, it’s a great setup and something I hope to see expanded upon in the not-so-distant future. We’ve been told that the system will be back in Stormblood, although we don’t yet know the details. A few tweaks and it’ll be nigh-on perfect… but then, a few tweaks are most likely exactly what we’ll get, because this studio is good about not fixing what isn’t broken.

Unfortunately, I didn’t really get to the numbers problem this week aside from brushing against it when talking about Expert dungeons… and next week I’ve got primals, Alexander, and the alliance raids to talk about. This is going to take a while, but we’re reaching the home stretch after all. So until then, feel free to leave your feedback down in the comments or mail it along to eliot@massivelyop.com. And if you’ve missed a column or two, well, use that roundup!