Alt Job Friendliness (Gearing Issue)

I would love to play an alt job in savage/criterion, however I am unmotivated because my main job's item level is too high. I highly suggest we rework the loot time gate(perhaps lower book reqs) over the course of the savage tier. By the time I can actually get an alt geared (raiding 2 days a week), people are lest interested in running the savage raid tier. I feel like if you have cleared a fight, why harshly limit loot from the players who have cleared?

This poses an even bigger issue when you consider that my main is BLM, and the melds are so much different for smn and redm, it doesn't feel good to play them in BLM bis. This could also be solved by adding "meld loadouts" where you can save & swap between 2 different meld profiles.

A final side note, the Criterion rewards are very underwhelming, same with the savage version. Please provide something more unique and cool, or gear near savage item levels.

Another Sildihn Subterrene (Regular, not Savage) should have had i620 gear to buy via the silver coins you get from each run, if not i625. Sfia said it best in a recent post, there are two sets of gear that we have to build BIS with, raid and upgraded tome. There's no variety, and it leads to dumb stuff like this tier where the BIS I was aiming for as healer would take 3 twines and 4 shines. It also used the boots from raid, so assuming I got zero luck in PF on rolls, that'd be sixteen weeks to get BIS.

A solution IMO would be to simply change tomes from 'you buy the item' to 'you buy the rights to reclaim the item for that slot, as any class'. This isn't a unique idea to me, I'm pretty sure in fact I saw it somewhere else in these forums first, or Reddit maybe. Basically though, instead of buying 'Lunar Envoy's Chest of Healing' for 825 tomes, I'd be buying 'Lunar Envoy's Chest Research' or whatever. From then on, I'd be able to claim any chestpiece, for any role, for free, as I've already paid the Tome cost for that slot. This allows us to, after (by my maths) 11 weeks, have every slot unlocked, and all the tome gear obtainable at any point, for free. If this is 'imbalanced' and 'oh no people will get gear too fast' then prices might change but that's up to the devs.

For raid gear, it's pretty silly IMO that in an even patch, it takes 4 tokens to get a Shine, but in an odd, catchup patch, it only takes 1 token, from a far easier piece of content, for that same Shine. Yeh I get it's 'catchup content' but come on this is ridiculous. Added to this, from what I understand at least, it's less so the actual raid gear drops, and more the Twines and Shines that are too limited. As such, I'd propose the following two ideas, pick whichever seems better/more feasible:

idea 1: Head Gloves Boots got changed from 6 to 4 books. This is a VERY good change. To go along with this, I'd make Accessories 2 instead of 4, Twines Shines and Brines 2 instead of 4, Legs 6 instead of 8, and Chestpieces 6 instead of 8. I am personally okay with weapons staying at 8, as they are such a big impact on our damage output. Alternatively, if people are very unhappy about the idea of a weapon taking 2 months to get, make Weapons 6, and reduce Legs/Chests to 5.

idea 2: Since SE keeps making doorbosses that take 8mins to beat, which then lead into a 'phase 2 boss' that takes roughly the same 8mins to beat, I'd also propose, either as an alternative or alongside the previous changes, a new path forward: a 5th boss. This would not be a 'real' 5th boss though, essentially, because the Doorboss takes as long as the actual Phase 2 (and often, is actually harder lmao), we split the two into separate fights. Doorboss becomes the new 'P4S' or 'P8S', with one chest being Twine and Shine, and the other being Brine and Tomestone. Therefore, even if only one chest drops, if it rolls the 'Tome and Brine chest', that is the items for both buying and upgrading the Tome weapon. Having a second source of upgrade items would help people get their upgrades faster, help people get upgrades for alt roles faster, and if a static is struggling on the 5th fight, they'd get an extra tome weapon to even the odds with. Note, this idea was made under the assumption that the Capped Tomes would be delayed a week, like savage, meaning that the earliest players would get these two tome weapons would be week 2, at which point the 'hardcore' gamers would have already cleared and it doesn't matter if a static has 2 or 20 tome weapons.

idea 2.5 (ever seen an idea have a doorboss?): While writing this, idea: one of the chests could give a chestpiece coffer and a random chestpiece, instead of tomestone and Brine for a tome weapon, if that is deemed too 'OP' to get two of per week. Chestpieces would then be bought with Page 4's from this new fight, meaning their purchase no longer conflicts with weapon purchases. To compensate for this, fight 5 would then drop a second random weapon, with a twist. This random weapon would be guaranteed to be one of the present classes (so if there's no MCH in the party, it won't ever be a MCH gun). Furthermore, it rolls that random 'definitely useable by someone' weapon first, and if the 'totally random 1/19' weapon we currently have rolls and is a duplicate, it rerolls until it is not. Therefore, a 5th fight 2chest run with a comp of DRK GNB WHM SCH DRG NIN BRD SMN could see this loot: Weapon Coffer, SCH book (guaranteed useable roll), DNC chakrams (completely random roll), Mount, then the other stuff like minion and orch roll. If that's too much programming effort, just make it a second weapon coffer instead. "Wow two people get BIS weapons per week? That's crazy!" Yeh, and it'd be great for PF too where people roll need on the coffer every week whether they have their BIS weapon or not too.

In order to keep old numbering for raids still making sense even with this new design, I would suggest this new 5th fight in RaidFinder be referred to not by a number, but by a name like 'Abyssos: The Eighth Circle (Addenum)'. 5th fight books can be named 'Abyssos Addenum', since an 'addenum' makes sense lorewise for 'this extra fight that is only available in Savage', like notes hastily tacked onto the end of the actual thesis. Making a new 'Addenum' naming convention for fights would maybe also allow the devs to create a new level difficulty, cranked between current end-of-Savage and Ultimate, for a more smooth difficulty curve, instead of the sudden jump from Savage to Ultimate we have now.

This 'Addenum' 5th fight would be a seperate option to queue into in the RaidDutyWhateverFinder, and would require the 4th fight be completed to queue in. This would, in my mind, be a hard restriction, in order to mimic the current style of 'you have to beat doorboss to get to the real fight'. Joining a '5th fight party' and trying to queue in to skip 4th fight without doing it would say 'You have not cleared 4th fight yet, you are unable to join this duty' or some such. No skipping. By seperating the two fights like this, the devs would also be able to potentially add an extra mechanic to each of the fights to extend them to be more 10ish min in duration if they wished. For example, in P4S, I was rather surprised there was not a second round of Orbs, possibly reversed in some way. No second towers, either. What if there was a final mechanic where you had to solve towers AND orbs at the same time? One person in the tower, one person outside, but both still within stack range for the orbs? Or for a more recent example, in P8S, the second 'High Concept' could have been moved to be the third, and a new 'HC2' could have been made that made use of the Snake and Tree reactions, for example, using the Snake to petrify an enraging add, and using the Tree to create a barrier for the party to LOS the Snake player, as a callback to Phase 1. This would have also shortened the final DPS burn from 40% of the boss's entire HP bar to closer to 30%, which would be good imo because it feels very strange to see his enrage sequence start at almost HALF HP.

Lastly, with any change like this, we have to remember that there's a difference between 'having enough gear to comfortably flex to alt roles' and 'having BIS'. The above 'slot license' idea would allow people to have full, unupgraded tome gear by week 11. This is plenty enough to hop into PFs or friend's groups to clear. Thinking about it, it'd also make us feel less crappy about buying a suboptimal piece for prog, eg healer tome chests seem to always be Det Piety, but with this idea, a player could buy it for prog, leave it unupgraded, then swap it out for the raid chest. They could then, instead of lamenting the wasted 825 tomes, go get the 'actually BIS' chestpieces for whichever roles have it as their BIS.