Gearing up is bad

I am watching Xenosys and I agree. I think gearing up takes way to long. 450 tome cap is weak and stupid. Should be able to get 900 tomes a week or just let it hit 2k anytime.

They just need to standardize the amount of books needed for gear at four books per piece.

It doesn't make sense to timegate players who've cleared savage so heavily when they don't necessarily even have something harder to use their shiny new gear on if there's no new ultimate releasing.

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Originally Posted by Velvet_Lunarfang

I am watching Xenosys and I agree. I think gearing up takes way to long. 450 tome cap is weak and stupid. Should be able to get 900 tomes a week or just let it hit 2k anytime.

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Gotta figure out a way to make players stay subscribed for the longest period of time. Can't have players getting their gear too quickly then unsubbing till the next content patch.

Here you go: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...eekly-Cap-Gear

Tomes should be removed. Can't believe in 2022 still using the same formula from 2007 mmos .

Introduce a new system for gear and progression already. 1 decade using the same method.

Why tho'? The progression naturally supports an uplift of simplifying content over months and it's not like you REALLY need it.
Here is something that is truly bad about the system, people that genuinely enjoy the game at a slow pace are being punished each week because the lack of storing mechanics.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Gearing is fine with a combination of raid/crafted and tome gear. the 450 cap works although 600 tomes might be a better cap per week in my view. its designed to be a weekly thing people do and i doubt they'll change it.

They at least reduced the tome weapon number from 1000 to 500 and that was long overdue.

Gearing isn't bad, people are just impatient.

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Originally Posted by WhiteWitch

I don't really watch streamers, i'd rather play the game ..but that's a whole other subject.

Anyways, i think people have been talking about this for years and the devs aren't ever gonna change this game's formula.

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Well you say that but just this savage tier we had the cost of the tome weapon reduced down to 500. Clearly they are capable of adjusting tome prices.

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Originally Posted by Saraide

Well you say that but just this savage tier we had the cost of the tome weapon reduced down to 500. Clearly they are capable of adjusting tome prices.

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The weapon was too high and they won't adjust anything else if it was easier for u get gear you then compline there nothing to do

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Originally Posted by Slayer25c

The weapon was too high and they won't adjust anything else if it was easier for u get gear you then compline there nothing to do

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This post is needlessly hostile. The reason people want cheaper tome stuff is so they can reasonably gear up more than one job. I hope I dont need to explain to you that there are more jobs now than there were in previous expansions.

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Originally Posted by Slayer25c

The weapon was too high and they won't adjust anything else if it was easier for u get gear you then compline there nothing to do

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Have you forgotten how many jobs a single players character can be?????


Nothing to do........

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Originally Posted by Izar_Chillen

Have you forgotten how many jobs a single players character can be?????


Nothing to do........

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Running all roulettes and a couple of dungeons once a week is also not terribly interesting content.

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Originally Posted by Saraide

Running all roulettes and a couple of dungeons once a week is also not terribly interesting content.

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Then dont do it ????

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Originally Posted by Izar_Chillen

Then dont do it ????

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No I mean if there was less of it if all tome costs were reduced, that would only take away from the least interesting part of a savage tier.

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Originally Posted by Saraide

This post is needlessly hostile. The reason people want cheaper tome stuff is so they can reasonably gear up more than one job. I hope I dont need to explain to you that there are more jobs now than there were in previous expansions.

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This, especially on NIN I don't even have another Job that I share gear with.......

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Originally Posted by Saraide

This post is needlessly hostile. The reason people want cheaper tome stuff is so they can reasonably gear up more than one job. I hope I dont need to explain to you that there are more jobs now than there were in previous expansions.

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There are more jobs to level, but there aren't any extra sets to farm for them.

More weapons of course, but they already reduced weapon cost.

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Originally Posted by Jandor

There are more jobs to level, but there aren't any extra sets to farm for them.

More weapons of course, but they already reduced weapon cost.

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What if you think that sage is a really cool job and you kinda want to try it out for savage but you've been a melee main. People dont always just stay on one role and with being able to have every job leveled on one character that seems to be encouraged even. Yet gearing sets back people who want to do exactly that. Melee is especially restrictive there with 3 different gear sets.

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Originally Posted by Zanarkand-Ronso

Gearing isn't bad, people are just impatient.

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Okay honestly you just have no idea what you are talking about ... i hate people who come in this forum just to say something dumb like that.

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Originally Posted by Vahlnir

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

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it's not broken but it could be way better.

I understand what people are saying. Though after watching Xenosys talk about it it's true. You should be able to get your gear in a month nothing more. It's gated and for people who talk saying it keeps people playing no it doesn't. Just raise the weekly cap or lower the cost of tome gear. There are a bunch of classes to level and gear up anyway. I suggest watching him him for the argument. It's 2022 not 2007 I think it's time to change the narrative of getting gear

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Originally Posted by Izar_Chillen

Have you forgotten how many jobs a single players character can be?????


Nothing to do........

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How many of those jobs do you actually play in content that needs the current best tomestone gear?

I've got 3 jobs that I rotate between in max level content (one tank, one healer, one DPS). The rest of my jobs I mostly ignore once leveled.

You don't need BIS for every job when you're not actively playing them all.

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Originally Posted by Velvet_Lunarfang

I understand what people are saying. Though after watching Xenosys talk about it it's true. You should be able to get your gear in a month nothing more. It's gated and for people who talk saying it keeps people playing no it doesn't. Just raise the weekly cap or lower the cost of tome gear. There are a bunch of classes to level and gear up anyway. I suggest watching him him for the argument. It's 2022 not 2007 I think it's time to change the narrative of getting gear

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Why is a month the arbitrary line when you won't need a full set until the next part of the raid series is released 6-7 months later (at which point many are going to opt for the newest crafted gear anyways because it will be 610 ilvl)?

As I said above, you don't need to have BiS gear for every job especially when you're already capable of clearing the existing content with lower ilvl gear.

You're right that there needs to be a change in narrative but that change needs to happen on the player side, not the development side. You do not need that gear overnight.

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Originally Posted by Saraide

Well you say that but just this savage tier we had the cost of the tome weapon reduced down to 500. Clearly they are capable of adjusting tome prices.

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they also removed belts, which saves another 375 tomes per job. so yea, fully gearing someone in tome gear allready is 875 tomes cheaper than it was before. that being said, sorry but people need to realize that the price of items actually is intentional timegating which one can disagree wit if so inclined, but "just letting you earn more tomestones" would completly defeat the purpose of their being a cap in the first place.

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Originally Posted by Slayer25c

The weapon was too high and they won't adjust anything else if it was easier for u get gear you then compline there nothing to do

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gotta be honest here, i do in fact appreciate the weapon being made cheaper, but i don't really see how the cost of the weapons was too high considering weapons offer more stats than legs/chest and were barely more expensive.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

How many of those jobs do you actually play in content that needs the current best tomestone gear?

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This is a really poor question. There are people who like to max out every single class in the game and play all of them at random. There are people that only play one.

Why do you care if someone plays all classes and wants to have them all geared up? The game is built to allow you to do this but puts shackles on you so you can't do it in a reasonable timeframe.

Me personally, I'm so tired of this tomestone system and the weekly caps that I just stopped even trying. It's too tedious for me to gear up both my Dragoon and Sage AND work on crafting/gathering. So now I'm not getting my characters geared up which means I won't do the higher content. It's not because I don't want to do it, it's because it sucks to do and I play games for fun.

I understand why people think 1000 tomes was too expensive.
The tome weapon had poor stats for almost every class, which is most likely intentional so people keep raiding longer and try to get the raid weapon because the upgrade material was quite easy to get. Tome weapon was a placeholder for almost every class until they get their real bis weapon.
So I appreciate lowering the costs, they're more in line with it being a placeholder item and people are generally happy to spend them. And it's nice for people that don't raid at all.

That said, I'm against increasing the weekly tome cap. Getting 580 gear for every class is easy enough and having better gear than that only matters when someone is actively progging later savage turns on those classes. Full 580 was fine for P3s. The cap is an important part to ensure that content doesn't get outgeared too fast. A savage tier lasts for roughly half a year and there's still the unlock period for people that want to go wild with alt classes.
The mindset that you should be able to seamlessly switch to a different class mid tier and be able to ensure that you instantly have roughly the same ilvl is a player problem of always wanting the best without restrictions.
Remember that huge content lull we had before Endwalker because things kept getting pushed back because of covid? Increasing the tome cap would essentially give us a repeat of that with every single tier.
Whether a tier is outgeared faster or the next is pushed back, the result is the same: content lull, bored players complaining everywhere and so on.

The only thing I could get behind is taking a look at the pity mechanic aka books.
For PF folks, 8 books for chest/ weapon with weapon being almost guaranteed to be bis is a lot. You have to reach the last boss first, which already takes some time. And then it's up to 2 months to get a single piece. Slightly lowering book costs is something I can see happening without a huge drawback but just doubling the tome cap not.

While I'm personally fine with the gearing system as is, I still think it's interesting to put some more thought into this.

Seems there are three separate goals with changes suggested to the gearing system, that all require separate changes and would need separate tradeoffs to be made:

• Reducing the number of weeks needed to gear in general,
• reducing the number of weeks needed to gear multiple jobs,
• and reducing the amount of pressure to keep "caught up".

Meanwhile, SE might have one or two of these two goals:

• Have the difficulty of the content decrease at a steady pace,
• and keep people subscribed over longer periods of time.

If SE fully wants to focus on the former, there are definitely improvements that could be made.

Gearing happens on two separate scales: Tomestones and books.

Tomestone gearing is and should be slow by design.

It provides a gradual drop of difficulty for those who can't clear savage, until they eventually can. Upgrade materials being a reward obtainable from the Alliance raids in odd-numbered patches supports this slow decrease. Even those who can not clear a single savage fight will eventually approach the current maximum iLevel of a patch (minues the maxiLevel+5 on the weapon slot). Tomestone gear is needed for nothing else, as the game's vertical progression ensures you want crafted gear, not book or tomestone gear by the time you go into Savage of the next even-numbered patch.

Should they not manage, then the echo will eventually push the remaining few capable of mechanics but lacking damage or healing into a clear.

This seems very much working as intended and speeding up the process therefore doesn't seem really neccessary. However, there could be plenty of quality-of-life added to it. First and foremost is the fact that your gear level does not neccessarily reflect everyone else's gear progression. You might have missed a week due to real life and been lagging behind on tomestones or upgrade materials as a result. If the overall goal is to slowly decrease the difficulty, then there is no reason why total tomestones shouldn't be cumulative, which would be a great change.

Didn't cap those 450 tomestones the first week? Whatever amount you had left over could just be added to your cap the next week and nothing would change for the game's overall balance. Players who play a lot still wouldn't be able to rush ahead of others and no one would have to worry about missing out if they miss a week. The same could be applied to weekly upgrade material drops from the Alliance raid in an odd-numbered patch, though in that case the reward for upgrade material drops would have to only be tradable for upgrade materials and be separate from other rewards purchasable with the coins.


Book gearing is an entirely different matter, as it is only accessible to those who have cleared at least one of the Savage fights.

It both fast-tracks you on your way towards a higher iLevel and actually allows you to put together your Best-in-Slot (since at bare minimum most classes at least want the book weapons). A group that regularily clears at least some of the fights will reach a much higher item level faster than by relying on tomestone gear alone, thereby giving them better odds at beating the fights that they can reach but not quite clear yet. This makes playing the game more interesting for them than if they were stonewalled by lack of damage on a fight for a month or more as might be the case if they only had access to tomestone gear. At the same time it rewards them for being able to clear at least some of the fights, compared to those who can only gear via tomestones.

So book gearing also serves its current purpose of decreasing savage difficulty as you clear savage fights over the weeks. But it's not very good at accomodating groups that have already cleared an entire savage tier. As they have already cleared, they technically don't care for what gear rewards they get, as they already have the skill to beat the fights without it.

But unlike tomestone gear, book gear (and upgrade materials) also serves a secondary purpose if preceeding an odd-numbered patch with an Ultimate fight released, as the Best-in-Slot from the Savage tier will inevitably also be needed to have a shot at that.

This is where the goal seems to be "keep people playing" than "slowly adjust the challenge of the content" the most out of all of these points:


Once someone has beaten all four savage fights, you could technically give that team their entire savage gear and nothing would be lost. What is also worth considering is that not all Best-in-Slot sets are created equal. While most uses decent mix, some classes heavily favour either upgraded tomestone gear or book gear over the other. This means that the amount of time required to gear a team will depend heavily on their static composition, especially since the Alliance raid will only be available for about a week before Ultimate releases.

If a theoretical Best-in-Slot required nothing but upgraded gear expect for the weapon, a static focused exclusively on gearing this person, that person would need 5010 tomestones, taking them 12 weeks at current tomestone cap. They'd further need 5 Coatings and 5 Twines, requiring 4 weeks of farming (though these will already be covered by the 12 weeks it takes them to farm tomestones). But if you then presume a theoretical (albeit highly unlikely) static where everyone needs nothing but tomestones and therefore an insane amount of upgrade materials is required, that's means it would take that group an additional 4 weeks on top of that until everyone had their upgrade materials.

There have been, on average, 15 weeks between the release of Savage and a corresponding Ultimate, meaning that such a group wouldn't be able to finish on time (though they most likely would use one week of Alliance raid coins to make up the difference if they carefully spread their upgrade materials out beforehand to still make it).

This isn't a problem in and of itself, but it the fact that such a huge difference in needed prep time is theoretically possible is kind of annoying. I doubt it has happened before, so as long as they are careful about it I doubt it needs fixing, but it still rubs me the wrong way to think about.

On the matter of having a catchup-mechanic for jobs you didn't gear with your raid rewards, I'd be very much in favour of this, but desining one that can not be abused to boost your item level on your original job sounds very system- or inventory-intesive, involving either multiple currencies, rewards or some other system to track which gear should be accessible.

tl;dr:

• Tomestone gearing is fine
• book gearing could use a speedup once you cleared a tier
• Catchup mechanics for other jobs would be nice

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Originally Posted by Akiudo

they also removed belts, which saves another 375 tomes per job. so yea, fully gearing someone in tome gear allready is 875 tomes cheaper than it was before. that being said, sorry but people need to realize that the price of items actually is intentional timegating which on can disagree wit hif so inclined, but "just letting you earn more tomestones" would completly defeat the purpose of their being a cap in the first place.

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Yes it is intentional time gating. Is anyone denying that? The point is to make the time gate less impactful, especially for people trying to gear multiple jobs, something explicitely encouraged by being able to level every job on the same character but discouraged by having a tight tome cap.

I mean an alt job Catchup mechanic could be something as simple as when you buy say a pair of tomestone boots you get a boot token said token can then be uses to buy a differnt pair of boots but only boots

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Originally Posted by Saraide

Yes it is intentional time gating. Is anyone denying that? The point is to make the time gate less impactful, especially for people trying to gear multiple jobs, something explicitely encouraged by being able to level every job on the same character but discouraged by having a tight tome cap.

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Iunno. I had every job basically in bis last tier and they hadn't even started the tome increase or unlocked savage yet when I finished.

I think gearing is fine. Plus, it's Xeno, he loves to complain when things inconvenience him.

I totally agree on the timing issue, and the RNG in savage is just ridiculous for PF community, it is all about luck , but speaking about that , another reason cause this issue appear is the game is too emphasize on BiS gear , there are not a lot flexibility that a player can do with the gear in this game , people just come in and ask “what is the best stat for whatever class” , this automatically make some type of gear become entirely trash, take healer as example ,since i main it , any gear with piety is crap , balance issue and making the game so easy now will make this issue bigger since people will always focus on some specific gear

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Originally Posted by zabu

I totally agree on the timing issue, and the RNG in savage is just ridiculous for PF community, it is all about luck , but speaking about that , another reason cause this issue appear is the game is too emphasize on BiS gear , there are not a lot flexibility that a player can do with the gear in this game , people just come in and ask “what is the best stat for whatever class” , this automatically make some type of gear become entirely trash, take healer as example ,since i main it , any gear with piety is crap , balance issue and making the game so easy now will make this issue bigger since people will always focus on some specific gear

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The difference in gear is a few % at most towards your dps.

Only when min-maxing does it really matter, and there will always be a best option for gear. Every game is like this...

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

The difference in gear is a few % at most towards your dps.

Only when min-maxing does it really matter, and there will always be a best option for gear. Every game is like this...

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Well, all I am saying BiS idea make this issue even worse cuz everyone is aiming for it.
Things might be slightly better if say tenacity and piety are better tuned or DPS has more other stat to play around with, however, we as player do not have any flexibility to play around with our stat in this game at all, there is only 1 set of gear that is the "correct" answer for each class and also for stat, for me is just a little bit werid on that part

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Originally Posted by zabu

Well, all I am saying BiS idea make this issue even worse cuz everyone is aiming for it.
Things might be slightly better if say tenacity and piety are better tuned or DPS has more other stat to play around with, however, we as player do not have any flexibility to play around with our stat in this game at all, there is only 1 set of gear that is the "correct" answer for each class and also for stat, for me is just a little bit werid on that part

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That's not true, many jobs have multiple sets. SAM has 3.

There is always going to be a best. That's what bis stands for. No matter how much you equalize things, there will still be a best.

The fact that it doesn't really matter in terms of damage means no one really needs bis. I think the difference in Sam's bis sets is less than 1% between the 3 of them.

Like, at some point these complaints are just silly.


Also. Xeno wants only 1 month to gear up? Then what, hell complain he has no content to do because he's done gearing, and ultimate isn't out so he has nothing to use his gear for.

I'm paying a month sub just to play 1 day a week for weekly savage with static. Literally nothing else to do. I wish i could gear up another job and just go help people clear savage or i wish they could add some more difficult content when the gear matter idk like savage dungeon but NOP i'm stuck with my ilvl 600 black mage for months without any content to do ! If there is no ultimate after savage there is literally no point to even gear up , and even when there is a ultimate its usually 4-5 months after the savage patch ... it's boring.

I don't think it takes too long. It's just boring since nothing really changes.

BiS is optional content doh

As someone else pointed out, when the next raid tier drops all the current BiS immediately becomes irrelevant. Not just because there's a new BiS hurrdurr, but also because the new crafted sets are immediately available, so the prior BiS isn't even really viable for prog in the next tier.

I agree, there is way too much grind, in order to get bis in at least 2 roles
1 month for gearing up 3 roles (2 tanks + 2 healers + drg/rpr) will be fine

I have to farm roulettes and do weekly savage lockout, for 8 weeks, just to have 2 weap + one set, eventually 3 weap and 2 set

Are the streamers now sending their minions out to further their agenda?

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Originally Posted by Shironeko_Narunyan

Are the streamers now sending their minions out to further their agenda?

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Or a bunch of people agree with that take specifically? Nah cant be, everyone except me is just a mindless drone parroting whatever streamer man says.