Coil Loot Sytem

[Nutz]

I'm a bit torn on this issue. I like that they implemented sands/ oils through coil (though making them significantly more obtainable through hunts 3 months later was odd), but I felt they were too gated. 4 upgrades between 8 people for a full clear of SCoB was rather meager, especially since you could only upgrade gear previously purchased with soldiery tomes that had their own lockout.

On the one hand, i110 soldiery stuff, regardless of secondary stats, is more or less equivalent to coil 2 gear. Aside form accuracy, secondary stats don't have a very dramatic effect -- nowhere near the effect that the increased primary stats have. On the other hand, having a system that allows certain people (and eventually all participants) to go unrewarded in practice for completing difficult content is obnoxious. I'm not sure that this can be remedied without a cumbersome and potentially exploitable system, but then again I'm not sure the 'exploits' would be unjustified. Something, perhaps, where you voted on what class gear should drop before you start. Initially everyone would likely just vote for their own class, but once you had everything you could get from that turn you can start voting for other classes to take your own class out of the loot table.

A system like this would allow you to specifically gear classes that had thus far been underrepresented, but it would also make selling turns much more enticing and potentially open the door to loot bullying in some groups.

Having large, randomized loot tables is fine for repeatable content, even knowing that early in the game I went through roughly 50 Garuda HM battles without seeing my weapon drop, but I feel it's a bit less appropriate for weekly lock out content. Finding an equitable compromise between being rewarded 100% of the time and 0% of the time can be difficult. I would personally be fine with a system that was 100% token based, just like tomestone distribution. Clear a turn, get your tokens, spend them how you like (each turn having its own tokens). A lot of people would not like this as it puts a fairly definite shelf life on the content and removes the excitement of FINALLY getting your drop. It does completely prevent people being left out though.

There are other solutions of course, like only allowing drops for classes currently participating, but that blocks some secondary class gearing as well as not preventing the problems with duplicate drops week after week that several people experience. A combination of the vote system and the currently played class system might work very well for most cases. Essentially the game could check what class everyone is playing and remove from the loot table any classes not present. Further it could check the inventories of the players and their retainers to deduce what equipment has already been obtained and remove those form the loot list as well (being careful to, for example, check that both the BLM and SMN had the caster's ring before removing it). In the unlikely event that all loot is removed from the table after these checks, loot from unplayed classes is reintroduced. This system might break down at the point where all players already have all items available from a turn, but I'd imagine it's completely unrealistic to expect that people would even be bothering to play through a turn at that point (it would necessarily be removed from the weekly lock out by the time everyone has everything without a concerted effort between multiple groups to engineer this scenario).