Suggestion: Set Bonuses or special effects

Now that we are in the 4th version of FFXIV wouldn't it be fun to have some gear that have set bonuses? Set bonuses have been in FFXI and in FFXIV 1.0. Basically if you equip enough pieces of gear from the same set they give you an extra bonus.

Like for example if you have 2 pieces of raid gear you get a bonus, at 4 pieces you get another bonus. And the bonus doesn't have to be stats but like a special effect. For example maybe for a tank having 2 pieces of raid gear would give you 20% more chance to parry and getting 4 pieces would make it so you would counter auto attack when you parry.

Or how about weapons that have special traits or procs. Stuff like a sword that occasionally attacks twice, or weapons that have an HP drain proc.

We use to have nice things like that but, according to SE, the community would force people to have said set and if they dont have it they would shun them away. Basically a PF would be "have X set or dont join".

For me i would love to see them back with nice special bonus but so much time have pass that the idea feels so far away or may never come.

At first I thought this was a cool idea.

Then again they make sets harder to get if they done this and well just like FFXI near the end people started excluding people out of runs if they didn't own certain pieces of gear or weapons.

example would be oh you don't have kraken club no thanks
Where is your haste armor no thanks

if got so bad in FFXI with that attitude I quit and came here.

Now if that didn't happen and the sets were easy to get I would say yes but usually people begin to change to elites.

other than those complaints I would support idea 100% if the above didn't happen.

This already exists in the game in the only way it should - vanity gear that gives bonus for leveling.

A way in which this could work at higher levels would be glamour. Give people more incentive to farm certain content because their glams would be all the prettier if they got it. Granted this should also count if you glamour the appearance onto other gear otherwise it'll become redundant by the next main patch.

SE already said they won't do sets because they build most of this game so even the dumbest person could play the game without being behind. Personally, I like games that have sets and they alter your skills a bit. I would be fine with them trying it just for an expansion and see how it goes. I have played plenty of other MMOs where they have gear with sets and I rarely see people say bring this or don't join (also why does it matter? majority of the people that play this game doesn't even raid... 0.68% of people in NA/EU have cleared savage based on lodestone data). The way FFXIV is designed it wouldn't even matter. Most would DF 24man and dungeons where it wouldn't matter.

No thanks, if only because it'd be a nightmare to balance. Either the bonuses are strong enough that SE has to balance assuming most people will have them or the bonuses are so weak as to be nothing more than mild flavor. Also, good luck designing new and interesting bonuses for every class every time a new set of gear comes out.

And it sucks when you have a nice set bonus, but wind up having to replace it with something "worse" the next time the gear cap is raised, especially if the bonus changes how you play the class.

I thought that something like this would have been great in the Eureka area. Weapons and armor with special effects which "breaks" the game... but only in the Eureka zone. Since it wouldn't be required to clear Eureka and would end up being an awesome bonus, I was hoping they would do something like this but my hopes have been dashed.

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Originally Posted by Zumi

Now that we are in the 4th version of FFXIV wouldn't it be fun to have some gear that have set bonuses? Set bonuses have been in FFXI and in FFXIV 1.0. Basically if you equip enough pieces of gear from the same set they give you an extra bonus.

Like for example if you have 2 pieces of raid gear you get a bonus, at 4 pieces you get another bonus. And the bonus doesn't have to be stats but like a special effect. For example maybe for a tank having 2 pieces of raid gear would give you 20% more chance to parry and getting 4 pieces would make it so you would counter auto attack when you parry.

Or how about weapons that have special traits or procs. Stuff like a sword that occasionally attacks twice, or weapons that have an HP drain proc.

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I played another game with sets like that and i spend over a year trying to complete 1 Set so no thanks, i'll pass.

This has been asked for from 2.x and there have been numerous explanations of why not... Mostly balancing and "illusion of choice" issues, which I can totally understand. Unfortunately I don't see it ever happening in a meaningful way.

I would take the illusion of choice over what we have currently, but as the game stands it pure veritical progression with a very oversimplified gear stats ECT. So I'm not expecting anything changing for that reason it would require drastic changes with combat system itself among other things. I don't see the dev doing it they have enough trying to balance the basics adding more complexity probably out of their scope. /Shrugs

I miss when equipment had bonuses like this:

http://i.imgur.com/Rt40A.jpg

It works in some games but I don't think it would work well in this one.

The turnover rate on gear is probably too fast to do set bonuses...
How long is it between gear upgrades, a few months?


It probably wouldn't work too well with the vertical progression FFXIV uses.
A horizontal progression game could do it much better.

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Originally Posted by TaranTatsuuchi

The turnover rate on gear is probably too fast to do set bonuses...
How long is it between gear upgrades, a few months?


It probably wouldn't work too well with the vertical progression FFXIV uses.
A horizontal progression game could do it much better.

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Yeah I agree that's probably the determining factor in how well set bonuses work out in a game.

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Originally Posted by Zumi

Like for example if you have 2 pieces of raid gear you get a bonus, at 4 pieces you get another bonus. And the bonus doesn't have to be stats but like a special effect. For example maybe for a tank having 2 pieces of raid gear would give you 20% more chance to parry and getting 4 pieces would make it so you would counter auto attack when you parry.

Or how about weapons that have special traits or procs. Stuff like a sword that occasionally attacks twice, or weapons that have an HP drain proc.

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Every single example you listed is a binary effect, thus would be trivially boring. All 4 examples do not change any decision points or offer any divergent gameplay.

In an ideal world, this is what the materia system would have been for, but they opted for a bland design there as well. Stuff like socketing materia improves/changes existing abilities.

In order for a design like this to work though, they'd need to revamp the entire job and encounter design paradigm, and frankly it's just too much work.

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Originally Posted by Myrhn

We use to have nice things like that but, according to SE, the community would force people to have said set and if they dont have it they would shun them away. Basically a PF would be "have X set or dont join".

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Which is ironic considering they built in ilvl restrictions for PF and duty complete checkboxes, things that are intentionally designed to shun players who do not meed arbitrary standards.

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Originally Posted by Myrhn

We use to have nice things like that but, according to SE, the community would force people to have said set and if they dont have it they would shun them away. Basically a PF would be "have X set or dont join".

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As someone who played WoW for a very long time, I can tell you that this is very true. It makes it difficult to get in to raiding if you lack set gear at any point after the first few weeks of the expansion because so many will turn you away if you don't have it.

While set gear looks fun on paper in practise it can be a nightmare to balance. In WoW some classes/specs were very underpowered unless they had certain set bonuses while others were fine without them but then became op with them. Then there were those who saw very little difference in their performance after getting set gear and then felt crappy as it was meaningless to them. It was very demoralising to see set gear carry some players and completely ***k others. I don't want to go through that again.