Excuse me what now? You can skip Devour now? This is messed up... Not as bad as being able to skip the whole scale mechanic in Aglaia, or melting Endsinger down, but still pretty bad.
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ilvl sync should be applied to all normal mode trials, raids and alliance raids. Not only does it make for a better experience for first time players, it evens out the experience for repeat players. It's crazy when you can queue into a roulette and get VASTLY different difficulty depending on whether you get a trial/raid released early in the expansion or late in the expansion.
Not to mention, it's just boring to steamroll content. I'm sure some people appreciate being able to get their rewards quickly, but I think it's a mistake for the game to treat its content like it's a chore that you just want to be done with as quickly as possible.
Dungeons already get ilvl synced, so I don't understand why other forms of content don't. I guess there is wanting players to feel more powerful as they get better gear, but I would prefer if no-syncing is the option you have to opt-into for story content, rather than syncing. Naturally high level content like extremes and savages can keep no-syncing as default.
I remember i did arr shiva a few months back (i haven't played recently) and you can kill her in about a minute and a half. It's honestly absurd and I really hope they address this. Adding item level sync to this stuff would be an easy win between 6.5 and 7.0 and I can't imagine it would be hard to implement.
I would welcome an ilevel change, but we don't even necessarily need to go that far if people are worried about it being "too hard." Giving the bosses an HP buff proportionate to the party's item levels would be fine too I think. The important thing is seeing all the mechanics and story beats moreso than it is about it being challenging.
I registered on the forums just to add my voice in support of this. Every time the topic comes up, the player base seem nearly unanimously in support of it. Please add reasonable level syncs to the final bosses from each expansion, comparable to the final dungeon that takes place before them. If a particular trial were harder than average because of this and you're worried about roulette players abandoning it, couldn't you make those particular trials also drop extra rewards? Like a % multiplier on their roulette bonus or something. If I were a new player going through the story right now, I would be so underwhelmed and disappointed by these encounters. It feels almost like punishing players for not playing at launch.
And speaking of inflated ilevels... While you're already about to tweak the requirements for Alliance Raid Roulette, it would be wonderful if you could also lower the maximum ilevel for the alliance raids as well! I've been playing XIV since beta and it's so sad that we don't get to actually experience things like LotA or Syrcus Tower properly anymore. They don't need to be as hard as they were on launch, but so many players have never even seen the bosses' actual mechanics. Why does the "game" aspect have to disappear from the game?
I don't normally post very often. Why do the developers bother hiring musicians (including orchestras!) for longer music tracks, recording professional VA's, creating animations/phase transitions and spend time developing mechanics? No one past a certain point in time is going to see them within the same expansion they come out, let alone future expansions.
If corporate finds out that the average player is not seeing/hearing a lot of the content that a many man hours (and money) went into, what does that mean for future development of this content type?
There should be a flat +30 item level sync on all cap content. It's just enough that overgearing is beneficial while being tight enough to retain some of the content's initial difficulty. As it stands a lot of early expansion mechanics are skipped by power creep and damage is so low as to not challenge tanks/healers to utilize their kits at all. This is unrewarding for skilled players and reinforces bad habits in unskilled players. We'd all be better off if the game was slightly more challenging.
Posting here in support of this issue.
Ultima Weapon is an incredibly entertaining fight after the rework, and while the reworked fight is a big part of that, the ilevel sync of 60 is a big factor as well.
Since then, I firmly believe that every final boss trial need to be ilevel synched to, at most, 10 ilevels above the respective expansion artifact gear. Ie, 220 for Thordan, 300 for Shinryu, 440 for Hades, 570 for Endsinger. Rebalance the fights if needed, but ilevel alone will be a big improvement.
That's kinda way huge for Thordan; i170 was the best gear available at the time of his release, the post 3.0 'expert dungeons' awarding i160, which is closer to what folks usually had fighting him the first time (between i142 and i150). The artifact gear in HW is a special case because it was not awarded just for story/job quest completion.