Item Levels

[Kristal]

I'm seeing several posts here that utterly miss the point of this change and it's consequences. So put away your torches and pitchforks and pay attention:

1. Exp will be based on the highest item level equipped in the party/alliance at any time.
2. Mobs that give exp will continue to give exp, which means that a lvl 56 easy prey at 75 will still give exp at 99 and 120. Magian trials that were intended for lvl 75 are still doable at 99, and will still be doable at 99/120.
3. Exp gain in Abyssea will be reduced if you use IL100-120 gear, but the cap will not. So you need to kill a few more critters to cap at 600 xp, but it caps the same regardless.
4. Bonus exp from chests and gov page completion is not affected, as it's BONUS EXP. (Ever wondered why Abyssea NMs do not count towards trial kills of their family/type? Because they only give bonus exp, not regular exp!)

In short, it will not affect you in an appreciable manner. Yes, you get less exp for killing that Fernfelling Chapuli if you use IL120 gear instead of IL99 gear, but you also kill it much faster and you weren't interested in the exp but items it can drop anyway.

And yes, the fault for this lies with the players that complained it was so easy to get exp that they had nothing left to spent their meripos on. SE listened, fixed merit weaponskills in the process, and now exp gain is going under the axe. We did it to ourselves! (Now go kill those opo-opos before they take over the world!)

[Tamoa]

The above might be correct but I honestly don't care. I think very very few of us cares. Abyssea made exping SO damn easy this isn't going to make much of a difference one way or another.

What I do care about, is SE spending time and effort on something which does not matter. If this really is a feeble attempt at "balancing" exp gain, it's WAY too little WAY too late - talk about closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.

[Kristal]

The above might be correct but I honestly don't care. I think very very few of us cares. Abyssea made exping SO damn easy this isn't going to make much of a difference one way or another.

What I do care about, is SE spending time and effort on something which does not matter. If this really is a feeble attempt at "balancing" exp gain, it's WAY too little WAY too late - talk about closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.

This Item Level thing is bigger then just exp. Someone mentioned making it actual levels, but any level gain is pointless if you can just sit in Abyssea for a few hours, so why bother.

I'm curious to see where they are expanding it further.. perhaps magic or abilities that can be used if you have a certain Item Level. Similar to Impact and Auto-Reraise, but irrespective of specific gear. Perhaps that is where the new merits are heading as well, like you can unlock Resolution on RUN, but until you got the skill level you can't use it.

[Edyth]

Camate, will item levels make it so that we can prevent aggression from currently-easy-prey monsters in old areas, such as Cape Terrigan?

[Jerbob]

I completely fail to see the point in this.

The whole concept of "item level" I understand, even if I completely disagree with the switch from "horizontal" progression to "vertical" progression that outdates all my equipment with every update. But why on earth are SE spending even 10 minutes, let alone creating a whole "update chunk", making it this formal?

I really don't care about having item levels written on my gear and I certainly don't want my combined equipment acting as some kind of bizarre "pseudo-level" that has an impact on the game. What honestly is the point of this? People have already pointed out that experience points are less relevant in today's game, so why is SE complicating it with this nonsense? SE have already shown themselves to be entirely ignorant when it comes to the relevance and usefulness of gear so the levels will almost certainly be allocated badly. We didn't need this at level 75, when gear was already pretty varied, and we certainly don't need it now.

There is currently a promised update backlog going back for more than a year and constant developer excuses about a lack of manpower. There are a mind-boggling number of things that should have higher priority than this - the atrocious macroing system, job balance issues, a myriad of bugfixes and ease of use issues, general balance problems centred around Adoulin, promised events like Monstrosity, AVATARS... I also hear that the cheese sandwich doesn't yet have a magian trial upgrade path, which rates a bit higher than this.

[FrankReynolds]

Yes but that would mean changing the amount and type of data concerning that packet, and they said in the past they have no intention to do that.
Altough I would agree with you if you were to say that such a statement doesn't really mean anything, given their lack of coherence...

I was just saying that if we assume for a moment that they truly, REALLY don't want to change packet data (maybe it's really an old and core-part of the system full of spaghetti uncommented code and they don't really want to mess with that?) then they have no way to achieve such a goal.

Either way I don't see the problem, why bothering with complicated (?) solutions when they could just make it viewable during /check and make everybody happy without changing the game "philosophy" of having to check a monster and without having to spend more than 30mins of human resources to do that, instead of wasting time in crappy systems like the one mentioned in the first post of this thread?

You're over thinking it. They can simply change the monster names from things like "Gigantobuggard" to things like "Gigantobuggard - level 73".

No need to make changes to packets, data, etc. that are sent to the client.

[Alpheus]

This Item Level thing is bigger then just exp. Someone mentioned making it actual levels, but any level gain is pointless if you can just sit in Abyssea for a few hours, so why bother.

No more useless than how it was before. To give meaning to something like that would mean to make it so only by doing epic things (read Endgame-y things)do you get exp towards levels above 99. And then people would complain that they can't do so because they haven't the opportunity or time or capability at the present time.

My point is that EXP has always been useless for anything other than gauging where you are and where you wanted to end up. EXP'ing has always been a grandiose style of waiting in line and familiarizing yourself with the game. Only the latter part I mentioned is actually finished well before the former. Abyssea style EXP took traditional 6 man EXP and killed it ugly and implementation of GoV set the corpse on fire.

So no if they did uncap our levels Abyssea wouldn't make it worthless and on the off chance that it did, I would find that infinitely more preferable than what appears to be starting here; which is that they are looking into ways to restrict the player for having earned their hard won gear. Granted such restrictions cuts both ways by future implementation of gear check end game events (the gear check being done by the game itself and not the playerbase) or by going about and trying to put the genie back in the bottle that is EXP accumulation.

IDK I'm just pissed that yet again the Dev team is on another tangent that NO ONE wants to see them go through. On a base level though I get what they intend to do, give item levels meaning and that's all well and good but then they started talking about how they can use it as a way to "sorta uncap the lvl cap" and there they lost me because it's really really half assed due to the most glaring point that essentially our levels will now be in flux.

And Kristal while your idea about how this will be how we get access to our new merit capabilities, that's..... actually a nice idea but it would essentially make all the new gear into macro pieces for said 2hours and JAs and spells. Except it wouldn't be tied to specific gear it would simply be "Macro all ilevel gear so that when i push this JA/spell macro; ilevel = 150" except you cant gear swap out of it cuz then technically you just de-leveled and you wont finish your action (assuming the action is in fact a spell)

[Ziyyigo-Tipyigo]

1. "Item Level" will be based on the item's fully augmented stats, regardless of how many (if any) augments have actually been applied.
2. "Item Level" will affect gameplay experience.
3. Therefore: anything that is not already fully augmented will not be used at all, lest the game throws more at you than you actually capable of handling.

And since this "Item Level" mechanic will only be applied to Adoulin gear, this right here is why level 99 gear predating Adoulin will still be in relatively high demand; it will give you stats and buffs without breaking anything else.

[Demon6324236]

And since this "Item Level" mechanic will only be applied to Adoulin gear, this right here is why level 99 gear predating Adoulin will still be in relatively high demand; it will give you stats and buffs without breaking anything else.

The only thing this seems to effect is the /check feature, and possibly experience points. Which of these two are worth gimping my character? /Check is only for checking the level of the mob, I suppose once we understand this system a bit more it can make it easier to determine the exact level of a mob above 99, maybe. As for experience points, we can get a chain of mobs and lights high enough to give even level 50s around 500~600 experience a kill in Abyssea, why would it matter if in Worms we have a level 120 WAR killing everything? We already get lv60s as EP while level 99, that is a 40ish level gap, so why would it be so unlikely to see level 120 WAR killing EP Worms in Abyssea, bringing everyones XP/Mob down a bit, but increasing the kill rate by an insane amount? I assure you, if these are the only changes, old gear will gain no true relevance it does not already have, or would have had without this feature.

[Nebo]

Wasting resources on updates that do not matter, while ignoring things that really need attention!

Keep up the good work, SE!

I can't say I'm suprised. As much as the dev team renounces claims that they do not play and understand the game, they sure do make a lot of updates that suggest that they really don't have the first clue.

This nonsense...

The main reasons for switching to this is due to the fact that if we kept it the same as it is currently, regardless of how strong a monster is introduced the message displayed when you "check” would be inaccurate and we are aiming to change this. We are also aiming to make sure the amount of experience points gained from defeating enemies, as well as the pace in which they are obtained, do not become unbalanced.

...Sounds like it came from someone that hasn't set foot on Vana'diel in the lat 4 years.

That aside, Gearswapping for every action: TP phase, Job Ability, WS, Situation, Spell cast, precast, mid cast, etc, etc EXISTS.

Pretended it doesn't and making ilevel enemy /checks based on currently equiped gear really highlights the lack of understanding of the dev team about basic, fundamental gameplay mechanics.

This ilevel monster check will not function properly at any level.

Balancing enemies to give less exp with higher level equipment...

Who cares about exp from normal mobs?

Abyssea exists. /end reason for exp balance update.