Conflicting tasks ruining the game?

I'm not sure if anyone else feels this way, but after coming back the game seems to have a problem with telling the player what they should be doing instead of letting them decide what they want to do.

To elaborate, the game has an expert roulette composed of two dungeons that reward lore tomes. Lore tomes are used to purchase the highest level gear outside of pure raiding in the game and the dungeons are the easiest way to get lore. Furthermore, a lot of the end game "keys of the castle" content require a certain gear level or push the community to enforce a specific gear level, so there's a lot of incentive to stay on top of gear level.

However, that expert roulette has a total of two dungeons in it and it becomes a slog every patch to have to go through the motions. Void ark is very much the same as a catch up instance: Everyone is going to run it to the point of exaustion instead of getting to go around and do things that are actually enjoyable, like EX / Savage, older content for glamour, etc.

Also, something just seems wrong if the community has to set it's own gear level restrictions just to try and make a hard fight more passable and to accomodate people who may not have run the content as much and thus turn a clear party into a learning group for the night. Usually it just turns into a game of "how high can I set this to keep noobs out?" sort of deal. :rolleyes:

Yeah I don't know, it just feels like the designers want us to do a dozen things, but then have emphasized just one or two of them as being the absolute best choice that needs to be done first all the time thanks to tome farming. Anyone else feel the same?

There might be only 2 expert roulette dungeons, but there are more than 2 dungeons that reward lore. Go do those?

What you say is true if your focused on absolute efficiency. However with the Lore cap only doing the Expert dungeon Roulette is rather pointless as you will likely cap halfway through the week. Why not do other stuff. Sure you will get less Lore per run but you will be getting no Lore for running content once you hit the weekly cap. Me personally I rarely run an Expert dungeon more than twice a week. Instead Ill do the trial roulette, a few lvl 60 roulettes, Void Ark from my Mhachi Matter, some Midas, a few days of Vath dailies and a few Frontlines and that will be more than enough to hit cap. In fact the trial roulette is the only roulette I do every day.

End game gear should be obtainable only by doing the hardest content. Tomestones gear should only be fillers.

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Originally Posted by Lambadelta

There might be only 2 expert roulette dungeons, but there are more than 2 dungeons that reward lore. Go do those?

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It's not so much about what awards lore, but rather what awards lore in significant quantity so as to help people with limited time reach cap. As Belhi puts it, it's about efficiency to make time to do other things in the game.

I used to agree with Melch's stance, but with time it's become apparent that approach to end game has it's own issues.

Another one of these threads >.>

I'm just going to post the list I've posted before of all the ways you can obtain Lore in this game currently:

DREX
DR 60
DR Trials
DR Frontlines
DR Mentor
Thordan Normal
Sephirot Normal
Bismarck EX
Ravana EX
Thordan EX
Sephirot EX
Alexander Gordias Normal
Alexander Gordias Savage
Alexander Midas
Alexander Midas Savage
Void Ark
Aetherochemical Research Facility
Neverreap
Fractal Continuum
Saint Mocianne's Arboretum
Pharos Sirius (Hard)
Antitower
Lost City of Amdapor (Hard)
Treasure Maps
Seal Rock
Vath Beast Quests
Diadem
3.0 S Rank Hunt Mobs

As for using "limited play time" as an excuse to only run DREX, well let me ask you this, if your time is so limited that you can't do anything but DREX, what exactly do you need the lore gear for in the first place? Also, with the current state of crafted gear, a lot of the i220 gear even without melds is stronger than the i230 lore gear. You also have the option to use the i220 Midan gear which for some slots are better than the i230 lore gear. Currently the highest ilvl requirement in the game is i205 for Sephirot EX. If you don't meed the ilvl requirements people post in PF, then start your own party with a lower ilvl requirement.

Outside of Midas Savage, you essentially do not need any gear higher than the i210 set. I'm not quite sure where you are getting the idea that "the designers want us to do a dozen things, but then have emphasized just one or two of them as being the absolute best choice that needs to be done first all the time thanks to tome farming." Yes, DREX is the most efficient, but it is not the only viable way. This is the same as people who cried when the 210 relic step was released and all they saw was that they had to run Alexander Gordias normal 800 times to get their items. They ignored the fact that A, you get Esoterics from running Gordias and B, that there were multiple alternate methods of obtaining unidentified items instead of Gordias normal.

Yeah, nothing wrong with "Expert" Roulette yielding more tomes than the hardest content in the game. lol

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Originally Posted by FabricioRF

Yeah, nothing wrong with "Expert" Roulette yielding more tomes than the hardest content in the game. lol

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Remove the tome bonus and they don't really yield more tomes than the hardest content in the game for people who have it on farm. You also get i240 gear from that hardest content in addition to tomes, so the reward is still greater.

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Originally Posted by Cnidarian

Remove the tome bonus and they don't really yield more tomes than the hardest content in the game for people who have it on farm. You also get i240 gear from that hardest content in addition to tomes, so the reward is still greater.

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They do.

Anyways, my question is: why does expert HAVE to be the only efficient way? Why the other methods can't yield more tomes? We're limited to 450 a week, anyway.

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Originally Posted by Cnidarian

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Don't know why you have such an issue with people wanting the alternate methods to be as rewarding as DREX.

To answer Cndarians question, it's a point of status and fullfills the need to be "up to date" with the in crowd of the MMO in question. This is pretty standard across a lot of MMOs today and is a part of the whole motivation to get better gear.

Also, when the community is promoting doing EX mode primals and sets gear requirements to high levels that also facilitates a need to get high level tome gear.

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Originally Posted by MomomiMomi

Don't know why you have such an issue with people wanting the alternate methods to be as rewarding as DREX.

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Because it isn't needed.

Please refer to: here or any one of the other many threads in which this topic has been discussed already.

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Originally Posted by Cnidarian

Because it isn't needed.

Please refer to: here or any one of the other many threads in which this topic has been discussed already.

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QoL changes generally aren't. But they're still very beneficial.

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Originally Posted by Cnidarian

Because it isn't needed.

Please refer to: here or any one of the other many threads in which this topic has been discussed already.

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69 likes in the OP, and you say "it isn't needed"? ok.

Before anything lemme clarify that I'm relatively a new player(hit 60 just days after 3.2 landed) so my opinion is based solely on my experience with the current patch.

Personally I don't share that feeling towards tome farming. It never felt a chore, and most of the time I was capped in a matter of 3-4 days. Both of the dungeons in this patch still feel enjoyable to me, even after all that repetition and drex is only a partial source of my lore tomestones. In fact most of mine used to come from hunting since HW A and S rank marks provide a decent amount for a 2min job.
However tackling hard content like Ex primals and Savage is something that doesn't interest me whatsoever, was never a hardcore player, so I also don't have that "drive" you describe above to have BiS gear. My ilvl226 WHM is more than enough to get me through 90% of the content and that's enough for me.
From my point of view it's not the game that's an issue, it's the community. A very minor percentage of the content is designed to cater specifically to a hardcore portion of the playerbase as it should be. It's hard, no question about it, and needs you to know the fight inside and out as well as your selected class. However all of these are designed to be doable with the BiS gear of the previous patch if my understanding of the game design is correct. Does it leave room for error when that is the case? No, it doesn't, you and 7 other people have to be flawless in your run. The higher gear you procure with every patch is just a way to give you wiggle room. And let's face it, when you aim to clear that kind of content you wanna maximize your chances which breeds the high requirements the community sets. Which also comes as no surprise since most of the time you'll end up with some people that can't perform at the level that content requires.

What I can understand and agree though is the option to select your method of aquiring tomes without being "penalized" if you choose to not do drex when you only have limited time to spend in the game during most of your week(I saw above someone arguing what you need the gear for if you don't have time to do other things but he clearly forgot that people might not have more than an hour or two daily during the week but be able to spend significantly more online during weekends, when they might wanna raid or whatever.). But what makes Drex the "dominant" lore source? The daily bonus! It's not that other methods should give more tomes, but there should be a system where you get one daily tome bonus from ANY method you choose. However getting that bonus would nullify all others. Maybe set drex to also give dated resources(as a roulette, not as dungeon rewards) and enable you to manually activate a special bonus in whatever DR you want that would give those extra 30-40 tomes once a day. Or a player buff that comes up on reset which gives you extra tomes the first time you get them from any source during your day. Or...Or...well I dunno, I'm out of ideas but you get the point.

The roulette wouldn't be so problematic if it wasn't set up to make people want to run the latest two dungeons before all other dungeons purely due to rewards. There isn't much of a reason not to reward lore for doing older content from ARR even, since the only purpose it serves (in combination with the limit per week) is as a means to gate the gear progression so people don't just get all the 230 gear and wander off.

And again, not saying that there aren't other ways to get lore. It's just right now as it stands the developers are making a statement that they want people to do EX Roulette, period, before all other casual content. That doesn't seem like a wise thing to do unless their objective is to get people to burn out on the two dungeons they make every three months relatively quickly.

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Originally Posted by Melch

End game gear should be obtainable only by doing the hardest content. Tomestones gear should only be fillers.

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end game gear from end game content? already ingame. Alex Savage give you the highest ilevel gear

I've just started the ARR beast tribes, on a lvl 60 toon thats about 36 lore at rank 1 in under an hour.

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Originally Posted by Shug

I've just started the ARR beast tribes, on a lvl 60 toon thats about 36 lore at rank 1 in under an hour.

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Those give poetics.

I cap Lore on 3 accounts each week. I have no problem with expert awarding bonus tomes. I get my Lore from Void, Midas (multiple runs), Expert, other roulettes, and hunts. It's Friday and I'm just about capped already. I don't see a problem with the current set-up.

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Originally Posted by Belhi

What you say is true if your focused on absolute efficiency. However with the Lore cap only doing the Expert dungeon Roulette is rather pointless as you will likely cap halfway through the week. Why not do other stuff. Sure you will get less Lore per run but you will be getting no Lore for running content once you hit the weekly cap. Me personally I rarely run an Expert dungeon more than twice a week. Instead Ill do the trial roulette, a few lvl 60 roulettes, Void Ark from my Mhachi Matter, some Midas, a few days of Vath dailies and a few Frontlines and that will be more than enough to hit cap. In fact the trial roulette is the only roulette I do every day.

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Yes! Yes! Yes! I spam content as well, so my Lore comes when it comes. It works out by the time weekly reset happens.

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Originally Posted by LaylaTsarra

I cap Lore on 3 accounts each week. I have no problem with expert awarding bonus tomes. I get my Lore from Void, Midas (multiple runs), Expert, other roulettes, and hunts. It's Friday and I'm just about capped already. I don't see a problem with the current set-up.

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http://i.imgur.com/gj9yhC4.png?1

Congrats.

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Originally Posted by MomomiMomi

http://i.imgur.com/gj9yhC4.png?1

Congrats.

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You can be capped at friday with just doing 1 expert roulette a day and 1 void each week already

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Originally Posted by MomomiMomi

Congrats.

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Thank you. Your warm wishes are noted. Shame things appear to be so difficult for you. You get no lore for fussing about the process or not doing anything.

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Originally Posted by Felis

You can be capped at friday with just doing 1 expert roulette a day and 1 void each week already

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No expert only has to be part of what you do each week. One can choose to do just it daily or lots of other things to cap. 450 Lore a week is easy. Oddly enough you have those who wish there was no cap and those who can't even do the weekly.

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Originally Posted by LaylaTsarra

Thank you. Your warm wishes are noted. Shame things appear to be so difficult for you. You get no lore for fussing about the process or not doing anything.

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Yes, I'm not doing anything. I only have put about 20 hours this week doing the things I enjoy and still haven't capped. There are many things in this game that don't reward lore. All people are asking for is for the other methods of gaining lore to be in line with DREX. Doing just the one is boring, and if you have limited time, doing just the one is sometimes (currently) the only option. There's no drawback to this change. It's not like we can go above 450 anyway.

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Originally Posted by MomomiMomi

Yes, I'm not doing anything. I only have put about 20 hours this week doing the things I enjoy and still haven't capped. There are many things in this game that don't reward lore. All people are asking for is for the other methods of gaining lore to be in line with DREX. Doing just the one is boring, and if you have limited time, doing just the one is sometimes (currently) the only option. There's no drawback to this change. It's not like we can go above 450 anyway.

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Yeah that is my feeling on the entire situation with lore. They used to even give relevant tomes with beastman dailies, but that changed in heavensward.

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Originally Posted by Colt47

Yeah that is my feeling on the entire situation with lore. They used to even give relevant tomes with beastman dailies, but that changed in heavensward.

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Last time I looked at the Vath and Vundu tribes, one of them was giving lore and the other esoterics, from max rank quests. But I'm focused more on the older tribes for materia now. Can cap lore without realising in 1 or 2 days of pvp spam.

Actually I've run out of important uses for lore tomes because I'm not planning on buying any more of the sets for side jobs. I'm interested in seeing the new gear from The Weeping City of Mhach though. If lore didn't exist at all, people would still have 3 levels of raid gear from proto-midas 220 > weeping city 230 > midas savage 240.

The reason for these lockouts (including the weekly cap) might be the reason why most sources of Lore are subpar compared to DREX. When one raids, they must educate themselves to one Job as to be more efficient in that job until they rreach the peak (represented blatantly by the iLevel cap, in this case, i240). This means that the gear and its iLevel are a testament to the Jobs dedication, and as such becomes a cycle. Good Gear is both a symbol and the cause of dedication to a Job. and as a result the Best gear should both be hard to get, and be rendered moot by the time you get it. Like say the Masamune or Ultima Weapons in other games, but to a lesser extent. If you already have the i240 gear, then there's little reason to go raid as that class bar skill (Since if you can get the i240 armor, chances are that you can ask for the gear in advance and not be the required class to gain it) and patch cycling, especially if you only have one job at 60 (reminder that can =/= have to applies to leveling and gearing alt jobs, they are optional content in this case).

With that said, I begin to wonder if SE could make a change to how they release Gear. As we know, there are currently two tiers of tomestone gear. A tier with a hard cap of 2000, and with with an additional soft cap of 450 a week. It might be possible that SE can make it so that the former set of Gear be cycled out early (like say, in catch up patches) and the latter sets be downgraded to be the former in the same time, but with no new gear/tomestone set released until the patch after (where the iLevel will be raised anyway).

The end result would be that during raid patches there will be two sets of gear to trae the tomestones for, for catch-ups the gear gets cycled out early with only one gear and that being the uncapped gear with all the benefits thereof (more per run, no weekly cap, newbie bonuses, etc). Then the next raid patch will cycle in the new gear as with a new tomestone under the soft cap. It will address part of the issues of gearing alts, but might have its own problems. There is a sort of precient with 3.0 (and I do mean 3.0, not 3.05) if what I presume (That Yahsa was the only available Tomestone gear at 60) is correct

All of these solutions are the same, it doesn't matter if you get tomes through the daily roulette or grinding out runs of extreme primals. The end result is going to be the same because the content is the same, this game focuses too much on PvE and that's where all the rewards are at. PvP doesn't offer much and given how small the PvP community is, at least on Jenova, it doesn't make it a substitute for obtaining gear. Nor is open world content like maps, hunts, and beast tribes, they're too limited and restricted to even be considered a good alternative to grab gear. The problem isn't the game is boring, it's there isn't anything that is equal to the reward gain of PvE content. It doesn't help that any attempt at trying to make new content fun or sustainable has fallen flat on SEs face forcing PvE content to be the main draw of this game. Until SE is able to fix this problem, nothing will change with how players obtain gear and burn out will continue to ravage players into unsubbing.

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Originally Posted by Colt47

However, that expert roulette has a total of two dungeons in it and it becomes a slog every patch to have to go through the motions. Void ark is very much the same as a catch up instance: Everyone is going to run it to the point of exaustion instead of getting to go around and do things that are actually enjoyable, like EX / Savage, older content for glamour, etc.

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Your definition of "actually enjoyable" FFXIV content greatly differs from mine, good madam.