Greetings,
Below are some comments from Akihiko Matsui in regards to equipment plans for the future.
Matsui here.
All of the items in your question possess extremely high stats, so we’d like to make it easier to enjoy playing jobs such as paladin and bard by adding equipment that will fill this gap.Are there any plans to add shields stronger than Ochain and Aegis? How about instruments that surpass Daurdabla and Gjallarhorn? Ranged weapons that are stronger than Yoichinoyumi and Annihilator? And if so, will they have weapon skills?
The strong point of Ochain is in its extremely high block rate, but damage reduction wise the Killedar Shield has been set higher. We will be adding an item level 119 shield in the future, so please know that we will be reducing this gap even further.
In regards to instruments, we are currently looking into adding an instrument that will add another song, but I can’t promise a time frame just yet.
Finally, in regards to ranger, as everyone is already aware, the enmity-related stats for Coronach are very high; however, we've tuned content so that it can be completed even without Annihilator if you put Decoy Shot and Camouflage to use. Ranger is a job that we’d like players to pay careful attention to enmity, so we do not have any plans at the moment to introduce equipment or weapon skills that largely reduce enmity.
Speaking in terms of the overall situation, we feel that enmity is lacking for high item level tanks, and as such we would like to look into enmity adjustments as a larger framework.Matsui here.
I’d like to discuss the fundamental plans for upgrading equipment with item levels, as there are questions and uncertainty in regards to the future.
First, the equipment we are currently planning to make upgradeable is the reward equipment from Rala Waterways, Cirdas Cavern, and Yorcia Weald skirmishes. You’ll be able to perform the final upgrade to item level 119 with the new skirmishes that are to be added.
Besides these items, we do not have any plans to upgrade other equipment with item levels. Also, we’ll be introducing brand-new rewards in the skirmishes to be added after the next round.
If we were to continue adding upgrade items, players would have to keep a large amount of equipment and this is tied to inventory space consumption, so moving forward when we implement higher-tier versions of existing content and make adjustments to content levels we would like to adopt the method of adding new equipment rewards.
Basically we will not be making it so you need to have older equipment to obtain the new equipment, and for the exceptions where you can upgrade and there are requirements to exchange existing equipment, we feel it necessary to make it easier to obtain the original item as well as have a way to recover the items if they were thrown away.
In regards to inventory expansion, just as Yoji Fujito has commented here, it is being investigated, but we need to create a new system from scratch and it will take some time.