Trust System Leveling

I realise this might be a little silly and not really worth talking about for most people, but I really dislike the choice made with having trust party members level back down to 71 after the main story and requiring you to manually level them up through repeated dungeon runs.

On paper it doesn't sound like that bad of an idea, you can level up your trusts alongside one or two alternate jobs, but sadly the experience requirements for them are straight up ridiculous - at level 71, each trust member requires 6 runs of the level appropriate dungeon in order to level up, that's at least 12 runs of the same dungeon before you can move on to the next one... and that's before you factor in the part where only the 3 out of 6 trusts you bring with you will actually gain experience, doubling that number to at least 24 if you want to level all of them.

Needless to say doing over 24 runs for each of the five story leveling dungeons would drive anyone mad, especially when they very rarely take less than 30 minutes to complete due to the trusts' reduced damage output.

The experience gain is so bad you'll end up vastly overleveling them on an alternate job even if you do nothing but trust runs on it...

This seems like far too much trouble for too little reward, it should either be made way more lenient or just be removed altogether.

I don't quite understand why they did this either. I'd personally take a complete reduction of personal rewards and a nuking of the exp we gain just to quintuple te exp the NPCs gain to make it half way worth it. I get Trusts are there to help people who have long dungeon queues and they don't want them to replace the roulette, but there are better ways to have done that without nuking the NPC's level from orbit.

Thank goodness I play every class so I’ll get the most out of those multiple runs per dungeon, seems like it’s to encourage trying other roles in a less demanding environment.

This kinda feels like they honked the "squadrons" mechanic onto MSQ dungeons and forgot how much grinding your squadron sucked without the supplementary "go do stuff" training.

That sounds like awful design.

Just make the trusts my level. Whatever my level is at the moment, that's the level they are. That's actually EXACTLY how it works in FFXI (where this system comes from).

Basically if I want to level with trusts, I can't do that. If it takes 12 runs to get 3 of them to the next dungeon that's absurd. For one thing it's not going to take ME any 12 runs to level that high. So I'm going to massively outlevel my trusts AND be unable to proceed to the next dungeon in the sequence if I want to bring them along. The only other way to do it would be to evenly level all my jobs to keep in range of the trusts and that just sounds horrible.

I can understand that this seems to be annoying at first. Then again depending on how many characters you are leveling anyway this doesn't seems so bad. SE loves a bit of grinding for their players. It still is a jrpg after all an they actually love some brainless farming. Still, it is a bit annoying.

I can only assume this will be related to a content involving the Trust Companions in later contents.

Maybe Trust Companion quests?

Or something else since right now we have the bare bone version of Trust once we complete 5.0 MSQ and the Trust system we have during 5.0 MSQ is the Trial version.

I always expect that trust will become something more than just "help players get through MSQ Story Dungeons for 5.0 and beyond for the first time" that we currently have now.

Shadowbringers has been a homerun, but I also have big issues with this decision. It feels like a bait and switch to have your Trusts "delevel" after finishing the MSQ, and the game punishes you for progressing. The amount of EXP you need to level your Trusts is ridiculous, especially if you play as a tank or healer. Then whenever you do play a DPS later on, Thancred, Alphinaud, and/or Urianger will be stuck at 71 even though you could have all of the DPS Trusts leveled.

This is a big oversight and SE should reconsider how demanding the Trust System should be after completing the story.

I love the trust system. I play casters so it's nice to not have to wait on long queues for dps runs. As to leveling them up, why not? You can always use the duty finder if you hate it that much. If they keep their levels the duty finder will get even harder to use to get things done. Especially if tanks and healers prefer the trust runs.

I will be running one trust dungeon a day to level and RDM on my main. She has a WHM at 80. I will also be running an Alliance and Main Story as well. I found yesterday that at level 71 you gain 2.5 million experience with the next level cap requiring about 14 million which is about 6 runs. I have quite a few alt roles to level so I'm not seeing this as that big an issue. I hope that the amount of experience at level 72, 73 etc will scale so we get more than 2.5 million.

I'm also leveling an alt and taking her through story so the above is what I have planned at the moment for my alt roles.