Skill-Specific Gear

[Garlyle]

Yoshida said he feared that skill enhancements on equipment would take away player choices in gearing.

Yoshi P, I love you forever, but sir, what choices?

You're misunderstanding the meaning of choice here.


When you offer a greater variety of effects of choices, it's inevitable that certain ones outstrip others. Consider just for a moment that we're talking about support skills, because in a way, they're equippable. Say every class was only afforded one. What would happen to a Marauder that didn't take Provoke? How would developpers handle the existance of Warriors without Provoke? Do you create content that never involves Tank Swaps, or do you still go ahead with it on the assumption they will have that?

Obviously, gear isn't as significant in terms of its effects - but let's face it, unless it is really significant, it won't satisfy the crowd who're hoping for it. Otherwise it falls into the "tiny number tweaking for min-maxing", which is what we already have. The more variety of significant choice you give players, the more that certain choices prove superior to others; to continue responding to those stronger existances, you end up having to design challenges around that, which means players who don't make that choice lose out. You don't actually get real choice - you get a right choice and a wrong choice. You don't have three choices for iLvl 90 body armor - you have one right choice, and two wrong ones. Nevermind if those three are things like "Water Resist +40" which you'll want for Leviathan EX and another is "Paralysis Null" which you'll want to ease up ADS nonsense, and another is "+15% HP recovered" which you want on for everything else - now you don't have a choice between all three iLvl 90 pieces, you need to get them all. I'm being a bit extreme, but you understand the risks, right?

Players already hate the effects that we do have because they "don't feel significant" - which is a completely fair assesment - but so long as they aren't significant, it really doesn't matter which of the iLvl 90 pieces you use unless you are really, really interested in getting that 5 extra DPS. That's a margin that can be balanced around.

So there's three levels you end up at now:

1. It's all basically the same - the differences are functionally so tiny that the balance doesn't really change much, overall power remains constant and expectable. (We are here)
2. Flavour differences - You have a whole lot of different tasting flavours, but realistically, they're such minor changes you wouldn't ever really notice. There's a lot more variety here, and I think people might overall be happier here, but you still don't have real meaningful variety. (We should probably be here, and I think this is what Yoshida is willing to start looking into based on his answer)
3. Significant differences - What I think a lot of people would like to see, but it runs huge risks of False Choice, forcing players to acquire and carry assloads of situational equipment, being extremely difficult to create content around, and other problems. (Yoshida doesn't want to be here, and going here would be a pretty significant philosophy change for XIV).