Alts Vs. Multiple jobs

[psyhcicwars]

What benefit is it to level multiple jobs on a single character when you can only get one piece of loot every week. As on the other hand I can level multiple characters and raise their item levels at the same rate. To me this is out of balance. Wouldn't it be better to put a loot lock based on job and not character?

[dejavutwo]

You do end up having to pick one main per major patch if you want to progress as fast as possible with one character, but having multiple classes allows you to much more easily switch your role between patch cycles. You won't have to repeat story, unlock dungeons, level alt classes for your cross class skills, ect. It would be a daunting amount of work to switch classes if you had to start from 0.

The other thing, is unless you are working on the most current raid tier, all content is easily completable in the previous patches item level cap, so spreading around your upgrades isn't going to be as much of a hindrance. But, if you are doing the current raid tier, you may end up gearing an off-spec or two depending on drops.

[AdamFyi]

Think of getting one kind of gear as a power-up to your character. Getting multiples of them gives you a stronger power-up. They restrict it by character to prevent you from overgearing multiple jobs at the same time on tge same character, basically. Alts have the benefit of having getting loot every week multiple times, but having to constantly keep running the same dungeon over and over and having to relogin every time you want to switch jobs sounds a bit tedious.

[Zykor]

Sounds nice in thought, but in practice it wouldn't work.

Imagine, I run as PLD then run again as WAR to get double tank loot for the week. You could counter and say that they could separate the loot by class. That would then increase the loot pool of each chest, which is ultimately a terrible thing. (Still looking forward to how the loot system changes in 3.0, as YoshiP said it would)

It would also make content obsolete much faster. Take WoD for example, if every class could get an item a week, WoD could literally be useless in a matter of 5 weeks.

That being said...the fact that we can be multiple classes at once doesn't mean much at end game raids. The typical person will specialize in one and leave the others in the dust. Not sure if there is a way to alleviate that, if we should even consider that to be a problem.

[Chihaya]

It works if you seriously have the time to gear/level up all cross class and able to cap poetics/run WoD and Coil on all your characters.

For me, it is just better to have 1 well-geared character rather than many gimped characters as I don't have the time to take care of so many.

[AzraelX]

I have two characters. I can't even imagine having more than that. Its alot to even get to level 50 im only at level 34 Just do level up is a long process. but i like having one male character and one female character to fully enjoy the game and for rp purposes. ITs fun but its very time consuming. So its going to take me awhile to reach end game

[Dyne_Fellpool]

In a perfect world (imo), there would be zero benefit to leveling alts as opposed to just leveling up all the various jobs on one character. The ability to do so is a major selling point for this particular mmo.

While I don't think this will ever be 100% the case (alts give extra retainers, etc) I definitely agree that it is the ideal the devs should be designing toward.

[Chihaya]

I have two characters. I can't even imagine having more than that. Its alot to even get to level 50 im only at level 34 Just do level up is a long process. but i like having one male character and one female character to fully enjoy the game and for rp purposes. ITs fun but its very time consuming. So its going to take me awhile to reach end game

Indeed, I have a second character as well but I just couldn't keep up with content on both characters anymore - it is now just a gil generator (treasure maps, retainer ventures, desynth). But I'm wondering why I even bother as there's not much gil sinks in this game =/ I just broke 45mil but there's nothing to spend it on.

[stoxastic]

The ability to play multiple jobs is great in that you don't need to start a whole new character if you want to play a different job. HOWEVER, this does not mean you should be able to gear ALL of them out at the same pace with the latest and greatest equipment (WoD lockout, Poetics cap, etc). You can still put in the time to gear every class to at least i110 from soldiery drops. That's still pretty good.

The ability to gear multiple jobs with the latest and greatest gear is a big benefit of having and alt. You'll need to put in double the weekly work, but it allows you to do it. Alts also allow you to raid on different jobs, which might appear to some people.

[Kidblinks]

When I first started I used multiple alts until I learned what cross class skills were. Just seems the most efficient to have one character that is everyone.