Will 8.0 Expansion Cap @ L55 ?

Yoshi P said that something drastic must happen to not endure level bloat.

So will we see all of our levels halved, and the cap reduce from 100 down to L50, giving 5 levels per expansion?

I think this is the most logical and easiest way to reduce the hefty load of 110 levels. Unless they're coming up with a whole new leveling system, which a lot of people seem to be against (Eureka leveling, for example).

Are we crunching our levels into halves at this point?

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Originally Posted by Veritas-Ancora

So will we see all of our levels halved, and the cap reduce from 100 down to L50, giving 5 levels per expansion?

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Make ARR cap level 30 instead of 50 and give 5 levels per expansion.

It'll go great with the job reworks that they promised/unpromised us so jobs have more of their kit earlier too! Nothing is more silly than waiting until level 40 until your first AoE.

Based on what happened with WoW's, I really don't trust CS3 to do a level squish.

Is there a recent source for this? Haven't seen him mention it for quite a long time now.

If it does happen, I would expect it to be more like this:

Level 30 ARR cap (because that is when jobs unlock).
Level 40 HW cap
Level 50 SB cap
Level 60 ShB cap
Level 70 EW cap
Level 80 DT cap

Or just flat out do away with it after ARR and keep everyone at level 50 forever, because patches prove we can get dungeons and story and gear growth without needing to level and that it's kind of a redundant concept. Its main function is to dilute the stats and reset them so that they don't get too powerful, so to solve that issue they might have to try and make gear less impactful or change what gear does ie. linear progression.

I'd personally love to see a lvl and stat squish down to lvl 50. It would make lvl 50 content more enjoyable, it would breathe new life into legacy ultimates, extremes, and savage, it would honestly put the game in a whole new light for me. With that being said I still think 10 lvl per expansion is a good option to stick with, 5 seems a bit low.

Cap ARR at level 30, and make every subsequent expansion be +5 levels. That way you have much level space between now and 100 for a good 8 or so expansions before reaching 100 again... Will also help with how many jobs we've got now.

Capping people out at 50 indefinitely makes no sense for this game... The amount of longevity you get from leveling alone is absurd.

Personally I would stop the levelling at 100, and replace it with farming skill points that you can exchange to unlock new optional actions which replace existing ones, allowing you to customize your job's aesthetics and playstyle. Giving players options like this would also help to alleviate the problem of divisive job changes.

Really don't think we need to change levels.

Yoshi p also talked about a different type of progression system I much rather that then halfing the levels as it feels like we're just reverting back in power.

Also no it would not solve level scaling issues thats a entirely different issue.

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Originally Posted by Underscore

Personally I would stop the levelling at 100, and replace it with farming skill points that you can exchange to unlock new optional actions which replace existing ones, allowing you to customize your job's aesthetics and playstyle. Giving players options like this would also help to alleviate the problem of divisive job changes.

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That's not a bad idea in itself, but there will be one meta build for every job, and people will be excluded from endgame raid content, or maybe even other content when they don't play that one meta build, which then makes the whole thing irrelevant and a waste of resources.
That maybe works in other games, but I don't trust the FFXIV devs to design it in such a way that there won't be that one proper meta build.

edit:
Look at bluemage, a lot of different skills which let you customize your build how you want, but good luck in finding groups for bluemage endgame content when you don't play with a certain build.

or even better, stay at lvl 100, and just increase the gear itemlvls add new job quests for the new abilities if there are any

All they need to do is add level system like GW2 once reach max level. There is no reason a level cap can't go past 100. I played a game once where the level cap was 300.

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Originally Posted by hynaku

All they need to do is add level system like GW2 once reach max level. There is no reason a level cap can't go past 100. I played a game once where the level cap was 300.

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Yes but when is too far?

Starting this game at L1 and hearing you have to go to L110 sounds painful as sin. It doesn't attract new players if the mountain is too big to see over.

What we need is fresh blood. That's the only way this game stays alive.

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Originally Posted by Veritas-Ancora

Yes but when is too far?

Starting this game at L1 and hearing you have to go to L110 sounds painful as sin. It doesn't attract new players if the mountain is too big to see over.

What we need is fresh blood. That's the only way this game stays alive.

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Maybe some players, but probably not the type to stick with an MMO long-term anyway. I for one would see it as something to look forward to, and something which is guaranteed to occupy my off time for a good long while. Daunting, perhaps, from some perspectives, but certainly not painful.

whats the point in doing this?

if the max lvl changes to 50 every quest and dungeon lvl would be halfed as well. the lvl we learn skills too. it would change nothing except the number we see. sure dragoon will get their aoe at 20 and not 40 anymore... but thats still gonna be after the 10th jobquest, right before you get access to stone vigil. and you would still get your jobstone at the same time you do that annoying food / titan quest.

well, we would need twice as long for one lvl. but the time to reach max lvl would be the same as now

Level squish is unnecessary and would mess up so much existing information about the game. The same effect can be gained by adjusting how much EXP we earn per activity relative to how much we need to level up.

A stat squish would be more beneficial and less noticable, and possibly reducing the ilevel of gear - still a bit messy, but less conspicuous than level.

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Originally Posted by Veritas-Ancora

Yes but when is too far?

Starting this game at L1 and hearing you have to go to L110 sounds painful as sin. It doesn't attract new players if the mountain is too big to see over.

What we need is fresh blood. That's the only way this game stays alive.

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I enjoyed WoWs 1-120 in bfa like damn i even had 11 alts in that expansion

It would make sense to cut down ARR levels... Since there's enough levels where you don't get any new skills, traits or unlock new duties or anything. Taking ARR down to like 30 and rebalancing it would allow for some more max level growth giving them a few extra years to figure out where they want to go aside from just an ever increasing level cap.

The expansions should stay at 10 levels each though.

I don’t mind a level squish in principle. Numbers are just numbers.

Right now, I do have concerns about the current leveling experience. I know several people who started the game and were facing the issue of being around level 30 in the ARR MSQ and with plenty of yellow and blue quests left to do, but their character level was already above 50. Leveling before Dawntrail is simply too fast. In my opinion, players who haven’t unlocked the next expansion yet shouldn’t be able to outlevel the expansion they are currently playing. If someone is still in ARR, their level progression should stay within ARR’s intended range.

Another issue with the current leveling is related to job design and skill progression. We’ve always had roughly 20–25 core active skills at endgame, whether in ARR, HW, SB, or now. The thing is that with each expansion, older skills are removed, merged, or reworked to make room for new ones earned while leveling. So even though the level cap increases every expansion, we don’t actually accumulate something like 5-6 active skills on every expansion to end up with a ridiculous amount of skills. We stay at roughly the same number — just with different buttons.

The side effect is that lower level brackets (50, 60, 70) often feel more stripped down than they used to. Because skills are constantly shifted upward or redesigned, players leveling through older content aren’t really experiencing a complete version of their job at those levels. They’re playing simplified versions that only fully come together at the current level cap.

On top of that, dungeon design has been simplified significantly over time. Whether players are casual or future raiders, they don’t really learn how to play their jobs properly when both their toolkit and the dungeon difficulty are heavily reduced. It should be acceptable — and even healthy — for players to wipe a few times in a new dungeon, and especially entering with an ilevel close to minimum item level when they do it for the first time. That’s part of learning and progression.

Right now, most dungeons follow the same predictable pattern: two trash packs, one simple boss, repeated three times, finished in 15–20 minutes. Mechanics are often minimal, and the experience feels very on-rails. In ARR and Heavensward, dungeons felt more engaging and occasionally challenging. Now they rarely do.

If implemented thoughtfully, a level and item level squish could be an opportunity to rebalance the early game and those issues, to make it more engaging again. It’s okay if it takes a couple of weeks to reach the latest expansion. There is a lot of older content that is genuinely fun, and it’s unfortunate that much of its original challenge has effectively disappeared — especially early expansion 24-man raids, where players now enter massively overgeared and breeze through mechanics that once mattered.

Level squish doesn't sound too farfetched, or merit points, or prestiges, or whatever inevitably occurs. It only took two expansions to skyrocket past the previous job HP values, and item levels are closing in on four digits which the spaghetti engine probably cannot handle. I do know 110 is an awkward number and agree that it may look daunting to grind to since people feel compelled to level every job. And since the leveling became almost entirely percentage-based, continuously adding them (or doubling the amount of EXP needed) doesn't have as much of an impact.

But the core gameplay issues (antiquated ARR classes, jobs with useless MP and auto-attacks, power creep in old content, etc.) are deeper than that.

A level squish feels like "kicking the can down the road" for when we inevitably hit level 100 again, to say nothing of how much they would need to overhaul every job and encounter to match the changes. ARR alone would be a mess trying to cram everything from 1-50 into 1-30. I mean, if we're getting our job crystals at level 10-15 at that point, they may as well remove the classes we start as before then, because people would barely even get to experience them before they're promoting out of them and a condensed story probably couldn't account for us wasting time with the old guilds anyway.

A secondary leveling track seems pointless though because "prestige level 10" is just "level 110" anyway with some fancier words, and giving it any kind of talent point system would be a waste because this community is too parser-brained to ever pick anything but the BiS build, where anything less will get you kicked and blacklisted when everyone and their dog already gets accused of being prog liars who only exist to ruin everyone else's runs.

I'm not really sure what else they can do, because either the game will fight against them trying to do it (I imagine messing around with any part of ARR could be troublesome with the spaghetti code), or the playerbase will optimize the fun out of it in less than 24 hours.

Maybe a little controversial, but I would eliminate levels 1-30 and just start with jobs. Rework those quests a little and jobs at level 1 start with level 30 skill set. If they cleaned up the skill/button bloat, I might as go as far as giving the whole level 50 skill set at level 1.

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Originally Posted by MisterNublet

Make ARR cap level 30 instead of 50 and give 5 levels per expansion.

It'll go great with the job reworks that they promised/unpromised us so jobs have more of their kit earlier too! Nothing is more silly than waiting until level 40 until your first AoE.

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Originally Posted by Underscore

Personally I would stop the levelling at 100, and replace it with farming skill points that you can exchange to unlock new optional actions which replace existing ones, allowing you to customize your job's aesthetics and playstyle. Giving players options like this would also help to alleviate the problem of divisive job changes.

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I think ability glamour is a feature that's long overdue! Let us use wide volley at higher levels!

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Originally Posted by Moonlite

Maybe a little controversial, but I would eliminate levels 1-30 and just start with jobs. Rework those quests a little and jobs at level 1 start with level 30 skill set. If they cleaned up the skill/button bloat, I might as go as far as giving the whole level 50 skill set at level 1.

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Interesting. I just got my alt up to L30. There was a few basic dungeons and Ifrit before L30, but nothing that can't be reworked.

I wouldn't mind cutting the fat like that.

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Originally Posted by Valor_C

That's not a bad idea in itself, but there will be one meta build for every job, and people will be excluded from endgame raid content, or maybe even other content when they don't play that one meta build, which then makes the whole thing irrelevant and a waste of resources.
That maybe works in other games, but I don't trust the FFXIV devs to design it in such a way that there won't be that one proper meta build.

edit:
Look at bluemage, a lot of different skills which let you customize your build how you want, but good luck in finding groups for bluemage endgame content when you don't play with a certain build.

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I'd probably design it such that the damage output of the job doesn't change much, or at least no more than the difference between different jobs within a role. For example; give Dragoon the option to replace Rise of the Dragon with two charges of Spineshatter dive with a combined potency equal to RoTD. Stuff like that.

What's the point? Why does it matter if it's 110 or 55 or 220 or 440?

You should be asking the question of will 8.0 simplify onboarding process for a new player. Because you know, it doesn't matter which level you will have by the end of the game if most of the players will simply never even get anywhere close to it.

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Originally Posted by Underscore

I'd probably design it such that the damage output of the job doesn't change much, or at least no more than the difference between different jobs within a role. For example; give Dragoon the option to replace Rise of the Dragon with two charges of Spineshatter dive with a combined potency equal to RoTD. Stuff like that.

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It could be interesting system to give buff dependent jobs a selfish build. For example, for a static you could choose to be a buff dancer, buff a beefy melee that has been fed all the gear and increase damage output to speed up your kill. Heading into PF and know everyone will be dying all day every day, swap to selfish dancer that will deal damage on par with other dps jobs.

Please, no level sqiush I don't see the point in doing this at all. Does it really matter if we go past 100? I see no reason to half the levels back down. It just feels awful to have all your work to get your character to 100 halved like that

I think they should go to 110 in 8.0 then do a level and stats squish in 9.0 down to 55 or even 60.

A lot of people don't understand how a squish actually functions and think "Number smaller OMG why did you nerf me?!"


Either way Stat and Level squishes need to happen eventually - MMO's are a genre where power creep is a huge problem which can cause overflows within code integers which can cause unexpected bugs and problems in game.

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Originally Posted by Xapapetsu

I'd personally love to see a lvl and stat squish down to lvl 50. It would make lvl 50 content more enjoyable, it would breathe new life into legacy ultimates, extremes, and savage, it would honestly put the game in a whole new light for me. With that being said I still think 10 lvl per expansion is a good option to stick with, 5 seems a bit low.

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Current level 50 content wouldn't be level 50 content post squish.

It'd be like level 15-20 content post squish.

I've never played WoW, so what does level squish actually do?

I would assume it means the level cap is reduced, but our relative strength & access to content remains the same, it's just being scaled down to a smaller numerical value.
Sort of like the "stat squish" that happened before in one of the earlier expansions.
It would be easier to just increase the cap to Lv.110, and would result in less headache with mismatched/outdated information that still lingers within the game when existing things get changed.

Don't really mind whatever happens, but I strongly believe they will cut corners wherever possible.

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Originally Posted by Stormfur

I've never played WoW, so what does level squish actually do?

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Reduced the number by your character's portrait, but because things related to mob levels or stats got missed (because attempting to change every number in an MMO is a large undertaking), entire expansions got bricked because some mobs that were the objectives of unskippable quests became unkillably strong.

You do know that nothing will happen? It's way too much for them to change their formula. Level squish would mean that they have to redo every boss, dungeon mob and stats for everyone which isn't simple. Doing just "cut 50% for everything" won't make it right due to some abilities and things scaling differently. For YoshiP and their team this would be "huge" job. So no we will just see 110 level instead. They haven't changed anything with every new expansion.

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Originally Posted by MayuAmakura

You do know that nothing will happen? It's way too much for them to change their formula. Level squish would mean that they have to redo every boss, dungeon mob and stats for everyone which isn't simple. Doing just "cut 50% for everything" won't make it right due to some abilities and things scaling differently. For YoshiP and their team this would be "huge" job. So no we will just see 110 level instead. They haven't changed anything with every new expansion.

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Yeah but Yoshi P even said there was a problem with the trajectory that is happening and that some form of rework needs to happen to keep the game relevant and appealing to users.

He even suggested that there was "A Realm Reborn" level of work, so that could mean rewiring the game in new ways that doesn't equate to L110.

Honestly there should be another stat squish and the next expansion level cap should be 50. However I'm not sure they will do that because they made such a big deal of lvl 100 being a big milestone for the game.

maybe they should make a new level scale for 'chapter 2' of the story where we all start at lvl 1 again. as a universal new starting point. new players wouldnt have to play the whole chapter 1 (2.0-6.55) leaving it as optional content.

that would lead to a lot of questions needing a solution though xD.

I wonder why so many are fixated on "level numbers". It doesn't make the leveling experience faster.

Consider that each expansion should provide as much time for completion as a normally priced AAA game. I've seen estimates that run anywhere from 45 hours for Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 to 103 hours for Witcher 3. [Here's a typical article from The Gamer for RPG completion times: https://www.thegamer.com/longest-rpgs-ever-made/

Estimates for completion of the MSQ for each expansion of Final Fantasy XIV run around the low end (40-50 hours) without doing anything extra.

Does it really matter if you're rising 10 levels in an expansion, or 5 levels, if the amount of time to completion remains the same?

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Originally Posted by Asari5

maybe they should make a new level scale for 'chapter 2' of the story where we all start at lvl 1 again. as a universal new starting point. new players wouldnt have to play the whole chapter 1 (2.0-6.55) leaving it as optional content.

that would lead to a lot of questions needing a solution though xD.

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I would like that, honestly. Take us to a new expansion where we have to re-level up to L50. But if you're going to do that, make the AoEs available at a lower level than 30+. It's really problematic that we don't have an AoE for dungeons at any of the lower levels.