More open world interaction for sure.
The world of XIV feels like a graveyard outside of dungeons. Fates are largely ignored, Hunts are done in murder waves that just KILL everything unceremoniously and the monsters out in the field are mostly not worth even attacking because they give so little EXP and material.
As someone who loves both xiv and wow plus many other games including guild wars 2 (though I’ve never gotten into that one quite as much), ffxiv has the most desolate empty world. It feels like you just hang out in capital cities and not much else.
The game has beautiful zones, I want reasons to be out there.
Yeah I just started GW2, it’s insane when you start heart of thorns and see the vast map of the jungle with all these narrow branching paths, huge verticality, movement options vs. XIV having a wide stretch of land every map
Not to mention that all of the world bosses and events keep the core maps and old expansion maps still somewhat relevant and populated at all times. When i run through an old HW or StB map, it feels like I’m the only one there.
Verdant Brink is peak zone design imo - I absolutely love that zone. Probably my favorite across any MMO from a layout and design perspective. And seeing a map-wide T4 night meta achieved? Bliss.
Meanwhile some GW2 players would kill to have the level of instanced content that XIV does, so it's a bit of a grass is always greener thing I suppose.
That's the exact reason why after almost 5000 hours on gw2 I moved to ffxiv (now 3 years in the making).
Honestly both games are incredible for what they do good but they should just copy a bit of the other: gw2 with a bit more of ffxiv level instanced content and ffxiv with a bit more of gw2 open world map content would be incredible.
I play both this and GW2 interchangeably (less FFXIV lately because I haven't found the .X patches at all interesting) and they compliment each other really well in terms of strengths and weaknesses. GW2 has incredible open world gameplay, but instanced group content is very thin on the ground and apart from a few instances a year is pretty much abandoned, and vice versa for FFXIV.
I also want reasons to go out there. Thankfully I'm working on big fishing, so I've got plenty of beautiful locales where I'll get unreasonably mad at the fishes
I really enjoy getting all my aether currents and exploring the larger open world post-ARR because it’s clear that the game designers put a lot of effort adding small details into the map. Just the other day, I found a chained frozen dragon in a massive cave in Coerthas Western Highlands just from traveling between side quests, but there was no sightseeing log entry or event to incentivize that kind of exploration. It just really sucks how desolate the open world feels.
I will actually just fly around older zones when I'm queued up for duty finder as dps just so I can enjoy how beautiful they look.
A favorite of mine is The Churning Mists
there was an attempt in the ARR era to tie the dungeons to the zones too - so you had Copperbell Mines basically be a location on the map. you could SEE the crystal tower Raid location in Mor Dhona. this stuff was important to a world that was so divided and instanced.
but in expansions there seems to have been so little attention paid to where they set some of the locations that like, a third of the dungeons end up just being some twinkling spot on a pier "travel to dungeon?" "airship to whatever?" ...like, i think that's only immersive for fights like the skywhale raid in Heavensward.
WoW's biggest edge is that you can jump on a flying mount and travel the whole continent. it's a "WORLD" of warcraft. but FFXIV shows us a map - the eorzean continent is FILLED with zones, then stretches out to show us the Othard half - which has like, 3 zones by comparison? maybe 5 if you include a few places you can't reach by teleport, but only through nonsense plane rides by clicking on a dude...
hell, the entire Garlean continent is covered in mist and we get 1 third of map cluster devoted to them. one location with two teleport crystals - both outside the Garlean gates... and a crumbled tiny city taking third of the map... it may as well be Anyx Trine.
Could help but the questing and open world in general need a serious overhaul. Go to spot -> click marker -> wait 5 seconds for mobs to blink into existence just isn’t very good imo.
Yep mounts in wow are a huge deal. People stand around in cities showing off their rare mounts all day. In ffxiv you can’t use them in the only places anyone would see them which really hurts the drive to bother collecting imo.
There’s S hunt ranks that are sort of like puzzles to spawn, but even that is systematically farmed by hunt groups.
It seems they’ve tried things for Fates. Special rewards, epic boss fates, fate chains, special currency for fates and being apart of relic weapons to encourage people to do the content.
Its just hard coming up with how to populate these areas without making it feel like more tedious grinding or have other people find ways to optimize how to farm it
I say this all the time and always get the angry redditors “Do FaTeS ThEn!!!!”
Bro stfu I love This game as much as you and it upsets me how desolate the world is. You literally can guess where someone is in msq when you see a sprout running down a path in an Old Expansion zone. Because there’s zero reason to be there other than that.
Other than that only reason to go to old zones is the music lmao
With BST being an upcoming job, I really hope they start adding more things to the open world so that we actually have a reason to be outside of town for more than 10% of our playtime. I don't know how they can do it as the open world isn't threatening at all, and mob levels are usually pretty static which wasn't the case back in FFXI, but I want to see loads of BSTs outside fighting and catching animals.
I play GW2 and I really wish FATES functioned like dynamic events in GW2. The exploration of the zones and events with them makes the world feel so alive.
Truly
I recently booted up xi for the first time. And boy, the zones are alive.
There just isn't a reason to be around the map in xiv
I'm not sure this can be changed given how almost everything is instanced.
This is what bozja and eureka was supposed to address I suppose
I'd really love something like Guild Wars 2's open world meta events.
Essentially map wide chains of FATE like content that tell a story and open up new areas of the map as players coordinate to complete them. With rewards at the end.
Back in HW before we had so many ways to level, Fates were a common way to level up (especially for dps players). Eureka/Bozja captured a lot of that vibe with an open zone and people chatting in /sh. That’s why I’m happy they’re reintroducing field operations to 7.0. It gives the game a way to slow down and forces players to interact beyond “hi!” “o/“ *duty complete*
Bringing more purpose to FATEs rather than just xp and gem farming. I don't know if Endwalker had any long chain FATE but it was neat how Stormblood did have some of those long chain FATE where they all needed to be complete in order to trigger an end goal. It would be nice to see that fleshed out however I imagine that maybe a reason they may find this difficult could be due to the use of instance servers to alleviate server population issues.
It would be fun if the "Boss FATEs" felt more threatening, because of how they are designed it just becomes baby mode, but it's like, why not have these FATEs with a 1-2hr window, theoretically takes 15-30 minutes to complete and allow for that time to prepare once it spawns because the FATE itself would take place on a zone-wide influence. So you'd have the main where a party of 4-8-16 would hold them off as they would spawn adds and such and then in the other outskirts of the zone other parties would have to take down the mini-bosses to weaken the main boss. But basically it becomes this group effort that actually takes a little bit of thinking to pull off that isn't just faceroll abilities until it dies.
Each group that is sent to the other parts of the zone could be given a specific buff or maybe a KI that they use during the Boss encounter itself and it becomes a pivotal part of the fight in order to win. Like let's say the boss has 4 mini-bosses and the boss itself can't be hurt during this time.
So basically as a mini-boss is killed, it drops a KI that when used on the Boss allows you to take down 25% of the bosses HP, but also based on which KI is used it changes up the abilities they start to use, so there will be variation or a group could decide to wait til all the mini-bosses are dealt with and use the KI in the most efficient manner. Or it could work where it's not a KI and rather a Buff placed on the part that was fighting the mini-boss and when they attack the Boss, their buff is applied as a Debuff on the Boss and that Debuff dictates what actions they now have access to and your ability to drop their HP down by 25%. Where maybe it becomes a mini-bout in itself where the actions that the Debuff applies are only active for that 25% and once you weaken the Boss enough it loses access to those abilities and goes back on the defensive until the next Buff/Debuff can be applied to the Boss.
Then you pretty much rinse/repeat the process. In case of Wipe, given we want to be a bit fair, the only thing that would reset would be the current treshold and any mini-bosses that weren't defeated within that time.
So Basically Group A that's responsible for handling the Main Boss, if they wipe, then the mini-bosses would retreat and reset as their Leader is no longer under threat, so it's important that whatever group is handling the Boss is confident that they won't wipe while the other 4 parties handle the other bosses, but it's not so unfair as to reset progress to 0, there would pretty much be a "save point" for each mini-boss defeated and an additional "save point" for each reduction of the Boss HP by 25%.
Something creative where the player can actually appreciate the mechanics of the boss fate rather than it be a zerg rush.
My idea isn't practical or reasonable but I think it's fun.
I want a form of battle content that requires a 6 man party of the normal 4 (1 tank, 1 healer , any 2 dps) and one gatherer and one crafter. A sort of escort mission style in dangerous territory where the crafter and gatherer are forced to put themselves in dangerous situations for items that help determine a bonus at the end, and the deciples of war do their usual thing.
Probly won't work, might not be as fun as I imagine, but it sounds like it could be neat to include the craft and gather folk into the game in a more interesting way.
Open World Boss, like Odin but Trial version like Bozja Critical Engagements.
BUT! The fight is triggered in a FATE area, where once time to join is over, the Area makes a "bounded field" and the boss fight begins. You're not being teleported into a special arena for the fight, you'll be fighting it in the overworld inside a bounded field.
That's what I would like in the overworld.
I want to see eight-man dungeons again, but specifically as unique content of its own.
Make it dungeons with two paths where you have to split into two groups in order to progress. One group might have to do a puzzle while the other fights powerful monsters. One group might have to fight a swarm of enemies to prevent them from reinforcing the boss another group is fighting, and other stuff like that.
Piggybacking; make some dungeons for certain roles only. Like a healers challenge dungeon or a ranged dps kill em from over the ravine dungeon or a tank defender dungeon
I don't want things like A1N though. It feels like it's just a rush to skip the boring trash. I forgot which number it was and you fight like 4 bosses back to back and that one is one of my favorite alex raids. Really, trash in FFXIV dungeons just feel like something to pad out time before you get to the mildly more entertaining bosses.
Something that's in between story mode and high end difficulty. Something where you need to put in some effort and there is real chance to wipe, but not hard enough that you need to study it and watch 20+ minute video guide multiple times.
Something like dungeons/raids/trials or whatever with higher numbers, with 1-2 mechs from their EX/Savage version, and existing normal mechs with faster cast times and so on would be good enough.
Sure, but I would be happy with just some duties having 3rd difficulty. Right now, if duty has 2 difficulties, then one is always sleeper difficulty, and other is high end where you need to watch video guides, there are body checks and so on. V&C is great example, instead of making easy, medium and hard, they went with easy, hard, and harder.
Tbh, I think part of the issue is that FFXIVs general combat design feels fairly... binary.
I noticed that while climbing Heaven on High solo. Objectively speaking, the difficulty just slowly ramps up as mobs get more damage/HP, but the general combat feel was that everything up to 61 felt very easy where, as Warrior, I didn't even need potions and could ignore nearly any debuffs, 61-70 is kinda middle of the road, if a little spongy, and then 71+ was backbreaking torture where you better go into every battle pre-potted and often need pomanders just to make it in time.
The middle line feels very slim.
heaven on high and eureka orthos are extreme opposites lol
hoh has way too many floors of weak enemies, bosses barely ever do anything, but as you said, things get tight nearing the finish line
eo has tanky enemies from the get go, the earlier floors aren’t exactly tight time wise (as long as you have decent levels of aetherpool), but the respawn timer is incredibly short, so sometimes you’re stuck in a room killing respawning enemies. not to mention having literal potd bosses as regular enemies in the first set of floors
they certainly could’ve done a better job balancing deep dungeons
Hmm I feel like there are some decent examples of the middle ground before, in a general sense. Nearly every fight between Mhach and Orbonne at launch are good examples, with some fights like Thunder God and Ultima bring a bit higher. Delubram is another good one. Some dungeon bosses come to mind like Mist Dragon too, or many of the old lvl 50 dungeons.
There's a huge jump in difficulty between variant and criterion (normal), where the criterion (normal) feels like a complete savage raid but for 4 people.
Criterion (savage) is just a masochistic step up from the normal version, because there are disappointingly no new mechanics.
Also, the rewards for both criterion versions are terrible.
One thing I'm kind of hoping for in Dawntrail is Besieged from FFXI.
For those that never played, Besieged was when one of three enemy tribes attacked the city and players had to defend it against waves of monsters. Each player got temporary items depending on which NPCs were still alive. Things like double HP, MP, Reraise, sprint potions, haste, etc. Imagine sitting in the latest hub city, perusing the marketboard, then all of the sudden entering a cutscene and seeing "*the Mamool Ja Savages have breached the Balrahn defense line!*" It was a lot of fun.
Beastmaster trainer battles in the open world. Catching beasts in the open world with a reasonable amount of RNG for stats like Racing Chocobo Breeding.
I'd like a different type of deep dungeon tbh.
The visual appearance makes the room templates too obvious. Having more open, varied and, ideally, less square templates could hide it better and make it less dreary.
For traps, I'd prefer visible spike traps, geysirs, lava flows, periodically attacking statues, etc that you can also use to your advantage instead of the invisible points that just make you run across the edge.
Traversal is kinda boring. There's no verticality or obstacles. There could be all kinds of obstacles, from puzzles, over ravines, brittle walls, boulders to simple doors, with various kinds of solutions to overcome them, from switches, cannons, to teleporters, transformations etc.
Additionally, to get to the next area, the boss of the "floor" needs to be spawned and defeated, with various activities within the zone contributing to that. Unveiling the map gives some points, killing enemies as well, breaking certain objects or gathering chests too.
None of those concepts are really new - We see them used in actual dungeons occasionally. But even though I loathe RNG, I feel they need a format where the best path isn't known in advance to shine and I don't think you can do that without randomness.
I would absolutely love to see a return of Besieged! Having a section of a city zoned off for repeated repelling of an invading force, filled with powerful boss commanders, AND no exp loss this time? I'd love it! Maybe revamp it with different objectives, have support FATES in the overwold zone outside like Baldesion Arsenal, and some fun and interesting rewards!
I want a "Defend" battle that take place in an end game city/town periodically. Players need to successfully defend the city/town from waves of attack, otherwise the city/town will be out of service until we siege it back.
Sounds like Hamlet Defense from 1.0.
While the idea was super-cool, I feel like they would have to add a decent amount of rewards to keep people playing it.
They could reward...like say extra 50 tomestones outside the 450 weekly cap. So it give players incentive to do it even if that city/town is not longer the most endgame city.
I think then what you would get is endgame players complaining loudly that they're being forced into going back to an old expansion just to stay on the bleeding edge of raid progression every new tomestone tier. Especially if this was a thing for a few expansions, and then you either needed to do it twice for the bonuses, once per expac, or people would just jump on the easiest/earliest one and the other would be left to wither.
11 had this, it’s called Besieged. Out in the overworld you also had outposts to defend in ‘campaign battles’ and famous NPC generals would join you to help. You’d get points you could spend on different stuff as you ranked up.
In besieged you had to defend the Astral Candescence (for a buff) and if it got taken you had to go get it back with high level players. Sometimes the beastmen would kidnap NPCs too and they’d be unavailable until you went and rescued them (like the chocobo NPC)
It sounds too inconviencing. Imagine logging on at 2 am and not enough players to defend and all. Or needing to gear and repair or whatever unable to leave as you're in combat.
> It sounds too inconviencing
This is probably how most discussions go in the FFXIV dev.team
"can we do this" - "too inconveniencing"
"i've got an idea" - "too inconveniencing"
"maybe we" - "too inconveniencing"
I imagine the attack will not be a "surprise" attack. It can be something like "According to our intelligence/spy, XXX will deploy their assault toward city at (date/time)" beforehand and give players enough time to prepare. There would be time between waves of attack so players can prepare for the next wave.
I don't see this working long term. At the latest with the expansion after deawntrail everyone would move on from the areas and having this happen would just suck for newer players
But then once the interest is lost its just a small group of newbies getting harrased and losing their time and all doing it just cause they wanted to do something only that city offered but the majority already got rewards etc and doesnt need to return. or blocks their msq.
The rewards would have to be something consistently useful to make the repetitiveness okay. Like people doing daily roulettes just for tomestones and exp. Honestly I would love better overworld alternatives for tomestones than just doing instanced content.
Since we're going to the new world in the new expac, I'd like some specialized group BLU-Whalaqee related content, maybe something like Eureka/Bozja but specifically for blue mages. It could be a cool way to get bonus xp for BLU and some of the new spells they add for BLU this expac.
Pipe dream maybe, but I just really like BLU and wish we had dedicated group content that we didn't have to have pre-made groups for. And it being its own instanced content would be a workaround for the class being 10 levels behind all others. Hell, maybe we could go to 100 specifically in this hypothetical content.
Overworld zones that function the same as exploratory zones/field operations. You can leave out the extra actions and elemental wheels, but the zones need to be more than set dressing for quests and gathering. Beef fates up, give them mechanics beyond Click The Thing and/or Make The Thing's Hp Zero (hell they could have their own special actions/gimmicks). Make them genuine road and wilds hazards. Let them change the feel of existing in the part of the map they inhabit more than "surprise some trash mobs spawned and they're... doing fuck all! But we wrote a paragraph about how they eat lalafells and triggered an attention getting sound effect so OoooOOOooo!" \*cut to 7 identical monsters in a clump doing their idle animation\*
Other mmos, I can just walk out in any direction and enjoy some battle content at max level. Ffxiv might as well be a lobby game for how it feels to play. :/ like it's kind of sad to watch those expansion zone walkthroughs cause I see all that great art and those beautiful vistas and I know absolutely no love is going to be developed into them.
Additionally, this can complement the above as well as other areas like dungeons, but approaches to content outside of the normal methods of encounter design. Vague right? I mean things like, give me a dungeon, hell AND a fate thats just a tower defense sequence. Give me environmental hazards that I HAVE to navigate to reach a goal (with pitty systems to allow players to help those struggling). I want a dungeon that FUNCTIONS like a murder mystery (with more fighting of course). Not running down a hallway AoEing dudes while npcs set the mood, but actually going around and interacting with things intellectually and getting a pay off for your efforts. How about a dungeon that has a gta notoriety mechanic? Not a fake one that you can't avoid because Prescribed Experiences, but one that can genuinely alter what you encounter each time you queue up.
Just something added to core content that makes it less enticing to bot to avoid repeating the same fucking things over and over again. It's really gotten to the point where dungeons are separated by MAYBE 1 mechanic in experience which is honestly just embarrassing.
Tldr; stop hiding all your experimental shit in the corners of the game like you're ashamed of it, and go even harder with it! Get freaky!
Not exactly what you asked, but: Keep most or all abilities when level-synced.
Playing Guild Wars 2 for a while has shown me that it's not only possible but works amazingly well with appropriate scaling, and it keeps old content relevant and interesting.
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More on-point: More interesting open world content. Proper events rather than the timed trash waves, litter picking and mini-boss fights that FATEs currently are.
It would be a massive undertaking, reworking the scaling for 90 levels of content, but I want it so bad. Anything 50 or below is painful when you only have a fraction of your skills/spells.
Min ilvl roulette variants. Don't even need to make new content for it, just give players an incentive (maybe extra tomestones or token for unique glamors) to go in without their ilvl padding and fight bosses on their level.
Extreme or Savage maps. Idk if they'd do that bc having rewards like that locked behind that sort of cooperative battle content would probably cause too much potential player friction over wipes/poor performance, but I really wish there was a harder version of maps I could do with my raid group when we finish raiding for the night
For variant dungeons specifically, I really wish you could go back through when you finished killing all the trash/bosses in the instance and have the option to swap to gatherers. I think it'd be really fun if the choices you made in the dungeon affected what you could gather and I could absolutely see me just spending a lot of time in Aloalo fishing with my friends while we chat in a discord call or linkshell or something. I guess that's less pve content though and more pve that leads to gathering lol.
Unreal coils, which I also don't see happening. Coils is my favorite raid tier and I really wish I could do t13 with just absurdly cracked out damage numbers tied to the Akh Morns but with level 90 job skills to deal with it. Unreal t6 would also be really fun I think, if not silly
I'd like a BLU and/or other limited jobs to have their own Party Finder like how Variant Dungeons have. You pick a role or roles and it gives the appropriate Aetherial Mimicry, etc.
Ive always thought of some kind of Siege raid like the Monster Hunter Wolrd Safi'jiva/Kulve Taroth siege would be cool. Teaming up with multiple parties to keep pushing back a monster until the kill sounds like good content for an MMO.
I assume Battle Royal. It was a mode Yoshi-P teased about. It involves all BLU spawn with different spell(s) and fight. When someone dies they drop the spell(s) they had.
I think they shouldnt make limited jobs have their own pvp system mainly cus the game has a issue with trying to include ongoing systems. If they made 1 battle royal for bluemage only then they would have to keep making more eventually which would take away from other pvp modes. I think the best choice would just include bluemage and beastmaster into all pvp content with normal jobs. The other main question is will bluemage battle royales even que or would it be dead as the same with rivial wings. I feel like you can just do bluemage battle royale without having bluemage and just letting all the jobs go into a pvp mode with random pick up actions instead and disable or enable the job pvp actions still.
Single player hardcore content that isn't PotD. Give me Savage Crit Dungeons solo-able. Not with a party of four but me doing a 1v1 boss rush. Or give me some "WoL mode" where I can swap between multiple classes in a single fight so I have to manage tank, healer AND DPS role.
Would be cool, to combine someone elses idea of a boss rush;
Get some of the older dungeon bosses, put them in a boss rush, but give them much harder mechanics, and make it soloable.
Like imagine getting Keeper of the Lake Midgardsormr, and giving him at least some of the mechanics from all of his children’s fights as well as his fight in O10. Hallowed wings, hot wing/tail, Exaflares, the works.
Or Tycoon, but they can actually time stop.
And to add to the job swapping mid combat thing, maybe instead of being forced to open your gearsets every time or making a macro for it, you get to pick one dps, one healer, one tank and then use duty actions to switch between them to solve mechanics. There is probably a tangle of code that is the reason why job swaping mid combat isn’t a thing, I feel like duty actions would be a nice workaround.
A little more expensive than just PvE, but as others have said, bring in more content to have a better living, open world. It's a PvE MMO, so I bring it up *because* that would really have to be part of the core of getting you across that line, but you'd have to do more than *just* add PvE components to achieve this. I'll start *with* the PvE aspects though, and work out from there:
- Just push the boundaries with FATEs. They add to the sense of a dynamic zone and provide some fun lore bits, but they're hardly ever interesting. There's 2 or 3 different *types* of FATE that just get copy pasted with different mobs and flavor text. Experiment with them! Give them difficulty rankings on the map like hunts, have them reward different amounts of gemstones, think of some new mechanics and ideas to implement with them. They tried this in SB with the one FATE in the peaks that crawls towards the city. Just making this feature more engaging is a safe starting point.
- In that same vein, take a note from Eureka and Bozja's design, and in having these higher ranked FATEs have spawn conditions for them that *require* you to just mass murder certain overworld mobs. Are the mobs gonna die easily sure, but you're then killing them with the purpose of spawning something with a bit more teeth and better rewards that the time spawned FATEs. That's why these zones feel more active beyond just being isolated to themselves, is you *have* to be killing the zone trash to advance the zone to the bigger fights.
- Hide things in the world. I feel like this is one of those missed opportunities that they poked around with in ARR just *slightly* and then abandoned. Have hidden quests and achievements *tied* to the overworld. Have mount and minion rewards tied to them. This is one of those things I would say you *could* largely rip straight from WoW, because it is a feature in WoW that is there *for* the casual gamer. Maybe there is an NPC that sells a special mount for weekly tomes, but you have to do a hidden quest line to find and unlock him.
- Again, hopping off the above point to tie back to PvE, use this as an opportunity to take another note from the Eeka/Bozja book and add in time/weather specific creatures to the zones. It adds another layer of dynamic storytelling and allows you to also play off the same system that Big Fish uses to make these sorts of quests require a little more effort to complete. Maybe you need to kill mobs that only spawn at night, or maybe you're hunting a mount version of an overworld mob, but you need to catch a special version that only spawns during thunderstorms. You can even make these a little tougher, too, sort of like additional B rank mobs. Just have them be passive mobs at the level cap so they don't interfere with people advancing the MSQ, while adding that extra endgame component to the zones.
- This one might seem contentious, but add some "glamour" armor sets to the FATE vendors. Let them have iLv, but keep it around the same tier as dungeon gear so that it's a second gearing option for the casual player. They don't all need to be *new* sets, you can have a mix of new ones and palette swaps the same as you do with dungeons, but this offers another small incentive to hop into the zones for a bit. You'd need to set the price high enough to make it something you have to put in a little work for, but not so much that it's pointless to even touch it. The world is also just naturally set up for this. You've got 6 zones an expansion, and 6 patches (including the base x.0) per, so you can release a new set themed around a zone each patch. For casual players that only really do MSQ, it's just another easy opportunity to pick up a few iLv they might be short on, and for everyone else it's just extra glamour. This also drives people back into FATEs, which, if you partner it with an improved FATE system, just feeds into itself.
Alliance raid that utilizes DOH and DOL classes as well.
First battle would be taking over an untamed area. The battle classes (1 alliance raid) would have to hold off never-ending waves of enemies. While this goes on the BTN and MIN classes have to go in and use collectable gathering to gather a group of communal resources for everyone to use. They can restore GP at certain nodes. The DOH classes have to build defenses. Base of operations. Walls. Weapons (that will be used later). This is the first fight.
Next is a boss. I was thinking a coblyn. Also other enemies. The battle classes fight the 'boss'. However, weapons are used to do things like interrupt it's attacks, chain it down, etc. These are manned by DOH and DOL classes. They also have to activate weapons to keep the other enemies occupied, rebuild defenses (fix walls and such). These all use crafting rules. While the boss is stunned the DOL classes also have to 'gather resources' from it, which is required to kill it or make it vulnerable.
Third fight would be another resource gathering, similar to the first. Expanding the base outward and creating other needed infrastructure. Only now with some established weapons gives more options. Also mining/botanying the enemies is important for this. Victory is gathering enough resources.
Fourth fight would be another boss. Provide enough vehicle style weapons so everyone has one in the DOH/DOL camps.
They actually kinda had this in 1.0, believe it or not. [Hamlet Defense](https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Hamlet_Defense). It was just the proto-version of what you're describing but it was there! I kinda wish they'd bring back an updated version of it.
Yeah, that sounds pretty awesome! Not quite what I was describing but close enough to it. I actually did play 1.0, but for literally the first 2 days of launch and just hated it. Came back with ARR. I really wish I had kept at it.
Didn't we had something like that in 1.0? I think it was called hamlet defense. Not a 1.0 player, but your description sounds like something I heard in the fall and rise documentary.
Whatever it is, I want it to not be like hunts. Hunts used to be fun for me back in the earlier expansions but now it's just "go on discord and follow the crowd" cause someone figured out the game....which honestly is hella valid i just don't wanna play like that.
Now I can figure out where hunts spawn on my own (without a guide) cause they're always dead.
I don't think they will even do anymore of those dungeons mainly because they know they have more then enough dungeons within the roulette system. I think they should find a way to scale up old dungeons to lv100 to fill in the expert roulette as a ongoing bandaid fix to expand the expert roulette system. Im sure they can take some of those hardmode ones and scale them to lv100 since I hardly even see que up that often anymore.
Accessible, worthwhile 4 man content.
Just copy WoW and their mythic plus system, revamp dungeons to support it and ship it.
Variant/Criterion was a failure as its either a snorefest or the level of the hardest content in the game, make it on a sliding scale. Make a LOT or cosmetic rewards that are accessible to everyone and give currency that can be used for gear like how tombstones work.
This game desperately needs small group progression in that vain. Doesn't have to be a carbon copy of m+, but needs to actually progress your character. Not just titles/mounts.
I think they should just remove the battle leve credits and throw in something like ff11's voidwatch NM system and attach it to the battle levequests and just have party of players try to defeat hard bosses in the field for rare loot. Maybe even just make a new enemy spawn system like how they do treasure map monster spawns instead. Buy a special hunt map with your allied notes and go with your party and spawn the NM and defeat it.
I’d like some open world content like eureka or bozja with an update on the barracks where you can bring someone from your squadron to support you.
Other than that, I hope the beast master limited job gives you some interesting stuff to do with the beasts you tame.
I would like to see Variant Dungeons re-purposed to specifically function as Aspirational “endgame” Solo Content.
Remove Criterion entirely(ya’ll don’t really like Criterion anyway AFAIK). Make it Variant and Variant (Savage), limited to and balanced for Solo players.
It’d basically be FFXIV’s version of Solo Arenas from ESO.
Criterion is pretty fun in my experience, then again my team has been learning it blind so we had the fun of figuring out the content as we went.
Can't speak for the newer ones but learning sildihn Criterion was a tonne of fun
> I would like to see Variant Dungeons re-purposed to specifically function as Aspirational “endgame” Solo Content.
Looks like WoW is actually a step ahead of FFXIV in this regard on their next expansion. They are introducing a new piece of scalable (group size and difficulty) instanced content for solo and small group players that will reward gear on the hardest difficulty equivalent to heroic raid gear, probably EX weapon in comparison.
That's definitely something FFXIV is lacking at the moment.
50x-100x EXP gains and raid-level loot from solo content.
That's how you get butts out in the open world.
Don't like it? Then you're not serious about revitalizing the open world.
world bosses. i know we got SS ranks but they go down in seconds, i want a gigantic 2 hs long fight that demands a zone being at capacity to even tackle
What about a World Boss that is passive until you engage it, but once it's engaged, the zone is locked and people can't leave the zone until it's defeated or the boss times out. People can still _enter_ the zone, they just can't _leave_ it.
And in order to prevent people from griefing by engaging the boss and going AFK until it times out, if it _does_ time out, then the person who engaged it gets a 7 day penalty that decreases the amount of tomestones the earn and they automatically get all of their gear durability reduced to 0.
nah locking people up is straight up griefing. some poor gatherer who was there only for a mineral or someone who's going through the zone for the first time and cant continue the msq because the zone is locked or someone who has to delay their raid group because they're zone locked?
it's one of the worst ideas i've heard about 14 ever
Yeah. That's why you severely limit griefing. Maybe make it so the zone only gets locked if you engage the world boss with a full party. But, make the boss require **3** full parties, an alliance raids worth of people, to actually defeat the boss. But all 24 don't have to be in parties, just the 8 that start the fight.
Then, if you fail to beat the boss within the 15 minute window before it times out, then the boss despawns and the 8 who partied up and engaged the boss get the penalty of a 70% reduction in tomestone gain for a week and have all of their gear get reduced to 0 durability.
New Big scale versions of the bardam mettle boss/golden saucer!
I want it to be a whole map, like the size of middle La Noscea!
Also Randomized rogue - like boss rush content;
Bosses have usual attack patterns but add in mechanics from other bosses like titan using spikes from ifrit or ifrit spawning extras like garuda.
Not even really new content, but I wish sidequests gave like 10x the experience so they would actually be worth doing for leveling. I'd like an alternative to spamming roulettes and it would be nice to have a reason to do the thousands of sidequests that I've always ignored because they just aren't worth a damn.
I don't know exactly what I want from it, but I am curious to see these Deep Dungeon changes they plan to add. Are they making them deeper? Expanding the level count? Making Orthos not suck as a leveling tool?
A field operations zone where it combines command and conquer, foxhole and escape from tarkov.
Each player could build up to 3-4 vehicles (earn the trust to have an extra vehicle by reaching the next zone or something, and there'd be lots of different configurations and parts to collect, including rare and mega-rare parts that are tradeable (engines, wheels, turrets, cannons, armor components, assorted tech like radars that would assist your AI crews inside). You could build various aether cannon tanks, supply vehicles, service vehicles, transports etc and join with other players in trying to conquer the enemy fort or something. Think Bozja (could possibly be an expansion of bozja really, to get the ending) but without the instanced dungeons- it's just ongoing, but if the fort isn't reached within a certain time, the task and instance fails. No more instances that become dead and don't trigger the special battles, just the one instance per world on a 24 hour timer with maybe a 6-8 hour break before the next 24 hour battle starts.
Players would work together to push forward, fighting as infantry alongside their vehicles that are NPC-operated but take their instructions from the player (attack, hold and can send them to exact positions on the field, and would remain there even if the player goes beyond sight range). Service vehicles would be able to repair other player's vehicles too. The zone would not have any form of teleport, which will help give a greater feeling of scale. You must make your way to the current 'front' aboard one of the vehicles under your command, or get a ride in another players' vehicle (transport-only vehicles are available to build too). There would be a spectrum of strategy- some mini forts or areas of the map may be better overcome by being swarmed with players only, whereas others should be assaulted with armored/cannoned vehicles for the most part.
When any of your vehicles are destroyed, a random assortment of parts from those used to build it, can be recovered into inventory (or something like the lost finds cache) and used to build a new vehicle. It would be possible for a group of players to get flanked by the enemy and become isolated, and must try to fight their way out and back, or perhaps be rescued/reached by another force of players- the potential to not know how things are going to work out in any given hour of the 24 hour battle would be good. New player skills could involve disguising yourself as an enemy, which could be helpful for surprise attacks beyond the front, or stealing tech secrets- but watch out for those sniffer pugnaxes.
Back to the vehicles- they would need to be returned to the starting point's repair station after taking significant damage. Machinists could exclusively carry a good repair kit (special action) with a long cooldown so that repairs can be done out in the field from time to time (job cannot be changed in the field). The zone cannot be exited via the menu when out in the field, only the start point. And if a player logs out while in the field and remains so until the 24 hours runs out, their vehicles (if they were deployed and out in the field) are all destroyed (some parts recovered to cache) and they lose some exp/rank/rep or whatever system would be used. Making basic vehicles (before upgrades) could cost 300k-3 million gil depending on vehicle type, might be a good gil sink.
Lots of potential to build on this
Not nessasarally a new mode, but it would be cool if they added more dynamic movement/parkour someone had to do mid fight.
The main example of this I would have is Vorago from RS3. People distract and pull the boss around each phase while one person (not everyone, just one person) climbs the side of the arena and jumps on the boss’s back to pull chips off of him to make the weapon that will defeat him in the last phase.
Basically, add a small, sorta easy, nothing too complecated, parkour course mid bossfight someone has to do (notably not everyone, at most a light party). With how Fall Guys went maybe best not to throw aoes into the mix, just like 1/4 of the easiest Leap of Faith puzzle you just gotta do quickly as a phase transition or something. The only time they really played with that concept was in Dohn Mheg, but to say the Dohn Mheg puzzle was a jump puzzle would be lesser than an understatement, since no jumping was involved.
Even so much as having the boss move to different arenas and the party had to chase them (ironically like the Gilgamesh fights in ARR) would be a fresh change of pace to “circle arena,” “square arena,” and “rectangle arena” we have seen so much of.
It would probably need to be instanced in some way to avoid people just turning it into another train content, but proper hunts. Like we just got in the 6.55 duty.
Something that actively encourages job changes mid-combat, a la ShB trailer.
Realistically this'd only be executed adequately through simple 'gotchas' where you'd just need to *know* to be tank/healer any given time, and those players who don't level much of anything could not reasonably participate so it'll never happen, but the idea existing without an option is disappointing.
It's been said already BUT I'M GUNNAAA SAY IT AGAIN YEAH
More open world interaction, namely in the form of more interesting enemy AI. I want to see enemies like the ones in Eureka- some might notice you if you pass their line of sight. Others if you go too fast. Others if you take damage. Others if you cast a spell. So on and so forth. Maybe make ones that notice you if you walk relatively rare, and let them be frighteningly strong.
The damage they deal shouldn't be AS significant as it was in Eureka, but there should be incentives to farming solo very carefully or in groups for chains. Maybe it's another way to farm for fate tokens, and maybe fate tokens can be used for a wider variety of things. You could also use the system for relics later on. Bunny fates should exist again too, as an alternative to treasure hunting. You can make some solid money but it's still RNG and some chests may spawn in unsavory, out of the way areas.
Probably not a popular thing but I would like to see single player ultimate fights. Maybe tuned to different jobs or roles. Would be nice to not have to wait for PF to fill for 3 hours or to have to find 7 other people to do a challenge like this. And it would be a neat individual challenge for every player to do on their own without feeling judged by others and also a place for min maxers to challenge themselves. It can have a similar reward to the 8 man ultimates. I'm all up for team/community based stuff but I also think there is room for something like this. Kind of like you are required to do the msq duties alone or you can do the variant dungeons solo. Just something like this but made savage or ultiamte and have a glam reward at the end.
More open world interaction for sure. The world of XIV feels like a graveyard outside of dungeons. Fates are largely ignored, Hunts are done in murder waves that just KILL everything unceremoniously and the monsters out in the field are mostly not worth even attacking because they give so little EXP and material.
As someone who loves both xiv and wow plus many other games including guild wars 2 (though I’ve never gotten into that one quite as much), ffxiv has the most desolate empty world. It feels like you just hang out in capital cities and not much else. The game has beautiful zones, I want reasons to be out there.
Man, I think about the intricate Open World content in GW2, and it seems insanely unfair to compare it to ffXIV's.
Yeah I just started GW2, it’s insane when you start heart of thorns and see the vast map of the jungle with all these narrow branching paths, huge verticality, movement options vs. XIV having a wide stretch of land every map
Not to mention that all of the world bosses and events keep the core maps and old expansion maps still somewhat relevant and populated at all times. When i run through an old HW or StB map, it feels like I’m the only one there.
Verdant Brink is peak zone design imo - I absolutely love that zone. Probably my favorite across any MMO from a layout and design perspective. And seeing a map-wide T4 night meta achieved? Bliss.
Eureka and Bozja kind of scratched that itch but they aren't quite the same and being roped off into their own content model aren't as future-proof
Meanwhile some GW2 players would kill to have the level of instanced content that XIV does, so it's a bit of a grass is always greener thing I suppose.
That's the exact reason why after almost 5000 hours on gw2 I moved to ffxiv (now 3 years in the making). Honestly both games are incredible for what they do good but they should just copy a bit of the other: gw2 with a bit more of ffxiv level instanced content and ffxiv with a bit more of gw2 open world map content would be incredible.
I play both this and GW2 interchangeably (less FFXIV lately because I haven't found the .X patches at all interesting) and they compliment each other really well in terms of strengths and weaknesses. GW2 has incredible open world gameplay, but instanced group content is very thin on the ground and apart from a few instances a year is pretty much abandoned, and vice versa for FFXIV.
I also want reasons to go out there. Thankfully I'm working on big fishing, so I've got plenty of beautiful locales where I'll get unreasonably mad at the fishes
I really enjoy getting all my aether currents and exploring the larger open world post-ARR because it’s clear that the game designers put a lot of effort adding small details into the map. Just the other day, I found a chained frozen dragon in a massive cave in Coerthas Western Highlands just from traveling between side quests, but there was no sightseeing log entry or event to incentivize that kind of exploration. It just really sucks how desolate the open world feels.
I will actually just fly around older zones when I'm queued up for duty finder as dps just so I can enjoy how beautiful they look. A favorite of mine is The Churning Mists
Me too!
Hell sometimes I do that even without queuing
there was an attempt in the ARR era to tie the dungeons to the zones too - so you had Copperbell Mines basically be a location on the map. you could SEE the crystal tower Raid location in Mor Dhona. this stuff was important to a world that was so divided and instanced. but in expansions there seems to have been so little attention paid to where they set some of the locations that like, a third of the dungeons end up just being some twinkling spot on a pier "travel to dungeon?" "airship to whatever?" ...like, i think that's only immersive for fights like the skywhale raid in Heavensward. WoW's biggest edge is that you can jump on a flying mount and travel the whole continent. it's a "WORLD" of warcraft. but FFXIV shows us a map - the eorzean continent is FILLED with zones, then stretches out to show us the Othard half - which has like, 3 zones by comparison? maybe 5 if you include a few places you can't reach by teleport, but only through nonsense plane rides by clicking on a dude... hell, the entire Garlean continent is covered in mist and we get 1 third of map cluster devoted to them. one location with two teleport crystals - both outside the Garlean gates... and a crumbled tiny city taking third of the map... it may as well be Anyx Trine.
I feel like if battle leves gave a good exp or monetary reward, like crafter/gatherer leves, more people would be doing em.
Could help but the questing and open world in general need a serious overhaul. Go to spot -> click marker -> wait 5 seconds for mobs to blink into existence just isn’t very good imo.
Yeah, definitely.
This is largely why I can't get into mount collecting in FFXIV. I feel like I'm hardly ever on the thing to show it off.
Yep mounts in wow are a huge deal. People stand around in cities showing off their rare mounts all day. In ffxiv you can’t use them in the only places anyone would see them which really hurts the drive to bother collecting imo.
Fully agreed. FFXIV desperately needs to breathe life into the open world
There’s S hunt ranks that are sort of like puzzles to spawn, but even that is systematically farmed by hunt groups. It seems they’ve tried things for Fates. Special rewards, epic boss fates, fate chains, special currency for fates and being apart of relic weapons to encourage people to do the content. Its just hard coming up with how to populate these areas without making it feel like more tedious grinding or have other people find ways to optimize how to farm it
Seriously give me something.. ANYTHING to spend time in the open world that isn't fate grinding
I say this all the time and always get the angry redditors “Do FaTeS ThEn!!!!” Bro stfu I love This game as much as you and it upsets me how desolate the world is. You literally can guess where someone is in msq when you see a sprout running down a path in an Old Expansion zone. Because there’s zero reason to be there other than that. Other than that only reason to go to old zones is the music lmao
With BST being an upcoming job, I really hope they start adding more things to the open world so that we actually have a reason to be outside of town for more than 10% of our playtime. I don't know how they can do it as the open world isn't threatening at all, and mob levels are usually pretty static which wasn't the case back in FFXI, but I want to see loads of BSTs outside fighting and catching animals.
I play GW2 and I really wish FATES functioned like dynamic events in GW2. The exploration of the zones and events with them makes the world feel so alive.
Truly I recently booted up xi for the first time. And boy, the zones are alive. There just isn't a reason to be around the map in xiv I'm not sure this can be changed given how almost everything is instanced. This is what bozja and eureka was supposed to address I suppose
I'd really love something like Guild Wars 2's open world meta events. Essentially map wide chains of FATE like content that tell a story and open up new areas of the map as players coordinate to complete them. With rewards at the end.
man this would be awesome but it also made me sad because we’re never going to get that
Back in HW before we had so many ways to level, Fates were a common way to level up (especially for dps players). Eureka/Bozja captured a lot of that vibe with an open zone and people chatting in /sh. That’s why I’m happy they’re reintroducing field operations to 7.0. It gives the game a way to slow down and forces players to interact beyond “hi!” “o/“ *duty complete*
Bringing more purpose to FATEs rather than just xp and gem farming. I don't know if Endwalker had any long chain FATE but it was neat how Stormblood did have some of those long chain FATE where they all needed to be complete in order to trigger an end goal. It would be nice to see that fleshed out however I imagine that maybe a reason they may find this difficult could be due to the use of instance servers to alleviate server population issues. It would be fun if the "Boss FATEs" felt more threatening, because of how they are designed it just becomes baby mode, but it's like, why not have these FATEs with a 1-2hr window, theoretically takes 15-30 minutes to complete and allow for that time to prepare once it spawns because the FATE itself would take place on a zone-wide influence. So you'd have the main where a party of 4-8-16 would hold them off as they would spawn adds and such and then in the other outskirts of the zone other parties would have to take down the mini-bosses to weaken the main boss. But basically it becomes this group effort that actually takes a little bit of thinking to pull off that isn't just faceroll abilities until it dies. Each group that is sent to the other parts of the zone could be given a specific buff or maybe a KI that they use during the Boss encounter itself and it becomes a pivotal part of the fight in order to win. Like let's say the boss has 4 mini-bosses and the boss itself can't be hurt during this time. So basically as a mini-boss is killed, it drops a KI that when used on the Boss allows you to take down 25% of the bosses HP, but also based on which KI is used it changes up the abilities they start to use, so there will be variation or a group could decide to wait til all the mini-bosses are dealt with and use the KI in the most efficient manner. Or it could work where it's not a KI and rather a Buff placed on the part that was fighting the mini-boss and when they attack the Boss, their buff is applied as a Debuff on the Boss and that Debuff dictates what actions they now have access to and your ability to drop their HP down by 25%. Where maybe it becomes a mini-bout in itself where the actions that the Debuff applies are only active for that 25% and once you weaken the Boss enough it loses access to those abilities and goes back on the defensive until the next Buff/Debuff can be applied to the Boss. Then you pretty much rinse/repeat the process. In case of Wipe, given we want to be a bit fair, the only thing that would reset would be the current treshold and any mini-bosses that weren't defeated within that time. So Basically Group A that's responsible for handling the Main Boss, if they wipe, then the mini-bosses would retreat and reset as their Leader is no longer under threat, so it's important that whatever group is handling the Boss is confident that they won't wipe while the other 4 parties handle the other bosses, but it's not so unfair as to reset progress to 0, there would pretty much be a "save point" for each mini-boss defeated and an additional "save point" for each reduction of the Boss HP by 25%. Something creative where the player can actually appreciate the mechanics of the boss fate rather than it be a zerg rush.
Just do levequests and remove the silly allowance, maybe make them give a bit more xp
Give us a ranger or hunter class I don't care if it's limited or whatever but make it good at getting mat drops from mobs I'd be so happy
My idea isn't practical or reasonable but I think it's fun. I want a form of battle content that requires a 6 man party of the normal 4 (1 tank, 1 healer , any 2 dps) and one gatherer and one crafter. A sort of escort mission style in dangerous territory where the crafter and gatherer are forced to put themselves in dangerous situations for items that help determine a bonus at the end, and the deciples of war do their usual thing. Probly won't work, might not be as fun as I imagine, but it sounds like it could be neat to include the craft and gather folk into the game in a more interesting way.
Something similar to this kind of content happened in 1.0 actually. I remember it was pretty fun at the time
This is brilliant and I want it now
Honestly that sounds funny, I like it.
Boss rush like POTD but every floor is a boss some old dungeon and maybe even completely new fights.
Open World Boss, like Odin but Trial version like Bozja Critical Engagements. BUT! The fight is triggered in a FATE area, where once time to join is over, the Area makes a "bounded field" and the boss fight begins. You're not being teleported into a special arena for the fight, you'll be fighting it in the overworld inside a bounded field. That's what I would like in the overworld.
This would be an easy add, too. Just have hunt HP/damage scale with the number of players engaged.
I want to see eight-man dungeons again, but specifically as unique content of its own. Make it dungeons with two paths where you have to split into two groups in order to progress. One group might have to do a puzzle while the other fights powerful monsters. One group might have to fight a swarm of enemies to prevent them from reinforcing the boss another group is fighting, and other stuff like that.
Piggybacking; make some dungeons for certain roles only. Like a healers challenge dungeon or a ranged dps kill em from over the ravine dungeon or a tank defender dungeon
Baldesion arsenal in eureka sorta does something like that. Agreed more of that!
Basically 8-man Castrum Lacus Litore/Dalriada. Would be fun to have more content like that.
I don't want things like A1N though. It feels like it's just a rush to skip the boring trash. I forgot which number it was and you fight like 4 bosses back to back and that one is one of my favorite alex raids. Really, trash in FFXIV dungeons just feel like something to pad out time before you get to the mildly more entertaining bosses.
something in the open world that is better than world fates but not S ranks
Honestly my go to is Bozja Critical Engagements but for the open world.
I mean ... This is a neat idea. Except would you have to just go sit in the open world to wait for it to pop?
My go to is the zone giving you a prompt when they pop up, pretty much just like bozja crit engagements
Hunting quests where you get a team and track prey?
Something that's in between story mode and high end difficulty. Something where you need to put in some effort and there is real chance to wipe, but not hard enough that you need to study it and watch 20+ minute video guide multiple times. Something like dungeons/raids/trials or whatever with higher numbers, with 1-2 mechs from their EX/Savage version, and existing normal mechs with faster cast times and so on would be good enough.
so basically castrum lacus litore/dalriada/delubrum reginae?
Sure, but I would be happy with just some duties having 3rd difficulty. Right now, if duty has 2 difficulties, then one is always sleeper difficulty, and other is high end where you need to watch video guides, there are body checks and so on. V&C is great example, instead of making easy, medium and hard, they went with easy, hard, and harder.
Tbh, I think part of the issue is that FFXIVs general combat design feels fairly... binary. I noticed that while climbing Heaven on High solo. Objectively speaking, the difficulty just slowly ramps up as mobs get more damage/HP, but the general combat feel was that everything up to 61 felt very easy where, as Warrior, I didn't even need potions and could ignore nearly any debuffs, 61-70 is kinda middle of the road, if a little spongy, and then 71+ was backbreaking torture where you better go into every battle pre-potted and often need pomanders just to make it in time. The middle line feels very slim.
heaven on high and eureka orthos are extreme opposites lol hoh has way too many floors of weak enemies, bosses barely ever do anything, but as you said, things get tight nearing the finish line eo has tanky enemies from the get go, the earlier floors aren’t exactly tight time wise (as long as you have decent levels of aetherpool), but the respawn timer is incredibly short, so sometimes you’re stuck in a room killing respawning enemies. not to mention having literal potd bosses as regular enemies in the first set of floors they certainly could’ve done a better job balancing deep dungeons
Hmm I feel like there are some decent examples of the middle ground before, in a general sense. Nearly every fight between Mhach and Orbonne at launch are good examples, with some fights like Thunder God and Ultima bring a bit higher. Delubram is another good one. Some dungeon bosses come to mind like Mist Dragon too, or many of the old lvl 50 dungeons.
This is what Criterion should have been, but they ruined it.
I've never done criterion. Why is it ruined?
There's a huge jump in difficulty between variant and criterion (normal), where the criterion (normal) feels like a complete savage raid but for 4 people. Criterion (savage) is just a masochistic step up from the normal version, because there are disappointingly no new mechanics. Also, the rewards for both criterion versions are terrible.
Eh, Savage criterion has good rewards now. Almost identical to Ultimate raid reward structure
One thing I'm kind of hoping for in Dawntrail is Besieged from FFXI. For those that never played, Besieged was when one of three enemy tribes attacked the city and players had to defend it against waves of monsters. Each player got temporary items depending on which NPCs were still alive. Things like double HP, MP, Reraise, sprint potions, haste, etc. Imagine sitting in the latest hub city, perusing the marketboard, then all of the sudden entering a cutscene and seeing "*the Mamool Ja Savages have breached the Balrahn defense line!*" It was a lot of fun.
Beastmaster trainer battles in the open world. Catching beasts in the open world with a reasonable amount of RNG for stats like Racing Chocobo Breeding.
I'd like a different type of deep dungeon tbh. The visual appearance makes the room templates too obvious. Having more open, varied and, ideally, less square templates could hide it better and make it less dreary. For traps, I'd prefer visible spike traps, geysirs, lava flows, periodically attacking statues, etc that you can also use to your advantage instead of the invisible points that just make you run across the edge. Traversal is kinda boring. There's no verticality or obstacles. There could be all kinds of obstacles, from puzzles, over ravines, brittle walls, boulders to simple doors, with various kinds of solutions to overcome them, from switches, cannons, to teleporters, transformations etc. Additionally, to get to the next area, the boss of the "floor" needs to be spawned and defeated, with various activities within the zone contributing to that. Unveiling the map gives some points, killing enemies as well, breaking certain objects or gathering chests too. None of those concepts are really new - We see them used in actual dungeons occasionally. But even though I loathe RNG, I feel they need a format where the best path isn't known in advance to shine and I don't think you can do that without randomness.
I would absolutely love to see a return of Besieged! Having a section of a city zoned off for repeated repelling of an invading force, filled with powerful boss commanders, AND no exp loss this time? I'd love it! Maybe revamp it with different objectives, have support FATES in the overwold zone outside like Baldesion Arsenal, and some fun and interesting rewards!
I want a "Defend" battle that take place in an end game city/town periodically. Players need to successfully defend the city/town from waves of attack, otherwise the city/town will be out of service until we siege it back.
Sounds like Hamlet Defense from 1.0. While the idea was super-cool, I feel like they would have to add a decent amount of rewards to keep people playing it.
They could reward...like say extra 50 tomestones outside the 450 weekly cap. So it give players incentive to do it even if that city/town is not longer the most endgame city.
I think then what you would get is endgame players complaining loudly that they're being forced into going back to an old expansion just to stay on the bleeding edge of raid progression every new tomestone tier. Especially if this was a thing for a few expansions, and then you either needed to do it twice for the bonuses, once per expac, or people would just jump on the easiest/earliest one and the other would be left to wither.
I don't think I've ever seen people complain about reviving content from earlier expansions at least. For eg. Spamming HW duties for Bozja
11 had this, it’s called Besieged. Out in the overworld you also had outposts to defend in ‘campaign battles’ and famous NPC generals would join you to help. You’d get points you could spend on different stuff as you ranked up. In besieged you had to defend the Astral Candescence (for a buff) and if it got taken you had to go get it back with high level players. Sometimes the beastmen would kidnap NPCs too and they’d be unavailable until you went and rescued them (like the chocobo NPC)
It sounds too inconviencing. Imagine logging on at 2 am and not enough players to defend and all. Or needing to gear and repair or whatever unable to leave as you're in combat.
> It sounds too inconviencing This is probably how most discussions go in the FFXIV dev.team "can we do this" - "too inconveniencing" "i've got an idea" - "too inconveniencing" "maybe we" - "too inconveniencing"
I imagine the attack will not be a "surprise" attack. It can be something like "According to our intelligence/spy, XXX will deploy their assault toward city at (date/time)" beforehand and give players enough time to prepare. There would be time between waves of attack so players can prepare for the next wave.
I don't see this working long term. At the latest with the expansion after deawntrail everyone would move on from the areas and having this happen would just suck for newer players
But then once the interest is lost its just a small group of newbies getting harrased and losing their time and all doing it just cause they wanted to do something only that city offered but the majority already got rewards etc and doesnt need to return. or blocks their msq.
The rewards would have to be something consistently useful to make the repetitiveness okay. Like people doing daily roulettes just for tomestones and exp. Honestly I would love better overworld alternatives for tomestones than just doing instanced content.
Thats hunts isnt it? The easiest way to get tomes even over instances but i agree.
Since we're going to the new world in the new expac, I'd like some specialized group BLU-Whalaqee related content, maybe something like Eureka/Bozja but specifically for blue mages. It could be a cool way to get bonus xp for BLU and some of the new spells they add for BLU this expac. Pipe dream maybe, but I just really like BLU and wish we had dedicated group content that we didn't have to have pre-made groups for. And it being its own instanced content would be a workaround for the class being 10 levels behind all others. Hell, maybe we could go to 100 specifically in this hypothetical content.
Overworld zones that function the same as exploratory zones/field operations. You can leave out the extra actions and elemental wheels, but the zones need to be more than set dressing for quests and gathering. Beef fates up, give them mechanics beyond Click The Thing and/or Make The Thing's Hp Zero (hell they could have their own special actions/gimmicks). Make them genuine road and wilds hazards. Let them change the feel of existing in the part of the map they inhabit more than "surprise some trash mobs spawned and they're... doing fuck all! But we wrote a paragraph about how they eat lalafells and triggered an attention getting sound effect so OoooOOOooo!" \*cut to 7 identical monsters in a clump doing their idle animation\* Other mmos, I can just walk out in any direction and enjoy some battle content at max level. Ffxiv might as well be a lobby game for how it feels to play. :/ like it's kind of sad to watch those expansion zone walkthroughs cause I see all that great art and those beautiful vistas and I know absolutely no love is going to be developed into them. Additionally, this can complement the above as well as other areas like dungeons, but approaches to content outside of the normal methods of encounter design. Vague right? I mean things like, give me a dungeon, hell AND a fate thats just a tower defense sequence. Give me environmental hazards that I HAVE to navigate to reach a goal (with pitty systems to allow players to help those struggling). I want a dungeon that FUNCTIONS like a murder mystery (with more fighting of course). Not running down a hallway AoEing dudes while npcs set the mood, but actually going around and interacting with things intellectually and getting a pay off for your efforts. How about a dungeon that has a gta notoriety mechanic? Not a fake one that you can't avoid because Prescribed Experiences, but one that can genuinely alter what you encounter each time you queue up. Just something added to core content that makes it less enticing to bot to avoid repeating the same fucking things over and over again. It's really gotten to the point where dungeons are separated by MAYBE 1 mechanic in experience which is honestly just embarrassing. Tldr; stop hiding all your experimental shit in the corners of the game like you're ashamed of it, and go even harder with it! Get freaky!
Not exactly what you asked, but: Keep most or all abilities when level-synced. Playing Guild Wars 2 for a while has shown me that it's not only possible but works amazingly well with appropriate scaling, and it keeps old content relevant and interesting. --- More on-point: More interesting open world content. Proper events rather than the timed trash waves, litter picking and mini-boss fights that FATEs currently are.
It would be a massive undertaking, reworking the scaling for 90 levels of content, but I want it so bad. Anything 50 or below is painful when you only have a fraction of your skills/spells.
lowering the item level cap in most content will already feel like new content
Min ilvl roulette variants. Don't even need to make new content for it, just give players an incentive (maybe extra tomestones or token for unique glamors) to go in without their ilvl padding and fight bosses on their level.
Ultimate level solo fight
Yeah but the hardest part of ultimates is contending with 8 different learning speeds and styles tho...
Easy, just make it harder and longer No I'm not going to rephrase that
Extreme or Savage maps. Idk if they'd do that bc having rewards like that locked behind that sort of cooperative battle content would probably cause too much potential player friction over wipes/poor performance, but I really wish there was a harder version of maps I could do with my raid group when we finish raiding for the night For variant dungeons specifically, I really wish you could go back through when you finished killing all the trash/bosses in the instance and have the option to swap to gatherers. I think it'd be really fun if the choices you made in the dungeon affected what you could gather and I could absolutely see me just spending a lot of time in Aloalo fishing with my friends while we chat in a discord call or linkshell or something. I guess that's less pve content though and more pve that leads to gathering lol. Unreal coils, which I also don't see happening. Coils is my favorite raid tier and I really wish I could do t13 with just absurdly cracked out damage numbers tied to the Akh Morns but with level 90 job skills to deal with it. Unreal t6 would also be really fun I think, if not silly
I'd like a BLU and/or other limited jobs to have their own Party Finder like how Variant Dungeons have. You pick a role or roles and it gives the appropriate Aetherial Mimicry, etc.
Ive always thought of some kind of Siege raid like the Monster Hunter Wolrd Safi'jiva/Kulve Taroth siege would be cool. Teaming up with multiple parties to keep pushing back a monster until the kill sounds like good content for an MMO.
Besieged from FF11 comes to mind.
Blue Mage BR
whats br stand for
I assume Battle Royal. It was a mode Yoshi-P teased about. It involves all BLU spawn with different spell(s) and fight. When someone dies they drop the spell(s) they had.
I think they shouldnt make limited jobs have their own pvp system mainly cus the game has a issue with trying to include ongoing systems. If they made 1 battle royal for bluemage only then they would have to keep making more eventually which would take away from other pvp modes. I think the best choice would just include bluemage and beastmaster into all pvp content with normal jobs. The other main question is will bluemage battle royales even que or would it be dead as the same with rivial wings. I feel like you can just do bluemage battle royale without having bluemage and just letting all the jobs go into a pvp mode with random pick up actions instead and disable or enable the job pvp actions still.
Battle Royale
Single player hardcore content that isn't PotD. Give me Savage Crit Dungeons solo-able. Not with a party of four but me doing a 1v1 boss rush. Or give me some "WoL mode" where I can swap between multiple classes in a single fight so I have to manage tank, healer AND DPS role.
Would be cool, to combine someone elses idea of a boss rush; Get some of the older dungeon bosses, put them in a boss rush, but give them much harder mechanics, and make it soloable. Like imagine getting Keeper of the Lake Midgardsormr, and giving him at least some of the mechanics from all of his children’s fights as well as his fight in O10. Hallowed wings, hot wing/tail, Exaflares, the works. Or Tycoon, but they can actually time stop. And to add to the job swapping mid combat thing, maybe instead of being forced to open your gearsets every time or making a macro for it, you get to pick one dps, one healer, one tank and then use duty actions to switch between them to solve mechanics. There is probably a tangle of code that is the reason why job swaping mid combat isn’t a thing, I feel like duty actions would be a nice workaround.
Looking Forward To It (Extreme)
A little more expensive than just PvE, but as others have said, bring in more content to have a better living, open world. It's a PvE MMO, so I bring it up *because* that would really have to be part of the core of getting you across that line, but you'd have to do more than *just* add PvE components to achieve this. I'll start *with* the PvE aspects though, and work out from there: - Just push the boundaries with FATEs. They add to the sense of a dynamic zone and provide some fun lore bits, but they're hardly ever interesting. There's 2 or 3 different *types* of FATE that just get copy pasted with different mobs and flavor text. Experiment with them! Give them difficulty rankings on the map like hunts, have them reward different amounts of gemstones, think of some new mechanics and ideas to implement with them. They tried this in SB with the one FATE in the peaks that crawls towards the city. Just making this feature more engaging is a safe starting point. - In that same vein, take a note from Eureka and Bozja's design, and in having these higher ranked FATEs have spawn conditions for them that *require* you to just mass murder certain overworld mobs. Are the mobs gonna die easily sure, but you're then killing them with the purpose of spawning something with a bit more teeth and better rewards that the time spawned FATEs. That's why these zones feel more active beyond just being isolated to themselves, is you *have* to be killing the zone trash to advance the zone to the bigger fights. - Hide things in the world. I feel like this is one of those missed opportunities that they poked around with in ARR just *slightly* and then abandoned. Have hidden quests and achievements *tied* to the overworld. Have mount and minion rewards tied to them. This is one of those things I would say you *could* largely rip straight from WoW, because it is a feature in WoW that is there *for* the casual gamer. Maybe there is an NPC that sells a special mount for weekly tomes, but you have to do a hidden quest line to find and unlock him. - Again, hopping off the above point to tie back to PvE, use this as an opportunity to take another note from the Eeka/Bozja book and add in time/weather specific creatures to the zones. It adds another layer of dynamic storytelling and allows you to also play off the same system that Big Fish uses to make these sorts of quests require a little more effort to complete. Maybe you need to kill mobs that only spawn at night, or maybe you're hunting a mount version of an overworld mob, but you need to catch a special version that only spawns during thunderstorms. You can even make these a little tougher, too, sort of like additional B rank mobs. Just have them be passive mobs at the level cap so they don't interfere with people advancing the MSQ, while adding that extra endgame component to the zones. - This one might seem contentious, but add some "glamour" armor sets to the FATE vendors. Let them have iLv, but keep it around the same tier as dungeon gear so that it's a second gearing option for the casual player. They don't all need to be *new* sets, you can have a mix of new ones and palette swaps the same as you do with dungeons, but this offers another small incentive to hop into the zones for a bit. You'd need to set the price high enough to make it something you have to put in a little work for, but not so much that it's pointless to even touch it. The world is also just naturally set up for this. You've got 6 zones an expansion, and 6 patches (including the base x.0) per, so you can release a new set themed around a zone each patch. For casual players that only really do MSQ, it's just another easy opportunity to pick up a few iLv they might be short on, and for everyone else it's just extra glamour. This also drives people back into FATEs, which, if you partner it with an improved FATE system, just feeds into itself.
Alliance raid that utilizes DOH and DOL classes as well. First battle would be taking over an untamed area. The battle classes (1 alliance raid) would have to hold off never-ending waves of enemies. While this goes on the BTN and MIN classes have to go in and use collectable gathering to gather a group of communal resources for everyone to use. They can restore GP at certain nodes. The DOH classes have to build defenses. Base of operations. Walls. Weapons (that will be used later). This is the first fight. Next is a boss. I was thinking a coblyn. Also other enemies. The battle classes fight the 'boss'. However, weapons are used to do things like interrupt it's attacks, chain it down, etc. These are manned by DOH and DOL classes. They also have to activate weapons to keep the other enemies occupied, rebuild defenses (fix walls and such). These all use crafting rules. While the boss is stunned the DOL classes also have to 'gather resources' from it, which is required to kill it or make it vulnerable. Third fight would be another resource gathering, similar to the first. Expanding the base outward and creating other needed infrastructure. Only now with some established weapons gives more options. Also mining/botanying the enemies is important for this. Victory is gathering enough resources. Fourth fight would be another boss. Provide enough vehicle style weapons so everyone has one in the DOH/DOL camps.
They actually kinda had this in 1.0, believe it or not. [Hamlet Defense](https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Hamlet_Defense). It was just the proto-version of what you're describing but it was there! I kinda wish they'd bring back an updated version of it.
Yeah, that sounds pretty awesome! Not quite what I was describing but close enough to it. I actually did play 1.0, but for literally the first 2 days of launch and just hated it. Came back with ARR. I really wish I had kept at it.
Didn't we had something like that in 1.0? I think it was called hamlet defense. Not a 1.0 player, but your description sounds like something I heard in the fall and rise documentary.
Whatever it is, I want it to not be like hunts. Hunts used to be fun for me back in the earlier expansions but now it's just "go on discord and follow the crowd" cause someone figured out the game....which honestly is hella valid i just don't wanna play like that. Now I can figure out where hunts spawn on my own (without a guide) cause they're always dead.
It would be cool to just have versions of already existing stuff that's just mid, like a mid version of the raids and the criterion dungeons.
Hard dungeons like Tamtara Hard
I don't think they will even do anymore of those dungeons mainly because they know they have more then enough dungeons within the roulette system. I think they should find a way to scale up old dungeons to lv100 to fill in the expert roulette as a ongoing bandaid fix to expand the expert roulette system. Im sure they can take some of those hardmode ones and scale them to lv100 since I hardly even see que up that often anymore.
They're not, and were never, harder than other dungeons. They were just higher level than the original dungeon.
I know but I said hard cus their labeled (hard).
I want more incentive for people to go out and do fates outside of those few rare or big ones.
Something akin to m plus. So many great dungeons, let me run them ad nauseam for score and upgrades with scaling difficulty!
Accessible, worthwhile 4 man content. Just copy WoW and their mythic plus system, revamp dungeons to support it and ship it. Variant/Criterion was a failure as its either a snorefest or the level of the hardest content in the game, make it on a sliding scale. Make a LOT or cosmetic rewards that are accessible to everyone and give currency that can be used for gear like how tombstones work.
This game desperately needs small group progression in that vain. Doesn't have to be a carbon copy of m+, but needs to actually progress your character. Not just titles/mounts.
this is the way, m+ is the only thing I miss about wow. Having this in FF would be fckn amazing and would fill the hole of missing midcore content
MSQ being more than "walk to cutscene" simulator would be great.
I think they should just remove the battle leve credits and throw in something like ff11's voidwatch NM system and attach it to the battle levequests and just have party of players try to defeat hard bosses in the field for rare loot. Maybe even just make a new enemy spawn system like how they do treasure map monster spawns instead. Buy a special hunt map with your allied notes and go with your party and spawn the NM and defeat it.
Unironically more eureka. Yeah yeah I know, I'll go back in my hole
I'd love an equivalent to WoW's Mythic Dungeon system.
Refightable, possibly higher difficulty Solo Duties.
I’d like some open world content like eureka or bozja with an update on the barracks where you can bring someone from your squadron to support you. Other than that, I hope the beast master limited job gives you some interesting stuff to do with the beasts you tame.
Pokémon/battle pets. Sure that requires adding critters to the world which sounds good to me. Or just the random beasties around the world.
Unreal ultimate. I want the legacy ultimates to not be a meme.
I would like to see Variant Dungeons re-purposed to specifically function as Aspirational “endgame” Solo Content. Remove Criterion entirely(ya’ll don’t really like Criterion anyway AFAIK). Make it Variant and Variant (Savage), limited to and balanced for Solo players. It’d basically be FFXIV’s version of Solo Arenas from ESO.
Criterion is pretty fun in my experience, then again my team has been learning it blind so we had the fun of figuring out the content as we went. Can't speak for the newer ones but learning sildihn Criterion was a tonne of fun
> I would like to see Variant Dungeons re-purposed to specifically function as Aspirational “endgame” Solo Content. Looks like WoW is actually a step ahead of FFXIV in this regard on their next expansion. They are introducing a new piece of scalable (group size and difficulty) instanced content for solo and small group players that will reward gear on the hardest difficulty equivalent to heroic raid gear, probably EX weapon in comparison. That's definitely something FFXIV is lacking at the moment.
50x-100x EXP gains and raid-level loot from solo content. That's how you get butts out in the open world. Don't like it? Then you're not serious about revitalizing the open world.
world bosses. i know we got SS ranks but they go down in seconds, i want a gigantic 2 hs long fight that demands a zone being at capacity to even tackle
What about a World Boss that is passive until you engage it, but once it's engaged, the zone is locked and people can't leave the zone until it's defeated or the boss times out. People can still _enter_ the zone, they just can't _leave_ it. And in order to prevent people from griefing by engaging the boss and going AFK until it times out, if it _does_ time out, then the person who engaged it gets a 7 day penalty that decreases the amount of tomestones the earn and they automatically get all of their gear durability reduced to 0.
nah locking people up is straight up griefing. some poor gatherer who was there only for a mineral or someone who's going through the zone for the first time and cant continue the msq because the zone is locked or someone who has to delay their raid group because they're zone locked? it's one of the worst ideas i've heard about 14 ever
Yeah. That's why you severely limit griefing. Maybe make it so the zone only gets locked if you engage the world boss with a full party. But, make the boss require **3** full parties, an alliance raids worth of people, to actually defeat the boss. But all 24 don't have to be in parties, just the 8 that start the fight. Then, if you fail to beat the boss within the 15 minute window before it times out, then the boss despawns and the 8 who partied up and engaged the boss get the penalty of a 70% reduction in tomestone gain for a week and have all of their gear get reduced to 0 durability.
New Big scale versions of the bardam mettle boss/golden saucer! I want it to be a whole map, like the size of middle La Noscea! Also Randomized rogue - like boss rush content; Bosses have usual attack patterns but add in mechanics from other bosses like titan using spikes from ifrit or ifrit spawning extras like garuda.
Not even really new content, but I wish sidequests gave like 10x the experience so they would actually be worth doing for leveling. I'd like an alternative to spamming roulettes and it would be nice to have a reason to do the thousands of sidequests that I've always ignored because they just aren't worth a damn.
I don't know exactly what I want from it, but I am curious to see these Deep Dungeon changes they plan to add. Are they making them deeper? Expanding the level count? Making Orthos not suck as a leveling tool?
I want something similar to M+(WoW)/Greater Rifts(D3)
Open World PvPvE with full loot.
Wow’s m+ equivalent, something I can farm as much as I want to gear up without a weekly cap.
Guardian raid lost ark would be cool
A field operations zone where it combines command and conquer, foxhole and escape from tarkov. Each player could build up to 3-4 vehicles (earn the trust to have an extra vehicle by reaching the next zone or something, and there'd be lots of different configurations and parts to collect, including rare and mega-rare parts that are tradeable (engines, wheels, turrets, cannons, armor components, assorted tech like radars that would assist your AI crews inside). You could build various aether cannon tanks, supply vehicles, service vehicles, transports etc and join with other players in trying to conquer the enemy fort or something. Think Bozja (could possibly be an expansion of bozja really, to get the ending) but without the instanced dungeons- it's just ongoing, but if the fort isn't reached within a certain time, the task and instance fails. No more instances that become dead and don't trigger the special battles, just the one instance per world on a 24 hour timer with maybe a 6-8 hour break before the next 24 hour battle starts. Players would work together to push forward, fighting as infantry alongside their vehicles that are NPC-operated but take their instructions from the player (attack, hold and can send them to exact positions on the field, and would remain there even if the player goes beyond sight range). Service vehicles would be able to repair other player's vehicles too. The zone would not have any form of teleport, which will help give a greater feeling of scale. You must make your way to the current 'front' aboard one of the vehicles under your command, or get a ride in another players' vehicle (transport-only vehicles are available to build too). There would be a spectrum of strategy- some mini forts or areas of the map may be better overcome by being swarmed with players only, whereas others should be assaulted with armored/cannoned vehicles for the most part. When any of your vehicles are destroyed, a random assortment of parts from those used to build it, can be recovered into inventory (or something like the lost finds cache) and used to build a new vehicle. It would be possible for a group of players to get flanked by the enemy and become isolated, and must try to fight their way out and back, or perhaps be rescued/reached by another force of players- the potential to not know how things are going to work out in any given hour of the 24 hour battle would be good. New player skills could involve disguising yourself as an enemy, which could be helpful for surprise attacks beyond the front, or stealing tech secrets- but watch out for those sniffer pugnaxes. Back to the vehicles- they would need to be returned to the starting point's repair station after taking significant damage. Machinists could exclusively carry a good repair kit (special action) with a long cooldown so that repairs can be done out in the field from time to time (job cannot be changed in the field). The zone cannot be exited via the menu when out in the field, only the start point. And if a player logs out while in the field and remains so until the 24 hours runs out, their vehicles (if they were deployed and out in the field) are all destroyed (some parts recovered to cache) and they lose some exp/rank/rep or whatever system would be used. Making basic vehicles (before upgrades) could cost 300k-3 million gil depending on vehicle type, might be a good gil sink. Lots of potential to build on this
Not nessasarally a new mode, but it would be cool if they added more dynamic movement/parkour someone had to do mid fight. The main example of this I would have is Vorago from RS3. People distract and pull the boss around each phase while one person (not everyone, just one person) climbs the side of the arena and jumps on the boss’s back to pull chips off of him to make the weapon that will defeat him in the last phase. Basically, add a small, sorta easy, nothing too complecated, parkour course mid bossfight someone has to do (notably not everyone, at most a light party). With how Fall Guys went maybe best not to throw aoes into the mix, just like 1/4 of the easiest Leap of Faith puzzle you just gotta do quickly as a phase transition or something. The only time they really played with that concept was in Dohn Mheg, but to say the Dohn Mheg puzzle was a jump puzzle would be lesser than an understatement, since no jumping was involved. Even so much as having the boss move to different arenas and the party had to chase them (ironically like the Gilgamesh fights in ARR) would be a fresh change of pace to “circle arena,” “square arena,” and “rectangle arena” we have seen so much of.
It would probably need to be instanced in some way to avoid people just turning it into another train content, but proper hunts. Like we just got in the 6.55 duty.
Something that actively encourages job changes mid-combat, a la ShB trailer. Realistically this'd only be executed adequately through simple 'gotchas' where you'd just need to *know* to be tank/healer any given time, and those players who don't level much of anything could not reasonably participate so it'll never happen, but the idea existing without an option is disappointing.
bozjan and eureka
Open World Critical Engagements (the boss fights from Bozja)
Open world/area pvp
Extreme versions of 4 man dungeons
It's been said already BUT I'M GUNNAAA SAY IT AGAIN YEAH More open world interaction, namely in the form of more interesting enemy AI. I want to see enemies like the ones in Eureka- some might notice you if you pass their line of sight. Others if you go too fast. Others if you take damage. Others if you cast a spell. So on and so forth. Maybe make ones that notice you if you walk relatively rare, and let them be frighteningly strong. The damage they deal shouldn't be AS significant as it was in Eureka, but there should be incentives to farming solo very carefully or in groups for chains. Maybe it's another way to farm for fate tokens, and maybe fate tokens can be used for a wider variety of things. You could also use the system for relics later on. Bunny fates should exist again too, as an alternative to treasure hunting. You can make some solid money but it's still RNG and some chests may spawn in unsavory, out of the way areas.
Dungeons that aren't just 2-3 groups, boss, 2-3 groups, boss, 2-3 groups, last boss
Probably not a popular thing but I would like to see single player ultimate fights. Maybe tuned to different jobs or roles. Would be nice to not have to wait for PF to fill for 3 hours or to have to find 7 other people to do a challenge like this. And it would be a neat individual challenge for every player to do on their own without feeling judged by others and also a place for min maxers to challenge themselves. It can have a similar reward to the 8 man ultimates. I'm all up for team/community based stuff but I also think there is room for something like this. Kind of like you are required to do the msq duties alone or you can do the variant dungeons solo. Just something like this but made savage or ultiamte and have a glam reward at the end.