Quote Originally Posted by Craiger View Post
When FFXIV 2.0 first came out, and everyone was still either leveling up or just started gearing up their 50 job, the dungeons was pretty enjoyable IMO. The gear that dropped there was actually usable at first, while you geared up with Darklight gear, and slowly with Myth gear (before myth cap increase). The dungeons was easy ofc, but you couldn't eat and listen to music at the same time (I couldn't at least)... I quite enjoyed to do that easy, but not too easy task to get my gear.

I liked how in 2.0, you actually had to get some decent gear before you could do dungeons like AK, and even when you could do it, you would still not go through it using 1 hand... You also had to do those dungeons to gear up before you gradually defeated the primals, and then could go on to do Coil (well the majority of players had to gear up quite a bit).

Why did SE change this after that? Ever since those first dungeons in 2.0, all the new ones have either been for the same ilvl, or just recently a little higher... Take the upcoming 2.4 for example, while we don't know the ilvl requirement of them yet, I'll bet it's way lower than most players current ilvl.
SE didn't really change it after that. Fact is still, if you want to progress through the current newest dungeons, you're not going to be able to do that without first gearing up in one way or another.

The "problem" is that players tend to choose the quickest and easiest way to gear up. So rather than sticking to dungeons, if that's ultimately what they've got the most interest in, they'd do ST anyway. And subsequently say that the content turned easy.

Asides from that obvious point, do not even think for a second that increasing required iLvL on something like shiva or final coil is going to make anything more fun or last longer for the casual player. As the only thing it'd do is make this level of content get even more out of reach. As it stands right now for many casuals T5 is too big of a hassle to get through. Even when heavily outgearing it, having the echo buff on, and having tactics readily available to them on just a few clicks away. Even if you end up carrying them through T5, they'd once again end up stuck on T6.

Having those people, once they finally get through T9, then be faced by a grind for higher iLvL before they can stand a chance in T10 again is most probably going to have the opposite effect of fun as you describe.



Whereas for hardcore players who like to raid, being forced to do dungeons in between for a meaningless gear grind is something which I personally would have no interest in. If they'd want to lengthen time to completion of a patch, I'd say rather stick the development effort into creating a boss or 2 extra for a raid. I'm missing 7 - 12 boss encounters in this game anyway. The current 4 boss raids are very short. The overall number of endgame raids in this game is also very minimal.

Rather than needlessly fluffing up raiding progression with timesinks outside of actual raiding, I'd much rather see raiding content progression come out of actual raiding content.