Should Alexander hard drop highest item level gear?

[Galdous]

Was in a extreme group so I could not respond. Compared to every other mmo on the market this game is very well casual to people who wish to raid. I know successful groups on Balmung who raid about 9 hours a week and have beaten every fight pre echo. I am just hoping that Yoshi P. does not break down and give in to the instant gratification players who emerged in the market over the last 5-6 years. FF 14 can be a great game that appeals to casuals without giving in to demands that some people feel they must be given the best gear in the game without having to put in much play time because they pay a sub.

And considering it seems he listens more so to the Japanese crowd he will not buckle so easily from reading the few japanese forum topics I see about input about the end game. Japanese forums are a whole seperate beast then the NA forums which we are for the most part a instant gratification/give me now and if i do not get what I want I will unsub mentality of pressure.

[SDaemon]

^ LOL

10/char

Oh, looks like he finally edited it over an hour later.

[Brannigan]

The biggest problem with the Final Coil system is that upgrade items came from the Hunt. Hunts are basically just FATEs and shouldn't reward anything but glamour gear. A good way to do the system would be something like

Dungeon gear is at level X-5

Tomestone gear is at level X
Normal mode dropped gear is X
Hard mode dropped gear is X+20
Upgrade items drop off of boss 2 (accessory upgrade), 3 (armor/weapon upgrade), and 4 (both upgrades)
Weekly quest to clear raid boss 1 (accessory upgrade item) and 2 (armor upgrade item)

24 man raid drops X+10 and has a weekly quest for accessory upgrades

Dungeon gear becomes more relevant, and it gives real incentives to do the introductory bosses for non-raiders (PUGs start accomplishing this pretty fast). They've said there's going to be more of an item level spread and that kind of implies more options, so I'm hoping for something like that. Also it'd be great if 24 man gear was upgradable with 8 man hard mode drops.

[DrOstler]

Basically everybody here who thinks tome gear deserves to be on par with coil gear

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8I9pYCl9AQ

[HaiHai]

The staggered system worked perfectly and they should very well stick with it, OP seems to want to lock out decent gear to anyone but the most elite of the elite.

You can acquire 130 upgrade items without even having to see the final turn of FCoB. How is that the "Elite if the Elite"? Even extremely casual raid groups will down bosses before the following patch.

Instead of thinking about locking out gear to the elite, how about locking out raid level gear to people who actually raid. It makes no sense that someone can get a raid iL 130 set of gear without ever setting foot inside of Coil.

To make matters worse, in most cases, the poetics upgraded gear can be better than the equivalent gear piece from coil, devaluing further the incentive to actually kill the bosses and do the raid content. Tome gear should be supplementary gear used to help upgrade and fill in pieces that you haven't managed to acquire yet. By no means should it ever be best in slot.

If you worried about casual players never being able to do the raids to see them tomes and get the gear, than that is what the whole point of moving raids into duty finder and giving them echo buff is for.

[Selli]

I dunno if this has been mentioned yet, but...

Another point of having two end-game gear sets is to have the ability to mix and match (aka stat builds). This is mostly important for DPS and Tanks who have to hit a certain accuracy requirement as well as having favored stats (for example, BLM is more likely to favor SpSpd, while SMN is more likely to focus Crit and even though they share gear-sets, the values preferred on each class are different).

Personally, as a WHM, I like to avoid Crit on my gear, as I find it generates a lot of aggro in older content and I like my heals to be constant (as a heal isn't always going to 100% crit), so I like to know that if I heal my PLD he's gonna get about 2.6k HP back every single time. I also favor SpSpd over Pie as I trust my static enough not to die (most of the time). Because of this my current build is high Det (337), medium SpSpd (566), and lower Pie (416), and lowest Crit (341). This build is only possible with 4 Coil items and 7 Poetic items (I have a second set with slightly more Pie and less SpSpd that is 6 Coil and 5 Poe, but the 4/7 is my preferred set).

If Poetic armor were stuck at i120 and I was forced to get all Coil armor to be i130 I would have pretty decent Crit (451), low Det (270), medium SpSpd (557), and low Pie (409). Which isn't too much of anything and not really ideal for either healer (at i130 SCH's can get easily 580 Crit between Poetics and Coil gear, so even though 451 is a lot of crit, it's not anywhere near the max).

Having 2+ armor sets for the end-game level/ilevel/whatever is actually super common in MMOs and some are easier to get than others (and I think FFXIV does a good job of making it accessible to everyone without being overwhelming, so even those with children and/or crazy jobs can keep current with the end-game content if they desire).

I even think the current weapon system works quite well. Max ilevel weapons drop from the hardest boss in the current game, that makes sense. But I also like that I can go out and acquire a weapon of the same level, but with my preferred stats on it. Even though the t13 Cane offers me 40 Pie and 37 SpSpd, my Zeta weapon offers me those (though valued less), as well as Det. As for the i130 weapons... I like that my side classes can have a nice weapon that helps them (eventually) reach that i130 number, but I really dislike how much of the weekly capped tome it costs on top of needing a twine. It makes it really hard to gear 9 (soon to be 12) other classes with armor, weapons, and accessories.

TL;DR I think the armor system is fine, and I actually quite like it. I like having the freedom to mix and match the items I want to get a build I like as my play-style is different from a SCH and even a bit different from other WHMs. But I do think that needing a ton of Poetics, and a Tome, and a Twine to get an i130 weapon is kind of ridiculous, especially when I have 9 other classes that are still using i110 weapons and I would much like to upgrade them.

[RiceisNice]

...

Because we're at the end of the content cycle. I've brought this up in my own post if you've skipped over it. When FCoB came out (in 2.4), the only way you could get ilvl130 items (whether it be dreadwyrm or augmented) was only through FCoB. It was only until 2.5 that they made augmented obtainable outside of FCoB, and even then that was staggered to only be acessories, body pieces 3 weeks later, then allow the ilvl 120 weapons to be obtained without touching FCoB. If you're against the idea that obtaining gear or getting stronger as the content gets older, then I'd disagree with you complete.y

Whether it's BiS or not is a completely different issue because of stat weights and the itemization on some of the pieces (esp for classes like BRD and SMN). Some augmented pieces are better than dreadwyrm, some dreadwyrm pieces are better than augmentation (and hell, some of them are straight up bad compared to demon or even crafted)

[Yamimarik]

I still kinda find this hard to believe, given that they also said that they're taking clear percentages into account. Not to mention the huge amount of people that have made it known that they find locking story content behind difficult raid content to be unacceptable. I dunno. I'm just waiting to see an official announcement and translation rather than stuff picked from interviews that may or may not be exactly what's on the tin.

Oh no, I concur with you honestly. I'd rather have an official Mod or Yoshi-P announcement on the forums or in an official LL or something myself. It was more just towards the OP as to where he'd heard what he was talking about, and I knew what I had said was easily found in various sources.

[HaiHai]

Because we're at the end of the content cycle. I've brought this up in my own post if you've skipped over it. When FCoB came out (in 2.4), the only way you could get ilvl130 items (whether it be dreadwyrm or augmented) was only through FCoB. It was only until 2.5 that they made augmented obtainable outside of FCoB, and even then that was staggered to only be acessories, body pieces 3 weeks later, then allow the ilvl 120 weapons to be obtained without touching FCoB. If you're against the idea that obtaining gear or getting stronger as the content gets older, then I'd disagree with you complete.y

I skipped over nothing. The whole point of my post was to say that you should not be able to obtain 130 upgrade tomes outside of Coil. To which, you and others would suggest that that would make it too hard for casuals or that it makes it hard to upgrade your gear, and I reminded that the whole point of adding coil to duty finder and giving it echo was to do those things already. Making 130 gear obtainable without even going inside Coil is unnecessary and ridiculous.

In order to obtain raid level gear, you should have to raid.

[RiceisNice]

I skipped over nothing. The whole point of my post was to say that you should not be able to obtain 130 upgrade tomes outside of Coil. To which, you and others would suggest that that would make it too hard for casuals or that it makes it hard to upgrade your gear, and I reminded that the whole point of adding coil to duty finder and giving it echo was to do those things already. Making 130 gear obtainable without even going inside Coil is unnecessary and ridiculous.

In order to obtain raid level gear, you should have to raid.

Then we'd have to disagree there. I personally do not see a reason to have to gate augmented ironworks behind content that is essentially at the end of the cycle (7 months). And even then, as I've mentioned before, the augmented ironworks pieces aren't even that good for some classes, and it's not like they'll ever get dreadwyrm (which is still considered the best piece of equip for some classes) without stepping into FCoB.

And here's two side questions that's probably unrelated to the topic. Do you feel it's any different to clear FCoB with full augmented ironworks pieces, versus clearing when echo is out?
Should relic weapons never be ilvl 130+ unless it requires the raiding scene directly (not light farming out of FCoB that is)

Don't take either of these questions the wrong way, I just make sure that I understand your viewpoint correctly when you want to keep ilvl 130 gear behind raiding content.