There has been a lot of positive feedback both on the forums and within my dungeon circle about Black Gem Foundry, but while it was a success, I hope that it is simply a step towards the future rather than the end goal to repeat.

What I mean by that is, while the mechanics are wonderfully crafted and require group synergy, the hard mode does become easy once you've figured it out. A lack of randomization is a good thing but there's not a lot of mechanics to be juggling at once so in the end, Black Gem Foundry's difficulty has just been in the learning prog where there's only meaningful strategical differences between groups on second boss. Yet, within the patch after Black Gem Foundry was released in, groups are already skipping entire phases on hard mode (even my group and we aren't sweaty nor meta, just average dungeon endgamers).

I hope that the success of Black Gem Foundry will have you all striving for more difficult hard modes with more mechanics to juggle in the future (and ideally less ability to burn past mechanics without employing immunity phases, but I think the concept of getting a boss stuck in a mechanic and burning is a basic game coding situation, so perhaps increased difficulty the faster its burned somehow?). After all, I am still of the belief that dungeon hard modes have a good curve going for them in difficulty (so there's not much of a gap to be filling in lower difficulty). But it does seem to be a running thing that only one of the dungeons have a particularly difficult hard mode, except for when SWR/CA came out. Only one I know of off the top of my head to both be hard.

But anyways, the second part of what I came here to say is the lessons I learned, not just the lessons I hope ZOS has learnt. When Black Gem Foundry came out, the trash sections were a nuisance. They're spread out, the more annoying enemies (forgers) are small enemies, and some pulls have multiple ranged adds. I have grown to immensely appreciate all of the traits of the Black Gem Foundry trash because by progging Black Gem Foundry HM/trifecta, it has made me a better tank in a much more blatant way than any other dungeon has. I thought I knew outranging and line of sight, I employ it when strategizing... but not as often as I could have. Black Gem Foundry requiring line of sight to stack the trash effectively in so many of its pulls has me now looking for line of sight spots in other dungeons and even IA... when I wasn't looking for them before. This could become annoying quickly as a trash gimmick, so I don't mean to imply all dungeons should take after Black Gem Foundry, but having a skill really be tested by trash was a wonderful idea (maybe an anti-blocking mechanic next so I stop "permablocking", ey? Ey? Could also be cool to have a "yellow aoe stack mechanic" but for trash enemies instead of players, to teach people that they need to stack trash, though that's a very basic tank skill that all endgame tanks should have down already.). As for the forgers, I have really been enjoying the "this is the reverse of what you'd think as a tank" "mechanics" lately: learning where small adds are to taunt them before big adds, intentionally coning the group on first boss, and temporarily being unable to move the second boss of Lep Seclusa (love that she chains YOU also!).