DEV REQUEST: Individual loot

[KisaiTenshi]

Same like WoW?

I've never played WoW... I've played other games...
buut...

Generally the loot system is as bad as it is in MMORPG's due to the historical problem of either "farming" easily obtainable items for people who ~already~ have the gear, and other players picking up the loot from the floor that players didn't immediately pick up. One of the earlier "vac-hacks" that were eliminated by changing how loot systems work so other players couldn't pick up objects that wasn't theirs, and later didn't drop anything to the floor at all, just straight into inventory.

The first time I actually saw the greed/need system was SWTOR, which I already knew was a WoW knock off because of how many freaking people kept comparing it during the Beta. Something that Final Fantasy XIV:ARR does better (or worse, depending on your POV) is that the gear system at least resembles gear. Games like SW:TOR, Star Trek Online, and numerous medieval-fantasy have no distiction between a poorer gear and a great gear other than a rarity indicator, so when you get these need/greed boxes, people don't #1 know why they are getting the box, and #2 if the item being rolled for is good or trash.

Fortunately FFXIV's stuff isn't usually trash. But I think automatically giving people what they want on the first go is just incredably stupid, players won't replay content once they get what they want from it, but on the other hand, I think RNG-based loot is also pretty stupid. How many times have I run WoD and not seen the healer chest piece? I've never seen it even once. I've seen the DRG/NIN/MNK gear dozens of times. I gave up and just bought the poetics tomes gear chest piece.

If the token system does what I think it will do, that will be replacing the "tomes" system we already have as well. eg every time you complete a dungeon but pass on the loot, you get a token for that dungeon. Each dungeon, like before only gives certain sets of gear, and if you pass on every gear, you just get the token instead. Trade several tokens in for the specific gear piece you want. This is kinda how the level 70/80/90 gear worked before, you rolled on the "old" unusable gear and traded it in for the piece you wanted. Except this probably simplifies the process so you don't have to dig through a dozen menus of NPC's looking for what exactly is traded for what.

Flooding the game with yet more useless stuff that is neither crafting materials nor tradeables just makes it not worth doing once you get what you wanted. So SE has to balance the needs of the few with the needs of the many. The entire tomes system was flawed in that way, because people were doing the dungeons to farm tomes, but since you can only get 450 poetics in a week, most people could get that in a day if they really wanted. Or just spread it over a week and do just each roulette once per day.

They will need to seriously change the loot since they are adding more jobs. I would prefer individual loot reduced to only minions and TT cards and make them UU (maybe not TT cards if they plan to implement a trade system) since I'm really tired of seeing minions selling more than actual gear that can be used for progression as well as annoyed at how many times i get beat on the Puff minion.

I'm hoping that loot will be distributed evenly i.e in the first raid level you will get four loot chests with two being for dps and the other two for tank/healer.
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You can't sell the Puff of Darkness. Though it will let you keep need'ing on it every time (that really should be fixed... don't allow "need"'s on unique items the player alreadys has, in both their inventory and their retainers.)

As for "one chest per person" , that's exactly how Mabinogi works, and is actually worse than FFXIV in that regard. In Mabinogi, IF there is a rare item, it is randomly added to one of the end chests ... along with a bunch of usually trash loot and some money. Getting rare stuff from dungeons in that game was super-hard (as in people would run it 100 times and get nothing every time, RNG is hateful.) and the rare items sold for millions, which is why people farmed them, even dragging along as many "mule" characters just to fill party spots so they got more chests. That system is awful for so many reasons, but the fact that you could run it 100 times and get nothing but trash that you can't even sell just makes it so much more infuriating.

There's no reason for people to explore dungeons if they are guaranteed the item on the first go. A game stops being a RPG game with a risk vs reward, when impatient people take the fun out of the game.

The proposed Token system sounds like a way to just put a floor under the amount of grind needed to get something useful. So you don't end up running a dungeon 100 times, and see the Ninja pants 97 times and Dragoon gear 3 times, but you're a caster.