Lately I have been back playing some Final Fantasy XIV and enjoying myself quite a bit. I am not sure if is the cavalcade of “leaving wow to play ffxiv” videos that the YouTube algorithm has deluged me with, or if I am avoiding finishing FF7R because I don’t want the story to be over. Whatever the case I have been back and piddling around several old haunts, spending a lot of time on my tiny paladin… which I guess sounds weird because as a Lalafell everything is tiny. I never really leveled up my Paladin past around 50 and I have been doing so because apparently I really like the ways they have changed that class over the years.
Over the years I have spent copious amounts of time in Palace of the Dead, so much so that I would probably put it up there as one of my favorite activities in the game. At its most simple level it is a roguelike dungeon exploration game mode where you progress through an one hundred floor deep dungeon. It uses its own progression system in the form of Aetherpool Weapons and Armor which gain strength by finding specific chests in the dungeon. Each ten floors you face a boss of sorts and your progression is locked in, allowing you to restart at the last flight of ten floors that you left off. There are also temporary buff items that you pick up along the way that allow you to deal with traps and challenges specific to the dungeon.
There are a few things that I find really interesting about the game mode. Firstly any square you step on in your travels could contain a trap, which makes you cautious to travel uncertain paths or stay too clumped up for fear an explosion will KO the entire party. Additionally any treasure chest could be a Mimic, which applies a very hefty debuff making each chest you open a risk versus reward decision. Clearing a certain amount of monsters unlocks the gate to the next floor, and in general because of the traps and mimics, groups tend to only explore the bare minimum needed to move forward. This is especially true if you are doing floors 51-60 which players tend to run over and over as a quick way to level alts.
I personally love it because it means I can level alternate jobs without having to worry about gearing. You can legitimately step into Palace of the Dead wearing nothing but your job weapon and be just as effective as a player decked out in full savage gear. The other aspect that I have loved is that there are hidden coffers spread throughout the dungeon which can be turned in for a random item. There are a bunch of interesting things on this drop table but the vast majority are cosmetics. For example most of the outfit I am wearing in the above screenshot came from random drops in Palace of the Dead.
All of this is why I was looking forward to Torghast opening in World of Warcraft with the Shadowlands expansion. At least on paper everything I had read about it prior to the launch of the expansion made me think that maybe just maybe they were taking notes from FFXIV and introducing a similar system. In practice however Torghast ended up feeling largely pointless. Palace of the Dead has this join purpose of helping you level your alts and at the same time get some cool cosmetics while doing it. Torghast on the other hand is a forced grind that you feel like you have to complete every week… with your only reward being yet another random currency required to unlock something that feels require… legendary items.
While there are some mechanically interesting things going on with Torghast, it doesn’t feel as balanced and it is also a much bigger time sink than clearing ten floors of Palace of the Dead. There is so much RNG given that you get a choice of three buffs each time you open one of the glowing orbs. Some of these are really good and others are absolutely horrible. Then there is the whole feeling that nothing I gained this week carries forward to help me with next week. If you are unlucky you have a really bad time and if you are lucky your power seems to snowball out of control becoming an immortal god of death.
On the other hand in Palace of the Dead I have over time increased my Aetherpool Arms and Armor rating to +99 and am effectively as strong as I will ever get. That means I can drag alts in there and get a pretty predictable leveling experience, yet still feel like I get the random chance of getting something cool as a drop. I mean even when it isn’t anything I need, I can still share the love and gift those items to someone else. Like yesterday my friend Clockwork Bells happened to be on at the same time as me and I gifted her a pet, a music scroll and a nifty pair of cosmetic boots that I got as a drops. If I don’t have someone to send to, I have often times gone into one of the newbie areas and just dropped goodies on people.
The problem with Torghast I think is the fact that I felt like I was required to do it. If I skipped a week I felt like I was falling behind the curve in the amount of soul ash that I could have obtained. Similarly that end goal of maybe crafting a legendary… that I would have to spend hundreds of thousands of gold to obtain just wasn’t enough carrot to make the stick feel manageable. If Torghast also became a source of gear that you could take out of it and put to use in the rest of the game… maybe just maybe it would feel worthwhile. If they turned it into an alternate leveling path like Palace of the Dead and made it so that gear was completely normalized and you could effectively walk in naked… also like PotD I think that would have been enough to make me get into it.
As it stands, Torghast seemed like someones pet project… crafted by someone who maybe heard a FFXIV player talking about how much fun Palace of the Dead was, without actually understanding any of the things that made it enjoyable. However what is more likely the case is that Torghast was initially designed to be a super challenging replacement for the Mage’s Tower from Legion, that just sort shifted purpose somewhere along the way. The end result is something that isn’t fun enough to do just for the sake of doing it… and not rewarding enough to make making to do it feel like a good use of time. There are so many ways that they could improve upon the design, but at the end of the day we all know that it is going to stop being relevant the moment the next expansion is released. On the other hand I am still playing Palace of the Dead and it is still relevant some two expansions after it was initially put into the game.