iLv needs to change

[JimboTCB]

Solution: Make lv 120 weapons as easy to grind as 120 gear (or vise-versa).

I hate to make this a "I hate the relic grind" thread, but it's really the cornerstone of the OP's problem.

Poetics weapons take all of 3 weeks to farm, and that's only because of the weekly currency cap. You could farm a 110 soldiery weapon in one afternoon if you were so inclined. The ease of obtaining gear isn't the issue, it's the laziness and disrespect for other players that leads to people cheesing their itemlevel with no regard for their actual performance. Some people don't care about being bad and just want to put in the absolute bare minimum effort necessary to get carried through content, and making weapons easier to grind out isn't going to change that.

[radioactive_lego]

Poetics weapons take all of 3 weeks to farm, and that's only because of the weekly currency cap. You could farm a 110 soldiery weapon in one afternoon if you were so inclined.

Why would I (anyone) waste their poetics on a weapon when you could get a poetics Head & Chest to 130 that same timeframe?
Oh, and I've put all this time and energy into a this Relic, that becomes effectively useless if I buy a new one. Furthermore, the among the grindiest parts of the Relic quest is gaining light which I get from doing dungeons with it equipped (and gaining Alexandrite, which I get by spending Soldiery). I'm not even going to get into the achievement debate.

Not only are there multiple incentives to using your Relic in content, but there's incentives to spend your Poetics and Soldiery elsewhere.
Players must have a complete lack of rudimentary sense and proportionality to buy a poetic weapon (or even a soldiery) if they already possess a Relic for that class.

[Valkrist]

Why would I (anyone) waste their poetics on a weapon when you could get a poetics Head & Chest to 130 that same timeframe?
Oh, and I've put all this time and energy into a this Relic, that becomes effectively useless if I buy a new one. Furthermore, the among the grindiest parts of the Relic quest is gaining light which I get from doing dungeons with it equipped (and gaining Alexandrite, which I get by spending Soldiery). I'm not even going to get into the achievement debate.

Not only are there multiple incentives to using your Relic in content, but there's incentives to spend your Poetics and Soldiery elsewhere.
Players must have a complete lack of rudimentary sense and proportionality to buy a poetic weapon (or even a soldiery) if they already possess a Relic for that class.

When I was gearing up my PLD for Second Coil, I bought a Burtgang and even unweathered it before Final Coil came out. I had a Curtana in my inventory and I was grinding it out. I bought the Burtgang because I absolutely needed a weapon that was competitive for the content that was available. Any tank will tell you how awful it is to try to tank with a subpar weapon against DPS or healers with up to date weapons. Tanks are forced into situations where they have to have a strong weapon to even do their job. Other jobs don't get that immediate feedback that says that their weapon isn't cutting it.

As for a "rudimentary sense and proportionality"... Upgrading your weapon is by far your best bang for your buck if you're not getting the endgame weapon in your hands literally today. In today's terms, if you're literally farming up Dreadwyrm weapons today, then yes. Buying a potetics weapon is a waste of your resources. If you're not capable of farming Dreadwyrm weapons, then going for the fastest weapon to reach an equivalent, or closeness, is by far the best usage of your resources to make the gap to reaching Dreadwyrm. Then if you're going to argue that they're making a relic, then their weapon should already be at least i90 (passable for most non-endgame content), but not Zeta level since we're still talking about reaching that point of strength, then buying a poetics weapon is still by far the best thing you could do to immediately improve your chances of getting Dreadwyrm weapons.

[lyndwyrm]

Not only are there multiple incentives to using your Relic in content, but there's incentives to spend your Poetics and Soldiery elsewhere.
Players must have a complete lack of rudimentary sense and proportionality to buy a poetic weapon (or even a soldiery) if they already possess a Relic for that class.

3 weeks of capping poetics at a generous 8 hours a week, 24 hours.
2 weeks of bad WoD runs taking 1 hour each, 2 hours.
<26 hours from nothing to i130 poetics weapon.

How far on a fresh relic (or at any other stage for that matter) can you get in 26 hours? With current rates, I personally could very likely finish atma, but probably not animus and definitely not novus. I'll be optimistic and say animus (i100). If you're starting from i55, the gain in gear from i55->i130 on head and body slots is 22(head)+36(body)=58 str/dex/int/mnd

The gain in weapon damage for physical classes from i100->i130 is 8, with a weighting of 8:1 for WD:STR, that equates to 64. Then there's a 14 gain from the mainstat on the weapon.

In summary, the damage gain from changing weapon from i100 to i130 is greater than changing head and body slot from i55 to i130 by about 20 mainstat points.

-snip-My overall ilvl was 90. It would have been 100 if every piece counted equally(or I don't understand averages).

Edit after readi ng the thread: As a newer player, I haven't found an easy way to get a higher ilvl bow. The ones I see for poetics or soldiery also require coil drops according to what I looked up. Did I see that wrong or am I just looking in the wrong place?

Each body piece is weighted the same currently, and 2-handed weapons are weigted doubly (multi-slot armor pieces also have increased weighting). With the gear you listed that should put you at 98 or so. However, the rounding can seem weird sometimes (I think there's a floor/ceiling function in there somewhere).

As for getting increased ilv weapons, there's no quest for the zenith (i90), you just buy 3 thavnarain mist and trade them in with Drake the furnace in North Shroud. The two tomestones now can be gotten in either Sycrus tower or from the weekly quest doing all three crystal tower stages.

[SarcasmMisser]

Why would I (anyone) waste their poetics on a weapon when you could get a poetics Head & Chest to 130 that same timeframe?
Oh, and I've put all this time and energy into a this Relic, that becomes effectively useless if I buy a new one. Furthermore, the among the grindiest parts of the Relic quest is gaining light which I get from doing dungeons with it equipped (and gaining Alexandrite, which I get by spending Soldiery). I'm not even going to get into the achievement debate.

Not only are there multiple incentives to using your Relic in content, but there's incentives to spend your Poetics and Soldiery elsewhere.
Players must have a complete lack of rudimentary sense and proportionality to buy a poetic weapon (or even a soldiery) if they already possess a Relic for that class.

This post is a perfect example of a player who has been rendered completely ignorant of the potency of gear by ilevel. If you are a damage dealer a weapon upgrade is by far a more potent upgrade than a head and chest piece, especially if said items have horrible stats for a given job.

[Felessan]

Item Level should be the first stat people can look at to judge their relative strength, but as is, it's just a prerequisite stat people look at to allow them to enter instances or join Party Finder groups, or compare as an epeen between people with optimal weapons.

ILVL requirement only ensure that you are not too undergeared for this particular content, so making weapon requirements is pointless as even if it have greater weight in your performance it doesn't ensure in any way your success.

But then a problem still stands about what to do about this suddenly-common occurrence of big-armor, little-weapon players?

The biggest impact on performance is lack of skill, not a bad weapon.
I (relatively) often see how people with ILVL90-100 weapon outpefroms people with 120+ weapons just because they know their class and proper rotations.
A quick calculation gives me that at ILVL130 changing weapon from ILVL90 to ILVL135 improves damage by about 15% based on NIN stat weights. It's not that much - you can easily see in WoD for example how people have half of dps of the top spot with similar equipment just because they obviously either not trying or doing something wrong.

They can technically enter T13. But if they're a DPS, for example, their damage output will be about half or less of what someone with an i135 weapon and full i120 gear + one i130 ring (also amounting to an overall iLv of 123) can do.

This is not even remotely true. Just checked myself. With i55 weapon I have 72% of dps of i135 weapon (40% drop).
You really underestimating the combined power of other gear slots. Vast amount of primary and secondary stats far outweigh additional weapon damage stat weapons have.

[synesthetic]

ILVL requirement only ensure that you are not too undergeared for this particular content, so making weapon requirements is pointless as even if it have greater weight in your performance it doesn't ensure in any way your success.

The biggest impact on performance is lack of skill, not a bad weapon.
[...]
This is not even remotely true. Just checked myself. With i55 weapon I have 72% of dps of i135 weapon (40% drop).
You really underestimating the combined power of other gear slots. Vast amount of primary and secondary stats far outweigh additional weapon damage stat weapons have.

I never said anything about making weapon requirements, and never said groups fail because of people with small weapons.
Nor did I ever imply that all underperforming players are only in that state because of having small weapons; skill is a separate issue which I am not trying to address here.

I will take your point that my estimation on an i90 weapon vs. i135 was off.
Between figures I remember from progression as each endgame tier came out, and what I keep hearing in instances now, that estimation felt right.
A drop in damage by 28% is still a pretty big impact though..

I don't have a job with both an i135 and an i90, so I had to substitute using an i125 and i70 with approximately the same drop in damage.
Equipped with the i70, I did about 75% of what I could do with an i125 and my regular armor--similar result to your test. Cumulative iLv was 110.
Re-equipping the i125, and removing an earring to bring my cumulative iLv down to 110, I did 92.5%.
Also with the i125, and removing body armor to bring my cumulative iLv down to 110, I did 89%.
Each trial was a full skill cycle lasting 2:07. Can't really eliminate randomness like crits from the trials (well I sort of can, but I don't have time for that right now), but I think the results of each are still reasonable.

My main point still stands that item level does not properly reflect your character's potential, and is thus misleading.
Two people with the same item level, but one with a far smaller weapon, have extremely different potential. Even different armor slots are not equal.
Almost everyone here knows all of this already, probably because they either happened to read it or someone happened to tell them. There is no metric in the game that shows this. Item Level is the closest people have, and is referenced everywhere as being super important. The second-closest stat would be that... "Attack Power" and "Attack Magic Potency" stat that just mirrors your primary damage stat, making it also misleading and pretty useless.

The game pushes people to learn how to play their jobs, but does little to convey anything about how to effectively do so, beyond just pushing buttons. Stuff like this helps brew bad blood between "good" players and "bad" players. Changing how Item Level is calculated, or providing some means for players to at least make a better-informed decision on how to upgrade their gear, is just one thing I'd like to see happen to help lessen the gap, because I'm sure there are a lot of "bad" players who are honestly trying but just don't know better.

[radioactive_lego]

This post is a perfect example of a player who has been rendered completely ignorant of the potency of gear by ilevel. If you are a damage dealer a weapon upgrade is by far a more potent upgrade than a head and chest piece, especially if said items have horrible stats for a given job.

Woo name calling. Congrats.

I will now address people who are rendered completely ignorant of the human condition. You (anyone) still hasn't addressed the fundamental conceptions that the Relic weapon *is your endgame weapon* regardless of it's ilv. Or the fact that some gears of lower level are better than others (some Demon pieces vs. Ironworks on SCH, for example).

I'm not ignorant, I understand there is a modest improvement in deeps when you upgrade weapon vs. gear. However, you are fighting the instinctual urge of people to double down on arms they've invested time (and subscription time = money) in.

Metaphor:
Very few people are inclined to buy a new Mitsubishi Evo X, when they have a 67' Vette in the garage they've been actively restoring for the past 2 years. It doesn't matter how much bang for the buck you get out of the Evo - I'm buying a garage for my vette. I'm getting a leather jacket with a Corvette logo. I'm even buying a bumper sticker for my Chocobo that says; "my other ride is a stingray."

Thus, the Ilv solution comes in two flavors:
- Make 130 gear as difficult to obtain as 130 Relic weapons.
- Make 130 Relics as easy as 130 gears.
...or continue to see folks with an average wLv of 102 and gLv of 118.

EDIT: Considering the uselessness of Relics in the near future; the former solution seems more appropriate.

[lyndwyrm]

I'm not ignorant, I understand there is a modest improvement in deeps when you upgrade weapon vs. gear. However, you are fighting the instinctual urge of people to double down on arms they've invested time (and subscription time = money) in.

This is true, if you've put time into something, then you don't want to replace it with something that makes the previous work moot. If you're already at animus+ on your relic, then sure, it's your prerogative to gear however you like.

The problem is that the feedback the player gets from the game is the same whether they upgrade 2 gear or accessory slots or their weapon. So the average item level display is a little misleading, if interpreted as a gearscore for the player as the community is like to do.

The implementation of a gearscore, strictly speaking, fulfilled the request of the playerbase for a numerical value to determine how well geared someone was. All the bells and whistles with it are nice, but the way the score is actually calculated is pretty half-assed. As some of the numbers presented before have displayed, there can be a 25+% change in available damage output between two identically scored gearsets, and that is the problem with the current weighting.

[Lemuria]

Players must have a complete lack of rudimentary sense and proportionality to buy a poetic weapon (or even a soldiery) if they already possess a Relic for that class.

If your relic is already at ilvl 125 or higher (in other words, an actual Zodiac) then sure, getting a Poetics weapon isn't going to be a big upgrade. You might as well take the time to get it to Zeta and have a stronger weapon. For anyone else who doesn't yet have their zodiac, it's a far quicker and simpler alternative, not to mention saves you thousands, if not millions of gil.

The Zodiac quest line isn't something you can easily complete in 3 weeks unless you have a LOT of spare time on your hands and are wholly dedicated to completing Atma books, farming alexandrite, farming light and getting all the expensive craftables for the penultimate step. Getting a poetics weapon, which is a significant improvement over any other slot, is much easier to do.

Getting a relic is easy. The initial level 90 weapon you get is practically gift-wrapped for you. Getting a zodiac is a massive time and money (and sanity) investment, and anyone who ignores that simple fact can't be taken seriously.