Level Sync feels worse every expansion

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Originally Posted by ovIm

Of course it matters, I have given you ample reason why it does and you have done nothing to dispute my arguments except for saying "no". But again, for the sake of the argument:
the player would have to know these resources exist (i for one did not know they do until now), and still, its a higher hurdle to get into than to open duty finder and saying "yeah I want to play this now".

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Agreed. To paraphrase Josh Strife Hayes, if you are reading about your game on Reddit or other forums, looking up websites on how to best play a game, or watch any content creators about gaming, you are already no longer one of the casual players.

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Originally Posted by WeakestZenosEnjoyer

"just do hunt trains"

literally the most braindead content in the game, where everyone plays tanks with their 40% passive damage resistance or a healer and spams Medica 3 to pump aggro unless they have neither actually leveled.

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Well, it IS the easiest way to farm tomes. Isn't wanting an efficient tome farm that lets you use your full kit the reason why you're complaining about roulettes / synced content in the first place?

Everything in this game is "braindead" after a while if it's all you do, roulettes included.

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Originally Posted by Eyrilona

Agreed. To paraphrase Josh Strife Hayes, if you are reading about your game on Reddit or other forums, looking up websites on how to best play a game, or watch any content creators about gaming, you are already no longer one of the casual players.

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Extremely low bar for "non-casuals" in my opinion, but everyone's got their own thresholds on this stuff, I guess.

People have been complaining about this since ARR and level 50. "Then just don't do roulettes" is extremely valid advice, actually. I stopped running leveling roulette as a DPS because of all the aforementioned problems. I stopped running MSQ roulettes entirely because I hate them. It's just not worth the tomes to me.

I'll run leveling as a tank or a healer for the exp on those jobs, because of much faster queues, and I'll run my DPS through a current level dungeon on Trusts instead. The queue time on DPS for leveling roulette makes up for the extra time lost to trusts being dumb and take 30 minutes per dungeon, plus there's the advantage of not feeling pressured to speed run since odds are good I'm still smoothing out the kinks in my 91-99 rotation on those jobs anyway.

Alliance raids are fun enough to me (and have a fast enough queue) that dropping down to a lower level to sync is worth the loss of the DPS rotation.

I'll run expert on my 100 jobs (again, usually a tank or healer if I'm going solo, or as a DPS if I'm with friends) and then I'm back to slamming current content in PF (M1-4 normal and progging M savage, extremes, etc.)

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Originally Posted by ovIm

Well, that can easily be mitigated. Just give synched players a debuff, a reverse echo if you will, that caps their maximum potency per GCD to the expected level of the current instance. Hells, give players an option if they want this type of sync or the current one.

Cause really, what do I care if Johnny Greensprout does the same DPS in Sastasha with 2 buttons as I do with 20? At least I can play my full kit and have fun with my class, and Johnny has something to look forward to.

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I have seen this alternative being proposed a couple of times and while I don't think it's bad at all, it still would require addressing the fundamental problems of earlier dungeons (especially anything before ShB due to the old battle system and powercreep), where stuff just melts in 5 sec. If you run sastasha in its current state, mobs legit die under 5s. Maybe you will not do higher damage than greensprout with your system, but you'll just leave the dungeon frustrated as heck because what does it serve you to have access to your fancy bursts and rotational tools when the whole mob pack will be dead after you pressed the first 2 buttons?

Still, I'm all for it, but lower level duties still need a full recalibration before any fix or improvement could even make sense. When I started playing in HW, sastasha took the normal length of a dungeon to complete. Mob packs took over 20-30s to die, not 10. To top it all, I started as a healer back then, and how many buttons did I have in that dungeons? Probably more than 10 since SE hadn't yet pruned again and again older skills to make room for new expansions, and the crossclass system also gave me more beyond utility buttons (not saying cross class was good, it was bad), and that's probably as many attack buttons than a current lvl100 healer has access to...

Ah, and yes, we also had to watch our MP, and sometimes slow down because it was possible to run out of it, especially for gladiators (which was required for them to aggro).

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Originally Posted by Valence

I have seen this alternative being proposed a couple of times and while I don't think it's bad at all, it still would require addressing the fundamental problems of earlier dungeons (especially anything before ShB due to the old battle system and powercreep), where stuff just melts in 5 sec.

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Oh for sure, 100%. We need a stricter ilevel sync or a different rebasing of enemy health values at this point. Hells, even more recent fights are affected, we don't get to see the scales on Nald'Thal anymore, and that is level 90 content. Earlier game fights are an absolute joke for a long time now.

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Originally Posted by Fynlar

Then don't do level sync content?

Roulettes are fine; there's more than enough people who want to do them even if you don't.

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Originally Posted by Atreus

Follow-up concerns

• Just don't do old content then?
  
  Okay. You could tell people that, or we could find a solution that's fun for everyone.

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Hey it's like I predicted that exact response.

I already stopped doing it for the most part. Doesn't mean the system can't be made better. There being "enough people already doing it" doesn't really mean anything.

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Originally Posted by ovIm

Oh for sure, 100%. We need a stricter ilevel sync or a different rebasing of enemy health values at this point. Hells, even more recent fights are affected, we don't get to see the scales on Nald'Thal anymore, and that is level 90 content. Earlier game fights are an absolute joke for a long time now.

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For levelling content, all that needs to happen is a potency squish. For the first few expansions, the Devs would raise potencies on things without really considering how it affects earlier content. All those buffs to Fast Blade, Twin Snakes, Heavy Swing etc. However, in EW and DT, they seem to have had the idea that you can make a trait to just increase potencies, without updating the animation for the actions in question. What they can do then is just introduce more traits like that, likely at levels X4 (since that seems to be where they place them), and then reduce the potency of the base actions, making the traits do the increased potencies throughout the expansions. Things die slower, however, you will still be action locked (if that is a concern).

As for on level cap content, you just need to add ilevel restrictions on everything so you cannot massively over gear things.

These 2 things alone will be enough to give some content their bite back.

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Originally Posted by Azurarok

I don't see how #3 can be managed for defensive/healing skills. I sure don't want to have nigh invincible tanks or the overbloated healing kits healers have in an ARR dungeon, at least.

Also I don't want to be permanently stuck with light mage WHM.

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I knew I forgot a bullet in follow-up concerns. Yes, you're correct that this is another huge consideration, one that makes me feel that #2 would be a better (but also high effort) solution.

World of Warcraft, the world's most popular MMO with over 7x the active player base as FFXIV, managed to get this right. Everyone is synced up and the same leveling content is playable regardless of your level. Perhaps that's why so many people still play that game over ours. It's odd that a 20-year old game has managed to fix this and Square Enix is incapable of doing so. Sad!

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Okay. You could tell people that, or we could find a solution that's fun for everyone.

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Try to please everyone and you will likely end up with something that pleases nobody.

Just accept that not all content is meant for you, like I have had to with savages and ultimates.

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Originally Posted by ovIm

Oh for sure, 100%. We need a stricter ilevel sync or a different rebasing of enemy health values at this point. Hells, even more recent fights are affected, we don't get to see the scales on Nald'Thal anymore, and that is level 90 content. Earlier game fights are an absolute joke for a long time now.

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Some groups were skipping the scales on Nald'Thal by the next raid. That raid's just undertuned in general.

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Originally Posted by Fynlar

Try to please everyone and you will likely end up with something that pleases nobody.

Just accept that not all content is meant for you, like I have had to with savages and ultimates.

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It feels like this is coming from a place of bitterness and I'm sorry if that's where you're at with it.

It'd be one thing if it were a pocket piece of content like Island Sanctuary or Ultimates, but almost every bit of content is synced and I'm going to continue to advocate for change.

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Originally Posted by Fynlar

Try to please everyone and you will likely end up with something that pleases nobody.

Just accept that not all content is meant for you, like I have had to with savages and ultimates.

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Surely from that statement you're basically dooming FFXIV to failure? The entire ethos of the game is to do broad appeal and make things are low barrier/milquetoast in implementation as possible to please everyone.

I mean, I would agree with your general statement in a vacuum - trying to please everyone will result in a worse product - I don't think it is particularly applicable to the discussion. It's like suggesting that quality-of-life changes are 'pleasing everyone' so therefore must be bad. Just a weak argument.

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Originally Posted by Purrnauskis

Item syncing is pure ass too. 80% of the time I que for expert rolo as a tank I get alexander and leave instantly because of that trash item synced dumpsterfire.

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I don't leave, but it feels so miserable. All this gear I've been working hard for in Savage, I get in there and "wow, this is worthless". They should really just include materia in the sync, at the level of the expansion your duty is. That would at least make it feel less terrible.

I tend to not play content I don't like, unless driven with a need for some other reason.

Personally, as a level 100 player, I'd like to think that I would be a bit OP in level 50 content since I'm so "wise and experienced" and whatnot.

As a newer player who just finished ARR, yeah it's poorly done level sync. Rather than lower levels and locking players out of nearly all their skills. It would be better to lower all character's strength or int (whatever their main action's stats are tied to) so they're limited and at the same level. Locking out actions isn't fun.

I really hope addressing the leveling, and low level experience is part of the 'jobs' focus of 8.0.

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Originally Posted by Doomed_Raven

As a newer player who just finished ARR, yeah it's poorly done level sync. Rather than lower levels and locking players out of nearly all their skills. It would be better to lower all character's strength or int (whatever their main action's stats are tied to) so they're limited and at the same level. Locking out actions isn't fun.

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All stats are already scaled down to the content. To go into more detail, levels have a set stat growth, so it just puts your stats where it should be. For gear, it just sets the ilevel to the max for the content, which then sets the stats to what they will be for that ilevel.

The issue comes down to potency and that isn't an easy one to get around (this is before looking at healing and defensives).

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Originally Posted by Valence

I have seen this alternative being proposed a couple of times and while I don't think it's bad at all, it still would require addressing the fundamental problems of earlier dungeons (especially anything before ShB due to the old battle system and powercreep), where stuff just melts in 5 sec. If you run sastasha in its current state, mobs legit die under 5s. Maybe you will not do higher damage than greensprout with your system, but you'll just leave the dungeon frustrated as heck because what does it serve you to have access to your fancy bursts and rotational tools when the whole mob pack will be dead after you pressed the first 2 buttons?

Still, I'm all for it, but lower level duties still need a full recalibration before any fix or improvement could even make sense. When I started playing in HW, sastasha took the normal length of a dungeon to complete. Mob packs took over 20-30s to die, not 10. To top it all, I started as a healer back then, and how many buttons did I have in that dungeons? Probably more than 10 since SE hadn't yet pruned again and again older skills to make room for new expansions, and the crossclass system also gave me more beyond utility buttons (not saying cross class was good, it was bad), and that's probably as many attack buttons than a current lvl100 healer has access to...

Ah, and yes, we also had to watch our MP, and sometimes slow down because it was possible to run out of it, especially for gladiators (which was required for them to aggro).

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Some combination of recalibrating the item level gap and the reverse Echo status suggested by many could be a good start.

I've thought about how FATEs work and how they scale up and I can't help but wonder if that scaling can be applied to other content when higher-level players are present. I also wonder how much of the tuning for Unreal fights is manual and meticulous versus a few number adjustments.

FATE synching is no different from any sync in duties. It will remove all the skills that are above level and sync level and stats the same way.

If they were to allow us to use all skills in low level dungeons, SE would need to heavily nerf them (including the start of the 1-2-3 rotation) in the level sync as well (like, more than half off the potency just to match the level cap potency or whatever). Primarily just so things don't die too fast. Gotta let the sprouts enjoy something in old content as they level up, you know?

I think I've complained about Level Sync about a dozen times since ARR. It's really one of the worst pieces of design and actively makes me avoid portions of the game.

I get they don't want to fully trvialize the game content with how little there is and how rushing to the end won't get you a lot more. That's a utilitarian take but the fact is that it's now reaching the boiling point on tedium. If they insist on keeping this system, they should redo the ability stack and get it largely wrapped up by ARR's end. If a new reward system is needed for later leveling, so be it.


My problem is that I've played FF16, so I pretty much just have no hope for future changes anymore after watching them copy/paste every problem this game has into a brand new single player game.

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Originally Posted by Valence

FATE synching is no different from any sync in duties. It will remove all the skills that are above level and sync level and stats the same way.

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.. yes that is how it works lol. I'm talking about the scaling that happens due to number of people in the zone.

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Originally Posted by Atreus

I've thought about how FATEs work and how they scale up and I can't help but wonder if that scaling can be applied to other content when higher-level players are present.

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Wouldn't work and that is due to the fact it scales off of number of players rather than strength of players.

Dungeons are fixed at 4 players, with a minimum level/ilevel to enter. This means, if you happen to have a high level, player in your low level party, the mobs get scaled to somewhere between the extremes, meaning your low levels players are contributing nothing, and your high level player is dominating everything.

I really don't get why they just don't:

1) Check the expected dps of a job at X level, at each level a dungeon's unlocked at
2) Calculate the expected damage at each level cap (70, 80, 90, 100, etc) per job
3) Make a buff per job where it nerfs your damage appropriately based on how far you're jumping back level-wise

This would basically require one "base" reading per job per expansion, with minor adjustments besides. It wouldn't be sufficient for high-end content like savage/ult (which require tighter tuning), but wrt duty roulettes it'd be a nice way to keep balance somewhat in-line without having to remove player abilities.

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Originally Posted by Akonyl

I really don't get why they just don't:

1) Check the expected dps of a job at X level, at each level a dungeon's unlocked at

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Well, your first mistake here is only looking at dps. There are more variables at play than simply how much damage a player can do.

And, more importantly, this sets a fixed expectation. See, most low-stress (casual) content is completely clearable while half-assing your job, no matter your role. That's just how it's tuned. You don't need to be rolling a perfect rotation. You just gotta sorta try.

And here everybody is, wanting their high level skills, "just nerf our potencies," and, at a glance, that sounds perfectly reasonable.

But, see, half-assing your end-game rotation is still significantly more potency-to-be-nerfed than synced abilities. Which means it's not as simple as just knocking your potency down, it's gotta be buried. Now, you gotta actually try a little harder just to keep up with a synced player. "Ok, great, that's fine, we're asking for our whole rotation."

Sure. And what about the players that don't try a little harder? Just for the sake of having your whole rotation, everyone's potency has been nerfed to the ground. And now you get grouped with someone that doesn't want to try any harder, they're just here to half-ass it, as the dungeon is designed to allow for, and now it's going to take you twice as long to get through. All because you had to have all your skills.

This is all to say nothing of the monstrous amount of work to calculate and calibrate every job at damn near every level, for every dungeon, and do it every single time they adjust anything. Versus, y'know, letting the sync feature take care of all of that without any extra hassle.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

Well, your first mistake here is only looking at dps. There are more variables at play than simply how much damage a player can do.

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DPS is the vast majority of what's actually important when it comes to being synced down into low-level content, especially for anyone who isn't the tank.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

Sure. And what about the players that don't try a little harder? Just for the sake of having your whole rotation, everyone's potency has been nerfed to the ground. And now you get grouped with someone that doesn't want to try any harder, they're just here to half-ass it, as the dungeon is designed to allow for, and now it's going to take you twice as long to get through. All because you had to have all your skills.

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Max-level players should absolutely be expected to try a little harder, even if they "don't want to". If some level 20 bard only has to press 2 buttons in their AOE rotation to hit the same DPS I do in Sastasha while I'm doing a full level 100 song rotation I am entirely for it.

Saying "but what if someone doesn't want to try to play the game?" is meaningless because that already happens in Experts. People already don't push buttons if they don't want to, that won't be a uniquely Leveling Roulette thing if Leveling Roulette suddenly asks max level players to push more buttons.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

Sure. And what about the players that don't try a little harder? Just for the sake of having your whole rotation, everyone's potency has been nerfed to the ground..

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Add in a toggle "use old level sync", I'd say, even though I fundamentally agree with Akonyl that higher level players can be expected to try a little harder. When reaching a certain level of play, the game should encourage you to use all your skills.

The problem with balancing around average DPS is you have higher highs and lower lows. The higher you level, the more access you have to higher potency actions, which just pushes damage higher and higher.

To illustrate this, PLD has access to 1 AoE at level 15, Total Eclipse, which does 100 potency on every enemy hit. By level 80, we have access to Confiteor, which is 1000 potency, it does 10 times the damage of Total Eclipse, 1 GCD of Confiteor is equivalent to 10 GCDs of Total Eclipse. You cannot really scale this effectively without it either being either insanely strong or having Total Eclipse being really weak, this is before we even look at the rest of the blade combo, which includes another 1000 potency is Blade of Valor and Blade of Honor, which also happens to be an oGCD.

Which then brings up oGCDs. How do you balance them? It is free extra damage that is another layer you have to work around.

How about those actions that get upgraded to AoE? PLD has 2 in Expiacion and Imperator, again, free extra damage.

How about healing kits? Low level healers have to rely on the GCD to heal, whilst high level healers rely on oGCDs, leaving more GCDs for more damage and you cannot really 'estimate' the amount of healing you are going to do on the GCD to balance DPS, because that is also reliant on the tanks defensives, which brings us nicely onto;

Tank defensives. Holy Sheltron has a heal, PLD's magic, has heals, this just forces healers in lower level content to ignore healing even more, not to mention just the upgraded defensives in general. Sentinel to Guardian? That is a spicy barrier which no low level mob is going to be able to break through.

There are way too many hurdles to get through to make it worth investing in. They would be better off making the low level kits more engaging and making more traits like 'melee mastery' to just increase the potencies of a large number of actions at the same time. The new player experience matters and this is a better way to do it than allowing high level players to just curb stomp everything in one hit.

Sometimes I kinda wish they kept each expansion's kits and systems within their own expansion, but I do understand that this wouldn't work well within a leveling progression system.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

Sure. And what about the players that don't try a little harder? Just for the sake of having your whole rotation, everyone's potency has been nerfed to the ground. And now you get grouped with someone that doesn't want to try any harder, they're just here to half-ass it, as the dungeon is designed to allow for, and now it's going to take you twice as long to get through. All because you had to have all your skills.

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I completely get where you're coming from, but I can't get behind it. People opting to "not try" is already felt pretty hard now in all level ranges. That behavior already adds time to dungeon and trial completions and it's not going to change no matter what system you implement. The key is that the content is still as completable.

There may be room to move some abilities around but the main problem with level sync is that the ilvl sync often isn't low enough to present a challenge. There's no way we're going to get level 15 content with level 100 abilities unless they decide to make a level 100 version of it and that I highly doubt they'll do, that'd be a huge amount of work for very little benefit, especially since every duty in the game is in some way or another connected to the story.

Others have pointed out - rightly - that it's not just damage potencies that would need to be adjusted, you'd have to handle mitigations, heals, damage buffs, oGCDs, the works. Besides, how would people's level 100 party buffs interact with level 15 abilites and power levels? Say we instead sync level 15 players to level 100 for their duties instead, have you tried picking up a level 70 job? Remember how long it takes to read your tooltips and place abilities? Imagine you're level 15 and getting your entire level 100 kit, would you really want that? Especially if you're going to be reduced to your level 15 kit immediately after finishing the duty, how is that fun?

tell me how you would make a warrior with bloodwhetting scale down to be equal to a warrior without it.

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Originally Posted by Gullis

tell me how you would make a warrior with bloodwhetting scale down to be equal to a warrior without it.

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that is actually a really good point - some utility gained in later levels could be a challenge not just to design around, but also for player expectations. After all, Blue Mage is not allowed in dungeons for fear of excluding players not having specific, expected skills.

Though, for that, it would be good for classes to have their base kit much earlier in the game, with traits upgrading those to the full version later on. Warrior also has Raw Intuition, for example. Could also get an earlier version of that. :think:

Going back on level sync is an absolute chore as a DPSer and completely counter-intuitive to how XIV's encounters are structured.

You are supposed to build muscle memory on your kit, and that's acquired by repetition. Then you're suddenly shaken up by missing essential parts of your kit at level cap - that's really unfun and the reason why I rarely go sync on DPSers.

Ironically, due to their barebones dps kit, healers are the least affected by this, and sometimes turns out to be actually fun to play because you need to strategize a bit as you have way less healing ogcds.

The worst jobs to go back on are the ones that start at 50+

Doing <lvl50 content is always terrible

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

There are way too many hurdles to get through to make it worth investing in. They would be better off making the low level kits more engaging and making more traits like 'melee mastery' to just increase the potencies of a large number of actions at the same time. The new player experience matters and this is a better way to do it than allowing high level players to just curb stomp everything in one hit.

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Everything mentioned in this post is why I advocate for reworking what skills we have at level 50 and making sure each job has a fully functional kit and rotation (assuming it has a rotation) at that level. It sounds like more work than "just let us have all of our level 100 skills and sync down the damage" but it really is more complicated than that. Reworking jobs to just suck less at each previous level cap takes a lot less math finagling and is much more fair on sprouts too.

I bet we can all think of jobs that feel better or worse than others to get stuck in another round of Labyrinth of the Ancients on.

As I continue to play and think of solutions, I still advocate for solution #2 in the OP. I think level capping feels awful to varying degrees and at a certain point "just don't do it" isn't an acceptable answer when 95% of the game's content at this point is synced.

At a certain point we need to look at the oGCD's and defensives and say "fuck it". Older content is still faceroll and if you really want to address that, lowering the item level cap for duties is probably one of the best things to do right now.

I just can't see yet another expansion come out where we just add more things that we can't use in older content.

Would not be surprised if the level cap did not increase in 8.0. That way, job leveling experience, and gameplay can be tailored to fit within a level 1 to 100 range. 8.0's MSQ could still reward EXP for level 90 to 100.

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Originally Posted by Gullis

tell me how you would make a warrior with bloodwhetting scale down to be equal to a warrior without it.

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You can work out an effective HPS/DPS for any given level and then take the ratio of that value against the level cap value. Using that you'll instantly equalize long term sustained healing/damage between any two levels. What is left unmatched is burst, but leveling was never tightly tuned in the first place. You will encounter players with outdated gear, players lacking skills because of level or not doing job quests, and players with different amounts of experience. In the end it doesn't matter very much that we'll have a wide range of ability between different levels of the same class, because that's already the case.