Chages to the game that I would like to see
Having been a long time player since the launch or AAR back in 2013 I have to say Final Fantasy 14 is my favorite MMO. It has brought me new friends and has been a blast to play through out 2.x with having a fun Story Quest, challenging Raid fights, and plenty of side content to keep me busy. With the current state of the game however me and other players started to probably feeling burnt out on playing 14 with all the current content out at the moment. These are just a few thoughts I had while having conversations with my friends and somethings that I would like to see changed to make it fun to play through all this "new" content that came out with 3.1.
Diadem
As of right now it is generally a farm fest for gear and gatherer nodes which quite frankly is boring. When I first heard of Daidem I thought we would be exploring the massive zone and doing small quests to fight notorious monsters.
We would have to go out and find key items to summon the boss monster in various ways like fending off a horde of monsters or fishing up the item and various other ways. After that we would have to go and fight our way through the caves and place the item on an alter or some such to summon A boss monster. after dodging AoEs, tanking tank busters, and cure all sorts of abnormal effects everyone would get something like a piece of gear, a token to trade in for items, and maybe a minion.
Another idea for this mode is to unlock flying you would have to use the Aether Compass to find a monster that disturbed the wind making you unable to fly. You would track it down and slay it to return the currents back to normal allowing you to fly and it would also hand out a token of some sort that could be spent for gear/mats/mounts/minions.
Last little event that I thought would be cool is tracking down big monsters that roam the zone. You would have to find footprints on the ground and when examined it would tell you what direction they are heading. You would follow these tracks until it would be summoned and then you and your party can kill it for rewards.
Dungeons
Every single dungeon follows the same, boring formula of fight mobs and the boss and repeat until the dungeon is done. After playing the game for so long this formula for every dungeon is almost painful to do for roulette for 30 minutes everyday.
In future patches I would actually like something where we could have different branching paths we could take in a dungeon that can lead us to different bosses and rewards.Lets take Saint Mocianne's Arboretum for example, what if after the Malboro boss you could choose to either go down to path with the bees and face the queen the and end the dungeon OR you could walk down a massive vine and continue to face only Belladona.
Now not only does it change what you would fight but also the length of the dungeon itself. Maybe there could be a dungeon where one path is longer than the other but it rewards more loot and tomes or you could be timed on a fight and if you don't kill the monster in time then you are forced to take another route through the dungeon.
I think branching dungeons would be a lot more fun because we wouldn't be doing the same thing over and over and over for the patch cycle.
Gold Saucer
Cross server queue of Verminion and Chocobo racing isn't new but aside from that I would like to see rewards from just those modes that would be exclusive to those activities. Similar how Triple Triad rewards cards for playing against NPCs, I would like to see a special currency that you earn from these modes that would go towards purchasing Minions for Verminion and Bardings/mounts/items for your chocobo for Chocobo racing.
After earning the achivment rewards from these modes what else is there really to do with them? you could farm MGP but that isn't really fun with chocobo racing and near impossible without a buddy to face in Verminion. I think these two things would get more players to do the minigames if there were more vanity rewards to obtain from them.
Raid
Alexander Normal was a joke and Savage was just that, Savage. I don't mind the difficulty of Savage so much because thats what a Savage mode should be. I think Alexander Normal mode though should be the same difficulty that second and final coil was.
Raid isn't something people should be doing casually like in Alexander Normal. Raid should be THE hardest content in the game where you go in with other players from a static or LS to challenge these fights. If people want to see the raid story but are not skilled enough to do them then they can easily look it up on youtube once people start getting clears done. The Binding Coil of Bahamut was a treat, it was rewarding to earn those cut scenes and find out the mystery of the calamity. I don't even recall what we're doing in Alexander besides a bunch of goofy goblins just want a cool fort that can walk around.
Last thing I can think of off the top my head is...
Relic!
Now I saw that in the Live Letter Digest that the only reason why they don't want to add a challenging fight the the relic quest line is because there was difficulty just obtaining the original 2.0 relic. I will admit that I did not get mine back in 2.0 because I couldn't face Titan HM due to the latency at the time of launch. But the reasons they listed were for Chimera and Hydra? Chimera was a decent fight and Hydra did have a few mechanics to it but they were both incredible easy compared to Titan HM at the time. I think a few challenge fights along with a bit a farming/killing mobs is more than fair for a step in the relic.
Also the Crafting items really need to stop being a part of relic as a whole. Relic is your personal weapon, you shouldn't need to pay crafters or bug your company crafters to make these items for you. I know its a way to get more people crafting but really it shouldn't affect something that should be entirely based on the amount of effort you put into it.
The last thing about Relic that I would like see is enhancements to you Jobs abilities. Such example would be for the AST relic you would have a shorter recast time on your "Draw" ability or "Celestial Opposition" would heal the party for the amount of damage they had taken in the past 30 seconds. Just something that would give it a much larger impact than just stats.
Another thing to keep a relic with these abilities attached to them would be to make their ilvl scale with you gear ilvl. Lets say the sum of the average ilvl of all your gear you had on you is 206 so the relic would adjust to stats of a 206 weapon. You could cap these stat adjustments to lower ilvls until you complete the next step of the relic which would boost the cap to the next relevant ilvl of that patch. There would also have to be a base ilvl for the weapon so that it isn't just completely out classed by the newest, shiny weapons on the block.
These are just a few things I would like to see in the game, Please share what changes you would like to see!
Also Thank you Kaurie for telling me how to bypass the 1000 character limit!