Level Syncing isn't the best solution

[Rhomagus]

I have played Whm and now play Ast, trying to balance their full 70 tool kit to work at low levels would be a headache. Level sync'd healers and tanks are already op in low level dungeons using the few skills they have, give them their full kit; Pffft you may was well being sending gods into low level dungoens with unsync level players. I don't have to explain how powerful Aspected benefict+time dialation+bole+ tank CD's are all combined. New players don't need to be impressed by level 70 skills they need to learn to use the skills they have first, not spend their time in a dungoen idolizing a high level player.

They won't be utilizing that low level rotation for very long, and because it's a boring rotation, their more inclined to quit the game because of it. One of the bigger complaints of WoW converts is that the early game mechanics are too slow, and the devs response is always, "You'll appreciate the 2.5 second GCD once you get your full kit." As you already stated, sync'd players are OP as is. Rookie players don't care about learning obsolete content, nor should they be. Their just trying to get through the game (which is the purpose of Duty Roulette in the first place), especially with so many veterans not even reading their tooltips as is and not understanding their rotations to begin with, learning lower level rotations is actually wasted time and effort, while you'd get much more bang for your buck displaying a jobs potential first hand. This far outweighs the ever decreasingly few moments they'll be tied to a rotation which is outdated and obsolete severely quickly.

Learning low level rotations serves no one.

[Rhomagus]

I don't think any change is currently necessary, besides it sounds like it would be a nightmare to balance. Any time spent on balancing this suggestion is likely better time spent on new content.

Ya, we could have Diadem 3 by now if it wasn't for these pesky QoL changes for a veteran heavy game.

[Zephera]

Ya, we could have Diadem 3 by now if it wasn't for these pesky QoL changes for a veteran heavy game.

What's with the attitude? Bit angry someone thinks differently?

[Rhomagus]

What's with the attitude? Bit angry someone thinks differently?

No, I'm just highlighting the flippant dismissal of things that would be of greater reward if the development team actually spent more time on them. By providing excellent customer service to their already paying customers. Also, explaining the multitudes of reasons why improving veterans QoL actually has a reverberating effect all throughout a game's populace by helping them showcase the dev teams own work to rookie players that wouldn't otherwise ever bare witness to it due to burnout is actually far more of a better time investment than implementing time sinks that no one really asked for, which has been the vast majority of "new" content that the development team seems to push ala Diadem, Eureka, Klhoe/Zhloe, etc. Which is also content that new players never get to see if they aren't enticed to do so from the beginning.

The OP's suggestion is far from a waste of development resources for the reasons already explained. On the contrary, working on things that people want is far more likely to create customer retention than the gamble of working on something that people never asked for but that the dev team gambled and thought the populace would love.

It's actually the smarter time investment.

[Zephera]

The OP's suggestion is far from a waste of development resources for the reasons already explained. On the contrary, working on things that people want is far more likely to create customer retention than the gamble of working on something that people never asked for but that the dev team gambled and thought the populace would love.

I don't think enough people are asking for this to warrant it.

EDIT: For the record, i'm not opposed to changing things so that a few more of the fun skills are able to be used early, it would make leveling classes like MCH much more fun for example. I just think that there's no point in re-balancing the lvl sync system.

[kikix12]

1. Most players wouldn't even notice at that level. Especially new players who aren't parsing, and any vet of MMOs knows endgame is where it's at.

Most players are not "MMO veterans". And even "MMO veterans" won't slog through a crappy early stages of a game just to get to the end game, seeing as they won't know whether the end game won't be even worse.

The only ones not affected are those that already have a reason to play end-game, like a friend that invites them and can vouch for end-game being good.

And you saying that I'm wrong on this point is pretty amusing, seeing the number of games that go under due to players not sticking to them because the early stages of the game don't appeal to them.

2. I honestly have no idea what "copy-driven progress" is.

Humans are copycats. If someone is doing something better than you, you copy him and thus become better yourself. That works on a subconscious level. In group content, if you manage to notice another player playing better than you with a class you use, you're very likely to start mimicking him...unless he's an asshole. At later stages of the game it's a bit too hectic to depend on it, true, but early on it's far easier.

My suggestion was to give EVERYONE all of their class skills immediately, not just players at max level.

They way you worded it seemed to imply something else. That it was the original posters idea, but limited only to class skills. And under that assumption I answered.

If you mean that lvl1 character will have ALL of the class skills, then that's another problem. Lack of any progress from 1 to 30. That too would have players lose interest in the game at early stages, reducing player retention.

4. All of the content is mostly invalidated anyways. I can do leveling dungeons in my sleep as is.

If it's broken, fix it. Don't break it even more. As I said earlier, the current way it works is most certainly broken, but it is broken LESS than the suggestions being put forth.

The sync function should be better fine-tuned to make players find some challenge in all of the content. At that point, the experience reward should be set more appropriately. This is what pisses me off in FATE's. The higher the level of FATE the less relevant the few levels above it are. At lvl30 FATE you can already be pretty badly beat-up by the enemies, not much less than at lvl50 FATE. But the experience you get for similar level of difficulty is absolutely horrible. If you're syncing down the players stats and skills, you need to sync up the experience accordingly. The time taken to clear a FATE, the feasibility of clearing it solo and the like should be taken into consideration, not the original level of the person. Since that original level does not exist in the FATE. The same is in dungeon. If the sync would make Sastasha a challenge, it should give experience at about 70%-80% of duty that's 3 levels below you. Less because it's easier to play your character well, but still viable since it would be challenging.

But it's not. It's a cakewalk even with syncing. And that's a problem that needs fixing.

I agree they could be more difficult, but that doesn't mean they can't be fun by letting us have more skills and some semblance of a functional rotation.

That's the problem. I am all for making fundamental parts of the class available early on, as I said before. But not the entire toolkit (not even from the class alone). There still needs to be some instant gratification for leveling in the form of skills. But an AoE, some sort of cooldown and at least one full rotation, one ranged attack should be already available at lvl15. This is something I can get behind. Dumping of skills...not.

The early game is already severely skewed by virtue of balance being for endgame.

Yeah. The moment Stormblood hit, playing below 50 for all classes went from bad to horrible. But that's proof of what I am talking about, not you.
Developers of FFXIV simply have this ridiculous notion that you promote that end-game is "where it's at". And that's what kills early stages of the game, even though technically if they were fun two years ago, they should be fun now as well. There is nothing in humans brains that makes old content unfun until AFTER it is done repeatedly. It's the developers that do it by making the old content play differently than it was designed for to cater to the end-game.

I enjoyed leveling classes before Stormblood more than I do now since the point at which the classes seem to have a fine selection got pushed back by at least several levels. And for some classes, they lack core, class-defining abilities until their 70th level altogether...

It needs to be roughly balanced, but being able to rip through Sastasha in 12-15 minutes instead of 30 doesn't deter new players. If anything, it attracts them, as the early story and leveling will be much faster.

All dungeons are set for 15-20minute mark, in general. And it's going to be that way with new or old players. The only way to exceed 20 minutes is to have a player that absolutely doesn't know what he's doing (like a tank that never uses Flash/Overpower and only attacks a single target all the time) and/or a full team of badly undergeared people. Only way to do it faster than about the 15 minute mark (it varies from dungeon to dungeon slightly, Sastasha for example have a lot of walking and stopping points with keys etc., so it takes longer even unsynced than other dungeons) is to have a totally spot-on team that is not only fully decked out but also goes about their business nearly-flawlessly.

The early dungeons are a slog only because you lack AoE attacks. Later in the game dungeons are a slog only if players don't USE their AoE attacks. Or are severely undergeared. Fights themselves are rather short. Hauke Manor for example is going to take you ~8 minutes (...or was it 10 for Hauke?!...sorry, I don't remember which, but roughly 5 minutes less than doing it with a good party if memory serves) unsynced, provided you have spammable AoE attacks and go from one wall to another. Even if you one-hit everything, there's just not THAT much you can cut on other than the bosses. And bosses are actually the most fun part of the dungeons.

So, yes for redesigning classes to have well-thought of kit from early on. No for sync that gives any player a skill that another player does not. And no for no skill gains for the entire early game.

[RiyahArp]

They may need to do some solution anyways though. I can't see playing the game at level cap 80, and having four different tiers of abilities to use in various content. (50, 60, 70, 80). I think they may have to reset content in 5.0, make the starting content level 60 or 70 so we aren't playing four different iterations of our job.

[GunksFoy]

Snip

I think we agree fundamentally, just differ in implementation.


This is exactly my point though. The game is abysmal at level 1-50. It didn't used to be so bad, but between loads of story that never seems to end (even if it was good when it came around, having to slog through all of it at one time and not have it spread out is mind numbing). And I think having more abilities early on, and more thinks to do besides auto attack and press 1-3 buttons would go a long way to fixing that.

I don't that I agree on this in this situation. I rarely pay any attention to the people I'm playing with unless I notice their DPS is very low or insanely high, and then I'm either checking to see what they're doing differently, or asking them/trying to help them, depending on the situation. Honestly, without a parser, most players don't even KNOW they're doing it wrong. I was a prime example back in 2.0 as a dragoon. I assume what I was doing was right, until someone told me that it was wrong. It was my first MMO and I failed to understand some of the tooltips, even though I read them. No amount of watching other people would have told me that what I was doing was not right.

Fair enough. I agree it has it's problems, but so does any solution. The devs have to work around, and try to make the beginning intriguing. I'm not sure what to do about level progress honestly. But if I had to choose between spamming Impulse Drive for 11 levels or not getting skills every few levels, I'm taking the former.

I don't think you need to make them "as challenging as a level 70 dungeon". Having the skills and scaling the potency to make you roughly as powerful as we already would be at that level, but having more abilities. You could even use to solve all the problem of level progression. Grant traits that increase skill potency as you level. As good as getting skills? No, but it's something. Not the perfect solution, but just spitballing. But why not scale up the experience based on your true level rather than the level you're synced to? They already do this with Leveling Roulette, giving a bigger bonus at the end for being a higher level to roughly compensate you for getting a lower level dungeon, but it would make getting lower dungeons less punishing. The biggest problem I foresee with this is that players would find the most efficient dungeon to run and spam that, reducing the value of having so many leveling dungeons.

Sure, I'm up for alterations to that suggestion. Basically, we need more to do in Sastasha than press 2 buttons. Many ways to solve that. Though I don't think having the full class set impacts dungeons too much except maybe tanks, since many of their major skills come from the class and not the job.

I mostly agree. I leveled everything to 50 in 2.x and it was way more fun that leveling now. But we are all just spitballing ideas. History has shown that SE isn't going to heed anything we say if they ever decide to fix it lol.

Sastasha and Tam-Tara can easily exceed the 20 minute mark, even if you aren't doing the extra rooms/mobs. Some of the others aren't as bad, but pre-30, many of the dungoens can easily break into the 25-30 minute time frame. Especially with new players. Stone Vigil is another one, but it is also much more fun because you have many more skills, including some AoE depending on Job. Later on it is pretty consistent on the 15-20 minute time frame.

To address your last sentence: Agreed, Agreed, and tentatively agree. I think they need to get creative with it, instead of making all skills be gated behind level. But as I said above: History has shown that SE isn't going to heed anything we say if they ever decide to fix it lol. So, /shrug

[Freyt]

Basically no one enjoys doing Sastasha because they have almost none of their abilities. Lowering your damage to match the dungeon in actuality leaves you still overpowered for the dungeon, as you have plenty of options available to you that the dungeon wasn't designed for you to have. This is not a bad thing. People worked hard to get to where they are, and they should find early content easier as a result of their efforts.

Wouldn't you enjoy being able to show off your various jumps as a dragoon to a fresh new player in the level 15 dungeon? You can even make it so any non-gcd abilities receive a harsh penalty in damage if it's synced down. This means those jumps will hit for less, but it's still more damage either way.

[Dzian]

And yeah FINAL FANTASY XIV's approach to storytelling is miles better than FINAL FANTASY XI's. Iit's basically the one indisputable thing it does better than FINAL FANTASY XI.

Again I disagree.

Final Fantasy XI's approach to the story was in my opinion very well done. Many separate chapters all interconnected and inter-weaved but by and large entirely up to the player how they worked through it. You could if you chose skip an entire story such as COP and jump straight into say the ToAU story without any issues at all. What was really smart though is that as much as they were separate they were also pretty well entwined. If you beat ToAU and went back to do CoP you'd learn little tid bits that may have answered a few of your questions along the ToAU path. Also in many ways it was much more accessible than what we have in XIV as there wasn't that much in the way of gates for a lot of it. A player with RoTZ for example could unlock and make it to Kazham and Norg pretty easily regardless of where they were in the story. The same could be said for Aht Ungan and Al Zhabi. this generally meant players could play together a lot more regardless of where in the story they were.

In XIV the story is for a lot of people nothing more than a huge obstacle that prevents them from getting to and playing with there friends. It's such a terrible road bloak that the devs had to add a skip potion to let players bypass a good section of it. and it is without doubt a big reason why a lot of new players don't stick around. The msq at present is getting close to like 600 quests long all entirely mandatory and thats an incredibly huge hurdle for players. Whats worse is a significant portion of those quests are literally just filler junk... "Oh hey you've defeated a mighty primal. now go kill some slugs ruining my crops....." wtf???

By comparison CoP widely regarded as one of the best stories XI ever told was roughly 35 missions or quests long significantly shorter than even just 2.0s main story. Yet despite being only 35 quests long it told an incredibly deep and detailed story and it was generally much better because there was almost no filler crap involved. Aht unghans was only 44 quests long and again told a deep and involved story that players could work through at there own pace. XIV's story is far to padded out with fluff and pointless quests that bare absolutely no significance at all to the actual plot... there just there as arbitrary filler and to throw players some exp.

Another big difference is XI's stories were all centered around Vana'diel. The entire game revolved around its world and the actions of its inhabitants. and thus players felt alot more connected to it. In XIV the story revolves around the player and the whole world of Eorzea is dead and lifeless as a result. A common compliant is it also breaks bonds between players and there characters because you might hate particular npcs with a passion but your character is best buddies with them. Even the dialogues that have choices in dont change. a character might say what about you? you can say of course or shake your head in disagreement. but the story still takes you to the exact same place and the npcs don't treat you any differently.

This also means the world never changes. at the risk of spoiling it for a few players...

take a look at the azim steppe you have this whole story thing building up about the naadam and you basically help the underdogs come out victorious. yet absolutely nothing in the steppe changes as a result of that. it's basically as if you never did it in the first place. hell some of the npcs in the dawn throne still make out they are the champions even though they got there butts handed to them.. so what exactly was the point??

There is also difficulty. In XI there was a good connection between the atmosphere the story tried to create and the difficulty of any fights that centred around it.... In XIV that just isn't the case. The story tries so many times to paint a tense or dire situation sometimes even one that all hope is lost. But then that gets completely destroyed when players roflstomp there way to vicotry with zero risk of ever failing.. Even in ARR, the Garleans were meant to be this mighty powerfull threat to the whole of Eorzea. Yet one level 50 player in i80 or there abouts could roflstomp the castrum in mordhona or wineport and completely destroy entire armies of Garleans.. It completely invalidates all the tension and atmosphere the story tries to create and that generally makes massive amounts of the story so forgettable...
Why exactly did we go into the Copperbell Mines again?
or Stone Vigil?
or Haukke Manor?
or Global Library?
or well take your pick....

So yeah I'm disputing your one indisputable thing. If you'd like to tell me why you believe its indisputable please do go ahead.. but IMO XI handled story telling way better than XIV does for so many reasons. some i've just stated and I could probably add more...