My Opinion on XIV's Gear Progression

FFXI did better with gear progression during end game periods. Like you could be ilvl 119 and a old lvl 75 or lvl 99 piece of gear could STILL last you YEARS.

FFXI was good at balancing gear progression and ensuring that old pieces of gear can still have their uses years down the line.

FFXIV's gear progression is a pure example of bad design. Some gear might take a long time to grind for and when you do get pieces you needed for all your jobs, a major patch comes and the ilvl raises again, thus making all that effort you did grinding for that gear completely POINTLESS.

Unless you like keeping the outdated pieces for glamour then it's basically going in the trash when the ilvl raises and new gear becomes available.

FFXI pieces? New gear! YAY! Awesome, this older piece of gear can still be useful in this slot!!

Dear FFXIV Gear Trendmill: Get Good. <3

*I'll await the White Knights with the Pitchforks while I'm busying doing my dailies.*


Thanks for reading.

FFXIV isnt set up in the same ways "traditional" MMOs are Yoshi himself is on record as saying he doesnt want people playing his game everyday, just come back for patches it's not supposed to be lasting, sure myself and a lot of people who grew up on grindy MMOs would prefer the older style of logging in everyday always having something to work toward but that model of game is kind of dying because largely MMO's in general arent appealing to a younger crowd and those of us who grew up on it don't have as much time so they opted for a style where you can log in an hour a night and still meet your weekly caps.

The truth is this game needs to make money and casting a wider net and appealing to casual players with full time jobs is what pays despite how anyone feels about it.

There are a few things that really irk me about the gear progression:

1. How useless gear is in the long run. It is all replaced too easily, too quickly.
2. How empty it is. Not a single piece of gear in the last 4 years of FFXIV has any special abilities or effects. Not. One. Would it kill them to make some gear with an in-town-only ability?
3. How difficult it is to gear up more than 1 job. In a game where you can be anything, it is incredibly difficult to properly gear up 2 or more jobs without exposing yourself to the horrible, terrible and hellish RNG and therefore sinking in ludicrous amounts of time.
3a. Let me also say this: I HATE RNG.

So yeah, those are my 2 cents.

That is the one thing I liked about 11. There were several choices for gear setups, and most of the best gear setups were pieces from different gear sets. Even when the lvl cap hit 99 the best ring for a TP set was a lvl 30 rajas ring. This also gave people multiple things to do to get instead of savage or dungeon grinds for tomes.

Go play FFXI.

I only have two issues with the way gearing is done in this game. The first is difficulty gearing multiple classes, and the second being the lack of any set bonuses or effects on Gear.

In theory you can have multiple classes decently geared up. You have tome gear, raid gear, NM Raid Gear, and crafted Gear. While its doable to gear up multiple classes through these methods its not practical for most, which typically leaves you with just NM raid and Tome gear. However there is a second problem to this which is how weapons are handed out. Personally I don't understand why the Story version of Primals/Trials doesn't give a weaker weapon. Dungeons could also help with this.

What ultimately kills me however is how boring gear is. I don't mind the cycle of 6 months for gear, however as long as it does nothing but numerical upgrades it has gotten increasingly difficult to care. I didn't realize how much this was effecting me until I tried WoW again and found myself wanting to run content because the set bonuses would add to the classes in either minor or dramatic ways. Let alone some of the cooler pieces of gear you get like being able to randomly breathe fire, or summoning wolves.

Ultimately, the gearing in FFXIV is painfully dry. I remember Yoshida not wanting to add too much to gear out of fear of alienating the playerbase but we already do that at a stupidly high level as is.

Gear is pointless.

https://i.imgflip.com/25k684.jpg

The horse is dead, and has been for a very long time. Time to stop beating it.

The gear treadmill itself feels inherently pointless, no matter how you do it. I've all but stopped playing right now because I don't enjoy running duties, and don't care about arbitrary stat gains. All they do is get you to normal in current content, and get synced down in older content anyway. Literally all it seems to do is gate progression so you don't get burned out as quickly.
They do nothing to change up gameplay; you can't even prioritize particular stats for a different playstyle, like large numbers vs. fast GCD, or steady numbers vs. swingy crits.

I'll never understand people who fanboy so much over horizontal progression. The reason it worked in FFXI is because that game allowed you to constantly swap out entire gearsets for EACH ABILITY with extensive macro support. It would require an extensive rebalance for extremely little gain. Considering how much SE hates macros in FFXIV, I find this highly unlikely.

If you weren't to do this, then what you end up with is a truck ton of content that ends up being dead on release. You can only put so many situationally effective things before running into jank like poison resistance or something where it feels like loot is introduced to do a single thing and then has no use after, which of course doesn't feel good.

It also heavily increases gatekeeping, which is super not good for gathering new players. What's a new player to do when they need a critical item from an old hard raid that everyone who's been playing already has? You can say they can ask friends or an FC or something, but let's be real, it's just not that easy.