Is this the road they will continue to take with items?

[skaterger]

snip

Wait, if min maxing is not a priority, and gear is garbage aside from the accuracy cap, then is that really a lack of options or choices aka horizontal progression as you like to call it? What about gc company gear, crafted gear, event/seasonal gear, primal gear, dungeon gear, AF gear etc etc. All these are sufficient for everything in game if you don't plan to do coil. The point people don't bring it up is that they still want the best gear in game which brings us back to the point of what should constitute getting it? I would like to hear your suggestions, because all the games with them have either like I mentioned, an incredible amount of rng and grind like XI or lack of end game content (no raids like gw2). What is in it for players who look to improve their character? Where is the incentive to keep playing?

[Kuwagami]

Wait, if min maxing is not a priority, and gear is garbage aside from the accuracy cap, then is that really a lack of options or choices aka horizontal progression as you like to call it? What about gc company gear, crafted gear, event/seasonal gear, primal gear, dungeon gear, AF gear etc etc. All these are sufficient for everything in game if you don't plan to do coil. The point people don't bring it up is that they still want the best gear in game which brings us back to the point of what should constitute getting it? I would like to hear your suggestions, because all the games with them have either like I mentioned, an incredible amount of rng and grind like XI or lack of end game content (no raids like gw2). What is in it for players who look to improve their character? Where is the incentive to keep playing?

I'm not sure abut what you're trying to prove...

first, min maxing only applies to a similar range of gear. You won't min-max i40 gear with i110. But once at full i110 (ie, when min maxing becomes relevant), it is not a priority as you can't gain significant power with that. As I said, a difference of 4-5 dps won't matter much if you can beat the game already.

For your other stuff, well...
=> GC company gear is... like, irrelevant since they decided GC gear would be for vanity only and have no use in end game (you can't even enter their "casual raid" with the hunt gear)
=> crafted gear has been irrelevant since SE decided that having a relevant crafting system would help RMTs. Are they wrong, are they true, I don't care, but crafting is relevant in game only at the start of a new coil patch. Also, the prices. By the time someone gets enough money for that, they have i100 gear or i110. You could craft it yourself, but it would be the same, by the time you get it you can have at least a full decked i100 waiting. it will always be subpar to the "farm a week and get it" gear anyway.
=> event/seasonal gear was never intended to have any use besides glamour, I fail to see your point
=> primal gear was good for the 2.0-2.1 era, where you needed the weapons to go further (or find an overgeared group) now they are all... useless. Ramuh is utterly useless. Shiva will probably be useless as well if they keep making primals on par with previous patch instead of aiming for the current patch
=> AF is a joke. The supposedly "mythic gear" which is supposed to be the best for your job, coming from ancestors and all... was a joke, given in lv45/50 quests, with no difficulty whatsoever. So much for the "most powerful gear of all time".


Get real, the game itself throws you at the last tier of gear, which is currently i100/110, and will be i120/130 soon enough with still no connection at all with the previous tier.


As for your question, there ARE options, they are just totally ignored by the devs for now.

=> crafting. Never said enough, but relevant crafting wouldn't hurt. Adding new tier recipes which require dungeon/raid drops, that you can't faceroll at patch start. Sure it will have RNG, but it will give more options for itemization
=> new GC stuff, the i55 is really laughable now. the i70 from hunt is even worse, as it is only designed for glamour (why isn't it i1 ? who knows...)
=> make AF gear really relevant. We upgrade relic, why is the AF gear so dull ? Just give us quests to upgrade it as well.
=> rare drops from difficult dungeons. Like, for 2.4, having a dungeon i115 dropping with 2% chance a new i130 piece of gear. regular drop would be i120. Incentives to do it on a regular basis for i120, incentives to do it for the jackpot, win-win. Oh and yeah, actually relevant dungeon asking you to gear up to go in (people who stopped at 2.1 will probably still be able to enter new dungeons in 2.4... >_> )
=> For raiders, raid only drop allowing you to upgrade XX stuff giving it : a) a new stat, or b) slightly higher stats. Tadaam you got your shinies.



There ARE ways of progressions to make the game less "everyone wears the same stuff". They are just ALL ignored to follow the "Raid + new currency" model.


grind, craft, rng, regular drop and raid drop. that's 5 ways of doing progression, even if they would have a hierarchy. Yet we don't even have that (only grind and raid atm..)

Good luck trying to convince me that you have time to watch your and 3 other DPS' damage output while doing mechanics in a 8-man and determine who is doing good and who is doing bad.

also because you don't need a parser to see someone is doing clearly sub par dps

I eased the reading for you, it seems you missed the point. There are things called enmity bars. A clearly sub par dps is easily noticeable unless they keep dying (but yet again, if you die at every single attempt, that's an other reason for you to get booted out of the group, isn't it ?)

[Dwill]

I eased the reading for you, it seems you missed the point. There are things called enmity bars. A clearly sub par dps is easily noticeable unless they keep dying (but yet again, if you die at every single attempt, that's an other reason for you to get booted out of the group, isn't it ?)

Summoners share their enmity with their pet so clearly the enmity bar is the way to go to determine DPS! Especially on multi target fight where you can keep track of everybody's enmity on every target!

Seriously though, try again but with a valid argument this time.

So, then ramuh ex rewards were perfect?

Hunt rewards seemed properly tuned and the time to acquire the rewards was just right?

My point is that SE is making major mistakes. You say you disagree? Then, by your opinion, SE is doing a great job?

I actually agree that the rewards for these systems could have been better handled but turning this game in a horizontal progression is not the solution.

[Kuwagami]

Summoners share their enmity with their pet so clearly the enmity bar is the way to go to determine DPS! Especially on multi target fight where you can keep track of everybody's enmity on every target!

Seriously though, try again but with a valid argument this time.

I will let you think that quelling strikes really makes a difference in enmity in a 8 mins+ fight and go ahead. oh and yeah every fight in current end game isn't a single mob with sometimes a few adds coming (T6, T8, every primal but the mog, T9, T5... sigh).

Also, you're trying to prove me wrong with bad arguments. Sure summoners share enmity with pets, but it's still easily noticeable if they do a good work or not. especially in 8 men fights where you can easily check if their DoTs are up or not.

But heh, if you can't, that doesn't mean noone can. I have had no use of a parser, and yet I have met my share of horrible dps who can't perform at all at their job (not totally their fault though, the game throws them at max level/ilevel without them ever having to perform their job at all...). You can tell when a player is bad just by paying attention to the screen and the infos it shows you. no need of a parser unless you want to rub their face with actual numbers.

Thanks, but I'm not stupid to think that seasonal/event gear is on par with coil gear, my whole point being that there is no lack of choices in gear. This game probably has more choices than a lot of gear out there, but most people will jump to the last 2 because its the most powerful. So lets put the lack of options to rest.

When the game throws you at the max tier, vanity gear is no longer a gearing option. I see what you mean, truly, but it won't work until SE decides to make people work for their gear rather than to use the "play 2 weeks before I give it to you" trick.

Now on to the 5 choices you mentioned

1) Some slots for crafted gear can be equally powerful/more powerful than i1oo/i110 gear with the correct melds. There is the option there, most poeple don't do it cause it's too expensive/difficult. Nevertheless its still an option.
2) RNG? Serious? Atma/Animus/novus is not rng?
3) Regular drop? So like 0.1% from open world? Back at grind and rng i see.

1) there is no way crafted gear is equal to i110 gear in any way due to the boring stat system (main > all). I would give you that correctly melded accessories can be more useful than i100 though. Not necessarily more powerful, but more useful, true. yet, it's trashed away the day you get the i110 counterpart instead of giving you the option
2) Animus is no RNg at all, Novus can be slightly, but seriously, it's more of a grind than a RNG factor. Atma is RNG dependent, but it's not really what I mean by RNG. See my example about the i115 dungeon with RNG involved, or rare ingredients for craft recipes.
3) regular drops as non raid drops, aka dungeon stuff. Noone is dumb enough to say that dungeon drops are relevant (unless you're grinding desynthesis, I guess) Your example would be open world RNG, if we had more mobs per map that we have now or open world dungeons.

[Dwill]

I will let you think that quelling strikes really makes a difference in enmity in a 8 mins+ fight and go ahead. oh and yeah every fight in current end game isn't a single mob with sometimes a few adds coming (T6, T8, every primal but the mog, T9, T5... sigh).

Also, you're trying to prove me wrong with bad arguments. Sure summoners share enmity with pets, but it's still easily noticeable if they do a good work or not. especially in 8 men fights where you can easily check if their DoTs are up or not.

Whether it does a huge difference or not is irrelevant. Fight of the matter is that it does make a slight difference and that's enough to throw your enmity bar argument in the garbage can.

Summoners DoT makes up for only 40% of their damage. Just checking once every so often if their dots are up is not going to be the sign of them doing good damage.

Horizontal progression works well with games that have very hard to obtain rewards such as ff11 in the zilart-treasures era.

This game would have to be changed in a fundamental way to allow for horizontal progression.

Is it smart to do for ff14? Probably not.

The game could use more depth to gear such as set bonuses, on use effects, and passive traits on gear. You can have an amalgamation of both horizontal and vertical progression in a game like this.

It didn't really work all that well because once you got your piece of gear, you had it for years. Not interested.

[cryptic_angel]

I actually agree that the rewards for these systems could have been better handled but turning this game in a horizontal progression is not the solution.

Horizontal progression works well with games that have very hard to obtain rewards such as ff11 in the zilart-treasures era.

This game would have to be changed in a fundamental way to allow for horizontal progression.

Is it smart to do for ff14? Probably not.

The game could use more depth to gear such as set bonuses, on use effects, and passive traits on gear. You can have an amalgamation of both horizontal and vertical progression in a game like this.

[Gralna]

I liked the horizontal progression DAoC had, they never raised max lvl thus allowing max lvl gear to be relevant for years to come.

To get around the whole BiS nonsense they did a combination of stat caps, and putting so many stats that affected your characters performance it was nearly impossible to cap them all(each class had roughly 15 stats including elemental/physical resists that affected them) And after a few expansions there was so much gear that could fit together to give you stats you wanted that a few people just created calculators to assist with gear builds, instead of relying on BiS since there was no true BiS. Also crafted gear while not as good as most end game drops, was still relevant to most builds.

[skaterger]

too long

Thanks, but I'm not stupid to think that seasonal/event gear is on par with coil gear, my whole point being that there is no lack of choices in gear. This game probably has more choices than a lot of gear out there, but most people will jump to the last 2 because its the most powerful. So lets put the lack of options to rest.

Now on to the 5 choices you mentioned

1) Some slots for crafted gear can be equally powerful/more powerful than i1oo/i110 gear with the correct melds. There is the option there, most poeple don't do it cause it's too expensive/difficult. Nevertheless its still an option.
2) RNG? Serious? Atma/Animus/novus is not rng?
3) Regular drop? So like 0.1% from open world? Back at grind and rng i see.

The biggest problem I have is that unless SE can do something no company has been able to do before, that is perfectly balance the game such that each route has its own bis gear (you can argue that bis isn't important but it is for me personally as it gives me a sense of completion), the gear is going to overlap in some way. Now I have played games like maple and RO with pitifully low drop rates so it wouldn't bother me that much, but looking at how people complain about atma, this route won't go down with players well at all. They just don't realize it yet. Right now I'm doing hunts even though I don't enjoy it so that I can get my bis. The fun it will be if I also have to craft, grind and farm open world mobs to do so! And all these because SE decides they need to artifically lengthen their content so they can keep old content relevant. Yay!