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

[Luvbunny]

Here is the thing, the theme park idea is fine. It gives them a "base" of "activities" that players can do. What they should have done is - with each patches, upgrading things or adding stuff to make older contents relevant. And as other have pointed out, giving OPTIONS on horizontal gears would be great. They can add accessories that boost cure potency, 3%-5% here and there, max it at 15%. Or tank gears that will mitigate damage reduction, up to 15%. The same with accuracy and attack boost gears. All it does is making the grind a little bit less of a grind, even if it is for a few minutes less per dungeon run due to your "boosted" stats. Crystal Towers need a big upgrade when it comes to items and reward, as it is now, Labyrinth of Ancients provide you with the least amount of reward in terms of risk/ratio/time spent.

EXAMPLE:
- They can add dungeon boss to the daily NM Hunt for 15 seals, one a day, random dungeon. And add ONE weekly dungeon boss that gives you 30 seals. Plus one random weekly hard mode trial Primal for another 20 seals. This will boost overall weekly seals and at the same time making older content somewhat worthwhile to do - if not once a week or once a day.
- They can add materia level 3-4 from treasure chest in dungeons, from level 41 and up. Random materia obviously, and random chance it may drop that.

That's just example on how making older contents relevant by altering existing ones.

[Souljacker]

It's for balance. The more "stats" you add to gear, be them your run of the mill things like det/crit or special things like you described, the harder it is to balance the game.

MMOs aren't supposed to be easy to balance. It's work, and work that somehow XI managed to do without too much trouble. I don't want to go back to the days where Okotes were relevant for your entire monk career, but I'd like to see them branch out with stats a little more. Enmity+\-, Cure Potency, all those things that were interesting in XI that are nonexistent here. We need some variety and complexity.

[Morningstar1337]

MMOs aren't supposed to be easy to balance. It's work, and work that somehow XI managed to do without too much trouble...

Probably because they likely didn't care much for balance, instead just use a Job+subjob system and let the players sort it all out, leading to things like a ninja that was supposed to be a DPS becoming used as a tank and a Red Mage becoming so gamebreakingly powerful and versatile it sets unrealistic expectations for it if it comes to XIV

[Dwill]

MMOs aren't supposed to be easy to balance. It's work, and work that somehow XI managed to do without too much trouble. I don't want to go back to the days where Okotes were relevant for your entire monk career, but I'd like to see them branch out with stats a little more. Enmity+\-, Cure Potency, all those things that were interesting in XI that are nonexistent here. We need some variety and complexity.

Yeah, I'm going to stop you there. Square Enix did a terrible job at balancing FFXI.

It's extremely easy to see by looking at:

• How powerful Bards were.
• How terrible Summoners were.
• How Samurai were the most powerful melee in endgame for years.
• How dragoons were terrible until the release of Hasso (which was acquired by using Samurai as a subjob no less).
• How they managed to turn a class (Ninja) that was supposed to DPS into a tank and the tank class into a DPS (Samurai) because they couldn't balance them properly before releasing them.

and there are plenty of other examples.


Could we use more depth ? Yeah of course but let's not kid ourselves here and say that FFXI was even remotely good at balancing their content.

[Recaldy]

The scale of the game is too small compared to other MMOs. That's the real problem. Too small = too little options.

[ispano]

MMOs aren't supposed to be easy to balance. It's work, and work that somehow XI managed to do without too much trouble. I don't want to go back to the days where Okotes were relevant for your entire monk career, but I'd like to see them branch out with stats a little more. Enmity+\-, Cure Potency, all those things that were interesting in XI that are nonexistent here. We need some variety and complexity.

As I and others have said, XI was NOT balanced. At all.