Shiva Unreal, why not just change the way min ilvl works?

Right now, even if you undersize an old fight, if you just select minimum ilvl, it sets you down to the same LEVEL as well as ilvl.

What is the actual purpose of implementing Unreal Shiva when the minimum ilvl feature could be reworked so that your stats are fixed down to an ilvl cap? That way they don't have to release it as a new fight.

I understand that level comes into this, but they could put fight specific caps on stats that force you to have the same *stats* and scaling as a level 50 character while still retaining all of your abilities.

The way they're doing it now is just one single fight as a time, whereas capping character stats to what they were at the given ilvl of the original content release when using the min ilvl function would make this permanently functional for all content in the game rather than doing 1 single fight at a time.

I guess my question is, why are we doing it this way?

Edit: There seems to be quite a few people mentioning balance, let me ask you this. What of Ultimate balance? Why are we holding a content minigame to a higher standard of balance than UcoB and UWU, who's DPS checks are abysmal in comparison to where they used to be. I don't think we should. There should be a minimum amount of effort made to keep it functional and not absurd (its not like if the balance isn't perfect on day one, they can't nerf a class' damage by x%), and that would be perfectly acceptable.
I've cleared all three and honestly, if we're okay as a community with Ultimate being the balanced that it is in damage, then we should be okay with min ilvl content having far more options but literally *slightly* worse balanced, to the point where it isn't actually noticeable.

nvm I learned to read and retract my message.


Potentially the formulas used to calculate damage and healing have changed, the potencies for skills probably don't scale linearly either, giving you more/less at higher levels even if you had the same stats as back then. Lastly it gives them room to make minor tweaks to mechanics to cover for the new skills we have.
tis all I got though.

Edit again: oh and it's more "new" content at a very low cost.

Honestly, they didn't make any mechanical tweaks at all in Shiva, which makes me feel like that's not actually what they're gonna do.
They've not sold it as new content, they've sold it as old content re-released at 80 to do again.

If they're gonna remake the content, sure, this method makes sense, but they didn't do that with Shiva at all. Its identical to release in everything but numbers.
And... to be quite honest, the potency increases we have, the abilities we have access to now don't trivialize it far more than the content is currently trivial in it's level 80 form.
If they really feel that you're killing it too quick, they could do what they do with frontlines and have an invisible debuff on certain classes to lower their potency by x% amount as balance for any given level.

Its really just the way they're releasing it like this instead of fixing the min ilvl system and making incentive to do old content like that is really weird. I feel like someone should ask them why they decided to go this route instead of fixing the minimum ilvl function as a whole.

The fact remains that item level sync on “new” content is dumb. People claim it’s to allow new players to join in when a new player wouldn’t clear this fight in a month of Sunday’s. Stop syncing content, make it aimed at the current item level tier

Minimum ilvl is more than just challenge mode, it ensures certain drops from fights.

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Originally Posted by GeraldineKerla

I understand that level comes into this, but they could put fight specific caps on stats that force you to have the same *stats* and scaling as a level 50 character while still retaining all of your abilities.

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A level 80 character synced to level 50 / ilevel 110 stats is not equal to what a level 50 / ilevel 110 character was in patch 2.4. New abilities with higher potencies have been added, new cooldowns have been added, old abilities have been buffed. In order to ensure the experience is similar to what it used to be, the fight would need to be rebalanced anyway.

As an example, here's a chart of Ninja skills from 2.4 (https://i.imgur.com/x6k3Jma.jpg) as opposed to the current skills (https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/jobguide/ninja/).

• Basic combo used to be 150/200/320 potency, now it's 220/330/480.
• Shadow Fang used to have 440 total potency, now it has 1100.
• Raiton used to be 360 potency, now it's 800.
• Doton used to be 240 total potency, now it's 800.
• The entire Ninki system didn't exist; Bhavacakra is a free 300 potency attack every 15-20 seconds.
• Dream within a dream didn't exist and Assassinate required target to be below 20% HP; those now give free 800 potency every 60 seconds, 200 of which is a guaranteed direct critical hit.
• Direct hits didn't exist.
• The vulnerability debuff was removed, as well as the damage buff from weapon poisons. This is a roughly 25% nerfs, but not enough to compensate for the buffs.

This list is not exhaustive, but you can see how only syncing stats would still make the fight way easier than it used to be.

Because doing it this way allows them to create an extra little minigame around the content?

Tweaking the system to allow the same challenge within its current limitations only really benefits the players bored and looking for a challenge. This seems like a way to get far more players interested in participating.

Substats already are in effect at the minimum ilvl.
They already have values correlating to the gear we had at the time, that gear didn't just stop existing.
Balancing Nightmare is not true. They don't make a significant enough difference to make classes "impossible to balance", you're WAY overstating the effects of substats in lower content.

If job damage output is so vastly different at 50 than it is right now, you can do literally what I said, put an invisible %buff/debuff on the class at that level when doing minimum ilvl content to retain some semblance of balance.
Its not like its actually difficult to figure out how much damage a job would do at those levels to a point that would be considered reasonable levels of balancing. If a job like RDM is doing 200 more dps than NIN in 2.4 Shiva, nerf it by like 12%.
Its not actually important or breaking anyone's immersion when old min ilvl job balance isn't literally perfect.

Scaling the substats down or even damage output down is something they only have to do once per set of level cap, and not even to a perfect degree. The "balancing nightmare" here is blown way out of proportion. You literally do not have to adjust all of these abilities, you only have to adjust the actual output of a given class. There aren't any abilities we have that trivialize the content more than we are going to trivialize it anyway with it at level 80.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

Because doing it this way allows them to create an extra little minigame around the content?

Tweaking the system to allow the same challenge within its current limitations only really benefits the players bored and looking for a challenge. This seems like a way to get far more players interested in participating.

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Honestly, you could make it a minigame without implementing it the current way it is, through the min ilvl system. It would work functionally identically but not be 1 primal release every few months.

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Originally Posted by Canadane

Minimum ilvl is more than just challenge mode, it ensures certain drops from fights.

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Could just keep it. It doesn't conflict at all.

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Originally Posted by GeraldineKerla

If job damage output is so vastly different at 50 than it is right now, you can do literally what I said, put an invisible %buff/debuff on the class at that level when doing minimum ilvl content to retain some semblance of balance.
Its not like its actually difficult to figure out how much damage a job would do at those levels to a point that would be considered reasonable levels of balancing. If a job like RDM is doing 200 more dps than NIN in 2.4 Shiva, nerf it by like 12%.
Its not actually important or breaking anyone's immersion when old min ilvl job balance isn't literally perfect.

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And when the next set of skills get released and jobs get stronger again they have to scale every single fight in the game again?

Also having only 1 primal at a time available ensures that people don't just do Garuda ex from now till eternity to get their rewards. They have to limit it to a specific fight, not only to prevent us from doing the easiest fight only, but also to make group building easier.

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Originally Posted by Tint

And when the next set of skills get released and jobs get stronger again they have to scale every single fight in the game again?

Also having only 1 primal at a time available ensures that people don't just do Garuda ex from now till eternity to get their rewards. They have to limit it to a specific fight, not only to prevent us from doing the easiest fight only, but also to make group building easier.

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Not every fight. Every expac, once every 2 years. And by that I mean, you scale the max and it automatically works downwards just fine from that. You don't have to scale every single fight just like they don't have to scale every single fight right now. They design it so that every job can play it, and then they make the DPS checks. The DPS checks have already been made, and the content is already designed so that you can do all of it, so all they need to do is attach it to a min ilvl system.

Also, you can just make 1 primal at a time give the reward that everybody shares, but with forced scaling. You only have to ensure that the dps differences in a single fight aren't too noteworthy, like Shiva, to be sure that it'll be reasonably balanced in essentially every other fight. The stat caps on each piece of gear are already there, so they reduce the main stat and main stat scaling to it's original level, then lower if its deemed too easy compared to release.

It's presumably because they wanted this to be content accessible to all level 80s, not just those caught up on "current" endgame levels.

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The fact remains that item level sync on “new” content is dumb. People claim it’s to allow new players to join in when a new player wouldn’t clear this fight in a month of Sunday’s. Stop syncing content, make it aimed at the current item level tier

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That really isn't the case. This fight isn't as difficult as you make it out to be (because Shiva EX was originally never that difficult either as far as extremes go, particularly not for being right after Ramuh) and it is very conceivable for someone to not be caught up to "current" endgame levels but still have done the original Shiva EX often enough to be very familiar with the fight's mechanics. Aside from all the numbers being scaled up, with greater emphasis placed on Shiva's HP because it's taking into account our greater proportional damage output with all our newer toys compared to what we had at 50... the fight is still ultimately a carbon copy of Shiva EX. Anyone that had lasting experience with Shiva EX will do just fine here.

It doesn't really matter what the item level cap is as far as fight difficulty goes; people familiar with Shiva EX are going to have a far easier time, and the people that aren't will have some learning to do. The same would apply even if the item level of the fight was more current.

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Originally Posted by Fynlar

It's presumably because they wanted this to be content accessible to all level 80s, not just because caught up on "current" endgame levels.

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Scaling it to how the min ilvl system works would make it *more* accessible as level 60s could participate, albeit missing skills?
Though if you can enter the fight then you have all the skills required to beat it regardless.

I agree with your comment on the item level sync, it honestly doesn't matter that its stuck at i435. Its not meant to be a serious progression fight to gain ilvls from beating.

Ima have to skip this "new" content. I've done Shiva enough at lv 50, 60 and even 70. Synced and not synced then I can throw Blue Mage in there. I just don't feel the rewards are enough to justify me running a fight I've ran so much. A Cait Sith ribbon doesn't really speak to me as a great reward and neither does a Horse that looks like a reused asset of horses I have plenty of. I can only Imagine them re doing Ifrit as Unreal where most of his mechanics are just flat out boring or even Titan. Feels like someone missed the purpose of Edengate. Its kinda Unreal how this is even considered as new content.

If I'm reading this right, and as someone who has played games that sync the item levels but not the skills, no thankyou. People with their whole kit will either be way more overpowered than those without, or scaled so that they are either weaker, or at least at the same dps but required to put in way more effort than someone with half the buttons to press. None of those results are that fun, and I'd rather everyone who can participate in a piece of content be allowed to be on the same footing as everyone else (minor differences in gear being the exception).

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Originally Posted by Roda

If I'm reading this right, and as someone who has played games that sync the item levels but not the skills, no thankyou. People with their whole kit will either be way more overpowered than those without, or scaled so that they are either weaker, or at least at the same dps but required to put in way more effort than someone with half the buttons to press. None of those results are that fun, and I'd rather everyone who can participate in a piece of content be allowed to be on the same footing as everyone else (minor differences in gear being the exception).

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This is a level 80 content. Everyone has their whole (level 80) kit.

EDIT: OH, you're talking about the proposal on this thread...

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Originally Posted by Wyakin

The fact remains that item level sync on “new” content is dumb. People claim it’s to allow new players to join in when a new player wouldn’t clear this fight in a month of Sunday’s. Stop syncing content, make it aimed at the current item level tier

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They're designed to rotate, like Frontlines maps.
When Shiva comes back around again, the current ilvl will be different, and they'll have to readjust it all again, which defeats the point if rotating it.

I wish they would let gear matter in Shiva unreal. I cleared it 2 times this week both of them felt very long to what it use to be. Shiva dies when she is at 9 or 10 stacks almost about to enrage due to ilvl sync to 430. When I was doing this at level 50 she died much faster because people could get better gear and start to outgear the fight it is not possible to do that with ilvl sync. There is so much stuff that has a gear sync on it some dungeons, exploration content, unreal. We spend a lot of time gearing up only for it to not matter for a lot of content.

My suggestion make Shiva ilvl 480. If you have 500 gear you will be able to clear it faster like it was back in level 50 when you had all the coil gear.

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Originally Posted by Zumi

I wish they would let gear matter in Shiva unreal. I cleared it 2 times this week both of them felt very long to what it use to be. Shiva dies when she is at 9 or 10 stacks almost about to enrage due to ilvl sync to 430. When I was doing this at level 50 she died much faster because people could get better gear and start to outgear the fight it is not possible to do that with ilvl sync. There is so much stuff that has a gear sync on it some dungeons, exploration content, unreal. We spend a lot of time gearing up only for it to not matter for a lot of content.

My suggestion make Shiva ilvl 480. If you have 500 gear you will be able to clear it faster like it was back in level 50 when you had all the coil gear.

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That would be because the ilevel sync only let's you be 5 ilevels above the minimum, whereas with Shiva in 2.4, you could potentially start 15 ilevels above her, as her minimum ilevel back then was i95 and the ilevel cap at the time was i110 (i115 with Second Coil weapon).

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Originally Posted by Zumi

I wish they would let gear matter in Shiva unreal. I cleared it 2 times this week both of them felt very long to what it use to be. Shiva dies when she is at 9 or 10 stacks almost about to enrage due to ilvl sync to 430. When I was doing this at level 50 she died much faster because people could get better gear and start to outgear the fight it is not possible to do that with ilvl sync. There is so much stuff that has a gear sync on it some dungeons, exploration content, unreal. We spend a lot of time gearing up only for it to not matter for a lot of content.

My suggestion make Shiva ilvl 480. If you have 500 gear you will be able to clear it faster like it was back in level 50 when you had all the coil gear.

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What is the benefit of this though? You will lock out any player that isn't up to date with the latest gear. For the sole purpose of making runs MAYBE easier in groups with members that struggle with the content but are also over geared for it?

You don't need gear for the fight to be easier, that can be accomplished with the group being partly competent.

I'd also prefer that level sync was changed to allow max level skills since that would benefit the entire game and not one select trial at a time, but if SE would rather sync old content up, that's fine too.

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Originally Posted by Zumi

I wish they would let gear matter in Shiva unreal. I cleared it 2 times this week both of them felt very long to what it use to be. Shiva dies when she is at 9 or 10 stacks almost about to enrage due to ilvl sync to 430. When I was doing this at level 50 she died much faster because people could get better gear and start to outgear the fight it is not possible to do that with ilvl sync.

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I like the strict gear limit exactly because it prevents people from outgearing the content. Overgearing really shows in Copied Factory, for the last couple of months it felt pointless to join as a healer unless your alliance was completely new. I'd like to feel little bit of urgency while in a duty.

I like the fact that you can't outgear it. It keeps the trial challenging and it feels better when you win.

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Originally Posted by Wyakin

The fact remains that item level sync on “new” content is dumb. People claim it’s to allow new players to join in when a new player wouldn’t clear this fight in a month of Sunday’s. Stop syncing content, make it aimed at the current item level tier

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No it's not dumb. Sorry it's not what you prefer but steam rolling the content with your raid gear isn't going to make the duty more fun. The content is aimed at a much broader community.

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Originally Posted by Wilford111

I like the fact that you can't outgear it. It keeps the trial challenging and it feels better when you win.

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Exactly.

There are a few classes that suffer from the ilvl sync, largely because of loss of skill/spellspeed melds which can be an issue for classes like Black Mage or Dark Knight. Off the top of my head, I wanna say Monk is the only crit reliant class left, but they also can suffer from lack of crit melds.

But aside from those, I don't think that there's really any issue with the low ilvl sync. it's deliberately designed not to be outgeared, and even the above classes can still function without their melds, even if less optimally.

I'm just gonna refer to my comment on this in a different thread.

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Originally Posted by Curisu

The DPS check is also fine and when I did it with my static we have seen the enrage just once with 1%, but we also nearly wiped twice and had to use a healer LB3 that try.

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This is the key point, with your static. I would expect an organized group to have very little issue with an extreme trial, I can't say the same about pugs. This is normally where gear makes up for the lack of coordination or players that are just playing below average, with the ilvl sync you do not have that kind of leeway.


This is why I really don't get the justification for the terrible ilvl sync. The current extreme fight is more "new player friendly" than the unreal fight is, simply because there is more room for a new player to make mistakes and still beat the fight.


Additionally the ilvl sync doesn't just make your stats a bit worse, it drags your crit value down to atrocious levels but even more importantly it disables materia. Unless you're gonna go through the hassle of getting a fully melded ilvl 430 set, which is a major pain with our limited inventory space, you will have significantly worse stats than you would normally have and absolutely zero Direct Hit on both tanks and healers which isn't an insignificant amount of extra dps that just disappears and it messes heavily with your Skillspeed tiers which needs to be at a certain GCD speed for some jobs to even play properly.


Is it unbeatable? Of course not but if their aim was to make this fight accessible to players who just reached 80 and get them into harder content then it absolutely fails at this objective because it certainly isn't forgiving enough for that.

Just cleared it again for the new week, and I think this is definitely going to be one of those things that gets easier in time as everyone, old and new, gets used to the fight. Was much easier to clear this week than last, with the first group I joined getting it down to 1% on first pull, and clearing on second pull. First week was all the oldies wiping the rust off and newbies learning the fight fresh. Second week everyone who plans on doing this content each week will have the fight mostly down pat, and seeing as it won't be changing any time soon, each week will be more business as usual clearing as more people sear the fight's mechanics into their brain, I think.

Leave payout is still atrocious though...

Yeah, I'm looking into making a i430 set (and a i300 set for Eureka) as well, since it seems like this is a style of content that will continue for a while and probably continue to maintain that same cap, at least until 6.0 lands at which point who knows what will happen.

As a PSA, remember that the freebie "AF" gear you can get from the Gerolt-clone in Tempest is i430, so that's your left side pretty much covered, and you can reclaim it anytime you want for free, even if you've already claimed them before.

EDIT: Actually wait, this fight is i435 cap not i430, isn't it? Balls.

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That would be because the ilevel sync only let's you be 5 ilevels above the minimum, whereas with Shiva in 2.4, you could potentially start 15 ilevels above her, as her minimum ilevel back then was i95 and the ilevel cap at the time was i110 (i115 with Second Coil weapon).

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Not to mention that 15 item levels meant much more back then than they do now due to the smaller range; they would be a much greater proportional increase in your output and survivability.

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Originally Posted by Fynlar

Yeah, I'm looking into making a i430 set (and a i300 set for Eureka) as well, since it seems like this is a style of content that will continue for a while and probably continue to maintain that same cap, at least until 6.0 lands at which point who knows what will happen.

As a PSA, remember that the freebie "AF" gear you can get from the Gerolt-clone in Tempest is i430, so that's your left side pretty much covered, and you can reclaim it anytime you want for free, even if you've already claimed them before.

EDIT: Actually wait, this fight is i435 cap not i430, isn't it? Balls.

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For what it's worth, I just did my clear in full i430 gear with one i500 ring (since there is no second i430 ring...) and I felt pretty good. I was (I believe) top dps when I wasn't dead (only 1 death though!) and I wasn't really doing super top tier rotations or anything, and the group was good. Really hard to say if it's worth it or not. From what I've been told, the 5ilevel advantage should be basically equal to the materia advantage of the i430 gear, but who knows. You do lose a minuscule amount of HP due to less Vit though, but it looked like it was only a few hundred total.

Upon casually looking around for actual i435 gear and not finding any of it, I've come to the conclusion that they probably placed the item level range of this fight (i430-435) specifically where it is to act as a sort of equalizer.

Yes, you can potentially join this fight as a fresh 80 with all i430 stuff; it may not be as high level as the more experienced players who will have stuff all over i435, but this means you will get materia boosts to help bring you to the level of the i435s.

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Originally Posted by Fynlar

Upon casually looking around for actual i435 gear and not finding any of it, I've come to the conclusion that they probably placed the item level range of this fight (i430-435) specifically where it is to act as a sort of equalizer.

Yes, you can potentially join this fight as a fresh 80 with all i430 stuff; it may not be as high level as the more experienced players who will have stuff all over i435, but this means you will get materia boosts to help bring you to the level of the i435s.

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Pretty sure they only ilevel sync it so it doesn't become a rofl stomp like doing Immaculate EX in full i500

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

This is the key point, with your static. I would expect an organized group to have very little issue with an extreme trial, I can't say the same about pugs. This is normally where gear makes up for the lack of coordination or players that are just playing below average, with the ilvl sync you do not have that kind of leeway.

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The fight literally has 1 tiny bit of organisation needed. People need to decide 2 people to each clock position. That's it.

If organisation like that is too much for the PUGs you have to handle, the problem isn't with the content lol.

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Pretty sure they only ilevel sync it so it doesn't become a rofl stomp like doing Immaculate EX in full i500

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Well the fight is literally just Shiva EX but rebalanced for the level range that it is. They could easily have adjusted Shiva's HP/damage even higher and made it a i480-485 (or whatever) fight instead and it would have made no difference, other than excluding fresh level 80 players.