Another Thread about Gearing in FFXIV

Hi,
I have seen a lot of complaints about the gearing system in FFXIV. Of course, there have been already a lot of people suggesting this or that on reddit, the forums or various other platforms, but there are a few thoughts I had personally, that were not mentioned before (at least to my knowledge):

• Criterion: Drops with a weekly lockout for all players a token. This token can exchanged for an tomestone upgrade material (of course this is not a new topic). On top of that you can also exchange it for a material to upgrade the alliance raid gear to bring it to the same ilvl as Savage gear. With that alliance raid gear is an option with different substats. Also the Criterion releases before the alliance raid, so even with the weekly lockout you can farm these tokens beforehand.

• Criterion Savage: No Change, maybe some more Glamour?

• Alliance Raid: No weekly lockout on gear, it is 10 item level below Savage anyway. The coin can still be locked.

• Savage: The amount of books you need should be halved on the alliance raid patch, so people can actually catch up. I would not open it completely (but this is of course debatable)

• Tomestone gear: Double the cap or reduce the cost of items by half on alliance raid patch

• Relic Weapon: So this is a big one. The relic weapon should be introduced with the patch of the normal raid. At that point it could be something like an artifact weapon, so no capped substats like the usual relic weapon. Also it should be the same Ilvl as crafted gear. With that, there is no change in balancing the savage raids week 1, because still crafted gear is BIS. You can increase the ilvl of your relic weapon each week by a small amount. The steps for doing that exist already in old relic quests, like light farming or Materia/Crystal Sand, where you increased previously the substats of your weapon. This increase should be locked per week, so you cannot just force it in week 1 to be savage equivalent. Also it should be possible to do many weapons at the same time, because why not? Furthermore you should be able to have a catch up mechanic: If you start you relic in week 3, you should be able to grind all the steps in one week up to the point, where all other players are right now. With that you can grind this step without weekly restrictions, when it becomes old content. The weapon should be weaker in Week 7 of normal raid as the tomestone weapon. So you could still get the tomestone weapon as an upgrade, but then the relic will become stronger in one of the next weeks. Then it will stop at the ilvl of the augmented tomestone weapon. On the alliance raid patch, it should be possible to upgrade it to the savage weapon ilvl. Will it be better then the savage weapon? Maybe due to capped substats, but it should have also different substats to make it an option. The savage weapon should be still viable for ultimate if you don’t want to do the relic grind.

So what I have in mind is not really more work for the devs (apart from adding the relic weapon earlier and one criterion per savage raidtier). There no new gear in all of the systems. Of course for the week 1 ultimate raiders, who needs BIS in every slot, it will be more work, because they have to also farm criterion. I personally like the most, that from a casual perspective you can use the relic for savage and you can get gear, which is as good as savage from criterion + alliance raid (maybe not exactly due to substats, but from Ilvl persperctive).
I am interested in your thoughts and thanks for reading.