How to make gear progression non-linear

Yea what this person suggesting is not power creep.

Theyre suggesting horizontal progression, or side grades, that can make your more powerful
in one area, but not a specific straight damage(or main stat) increase. Horizontal progression
can be a wonderful thing when done correctly. If certain builds are not too favorable, it can add
reason for content. I do however think that we should keep slots on crafted gear. And make
some crafted gear more relevant. (they said new recipes are coming, we'll see)

err let me give an example.

lets say best body is i80 gear from a content.
second best is a crafted i70 at HQ.
slap on rare materia that maybe adds some nice trait (shield procs+%,
double attack+% etc) that has a chance to bring it to almost ilvl80
gears parsing value, and bam, alternative, that is not more powerful.

spend time doing the content one way for the drop, or spend time
doing a different content for a different build. either way you'll be putting
time and effort into getting one of those two items. It can be hard to
balance, but when done well, nothing wrong with some horizontal
progression.

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Originally Posted by lackofwords

Isn't that essentially power creeping for mmo? Rendering old content (in this case gear) obsolete...
Also isn't mmo suppose supply a ton of replay value?...

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Well, FFXIV is a game that's all about forward progression and really doesn't do much to stop you from obtaining powerful gear by simply playing the game. A good bit of the other content has to do with completing difficult boss fights, and to do so requires being geared sufficently enough to first accept the duty and then survive it.

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Originally Posted by lackofwords

As it is now, gear only adds a boost or multiplier to your output, but does not change the way you approach your fights....

Why just add new abilities instead of the cumbersome load of holding multiple gear sets around?
Could make trials to drop random scrolls that teaches new skills, and limited how many you can equip at once. Save everyone the hassle of an inventory nightmare again, while still providing the player with option to micro-manage battle stances or whatever non-sense that comes along with gear swapping.

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I agree, which is why I suggested Materia be the culprit in creating endgame content that doesn't powercreep itself. I was mostly just thinking of how FF7 handled Materia, but there's really no reason why it shouldn't be similar in XIV because it's an MMO.

There's really no reason to create new skills when you can just create equippable items that alter the functionality of your current ones enough to make them feel like new abilities altogether. If endgame Materia functioned that way, it would essentially equate to every new drop becoming a new skill for your character, or a possible alteration to your rotation. The only MMO i've ever played that successfully implemented this concept was Phantasy Star Online ep1&2...and it is literally the only one. (Even the sequels to the franchise failed at it.)

An even more interesting application for Materia that enhanced abilities would be Cross-Class abilities. There are plenty of abilities that are cross-class though completely useless on jobs because they lack a combo ability or are eclipsed by your natural skills. This type of system could open up all sorts of possibilities concerning that.



I don't really know what to call it. I use the term "emergent gameplay design", or "non-linear design". Horizontal/vertical progression sounds more like what we're already doing, which is A > B > C

I don't think they were referring to the suggestion as power creeping, but the notion that the ilvl keeps raising is power creeping. Or at least that was what I was referring to.
The ilvl is their way of assessing the value of the item, while two different items with the same ilvl can have different stats. Take a look at Coil items to AF items.

Yoshi did mention somewhere in either a Q&A or Letter from Producer somewhere that the crafted gear comes close to being just as good as dropped gear when overloaded with materia (that is slotted to 5 maximizing the stats it can have).
However, each item at a certain ilvl has limit on the max stats for that item. And I don't think you can have a higher stat from a crafted lower ilvl to be higher than higher ilvl. You can have more diversity though with crafted gear.

I sorely dislike Materia being used as stat boosts. It's such a waste, especially considering the awesome things you could do with it in the game they took it from.

I always liked the itemisation in monster hunter games, they all have roughly the same base stats while the secondary stats interact either with skills or a particular monster's weakness. It's perfect horizontal progression, even when you are at max hunter rank there is no one perfect set of gear, and you find yourself hunting weaker monsters because their gear has a skill that is useful in x situation.

However monhan is a action rpg, so it's easier to do this. In a game where encounters are more about rolling your stats against the checks in an encounter, it is hard to stray away from there being an optimal setup and people will min max that to heck. The differences between secondary stats are already incredibly minor but people will talk like your character is unplayable if you went speed over crit. If they were more distinct then this will be more pronounced. I think the design of the game is always going to gravitate it towards vertical progression, and tbh I'm ok with that.

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Originally Posted by Edellis

There's really no reason to create new skills when you can just create equippable items that alter the functionality of your current ones enough to make them feel like new abilities altogether. If endgame Materia functioned that way, it would essentially equate to every new drop becoming a new skill for your character, or a possible alteration to your rotation.

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What exactly do you have in mind that can alter a skill rotation?

Cause at the moment I can't help but think 'why items and not skills?'
Let's take a look at Cleric Stance, it swaps MND and INT stats around, basically WHM switching to combat while not healing with a small downtime to switch out of Cleric Stance.
This does not necessarily alter skill rotation, but enhances your attack immensely. Such as the same effect as if someone were to change into higher damage dealing gear to perform an attack, before switching back to another gear set.

Now let's say there's a fictional materia that adds HP leech according to the number of enemies you hit, you're trading this off with another materia that could increase your class's base stat.
So let's say this is for a tank, and this materia is only useful while facing large numbers of enemies, since the HP recover rate would be higher than the trade-off of lower defense. Thus, it wouldn't be as useful when tanking a single boss target.
So, why make it an item that you have to carry around, and swap into when the situation occurs?

Why not make this into an ability like Cleric Stance?
It'll serve the same purpose without taking up inventory space, nor the hassle of changing out of gear in between non-combat phases.
(not entirely different weapons though since that changes classes)

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Originally Posted by Edellis

An even more interesting application for Materia that enhanced abilities would be Cross-Class abilities. There are plenty of abilities that are cross-class though completely useless on jobs because they lack a combo ability or are eclipsed by your natural skills. This type of system could open up all sorts of possibilities concerning that.

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I'm not seeing what you're imagining here. Like, would it allow the cross-class abilities to combo with something else?

Either way, bottom-line, as a materia it is still a slot trade-off, which in turn will make a player carry different sets of equipment around if the trade-off is distinct enough.
And we already have two sets of gear we need to carry, PvP and non-PvP for each class.

The only way I could imagine it working, as I think you would want it, is if the materia was actually like FFVII materia system, where you chain additional abilities and skills onto the weapon as well as support materia that enhances the those abilities and skills. Path of Exile also does something similar. The character has only passive abilities, while all the active abilities are in the gems themselves.

The problem with non linear progression gears is that it will require a lot of inventory and armory places to keep everything while with linear ones you can get rid of the obsolete ones without a thought.

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Originally Posted by lackofwords

Now let's say there's a fictional materia that adds HP leech according to the number of enemies you hit, you're trading this off with another materia that could increase your class's base stat.

I'm not seeing what you're imagining here. Like, would it allow the cross-class abilities to combo with something else?

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I specifically mentioned not even including materia that boosts your base stat, because that's the opposite of non-linear progression. There would be no rare materia that would provide stat boosts...at least not without some kind of situational catch or drawback. As for allowing cross-class abilities to combo with other moves...yeah, that could definitely be an effect that would be worth equipping.


For instance, Skull Sunder is a completely useless ability on a Paladin. It's the exact same thing as Savage Sword without the combo potency. However if you could meld a Materia to your weapon that, say, caused it to reduce Slashing Resistance by 20% for 5 seconds if combo'd out of Savage Blade, suddenly your paladin has essentially learned a new skill, by increasing the usefulness of another skill. (This would also benefit Warriors, as Both Savage Blade and Skull Sunder are cross-class abilities.)

Or take a skill like Awareness for instance, which nullifies the chance of receiving critical damage. An added Materia effect could be that during the 15s duration, your character gains a proc of Shield Swipe everytime he receives damage. Niche use, but still a new use. That could be built upon with maybe another Armor Materia that adds an effect or increases the potency of Shield Swipe.


Basically, this is the exact same function as the "Class Traits" that already exist, just extended to allow customization. It's no different than Enhanced Barrage significantly increasing the power of Barrage, or Firestarter becoming a significant change to a Black Mage, all without adding any skills to the character.


Something like "Adds HP steal" without anything to supplement it is precisely the type of fail mechanics that MMOs add when they don't seem to put any thought into it. Passive HP steal would be no better than a simple vitality/defense increase for most classes in this game unless it was really high. Slapping HP Steal on a passive skill duration though would be pretty interesting though.

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Either way, bottom-line, as a materia it is still a slot trade-off, which in turn will make a player carry different sets of equipment around if the trade-off is distinct enough.
And we already have two sets of gear we need to carry, PvP and non-PvP for each class.

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That's the whole point. When gear progression is linear, obtaining a i100 weapon means you can basically discard your i90 one. Non-linear means you're able to keep both your i100 and i90 because although one technically is better stat wise, it may lack some detail that the i90 one provided.

As for inventory space, that really doesnt seem like that big an issue to me. If something like this was implemented, im sure there'd be a new menu that only carried your materia or something.

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The only way I could imagine it working, as I think you would want it, is if the materia was actually like FFVII materia system, where you chain additional abilities and skills onto the weapon as well as support materia that enhances the those abilities and skills.

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What you imagine and what I imagine are one in the same. It's literally the same thing. The only reason I didn't mention adding skills is because i'm almost 99% positive it's something Square wouldn't do.