I'm personally laughing with how the legendary weapons are being treated, you got i119, then i119 with afterglow and then the new i119 with increased stats and afterglow but all remain i119. I was already against the idea of having levels on equipment but this is getting out of hand. Either raise the item levels higher to reflect their stats or scrap the already meaningless and rather misleading system.
Also: https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/Item_Level
For monsters above the player's character level, the average item level will impact the amount of experience received.
Ninja: The chance of a shadow being absorbed with Utsusemi varies according to the level of the weapon equipped in the main weapon slot.
Though I believe this is specifically referring to physical attacks that absorb multiple shadows, item levels supposedly lower the amount of shadows they clear, so, pets, trust, experience, and ninja shadows, are I think the only things that are derived from iLevel.
I am in the camp that believes this is just going to be starter i119 gear that they're talking about, and that item levels, as implemented, is a system that got implemented awkwardly at best.
If you are in Escha Ruan and kill a mob you can cap XP at around 6.3k per kill with a 119 weapon/armor, if you have a weapon/armor that has no ilevel you get around 2.2k Not sure what it is for a 117 weapon but it's still a horrible disability that should not exist, the people who need more xp are not the ones decked out.
It was a poorly implemented system in multiple ways, and refusal to raise the item level cap to reflect the increasing power of gear is but one of those ways.
Another would be stat vomit on gear. By stat vomit I mean how everything has loads of STR, DEX, etc, on it. It makes it hard to judge what actually has increased stats over the baseline without a lot of switching back and forth between items to compare them. It also blurs job differences, since you can lump together jobs on a single piece of gear that would have different base stat progressions. A much more elegant way to do it would simply to have item level determine your base statistics, just like normal level does. Then there's no stat vomit, and you can clearly see that this piece of gear his 20 DEX on it, or this piece has 15 Evasion.
Player
Back 6 years ago we had auction house level 75 weapons that were destroyed by other level 75 weapons like relics or ridill etc. This isn't something new so don't act like it is.
To do away with Ilevel now would be impossible because it's become a backbone feature of the game, trust levels are based off it and so are many XP rates. We have a small dev team, they don't need to waste time on removing something because you think some 119 weapons aren't as good as other 119 weapons. You know which are better than others by looking at the stats so why make a fuss about it?
Back in the days of 75 the difference between 75 gear and amazing 75 gear was 1-3 stat difference, ability modifier and/or a aftermath effect. But even still the difference was there but not to the extreme effect they are now. When you have i119 gear with a difference of 10-20 or even higher on stats that is a whole new level of gear.
Uh.... a lot more than 1-3 stat points different, very often, Ridill, Joyeuse, Hagun, Kraken Club, Maneater, Juggernaut, Relics, Mythics, etc etc etc, I've got gripes about some of the changes, and felt like iLevel could've been implemented better, but some weapons dwarfing others and specific ones being stand out obvious best is really nothing new, in fact I feel like people do have MORE options for endgame weapons and armor than they used to, rather than one clear winner always, I've got my gripes (don't even get me started on random augments), but, I feel like there are at least a few exceptional options on almost any given peice for the most part, rather than one "must-have" like the old days.
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