I think there are two versions of "locked" dungeons that exist, but only one of them is actually creative or functionally "ok".

1. Gating mechanic (Direfrost/Imperial City Prison)

These just should not exist. They don't actually add anything functional to the dungeon in terms of difficulty, or require any adjustment of tactics to clear. They are just artificial gates.

This does exclude something like the gates in Hel Ra, because those at least require progression through a boss to open, effectively tying their usage to defeating a boss rather than just arbitrarily halting players.

2. Mechanic's based gating (Lock down mechanics like Dranos, or Fungal 2, or any boss that has ramping difficulty throughout a fight)

These are fine. Many of them are even solable (Dranos, Fungal 2 are both soloable if you time your AOEs right, others are with decently timed ults) if you can manage to hit the right timing or use specific skills to mitigate the lockdown or mechanic. But even if they weren't traversable solo (Wayrest 2 for example), they'd be fine, because they require actual skill to accomplish.

Hitting two pressure plates in a dungeon after killing some ads is not skill based and has no room in dungeons imo. The actual fights should be the deciding factor that holds up progress in a dungeon, not a pressure plate.

It's why I think Coral Aerie hit the right mark on the side bosses, as well as a few of the more recent dungeons.

Lozeenge wrote: »

the issue here i think isn't about dungeon accessibility but that there needs to be more lucrative solo content. maelstrom and vateshran were good starts and some of their drops are still sought after to this day. bastion nymic would've maybe also filled that niche but stuff hits crazily hard in there for it to be considered overland and you're only ever doing it for the daily anyway.

Absolutely! We only have 2 solo challenges currently in the game (maelstrom and Vateshran) but in the meantime it’d be cool if you could solo all of them as a fun challenge and maybe even have achievements with titles for doing it.

Just 2 manned vet bloodroot on hm yesterday with a buddy. It’d be cool to have little achievements for stuff like that