Are you happy with the current raiding structure in this game?

[Yukariko]

Thing is any arguments about loot and how hard/casual it is to get/earn have gone out the window with the introduction of hunts which hand out gear through mindless grinding.

As far as actual raiding goes, what we really need is
1) keep old content relevant somehow (maybe with updated rewards)
2) more horizontal progression. IE more different raids.

imagine if each of the 4 combat related beast tribes had their own raid quest line with their own themed armours.

[Fendred]

Thing is any arguments about loot and how hard/casual it is to get/earn have gone out the window with the introduction of hunts which hand out gear through mindless grinding.

As far as actual raiding goes, what we really need is
1) keep old content relevant somehow (maybe with updated rewards)
2) more horizontal progression. IE more different raids.

imagine if each of the 4 combat related beast tribes had their own raid quest line with their own themed armours.

What they should be doing is going full out horizontal progression until they reach the next expansion. Single player RPGs do this, and there isn't any good argument against this approach other than developers can't take the short sighted route of using a math equation to replace depth with unending upgrade oriented gear grind.

[skaterger]

What they should be doing is going full out horizontal progression until they reach the next expansion. Single player RPGs do this, and there isn't any good argument against this approach other than developers can't take the short sighted route of using a math equation to replace depth with unending upgrade oriented gear grind.

Now lets not get carried away. If you've played gw2 where its essentially entirely horizontal progression, you would know how absurd of a grind/time sink it is to do content for ascended/legendary gear which mostly are just for aesthetics and provide minimal combat benefits. The system has to be designed that way because that is the only way to keep players interested and playing. Instead of skill based checks which offer better gear from new content, it becomes a huge time/gold investment to work for that small upgrade. Why would I want to do content to get any gear when this piece of gear I got from 2 tiers ago is still useful? That is the reason I stopped playing gw2 cause at the end of the game there is just no reason to play anymore if you wanna progress.

Also gw2 has essentially no raids, they have open world bosses so the way the game is fundamentally designed is already different from ffxiv. They focus more on the living story and content is released much slower than here, which is also synonymous with horizontal progression. They need people to keep playing in the form of a grind so that they have time to released new content. This is fine since gw2 is b2p. FFXIV, being a p2p game, releases content at a much quicker rate so vertical progression makes sense here.

This is not to say that I don't want horizontal progression. I think adding materia slots to gear and having a few side upgrades from open world content is fine. What I don't want is to go back to the ffxi style where gear from 2-3 years ago is still the bis.

[Fendred]

Skaet, I'm fine with them raising the ilvl and character level as long as they tone it down. Right now they're going too fast in the vertical progression category. WoW's collapse was partly due to breaking the leveling experience by going too far with character level. It was a waste of a really good idea because people were out-leveling the zones before they even finished the quest chains in them. Additionally, constantly boosting item level causes the difficulty of content to decrease rather considerably with time. People get used to the easier difficulty so the game ends up becoming one step closer to a hack and slash style game.

What I want them to do is divide up the progression between the vertical and horizontal equally. Increase the max item level maybe once between expansions and once during the beginning of expansions, but then focus on making things more sideways at other times. It would give them time to add a lot more fun options to the game, prevent the rat race effect, and still reap the benefits of increased item level when they absolutely need to boost things. It would also give them time to figure out ways of keeping the old end game content desirable.