Why do endgame dungeons not give you a piece of gear like leveling dungeons?

Prolly has been talked about before, I'm just here salty because The Lunar Subterrane recently has LITERALLY ONLY BEEN DROPPING CASTING GEAR and I've ran the dungeon at least 20 times now... so I was wondering if they ever gave an official reason for this

Probably so you’ll run it over and over to try for the gear while new people are still trying to get it done for the first time. :)

Wish I could trade you loot drop RNG though… the casting coat from that dungeon took me forever to get! Fending and healing dropped the most for me. lol

It used to be no dungeons would give you gear.
Now you can at least catch up until you can get actual endgame gear from raids or buy some with tomestones.

Mainly because it's not the endgame gear that they want you to get. The gear they want you to get is the weekly-cap tomestone and savage raid gear. The dungeon loot is just bottom-of-the-barrel scraps left for people who don't engage with the tomestone and raid gear, to help them increase their item level a little.

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Originally Posted by Canadane

It used to be no dungeons would give you gear.
Now you can at least catch up until you can get actual endgame gear from raids or buy some with tomestones.

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I would still say it's kind of erratic to have made levelling dungeons better for drops than endgame dungeons. To the new player this would just be confusing. Hopefully they make it consistent, so all dungeons work the same. We all know they all sure FEEL the same......

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Originally Posted by Khryseis_Astra

Probably so you’ll run it over and over to try for the gear while new people are still trying to get it done for the first time. :)

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Mainly because it's not the endgame gear that they want you to get. The gear they want you to get is the weekly-cap tomestone and savage raid gear.

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That makes sense for current endgame, but not for all the older dungeons that are no longer at level cap. If you get guaranteed gear from the level 47 dungeon and the level 51 dungeon, why not from level 50?

Trying to get specific pieces of capstone dungeons for glam or for bis is so insanely annoying. They really should do the leveling dungeon style drop for capstone dungeons.

Honestly, I'm more annoyed that the endgame dungeons don't have weapons. All the gear is already outdated on release, might as well let people get weapons that can at least hold them over on alt jobs like everything else.

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Originally Posted by EusisLandale

Honestly, I'm more annoyed that the endgame dungeons don't have weapons. All the gear is already outdated on release, might as well let people get weapons that can at least hold them over on alt jobs like everything else.

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They serve a purpose in being better gear for specific Ultimate fights too, it's not always just glam. It's just weird to me how leveling dungeons are better in their quality of life than endgame ones

I wonder how many responding ever met someone who had to deal with late catch-ups.

A friend of mine who started XIV during late Shadowbringer patch era had a miserable time having to redo Lv80 MSQ dungeons for pieces of gear that would or wouldn't drop to raise their item level in order to continue the MSQ with each additional mandatory dungeon.
To avoid that you have to know you shouldn't spend gil in anything prior to finishing the base story so you can buy crafted gear. A lot of people don't know that. You need to be capped before the game starts rewarding you with the non-poetic tomestones, so you can't even prepare that in advance.
Just another outdated aspect of the gearing system in the game.

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Originally Posted by ReynTime

I wonder how many responding ever met someone who had to deal with late catch-ups.

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I've had to do it myself, especially on an alt with hardly any gil or that just beat the MSQ.

If you scrape and claw you can get there pretty fast. Get your 560 job artifact gear, do your weekly hunt bill and daily level 3 hunt bill for Shadowbringers and Endwalker to get 350 Sacks of Nuts and buy 590 gear with it, do daily roulettes for gil and tomestones, sell any valuable loot on the market board or to a vendor such as materia and sell any useless loot for GC seals or gil as well. Buy the most valuable thing you can with poetics and vendor it for some gil. Sell your GC seals for the items that vendor for 360 gil.

After that, you can buy some left-side uncapped tomestone gear and world visit to find the cheapest priced crafted gear even if you only have enough for 1 piece of gear. Start clearing the normal raids and get the right-side drops and exchange for them. Do the same for each tier and gradually boost your right side item level significantly.

Continue with the MSQ and unlock all the dungeons, equipping any left-side loot that drops and is an upgrade. Finally, unlock Expert roulette and do that. Then purchase your weekly-cap tomestone gear piece.

And by now, your item level is pretty decent. It can be improved further by doing the alliance raids and getting all the drops from there.

Not all of that is necessary and just doing some of it will work, but the point is you don't necessarily have to buy crafted gear to get high enough to progress MSQ, it is just the quickest and easiest way to explain to a new or returning player if they have the gil.

Farming leveling dungeons would not really be useful at any point in my opinion, since the MSQ always drops the gear you need for the next leveling dungeon as a coffer and at max level you have the job artifact gear. So the player was misguided in doing this.

I'd appreciate some sort of gear token system, maybe letting us purchase tokens for the relevant expansion with uncapped tomes, and previous expansion tokens for poetics. Exchange tokens for dungeon gear from their associated expansion. Works the same way 8-man raid gear exchange works, just not weekly capped. And if they don't want people stockpiling tokens to exchange for gear from on-patch dungeons, they could just lock them off for two weeks after release or something, then open them up for purchase after that.

Anyone who wants the gear on patch can still grind it out, and anybody playing catch-up later could use spare tomes to slot in gear upgrades into slots where they need them as they go through the story.

Edit: Of course, there's still the issue of uncapped tomestone grinding being slower than continental drift, so maybe also include tokens in the 'adventurer in need' reward thingy in roulettes.

Edit Edit: While we're at it, maybe they can finally get around to making dungeon roulettes for individual expansions, and include [X expansion] tokens in their respective roulette as incentive.

Just for like glamour collection sake, we need this absolutely. I ran Skalla 223 times for that damned coat. A leveling dungeon is what 11 runs tops? That would be a good change to me.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

That makes sense for current endgame, but not for all the older dungeons that are no longer at level cap. If you get guaranteed gear from the level 47 dungeon and the level 51 dungeon, why not from level 50?

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They add tomestone gear caches (weapon then full accessories then full left side) to some of the post-MSQ quests so the player should also be able to meet the ilvl requirement for the next MSQ duty.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

They add tomestone gear caches (weapon then full accessories then full left side) to some of the post-MSQ quests so the player should also be able to meet the ilvl requirement for the next MSQ duty.

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That gets you sorted for ilevel, but not for acquiring the specific pieces. And in any case, they also give you gear coffers throughout the main levelling MSQ, but that isn't a reason to not give the free piece in the levelling dungeons.

Let me reword, then.

If I want glamour from the level 51 or 67 or 73 dungeon, I can get it, guaranteed, within ten runs.

If I want glamour from the level 50 or 60 or 70 dungeons, I might have to run it thirty times.

Additionally, even before you get to the guaranteed drop thing, the endgame and ex-endgame dungeons are less generous with whether there is gear in treasure chests at all. It seems to be super formulaic: there are four chests along the path plus three dropped from bosses; the path chests only have a chance to drop their gear. One path chest contains boots-or-nothing (ex belt), one is gloves-or-hat, one is top-or-pants and the fourth contains weapons in the few dungeons that have them but only jewellery in the rest. The boss loot chests have the same layout as the first three path chests.

Because it is only a chance for the path chests to drop loot, plus the first boss being 50/50 between boots and nothing, it is quite possible to walk out of an endgame dungeon with only two pieces of gear having dropped throughout the entire run.

For trying to acquire specific pieces, it is incredibly frustrating.

Currently trying to get the Valkyrie Fending set
And it is suffering

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

• Get your 560 job artifact gear
• do your weekly hunt bill and daily level 3 hunt bill for Shadowbringers and Endwalker to get 350 Sacks of Nuts and buy 590 gear with it
• do daily roulettes for gil and tomestones
• [convert loot to gil]
  
• buy some left-side uncapped tomestone gear
• world visit to find the cheapest priced crafted gear even if you only have enough for 1 piece of gear.
• Start clearing the normal raids and get the right-side drops and exchange for them.
  
• Continue with the MSQ
• purchase your weekly-cap tomestone gear piece.

And by now, your item level is pretty decent. It can be improved further by doing the alliance raids and getting all the drops from there.

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The simpler beginning IMO is to purchase a crafted weapon if you can afford it, then the bare minimum of other gear from hunts or tomes to get you into the first tier of raids. (Additionally, if you've been doing hunts as you go then you may already have a stock of nuts for purchasing gear now.)

Doing the raids doesn't just get you right-side gear; you get left-side gear as well, and if other players aren't interested in the tokens then you may end up very well kitted out without needing to buy anything at all. You'll also be earning tomes by doing this, which feeds back into starting to work your way up to higher gear.

If your focus is "doing all content in release sequence to gear up incrementally", you'd want to get the alliance raids unlocked sooner rather than later, too.

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Originally Posted by Canadane

It used to be no dungeons would give you gear.
Now you can at least catch up until you can get actual endgame gear from raids or buy some with tomestones.

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do you mean 1.0 because i have vivid memories of playing ARR when it was new and getting a bajillion "pink" items from haukke manor.

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Originally Posted by Denji

do you mean 1.0 because i have vivid memories of playing ARR when it was new and getting a bajillion "pink" items from haukke manor.

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ARR dungeons used to not give guaranteed loot even though Heavensward-onwards did. They switched it at some point (5.3?), which shows they can definitely add it to dungeons that didn't previously have it.

No more tokens please. Just have endgame dungeons auto drop a piece of loot when they are no longer relevant, when they drop out of expert roulette