Variance in player skill is hurting FFXIV's itemization design.

[Kerii]

You're only synced for old content, not things like Expert Roulette.

I don't want to make assumptions, but I imagine that everyone who isn't sporting full raid gear or upgraded currency gear would be within the acceptable ilv range for the dungeons when they're current. Looking at duty finder, what they end up syncing almost looks random, but maybe I'm just forgetting something. In either case, I think it is still fair to say that you don't get kicked out of dungeons over gear disparity in duty finder.

[RobbieH]

(Not everything bellow is for you, just something i need to spill out)

RPG = Character progression. That is the point of the game.

The RPG element in this game isn't one of it's strong points, things need to be changed because honestly it doesn't feel too much like an RPG.

Niddhogg offers the BiS weapons for everyone that doesn't raid savage and is not interested in the rather intense grind of the Relic.

No it doesn't lets see the monk Weapon for example, it gives DET+SkS, while the i230 Lore gives CRIT+SkS, the lore weapon offers 25 more DEX in stat weight than the Nidhogg weapon, there for not BiS.

Since you asked: I am doing my 240 relic right now. No I am not one of those lunatics that does it in 2 weeks. So theoretically Niddhoggs weapons would be useful to me.

I still don't see how i235 is useful, let's say you don't raid, how is it useful? Saving a few seconds in dungeons so you can go afk in Limsa faster? That's what i see people doing lol.

Hell i even see people with i245 afk or showing off their weapons instead of doing anything, that's the state the game is currently, sure hardcore players could go do relic, but that's something they only do for glamour/because there's nothing else for them to do that appeals them.

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I stop raiding at A6S, mainly because i don't have a static and didn't bother finding another one, god forbid me but Ragnarok is AWFUL for statics, either get into Angered/Solitude or good luck with your sub time.

Anyway, i've stopped raiding during A6S and decided to learn Dragoon due to being bored of NIN (main since 2.4), i did Nexus Relic, did i230 relic all for DRG (had Zeta and also i230 relic on NIN), and currently doing i240 relic for DRG, i have literally nothing appealing to do besides Savage, but i'm not going into it while still learning DRG, so i decided to learn DRG til 3.4

I was actually hyped about going into Nidhogg EX, until i saw how boring it was on streams and that the weapons are i235, yeah no.

Even if i got my DRG i235 spear what benefits would i get from it if not raiding atm? None, i'm doing hunts for the relic and because it's something more dynamic due to hunts having various spots to check, so it's pointless for me, i don't do roulettes because i don't want to go do the same content over and over i've been doing since 2.0

All i know is that we had more content before 3.0 than when it arrived, everytime they release stuff they kill stuff.

Bad design decisions:

- One end-game every 6 months, same for 24 man raids
- All their gear is worthless when new tier comes
- Putting chest in last turn of Savage (...), if they were even good looking i'd understand.
- No 24 Man raid roulette
- No Coil/2nd Coil Savage Roulette, even tho the rewards for 2nd Coil savage are worthless, if i wanted the glamours i could just craft them or do normal 2nd Coil
- Expert roulette with two dungeons
- Previous lvl60 Dungeons are thrown into lvl60 Roulette which is worthless unless you are farming tomes, i wonder whats the point of having them in-game, same for lvl50 dungeons, unless you are leveling
- Weekly limits everywhere, people just get their item and logout or go afk in Limsa
- i230 Item from 24 man raid is one-per-week and isn't upgradeable, seriously?
- Savage restrictions to farm only lifted when next raid tier comes
- Diadem
- Relics being worthless once new expansion hits, instead of building upon it, imo they should just make relics work like Nexus stage where we upgrade it as we do stuff, currently crafters and premades unlock relics in 2/3 days
- 7 weeks to get lore i230 unless you raid and get item from A7S, seriously SEVEN weeks?
- Gold saucer rewards
- Still no armor from Trials, making trials pointless unless it's a must like Ravana weapon was, i believe weapons-only from trials is so that it's another GATE and less time from devs making new armor.
- Remove armor from dungeons and put them in trials so we have Trial themed armor, dungeons armors are useless ilvl so they should remove it from them.
- Add crafting materials to dungeons instead so people without crafting or lazy crafters could make some gil, DoW saving the world from being destroyed no, crafters get all the gil, lmao i'll never understand.
- Still on same topic as above, crafters and gatherers re the only ones that make gil, as a DoW i find that hilarious, Expert roulette 5k gil, yay ._.
- Relics, relics are proof of bad design, they were supposed to be the most powerful weapons in the game, but no they re completely useless from a raider PoV, they should be the best weapons but would require serious grind, instead they make it so that crafters and premades get it in 2 days ._.


Good design decisions:

- Giving tokens for clearing a Savage turn
- Story, i don't even care about story but i admit it's good
- ???

[Waterdeep]

Let's say clearing T13 as DRG -synced with min iLevel, we don't want the casual scrubs get the loot- will grant you a lance or boots with Dreadwyrm Jump. The ability completely opens up your rotation, looks sweet and makes for a whole new DRG experience while also improving your dps by 10%. Where is the difference if you just gave the player a lance/boots that had better stats that resulted in 10% more dps? Easy: it looks better and has more bragging rights, elevating the raider over the grey masses. I can get if you want that, I really do, but please call it like that and don't propose it under the guise of 'Interesting itemization', especially if you are so willing to leave a certain portion of the playerbase behind.

Maybe I misremember XIs itemization a lot, but it usually resulted in having to macro a lot of gear changed into every ability to get the optimal results? Something like that would be impossible in XIV as it is now unless they change the rules of gear switching in combat. But I will admitt that it was a lot more interesting than the items in XIV.

Now, personally I am pretty happy they don't cater to raider in that sense. XIV is for me a casual feelgood MMO and I would prefere it to stay so. I think it is already pretty sad that they balance classes around savage progression instead of going for a more diverse feeling in classes. So what if Job X is really bad at A6S? Heck XI balance was completely atrocious and you had really unique classes that felt different from each other.

[Granyala]

I still don't see how i235 is useful, let's say you don't raid, how is it useful? Saving a few seconds in dungeons so you can go afk in Limsa faster?

To give players a sense of progression and something to work towards.

25dex more would roughly equal to 2.5 weapon damage. (IIRC WDamage to mainstat ratio was 1:10). So if the 235 offers >3WDamage more (I don't know just guessing as I do not play melee) it would be better, despite having suboptimal secondary stats. Not that you'll ever notice that difference in real gameplay scenarios. Deltas this tiny are purely academic in nature.

As i said: placing the 235s in extreme mode was a misstep, because the weapon misses a target audience that might benefit: people that only have a 230 and do not raid/do relic (or like me: do relic slowly over months, because they don't like to grind hardcore).
I fully understand that raiders might not care about the weapon at all.

Bottom line: its a subscription game. They have to implement stuff and gate/timesink it if they want to coerce continued pay from players. That's your relic in a nutshell.

[RobbieH]

Bottom line: its a subscription game. They have to implement stuff and gate/timesink it if they want to coerce continued pay from players. That's your relic in a nutshell.

On the other hand i see more and more people offline on my friends list.

They said that the new influx of new players is what keeps the game alive, i call that BS.

I bought an FC with medium house (ended up selling it because i was considering quit and if i sold the FC would have some gil if i came back), most of it's members were sprouts, as time passed i saw their days of not login increase, til i moved them to the AFK.

SE still believes that new players is better than MAINTAINING what already exists, until they see how wrong they are they're going to keep losing people.

T
25dex more would roughly equal to 2.5 weapon damage. (IIRC WDamage to mainstat ratio was 1:10). So if the 235 offers >3WDamage more (I don't know just guessing as I do not play melee) it would be better, despite having suboptimal secondary stats. Not that you'll ever notice that difference in real gameplay scenarios. Deltas this tiny are purely academic in nature.

- http://xivdb.com/item/14313/Hellfire-Claws
- http://xivdb.com/item/15304/Horde-Knuckles

Same weapon damage, horde gives one more magic damage lol.

[Granyala]

They said that the new influx of new players is what keeps the game alive, i call that BS.

Heavy churn is quite normal in MMOs.
WoW had the same thing happen. People eventually quit and it's when the new folks start falling away that sub count declines.

Same weapon damage, horde gives one more magic damage lol.

Then the 235s are indeed suboptimal to a 230.

I do think 5 item levels is simply to little an improvement in order to feel a difference, so secondary stats win out.

[Jynx]

RPG = Character progression. That is the point of the game.

You know I'm pretty casual only due to how the game is structured. I have no reason to shoot for lofty goals like savage because a few months down the line it will be pointless anyways.

People also need things to aspire too and not just handouts.

I remember being floored by how awesome maxed characters were in FFXI. You always had something to shoot for. Not just level cap and tome caps.

[Granyala]

You know I'm pretty casual only due to how the game is structured. I have no reason to shoot for lofty goals like savage because a few months down the line it will be pointless anyways.

What about the actual raiding experience?

That feeling when you finally down a boss can never be taken away.

Screw gear, that gets outdated by every patch anyway. It's merely a tool needed for the job.

...

And to look fabulous of course. ^_^

[CosmicKirby]

I'd argue that, as summarized by the OP, Yoshida is missing the point.

No-one wants to be mediocre. The hard core raider don't want just slightly better boring stats. The hard core crafters don't want a few neat things to make and ways to make gil with nothing to spend it on. Casuals don't want to struggle to get through stuff with no real reward.

There's definitely room to reward each of their play styles well while separating their effort put in. RUNESCAPE has done this. There's some really, really, really nice and cool things to earn in Runescape by devoting most of your time in one of several directions. The most dedicated can take all those directions, those less so can still head in one and feel accomplished. This mire of baseline success is hurting the game more than helping it.

[Brian_]

...

You can't have piss poor rewards for raiding and expect that aspect of your game to flourish. If you removed the gear from Savage and made it purely about the challenge, the raiding community would shrink even more, there would be less and less of a reason to devote any development budgeting to Savage, burn out would hurt even more since there wouldn't be a steady stream of new raiders to replace the old ones, and the raiding aspect of the game would die off completely leaving even the raiders that only raid for the challenge disenfranchised. You'd have what many regard as a PvE game without challenging PvE.

I don't think many raiders raid purely for the gear. But, you have to be completely clueless to think that the gear doesn't matter to any raider. It obviously matters.

You speak to others of their lack of experience with WoW. I was in one of the few WoW guilds that cleared vanilla Naxx before BC and continued to be at least a server first raider until late into BC. I also witnessed all the vanilla gear aside from a few items get completely trashed in one expansion. Not only that, but I was an avid PvPer before they really separated the PvP and PvE gearing aspects so raiders would curb-stomp non-raiders in PvP -- I also played on the largest PvP server at the time.

That said, now that I've taken a step back from top-progression raiding in FFXIV due to being older and having a job, I don't get envious of others for their gear and achievements or feel like I deserve to be their equal for whatever self deluded reason. At times, I'll see their BiS gear and feel more motivation to progress myself -- how is that a bad thing? I still remember back when I first started playing WoW the sense of awe at seeing a fully geared bad ass storm through and wreck everything. Like I said, what you are doing is removing the carrot from the stick for some people and expecting that they'll still move forward.

As for why raiding needs to matter -- it's not some mystery why so many people sub to this game for a few months and then quit until the next content patch. The reality is there really are only a few things in this game that have true, natural longevity and actually help build the bonds and friendships that keep people immersed within the community.

One is crafting. Unless you somehow start the game filthy rich, the progression cycle of gearing for crafting as well as the development and optimization of rotations naturally takes some time. If you were starting from scratch today, the process of becoming a geared omnicrafter would take you a lot of time. The social interaction of selling your services or products as well as the interactions with other crafters naturally builds human relationships.

Another is PvP. Due to the RNG nature of node spawns in the recent PvP maps / modes and the always changing nature of player versus player interactions, PvP naturally has enough variance to stay fresh for a long period of time.

The last is raiding. The content is challenging enough for most (and even the best) that it requires time and effort to learn and clear. Regardless of if you are PuGing the content through PF or with a static, the requirement of teamwork and communication naturally creates a social interaction. Experiencing something together with a team naturally builds camaraderie and relationships. It's really not that different from going to the park and playing a sport with someone.

Outside of that, the rest of the game is quite superficial. I might catch some flak for saying so from people that enjoy playing dress-up or RPing, but the reality is in the numbers -- it's hard for many to justify paying a monthly subscription to play virtual barbie. If this wasn't the case, we wouldn't see such a large dip in subs during content lulls.

But, from those three things, I think the one with the obvious widest appeal is raiding. PvP just simply isn't something a lot of people enjoy -- especially with the bad rewards, and as someone who is already fully-geared in self-crafted IW gear for both my crafters and gatherers, I can admit that the entry bar for crafting is rather high and the role of MMO tycoon isn't for everyone.

With harder PvE content, you really have the tools to create a rewarding and fulfilling path of progression. I think most who cleared coil will never forget the moment they cleared T12 with their friends and experienced the truth behind the calamity together. Even after they stripped out the story from Savage, I can still remember how good it felt to finally beat A3S with my static and that shared experience has kept me raiding and playing the game.

So yea, I really don't see the problem with rewarding people more for raiding so that you have a healthier end-game PvE scene in your PvE game. Is that necessarily gear? No, but I also don't see the issue with gear rewards as long as the path of progression is accessible. As the system currently exists and even if the disparity grows, the lack of raid gear is not holding anyone back from clearing Savage.