Tighten the ilvl sync for early trials/alliance raids/raids

As it is, early raids throughout the game such as labyrinth of the ancients or alexander gordias, etc. are so trivialized by the non-existent item level sync that the content essentially just becomes whacking on a prettied up striking dummy for 10 minutes until you can get your roulette bonus for the day. When's the last time anyone has ever seen the mechanics in crystal tower? Apart from one or two instant kill mechanics, I'd bet that the answer would be "not in 5 years or so". The extra stats from being upwards of 80-100 item levels above the original item level the content was designed for just ruin it all. extra health making attacks barely a threat, extra DPS skipping mechanics entirely, etc. It all just builds up to a feeling of "why even play this?"

It could easily be fixed. Just tighten the ilvl sync from a level cap's max ilvl, down to somewhere like 20-40 ilvls above the original minimum. Enough that it'd be faster/easier at launch, but not enough to turn the content into a complete snooze. I know a lot of people want to just get their daily circus tower run for EXP or relics and get out, but is that really a healthy state for the game? Content that you have to run over and over should at least have some level of thought or intrigue needed. I know that all blurs together when you repeat it for the 10th time, but still; It's a problem for new players seeing the content for the first time, as well. Having Labyrinth of the Ancients be a player's first view of 24-man content doesn't make for a good impression...

I don't know... this problem is so prevalent throughout the game, with content becoming trivial not too long after it comes out. It's a normal raid, sure, but later normal-level content can get fun enough even for just being normal when mechanics are actually somewhat threatening. For the new player experience, it really just makes the game a matter of "get to current content faster so I can actually have a nice time" rather than being able to enjoy the content that's already there. Yeah, there's extremes and savages, but being able to enjoy the content fed to you through the story and roulettes would be nice, too.

I certainly would enjoy if the ilvl sync was tighter. It's a bit sad when a fight that was exciting at lsunch becomes faceroll.

Wait a little bit to see if they'll put out more detailed information about the upcoming stat squish. So far they have explicitly said that doing content at the intended level will still feel the same as it does now, but the new power curve will have the side effect of making unsyncked content harder because the relative power levels between cap levels will be smaller. Whether "level" means "character level" or "item level", one of the possible consequences we can extrapolate from this is that severely overgearing content should also be harder than it is now, since much of the power difference between character levels is attributable to the difference in available gear, and the power difference between item levels is most sharply seen within the iLv spread of a single cap level. So you might get what you're asking for as a side effect of the stat squish.

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Originally Posted by Stepjam

I certainly would enjoy if the ilvl sync was tighter. It's a bit sad when a fight that was exciting at lsunch becomes faceroll.

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I feel a bit sad in general as I was never around for those exciting launches and ShBs alliance raids have been pretty faceroll on launch.
I keep hearing about how this alliance raid or that alliance raid was pretty tough on release.
Ozma
Thunder man
Even the skeletons in labyrinth of the ancients would wipe parties.
So I was hype to do the Nier raids on day 1 when everyone would be maximally confused and things would be chaotic and crazy, but things went pretty all right. I've never wiped on either of the Neir raids. I wanna have a crazy 24-man time :(

Cape Westwind direly needs a tighter sync. It's at the point that bewildered newbies are left asking "that was it?" when he dies after a twenty-second fight that might as well be against a striking dummy.

I got to try it at minimum ilevel the other day and it was actually a challenge. Not enough to be a roadblock, but enough to feel like we came through a battle.

Just make Cape Westwind cap at 49

yes pls. do it.... sync the ilvl down to a lower lvl as now. i'm totally in for it. i heard a lot of new player saying how its WAY too easy and boring. its totally not helpful to keep new players if they dont have to do anything in the raids. The game is already very slow in the beginning... no need to make all these epic battles totally unepic through such a feeble lvl sync

i stopped doing alliance raid roulette because of the crystal tower raids.... i cant see them anymore... it would help at least a bit if we actually have to do something in there
and all the lvl 50 dungeons too... most mechanics dont even matter anymore. i dont understand it... new players dont understand it either. they ask: 'why even implement a mechanic if its this easy?'.

I would certainly welcome this. Hell, just last night I was going through ARR dungeons to help a friend and mocking at how ridiculously fast bosses die. Raids like Weeping City, Rabanastre and etc are a shell of their former selves, though nothing beats how comically overpowered we are for Crystal Tower. I can't help but think if I were a new player, so much of this content just... wouldn't be fun or engaging because it's so absurdly easy.

What I think they ought to do is scale each fight to the highest ilvl obtainable at the time of its relevance. So in the case of Weeping City, i240 was BiS. So that's what we're synced to. Crystal Tower would need to be synced further since I believe it's scaling was always been pretty ridiculous, but the general idea follows. They also need to address how imbalanced certain jobs are at low levels. It's another factor in why old content is a complete joke. Jobs like Ninja, Gunbreaker, Dancer and Red Mage are comically overpowered at various levels. I don't know why they seemingly abandoned trait upgrades this expansion, however it needs to be brought back so Ninja doesn't have an 800 potency attack at level 35 and a 30% buff to said attack by level 50.

Gotta disagree. I'm fine with how it is. Yep, Crystal Tower is a faceroll. It's also required for MSQ now and has a LOT more new folks going through it. They have issues with the mechanics even when they're explained. They're going to. They're new. They don't have the practice at them that veterans have. And when half the WoD raid is new, I usually see wipes. And if we wipe a couple of times on the eye due to new folks, then people start dropping. I do Alliance roulette pretty much every day because I find it enjoyable and it's good tomes, even on the runs that go pear-shaped, and it's a consistent pattern.

Right now newness can be mitigated by how powerful everyone else is. That will be more difficult with a tighter ilvl sync. And that will lead to greater frustration, so either more people will drop since we'll probably wipe more or just choose not to do the roulette at all, meaning new folks have less of a pool to help them get through a now-required raid. I also don't think they would have made it required if they intended to make it harder. It's only something they could add to the MSQ because it's so easy now. Same reason they modified the Ivalice raids, since they made them a requirement for resistance weapons, a non-Savage item and thus something a wider base would pursue.

And really, this goes along with the idea of Final Fantasy games. What happens when you have a boss you can't get past (minus XIII which artificially limits you)? You level up so you can overpower it and curbstomp it to continue.

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

Yep, Crystal Tower is a faceroll. It's also required for MSQ now and has a LOT more new folks going through it. They have issues with the mechanics even when they're explained. They're going to. They're new. They don't have the practice at them that veterans have.

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They're not going to get practice with "mechanics matter" if things are so faceroll that six people can carry the other eighteen. They're also not going to learn mechanics without feedback. It's never new people's fault for being new, and if after the first wipe nobody ever takes the five seconds to type "face away from Mortal Gaze" or "stand in light circle to cleanse doom", repeated wipes are on the vets.

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Originally Posted by ItMe

I feel a bit sad in general as I was never around for those exciting launches and ShBs alliance raids have been pretty faceroll on launch.
I keep hearing about how this alliance raid or that alliance raid was pretty tough on release.
Ozma
Thunder man
Even the skeletons in labyrinth of the ancients would wipe parties.
So I was hype to do the Nier raids on day 1 when everyone would be maximally confused and things would be chaotic and crazy, but things went pretty all right. I've never wiped on either of the Neir raids. I wanna have a crazy 24-man time :(

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Oh Ozma... i remmeber fondly, i was late for void ark, but well prepared for weeping city... IF we even beat forgal within 2-4 tries, Ozma was always a feast... someone misplaced a meteor? wipe. Too many adds at one group/too low dps? wipe. Healers not knowing how to heal the bleeding debuff? wipe. I recall many runs were the time was about to run out when finally reaching the final boss. Oh her cleaves... the bleeding debuff that just ate like 80% your hp per tick... and tanks that loved to tank her cleave into the party lol. And Dun scaith... such beautiful nightmare - even the succubus that was there before they gave us proto ultima was hell... and i cant count how many times i'Ve entered at the queen as replacement...

Compared that that all lv 70/80 raids were so easy... Heck i think we cleard all of em on first try with not even fullwipes. I think besides Cid I'Ve had less fullwipes in a year 4.0/5.0 then in a month 3.0 xD

LotA used to be one of my favorite places. Ran into some of the same people a lot of times because I was always in there, partly for fun, partly for farming up tanking counts for mounts. Now? I just can't stand the place. I hate how nerfed / easy / steamrolled that place is, as well as others, like AV Coincounter now having aoe markers. Skellies not being killed? Used to maybe 3 would start to kill half or wipe the raid. Now? Lucky if any of them die, they all run to dragon, and, like nothing happens to anyone now. I would love a real tighten up of some of these ilvls in places.

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Originally Posted by Kuroka

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I crave this chaos QQ

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

Gotta disagree. I'm fine with how it is. Yep, Crystal Tower is a faceroll. It's also required for MSQ now and has a LOT more new folks going through it. They have issues with the mechanics even when they're explained. They're going to. They're new. They don't have the practice at them that veterans have.

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how do you think veterans got their experience like... you can't get better without going through a little struggle here and there.

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

Right now newness can be mitigated by how powerful everyone else is. That will be more difficult with a tighter ilvl sync. And that will lead to greater frustration, so either more people will drop since we'll probably wipe more or just choose not to do the roulette at all, meaning new folks have less of a pool to help them get through a now-required raid.

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You say that, but that isnt the whole picture. There are also players who currently wont touch the alliance roulette because the extra weak sync on syrcus and labrynth make the runs not fun for them, this being made worse by the players who cheat ilvl to force those runs only. Some of them would come back to the roulette if you fixed those issues. Lab was balanced based on a group with an ilvl around 60 or so, and it syncs at 135. There is clearly room to tighten that sync while still not requiring actual good play to clear.

The Item Level is also compounded by the automatic Echo buff granted just for existing in older content as well. I'm fine with tighter item level restrictions on Alliance Raids and Trials but by the Light, please not on Normal Raids. I still have horrifying memories of Coils and Alexander in their respective 2.0 and 3.0 releases. Don't torment me having to try and get some paltry exp boost on a job and suffer through those with people with 0 knowledge or care of the mechanics and barely giving minimal effort to their role. Have mercy.

Also, the Echo should probably not be an automatic thing granted because you spawned into the duty.

I think it may be for the best, at least for alliance raids. The older raids are no longer relevant and many of them required to get into content be it msq or bozja, I think it's fine if they're easy compared to when they were relevant.

I'd be down for tighter ilvl if for no other reason than CT would actually have mechanics that have to be done, and maybe, just maybe, finally people would stop feeling the need to cheese their ilvl to get it. Especially since I understand that it's actually harder than some of the later alliance raids mechanically.

I always get antsy when I see these sorts of threads because one of the major issues this game has is that there is an obscene amount of instanced content that gets outdated more and more as the years pass.

In theory tightening the ilvl could seem like a good idea but the truth is, the average player won’t know wtf they’re doing and the complaints will skyrocket because instead of “it’s a face roll!” It will become “I shouldn’t be spending (excess) amount of time doing my dailies, fix this SE!!!”

Granted, a lot of it is completely optional (All the normal raids, any non-Crystal Tower alliance raids) so there’s a lot people wouldn’t get, but my goodness, recalling the absolute nightmare that was Wiping city of Mhach (yes, Wiping) and Dun Scaith when they were relevant content...or even Rabanastre with Rofocale, or A12 and the time gate mechanic. It’s just not a good idea.

Hopefully nobody here is asking for old raids to be so tightly tuned that they once again resemble the mess when they were new, people were still gearing up, and learning the fights type of hard. To just tighten them down, to maybe just a tad tighter than their normal dungeon syncs.

Using this purely as an example. First, because the raids don't have an ilvl sync, to put one in. And then fine tune it. Let's take The Wanderer's Palace. Currently ilvl sync 110. Let's say that is a raid, and the raid is still too much of a faceroll. To try ilvl 105, to tighten it up some. Average ilvl to get in 45, so we not asking for it to be brought down to 60. Again, as an example, I know WP is not a raid. To where there is SOME danger outside of bosses that do some form of instakill mechanic.

Currently LotA is like this:

1. 2 trash pull rooms, who cares what direction anything is facing or even if they standing in the bad stuff. Smash aoe buttons and go.
2. Bone dragon, just everyone stand in middle and nuke dragon. Ignore skellies and eyes.
3. Go into whatever lane you want, stand on the pad or not. Nuke down Atomos in a hurry, then because you are still locked in and bored go ahead and go back and stand on pad for a few seconds for the other group.
4. Kill Thanatos before the second group even needs to tank. Ignore adds once again!
5. Kill Vagasso wherever you want, ignore adds (sensing a theme), everything will die fast enough, then the big bomb will.
6. Behemoth, nobody bother clicking towers or getting adds, just nuke him down and don't worry about picking up the big add either. He doesn't really hurt anymore. Doesn't matter if somehow miraculously 70%+ of the raid gets killed during that first meteor.
7. Finally a mechanic that must be done, because you can't kill Archeron, oh, I mean Phlegethon, before everyone needs to be back on pads.

And that just bores the hell out of me, as tank, dps, or healer. I remember making full raids of classes, yes, classes (sure, before all the cross class skills were killed) instead of jobs, and it was still a faceroll. Yes, these places over time should be easier than when they first came out. But not THIS easy.

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Originally Posted by ramsesh

I always get antsy when I see these sorts of threads because one of the major issues this game has is that there is an obscene amount of instanced content that gets outdated more and more as the years pass.

In theory tightening the ilvl could seem like a good idea but the truth is, the average player won’t know wtf they’re doing and the complaints will skyrocket because instead of “it’s a face roll!” It will become “I shouldn’t be spending (excess) amount of time doing my dailies, fix this SE!!!”

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This. Makes. Me. Want. It. Even. More. SO. MUCH. MORE. The "average" player wont know what to do? Then the "average" player needs to improve. Full stop. None of these fights have intricate or difficult mechanics. I was originally thinking a sync at around 85-90 for lab. Its a little higher then the loot that drops there so you can get a bit of a boost from higher then intended gear, but not outrageously so. But especially after reading "amount of time doing my dailies" now i am thinking that like 60 would be for the best. I would greatly like to "motivate" the people who think that way to change. They are the ones cheating the system to force lab and syrcus runs, so we need to fix this sync so they no longer benefit from said cheating. The runs should take longer, and if im being honest about what i would want then i think they probly should reward less exp for higher level players too. Once you hit 60, you should want void ark/wiping city/dun scaith. If your character has hit 70 you should be excited for alliance to send you to ivalice, not purposefully unequipping your gear to make sure it doesnt happen. The higher level runs have better glamour, they offer you the chance to practice and get better at using more of your classes kit. Why not also give more exp to incentivize them even more?

And in case im not being clear, im not saying any of these things about you specifically ramsesh. I dont know you or how you are. But your post about how certain people would complain reminds me what i think about certain people.

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

Gotta disagree. I'm fine with how it is. Yep, Crystal Tower is a faceroll. It's also required for MSQ now and has a LOT more new folks going through it. They have issues with the mechanics even when they're explained. They're going to. They're new. They don't have the practice at them that veterans have.

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What practice to you think those new players get when they see me on Warrior eat every single mechanic, collecting vuln stacks and still not coming close to dying? In the case of Crystal Tower specifically, what practice do they get when bosses die so fast literally nothing happens? You can't practice without actually experiencing the mechanic. And you have no incentive to actually learn it if said mechanic barely grazes you. This is why the constant nerfs we've seen is such a shortsighted "solution" by the dev team.

All of that aside, if I were a new player, my excitement would go down pretty quick seeing supposedly big raids be utterly steamrolled so easily. In fact, a massive letdown for me back when I started was Thordan. Seeing everyone ignore mechanics and how little they actually hurt me made the whole encounter far less epic. Meanwhile, Shinryu and Hades, despite being "easy", are far more memorable to me.

:D

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

All of that aside, if I were a new player, my excitement would go down pretty quick seeing supposedly big raids be utterly steamrolled so easily.

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I distinctly remember running the Crystal Tower raids for the first time and thinking "it's a good thing these are easy because I have no idea what I'm doing."
The Praetorium is basically just a big cinematic setpiece, and since Final Fantasy is known for those I never thought anything was strange or disappointing about Crystal Tower.
It's not a big deal that the older ones are a bit faceroll, especially since ARR isn't endgame anymore. There are a LOT of trials and raids in this game, and if people had to either study up on every one before going into them or be carried I think a lot more people would quit going through MSQ than we realize.

I wish we would have some challenge back. I hardly do roulettes because of this.

Even Sastasha should be tightened to force people to do the mechanic. We used to do it. It's a fun little mechanic for new players to do.

Honestly, we don't really need a huge iLvl nerf. We just need them to return alliance raid bosses to their old HP levels. I can't remember what patch it was, but they did a massive HP% nerf lowering every alliance raid's boss HP by like 33% or something. I still don't really remember why, but if they ever brought it back up, I can't tell.

I do wish that they'd at least stop nerfing the important mechanics. The Iron Giant in the Behemoth fight in LoTA not being able to scrap the comets you use as meteor shelters is pretty lame. Of course, what was happening when people first started to outgear it was, was that one tank would decide to be the tank for the Giant, and then everyone would ignore the Giant and zerg the Behemoth, leaving the tank to eventually die. Feels pretty bad to be that tank when the other 23 people are just stomping on the boss with no thought.

The Bone Dragon fight is also pretty annoying, since its main mechanic is ignored.

None of this was harder than later raids. It just required that people take a minute to communicate who's tanking what, and who needs to do what. People communicated back then, and the only reason the communication stopped is because it got so easy it was no longer required.

I'd also really like to see the full mechanic set on Glasyas Labiosa or whatever. I remember he had 3 adds that needed tanked, people actually had to stand in the little drones that pop up and feed his ultimate, and ya know, people had to leave the arena and go around on the hoppy pads. It was a fun fight.

Personally I'd love to see the HP values go back up, and I'd love it if they made the iLvl sync for the Crystal Towers series a mere 10 ilvls higher than the gear obtainable from the raid. That's more than reasonable, as everyone having that gear level let alliances that have good players actually skip with enough crits, while everybody else has little to no trouble getting by.

At the end of the day though, there is a ton of content to get through if you do try to do it all, as you go. I'm very much a proponent of everyone doing as much story and side story content as possible to fully see the world. Yet, if we do raise the stakes of all the old content, by the time they make it to the new content, they'll be wondering why so much was recycled. It serves SE in a way, to let us easily roflstomp old stuff, such that newer players don't experience repeat mechanics ad nauseum while they work their way through the game.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

Wait a little bit to see if they'll put out more detailed information about the upcoming stat squish. So far they have explicitly said that doing content at the intended level will still feel the same as it does now, but the new power curve will have the side effect of making unsyncked content harder because the relative power levels between cap levels will be smaller. Whether "level" means "character level" or "item level", one of the possible consequences we can extrapolate from this is that severely overgearing content should also be harder than it is now, since much of the power difference between character levels is attributable to the difference in available gear, and the power difference between item levels is most sharply seen within the iLv spread of a single cap level. So you might get what you're asking for as a side effect of the stat squish.

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This is largely down to how the gap between ilevles grows exponentially the higher you go the bigger the difference just 10 ilevels can make.

Materia is the same. When 1 tier of materia is crit+20 and the next tier is critical +60. Thats a stonking difference.

But item level is going kinda crazy. If you trust the theory behind some of the calculators on the balance and stuff. Going from say 520 to 530 can be a pretty substantial gain of 2500-3000 dps. It's kinda crazy. Especially if you multiplied that across a full party.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

Materia is the same. When 1 tier of materia is crit+20 and the next tier is critical +60. Thats a stonking difference.

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It's actually +40 and then +60. The +20 materias don't count, as they are specifically intended to be used for overmelding when the gear is maxed out on +40s.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

They're not going to get practice with "mechanics matter" if things are so faceroll that six people can carry the other eighteen. They're also not going to learn mechanics without feedback. It's never new people's fault for being new, and if after the first wipe nobody ever takes the five seconds to type "face away from Mortal Gaze" or "stand in light circle to cleanse doom", repeated wipes are on the vets.

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Hardly get the chance to. I had a WoD raid the other day with pretty much half new and while I and another person are trying a third time to go over things after wiping twice on the eye, Mr Ants in His Pants Dancer who had been early pulling everything just rushes in again. This isn't just old content either. I just ran the new Nier raid and it was speedrun city. The speedrun and rush mentality is why there is no communication in this game anymore. Even with things that *should* be communicated, no one is given the chance to.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

What practice to you think those new players get when they see me on Warrior eat every single mechanic, collecting vuln stacks and still not coming close to dying? In the case of Crystal Tower specifically, what practice do they get when bosses die so fast literally nothing happens? You can't practice without actually experiencing the mechanic. And you have no incentive to actually learn it if said mechanic barely grazes you. This is why the constant nerfs we've seen is such a shortsighted "solution" by the dev team.

All of that aside, if I were a new player, my excitement would go down pretty quick seeing supposedly big raids be utterly steamrolled so easily. In fact, a massive letdown for me back when I started was Thordan. Seeing everyone ignore mechanics and how little they actually hurt me made the whole encounter far less epic. Meanwhile, Shinryu and Hades, despite being "easy", are far more memorable to me.

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Their excitement goes down too when everyone bails after one wipe. I've been the person who stayed with new people many times to help rebuild and get them through things. It's demoralizing when all the veterans just leave because they can't be arsed to explain anything or help the new folks in any way. They just want their smooth run.

Honestly, thinking over it again, the problem might just be with raid design in general. Things are too static, once you know the trick/"how" to dodging an attack or handling some mechanic, that's it. Making the numbers more threatening could help, but once you know the fight enough, that ends up being mitigated, as well. Still though, would be nice to actually have to pay attention like that.

I wonder how many players have never seen daybreak in syrcus tower.

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Originally Posted by catofsnake

Honestly, thinking over it again, the problem might just be with raid design in general. Things are too static, once you know the trick/"how" to dodging an attack or handling some mechanic, that's it. Making the numbers more threatening could help, but once you know the fight enough, that ends up being mitigated, as well. Still though, would be nice to actually have to pay attention like that.

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That's like... a problem with games in general to be fair.
I can only play Mario so many times before I've memorized where everything is.
I can only play Golden Eye so many times before I'm speed running the game while keeping my camera fixed on the floor.
I can only play Dark Souls so many times before I know all the traps and none of the bosses have any surprises and can't kill me unless I mess up.

14 is def scripted to hell though I will give you that.