How would you *fix* gear progression.

Taking this away from the other topic of mine and that's gear progression, how would you approach fixing it?

I've done some savage tiers here and there and my general notion is that item level doesn't really matter unless it's a difference of like 20? (600-620) I could be incredibly wrong here, but as a semi-casual it just feels to me that even something like pentamelding is like 1-2% difference in overall. that's just a side note you can correct me on it if I'm incredibly wrong there.

Regardless gearing in 14 has gotten alot of critique for a long time in that it doesn't feel meaningful, then what could we do to make gearing feel meaningful.

I'm just going to borrow a system I know from a little game called Monster Hunter into 14 and make them fuse. :D

So here's my idea.

Let's not scrap the current gearing system, keep it as is, it's totally fine for people who want to squeeze just a little more out of their gears. But let's add a layer ontop of it.

First, let's seperate gearsets into 3 categories.

Overwrold Gear - Dungeon Gear - Raid Gear

This does NOT lock you from using Overworld gear in a dungeon or a raid, nor does it lock you from using raid gear in overworld.

But each category of gear will have a new "worldbonding" presentage that goes from 0 to 100% the more you do content with that gear in their corresponding content. It doesn't matter if it's FATE's, Hunts or farming mobs or World bosses, it all contributes to it.

Once it reaches 100% you can "extract" it. Yes very similarly to how spiritbonding works.

Now, each of these gear categories have a pool of skills they can get:

Overworld:
+5% running speed
Cast times halved
You can avoid a ground AoE with a jump every 1min30secs.
+100 critical hit in FATES or hunt targets
HASTE on O-GCD abilities in all overworld content.

Dungeon:
All party members have 5% shields at start.
+5% EXP for all party members
+20% extra gil on completion
Get 2 extra tomestones for completion OR get an egg.
30% faster Limit Gauge gain.

Raid:
1% increase on droprate for mount item.
1% potency increase on pots
1% potency increase on food
85% chance for extra 5 tomestones for completition
0.5% chance that getting hit does not give a Vulnerability Up or Damage Down
0.2% chance that dying does not give Weakness.

Just to name a few just randomly thought about, and using gear from the Raid category would not activate these skills in the Overworld.

There should be some determenistic way to approach these skills so that when they "worldbond" the gear it's not just an arbitruary % chance that you get the right one.

So in order to do this, you have to get the specific books from specific raids to increase the chance.
So let's say the Omega Savage raids books increase the chance of getting "1% potecy on food". then you would have to get a handful of those books, bring them to a melder with the extracted "worldbond" material. And it would have like a good 80% chance of giving you that skill instead. Or you can try your luck without the books.

And all this would work ontop of the current gear system.

the only thing that would change is that gear you get from dungeons are dungeon gear. Gear you get from raids are raid gear and gear you get from overworld stuff is overworld. You can still keep crafted gear as raid gear. But you could also add additional craftable dungeon and overworld gear.

And if overworld gear progression is bad from lvl1 to lvl100. The overworld "worldbonding" could be possible at lvl20 and above.
In order to target some lower level skills like let's say. "1% runspeed" you would have to give a merchant some grand company seals.
Or buy some grand company item with the seals that would target a specific skill to activate on your lvl20 overworld gear.

Probably something similar for dungeon gear, but you'd need a specific items from dungeons.

You can't really have interesting or unique effects on transient items that are designed to be thrown in the trash after a few months. This is just the nature of modern hamster wheel MMOs. Ideas like this don't work with the current formula and I don't see that changing any time soon.

Do you think anyone is going to waste their time building new sets of overworld, dungeon, and raid gear for minor bonuses every few months? Or do you think they're just going to build their BiS set and ignore the rest? They would need to completely rethink the game for something like this to work.

I'd rather they just completely removed stats on gear and made it cosmetic. Having to replace our gear to get back to the same power level that we were already at previously every few months is tiresome and serves no purpose.

But what is the point then if things are entirely cosmetic?
Fashion only carries the game so far. In DT alone there's only a handful of cosmetic items that looked interesting enough for me to get.

I am more into removing the ilevel entirely and make it level based only and skill based, if anything.

It for starters for any level content grants the full pool of players as long as have unlocked the instance and at a job that is at the required level or above.

It would be better in general, also would need less time to focus on adjusting damage up and down and resistances and more onto bosses as well giving the more development time adding massive amounts of content instead.

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Originally Posted by BigCheez

You can't really have interesting or unique effects on transient items that are designed to be thrown in the trash after a few months. This is just the nature of modern hamster wheel MMOs. Ideas like this don't work with the current formula and I don't see that changing any time soon.

(...)

I'd rather they just completely removed stats on gear and made it cosmetic. Having to replace our gear to get back to the same power level that we were already at previously every few months is tiresome and serves no purpose.

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I like this idea!!

Remove all stats, and integrating with OPs idea, every gear we get could give us both glamour option and a permanent skill that could be as flat as

Dexterity+2

And as interesting as

(VPR) Ouroboros sequence is now 7yalms AoE.

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Originally Posted by Themarvin

I am more into removing the ilevel entirely and make it level based only and skill based, if anything.

It for starters for any level content grants the full pool of players as long as have unlocked the instance and at a job that is at the required level or above.

It would be better in general, also would need less time to focus on adjusting damage up and down and resistances and more onto bosses as well giving the more development time adding massive amounts of content instead.

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Yeah, if they were going to fix the problem (and they won't), they would need to do something like this to make gear less temporary so that it can be more interesting and meaningful.

This will absolutely never happen in FFXIV but if I was going to make changes to improve progression in XIV:

• Freeze the level cap at 99. Player level no longer increases.
• Item level only increases on expansion launch and does not increase with subsequent patches until the next expansion releases.
• Remove time-gated tome and augmented tome gear.
• The currently useless Artifact armour that exists only for glamour can be upgraded to +1, +2 and +3 variants throughout an expansion. These have increasingly better stats and unique and interesting effects.
• Savage raids should offer a similar set of gear that can be upgraded with each savage tier. These should also have increasingly better stats and unique and interesting effects.
• Ultimate weapons should offer more than a materia slot. They should be objectively the strongest weapons in the game.
• Relic weapons should require more work to get, have interesting/unique effects and be better than other weapons before they're completed at the end of an expansion. They should be close to competing with ultimate weapons, maybe more useful in niche scenarios where you can make use of their special effects.
• Crafted gear should be catch-up gear. It should not be better than the gear from the previous raid tier. It should not make your previous progress irrelevant. If people are worried about crafters becoming irrelevant, add some powerful crafted accessories with excellent stats that are very hard expert crafts that require BiS crafter gear and rare non-tradeable mats that are hard to get.

Other sources of gear could also offer relevant gear and by the end of an expac your BiS set would be an Ultimate or Relic weapon with a mix of Artifact and Savage gear, with a couple of particularly nice pieces from other sources added in.

If we're going to have meaningful gear progression, gear needs to last a lot longer. The scope of gear would need to be an expansion, not a patch. You can't have meaningful progression when that progression only takes a few weeks and is completely deleted every few months.

Otherwise, gear is pointless and should just be removed because it adds zero value to the game IMO.

Other people have brought up concerns with the idea presented here, but the one I'd add is the nature of people and things like the "raid" bonuses. I could absolutely see it becoming a Catch-22 very quickly, where if you didn't get the "Raid" gear that provides bonuses in Raids right away, groups would shut you out because not having that gear means (at least in our minds) that taking you would be a disadvantage compared to someone who has it. So, you need to do the raid to get the gear, but groups won't let you into the raid without said gear...

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Fashion only carries the game so far. In DT alone there's only a handful of cosmetic items that looked interesting enough for me to get.

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That's what's known as a personal opinion. Other people might find a lot of them "interesting enough" to get (or on the flipside, might not even like the handful that you do).

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Originally Posted by Brandr

I like this idea!!

Remove all stats, and integrating with OPs idea, every gear we get could give us both glamour option and a permanent skill that could be as flat as

Dexterity+2

And as interesting as

(VPR) Ouroboros sequence is now 7yalms AoE.

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Yeah, those kinds of effects are the kind of thing you would see in FFXI. Upgrading a piece of your Artifact/Relic/Empyrean armour might give it an effect that doubles the duration of your raid buff, or increases the potency of an ability.

The difference is that the level cap and item level don't increase in FFXI, so the piece of gear is relevant and useable forever. Something like that doesn't work when all of your gear is destined for the trash can and won't last more than a few months.

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Originally Posted by BigCheez

Yeah, if they were going to fix the problem (and they won't), they would need to do something like this to make gear less temporary so that it can be more interesting and meaningful.

This will absolutely never happen in FFXIV but if I was going to make changes to improve progression in XIV:

• Freeze the level cap at 99. Player level no longer increases.
• Item level only increases on expansion launch and does not increase with subsequent patches until the next expansion releases.
• Remove time-gated tome and augmented tome gear.
• The currently useless Artifact armour that exists only for glamour can be upgraded to +1, +2 and +3 variants throughout an expansion. These have increasingly better stats and unique and interesting effects.
• Savage raids should offer a similar set of gear that can be upgraded with each savage tier. These should also have increasingly better stats and unique and interesting effects.
• Ultimate weapons should offer more than a materia slot. They should be objectively the strongest weapons in the game.
• Relic weapons should require more work to get, have interesting/unique effects and be better than other weapons before they're completed at the end of an expansion. They should be close to competing with ultimate weapons, maybe more useful in niche scenarios where you can make use of their special effects.
• Crafted gear should be catch-up gear. It should not be better than the gear from the previous raid tier. It should not make your previous progress irrelevant. If people are worried about crafters becoming irrelevant, add some powerful crafted accessories with excellent stats that are very hard expert crafts that require BiS crafter gear and rare non-tradeable mats that are hard to get.

Other sources of gear could also offer relevant gear and by the end of an expac your BiS set would be an Ultimate or Relic weapon with a mix of Artifact and Savage gear, with a couple of particularly nice pieces from other sources added in.

If we're going to have meaningful gear progression, gear needs to last a lot longer. The scope of gear would need to be an expansion, not a patch. You can't have meaningful progression when that progression only takes a few weeks and is completely deleted every few months.

Otherwise, gear is pointless and should just be removed because it adds zero value to the game IMO.

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Better just to leave it all the same cap level no matter if you are a casual or not, the difficulty of the content and to unlock the next step, solves the other problems... also...it would also mean... there is only that amount of speed you can do to finish a dungeon due to the limitations as it is meaning you would and they could make so you would need to deal with ALL mechanics in savage, Ultimates, dungeons, extremes, normal raids and so on and so forth meaning you get more game play as well.

And in that area you could reward the players better.

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Originally Posted by Striker44

Other people have brought up concerns with the idea presented here, but the one I'd add is the nature of people and things like the "raid" bonuses. I could absolutely see it becoming a Catch-22 very quickly, where if you didn't get the "Raid" gear that provides bonuses in Raids right away, groups would shut you out because not having that gear means (at least in our minds) that taking you would be a disadvantage compared to someone who has it. So, you need to do the raid to get the gear, but groups won't let you into the raid without said gear...

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A valid concern, but if we look at other games (like FFXI) where this is the case, that doesn't tend to happen outside of high-end circles who are pushing the hardest content, where you really should have the gear required to do the content before trying to do it.

I think this is the crux of a lot of the problems in the game at the minute. There are 2 design philosophies:

1) Allow things to be complex, interesting and powerful but risk players who are lacking in knowledge, skill or gear being excluded.
2) Remove all complexity and gear/skill gap but prevent people from being excluded for not having these things.

Option 1 allows the game to be fun and interesting. Option 2 keeps the peace but makes the game shit. Yes, it's a possibility that people could run into groups that won't accept them because they don't have a particular thing. But I'd rather have that than a shit game.

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Originally Posted by BigCheez

Yeah, if they were going to fix the problem (and they won't), they would need to do something like this

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Well this on paper atleast sounds more simpler than what I suggested and probably fits better to the current structure the game already has. :D

First I would implement that one plugin that enchances the character stats page, because info is unnecesarely obtuse in-game

The short version of what it does, is that it shows the percentages next to the stat, so you can know that 2600 crit is 20.5% Crit chance for your current class/level (not sure about the numbers, just an example)

Then I would rebalance stats on gear ever so slightly to increase how much materia do, for example, in tank gear you can reduce 2-3% defense and move it to tenacity materia, it would make prog gear consider some ten for prog, then damage melds for the higher defense/ilvl pieces

Another thing is that stats could use some tie-in with skills. Right now skills just work mainly on your offensive stats, but if tenacity made defensives slightly stronger o have shorter cooldown, and piety made lucid dreaming more effective, then, again, we could see some variety in melds

Of course, this would have some drawbacks, like unmelded gear being weaker, to help with this, I believe tomestone gear could keep their current stats but reduced to 1 meld slot, as a easier entry point for casual players

There is much more to consider, but thats what I would try to experiment with at first to tackle gearing without changing it much, if I had to do bigger sweeping changes, gear sets and set bonuses for casual content are something I always love (I had a Vanguard playlist set in D2 and even the 4 dedicated Gambit sets) but they are a bit controversial

I kind of figured with endwalker they were experimenting with giving unique effects to gear.

As Crafters get 1.75x instead of 1.5x value from the good condition. Fishers have about a 20% chance to make their powerful and precision hooksets have a 50% cost reduction. Finally, Miners & Botanists have a 20% increased chance for intuition.

So far not seeing that with dawntrail for battle relics. And if they did have unique effects, I would rather it be a unique effect for that job that changes how the job is actually played.

The only other unique effect on an item that comes to mind is the strider boots and hermes shoes (sprint duration increase while in a capital city) and the wedding ring (teleport to the other player whose ring is connected to yours).

Which none of those three items are combat-related effects.

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Originally Posted by Chasingstars

The only other unique effect on an item that comes to mind is the strider boots and hermes shoes (sprint duration increase while in a capital city) and the wedding ring (teleport to the other player whose ring is connected to yours).

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Honestly it would be amazing if they started sprinkling little effects like that on other gear

They could have added Occult crescent speed out-of-combat to all the OC boots on +1 or +2 as a nice boon

Usually the reason why people dont use Striders is because they are "lazy" to swap gearsets, wich, dont get me wrong, I understand. So if Striders was an upgrade or "enchant" you could put on boots aside from materia it would be much more popular

*Enchants would need to stick strictly to out-of-combat for it to work, or everyone would use damage/combat passives

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Originally Posted by BigCheez

Yeah, if they were going to fix the problem (and they won't), they would need to do something like this to make gear less temporaryIMO.

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An idea I have is to add a special stat to an expansion's max level gear. So for DT it would be LHW: +1, CW: +2, HW: +3
If the special stat is equal or higher than the content's special stat the item's stats stay as it is if it is lower ilvl is lowered to be equal to be min iLvl of the duty. Dungeon gear will always have +3 Special. Previous Armor/Accs etc's special stats can be upgraded by combining the previous and the current item together. And new armor/accs would have new stat distributions. At the end of the expansion, it would give both raiders and non-raiders multiple armor/accs to choose from. And would help with earlier content being too easy becuase of iLvl. And when we get to the next expansion, they can remove the special stat from everywhere.

And instead of adding raid bonuses/artifact bonuses etc they could add an off-hand slot items to all jobs that acts as runes. Lvl 1, iLvl 1 that gives bonuses. It could be grindy but then made easier after the expansion is over. I'm thinking something simple like AoE Thunder spells in BLM dealing equal damage to ST Thunder spells, Lowering the damage of Empyral Arrow but giving a second/third charge for BRD's etc.

- Make stats count
- Make that turning your back to an enemy negates all armor + defenses and you take all damage
- Make additional stats to gear. e.g. tanks get dodge, parry
- Make talents
- Make glyphs,
- Make gear that isn't already written: ''its for you, dw you can't make a mistake!".

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Originally Posted by Raraka

Honestly it would be amazing if they started sprinkling little effects like that on other gear

They could have added Occult crescent speed out-of-combat to all the OC boots on +1 or +2 as a nice boon

Usually the reason why people dont use Striders is because they are "lazy" to swap gearsets, wich, dont get me wrong, I understand. So if Striders was an upgrade or "enchant" you could put on boots aside from materia it would be much more popular

*Enchants would need to stick strictly to out-of-combat for it to work, or everyone would use damage/combat passives

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Which is understandable. And also kind of weird we don't have a method to "enchant" effects onto gear pieces. Although I would personally prefer the old mmorpg method of having unique items with unique effects. Which adds incentive to go hunting/grinding for rare items in a similar way in how relics are meant to facilitate that sort of desire.

Yet with how relics currently are, they are not as interesting from what they provide in a gameplay sense, just their appearance, which while I agree everyone likes to play fashion, it does feel kind of tired there isn't something to grind beyond fashion. Even the stats like critical hit for example, each new expansion basically feels like a reset, sisyphean even, where we got push the metaphorical boulder up the hill again to get to what we had at the end of the previous expansion.

I don't like the idea of removing gear entirely just because it doesn't work well and is bland and uninspired. It's exactly like people slowly gnawing away at public service irl until it becomes dysfunctional enough for people to want to finally get rid of it. And SE has a serious track reword of destroying what has issues instead of actually addressing them, so don't go and cry once they have removed effectively anything and the game has even less goals to have, and gear has been one fundamental staple of every RPG in the universe and a good amount of MMOs as well. Getting stronger not only by leveling, but also by improving the build of one's characters over and over. XIV may do this poorly and sparsely because the devs think that they also have to accommodate for players wanting to catch up but it still offers at least a small amount of gearing that ultimately I wouldn't want to see gone.

I do think the OP had a good lead although I don't think this would work because of its clunkiness. And I do think it would be easy to actually make it smoother by having a base gear like we have today, the baseline backbone of stats and item level. You can even imagine a world where they make the substats (and even the main stats?) actually more interesting but that's another topic. What i'd like though is to have different perks as you mentioned (and probably more exotic or wild ones, cf lost actions and whatnot), but only added as a second layer. For instance you could perfectly chase after those and get neat unique little things that only work on the overworld areas and fates and whatnot as you said, and you could attach them to the gearset. For instance, you could also stumble across similar little perks or lost actions or whatever you want to call them, in dungeons, and by running more dungeons you'd get more of those, and they'd only work in dungeons. The trick would be that what you attach, you could detach and load up another set depending on what you do, or even just have multiple attached, and say, you boot up a dungeon, then the dungeon set of perks would activate, and next when you hop into deep dungeons, you'd get your deep dungeon set of perks turning on instead, if that makes sense?