Please remove iLevel

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Originally Posted by Thunderz

did you ever try to do "anything" on DF and you have someone join under-geared to the point its detrimental

when they introduce the Gear requirement on 2.1 update this will force people to gear up before undertaking a harder instance which helps everyone

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I'm not worried about undergearing or whatever

My primary concern is that the very system itself pigeonholes gear progression into a very boring linear path

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Originally Posted by Caraway

You are going to have vertical progression in any game with a level system, that's a fact and will never change (level systems by design are broken with current MMO design methodologies but that's a whole different discussion). So I personally don't see anything 'wrong' with scaling rewards along a progressive path in the format it's done in this game.

What I am a little interested in though is how SE plans on growing the game once a level cap hits. Will iLVL just keep scaling as it is now? We're only level 50 but we have what would effectively be a level 90's gear (assuming the scaling is linear). So what are we going to be using when we're actually 90?

Did FFXI do it this way with iLVL gear? Personally, I've felt that rarity tiers were a better way of dividing gear amongst a similar level, where each rarity/level combination only has so many stat points available for allocation meaning that the highest rarity for a level is the highest amount of stats someone in that level can attain. If more power is needed in such a system then either AAs (alternative advancement, a la EQ, EQ2 for example) or a level increase is required.

Personally I'm more a fan of the level increase method because then you're actually getting something for your work (in the form of new abilities and potentially new ways to play your character) as opposed to a comparatively boring statistical increase (a +5% DPS gain with the same skills is less fun to me than a +2% gain because you gained a new ability).

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FFXI had mostly Horizontal progression for most of its life, it gelled really well with the decade worth of content that it had and diff BiS gear from diff sources so you never really felt like grinding away at only one thing. A lot of people enjoyed this because you never really felt you were on a hamster wheel grinding to gear cap and waiting for the next update to invalidate your earnings. On top of this the battle system in XI was designed with gear swaps mid battle so while a piece of Gear was BiS for a Weaponskill it wasnt BiS for a spell's Pre-cast set or Mid-Cast set or a Damage Reduction Set or a Idle Set. I personally enjoyed it (as I saw someone describe it) since "each piece of gear felt like a card in a Deck" and you had all these events to get the best gear for a specific purpose so it kept the gear grind rather fun especially knowing that what you earned wasn't gonna get blown out of the water completely, maybe by a few stat points here and there.

Then Seekers of Adoulin came out and they put one of the Battle Leads in charge of FFXIV 2.0 in charge of XI and we now have Ilvls up to 118 to circumvent breaking the 99 cap so now we have gear with paragraph long stat descriptions and monsters essentially sniping players mid gear swap since when you swap out of ilvl gear you effectively are at a lower lvl.

That's a oversimplification I'll admit but it's my take on XI's handling of Gear past and present.

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Originally Posted by Caraway

Did FFXI do it this way with iLVL gear?

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FFXI didn't have item levels, and it allowed you to switch gear in the middle of combat. People would carry around multiple gearsets, like a set for damage dealing, a set to macro into when pulling off a big weaponskill to take advantage of STR modifiers on damage and then switch back to their other gear, mages would have a debuff gear set and a healing / damage gear set, etc. The gear didn't have every single stat pasted onto it either like FF14 does, so you'd have good ACC pieces, good STR pieces, some gear with Haste, gear with unique buffs like giving you a % to double attack, gear that augmented your job abilities, etc. FFXI was set up in such a way that you didn't replace every single piece of gear each time new content came out, and there was still reasons to run old content for great gear. There were plenty of sidegrade options that if you didn't like one endgame activity, you could do a few others and get comparable gear, and compiling a gear set was a matter of looking at what you have, what you could get, and what stats you needed.

Conversely, FF14 is just get the best for your level > get your artifact > get your darklight > start working on Coil and myth gear.

The people that always complain about ilvl and "elitists" are the ones still in af and refuse to spend time to gear up. I'm sure that's why "elitists" are sick of you care bears.

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Originally Posted by Alpheus

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This. Every single word of it

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Originally Posted by calamityz

The people that always complain about ilvl and "elitists" are the ones still in af and refuse to spend time to gear up. I'm sure that's why "elitists" are sick of you care bears.

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Please read the thread. Thanks

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Originally Posted by Jocko

XI didn't have iLvl. It also maintained it's level cap over a looooooong period of time. Gear in that game was often situational, some pieces doing elemental damage, different attack damage types (slashing, blunt etc), had innate skills on it for different situations (Carbuncle Mitts, a piece of gear that made summoning Carbuncle have 0 upkeep cost or Kraken's Club, something that had the chance to proc several hits per attack), and there were pieces you could get as low as level 7 that could remain in slot up at cap. It made collecting gear actually -feel- meaningful

it was far more interesting than the linear scaling we have now. That's what I want to see in XIV

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Agreed, FFXI had a much more complex way of equipping gear. iLevel is shortsighted much like the rest of game mechanics in FFXIV. Very little thought went into the gear system, it is all streamlined for ease.

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Originally Posted by Jocko

Please read the thread. Thanks

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All I had to do was look at your gear and already knew why you posted this.

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Originally Posted by calamityz

All I had to do was look at your gear and already knew why you posted this.

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I sincerely hope this is parody

It was an interesting system for sure, but also a very bad one. You can't just pump more and more sidegrades into the system and expect good things to happen from it. All it lead to was people needing to use 3rd party tools to make macros to utilize it all, and created an absolute inventory nightmare that is still there to this day.

Vertical gear progression and ilvl is a good thing, and one that I'm hoping they stick with. As was already said, you don't need ilvl for people to judge you by your gear. They will already do that. Bad gear will be bad and good gear will be good regardless of what number SE puts next to it.