The Current Status of FFXIV Patch 3.1 and How to Address it Moving Forward

[RiceisNice]

Honestly, I feel like FFXIV does a better job with the content model than WoW did, for me at least. We get more dungeons per Expansion than WoW ever did, at least for now--I'm honestly a bit worried about them going down to 2 per major patch. Are we going to be at 1 per major patch in 4.x? I sure hope not.

WoW's dungeon stays more relevant as far as the gearing process is concerned, and you certainly did not outlevel them (or at the very least, exhaust the novelty of them within the first 2 weeks because of Expert Conflip) as soon as they came out or within 4 days after hitting level cap. They also have the achievement systems behind said dungeons which adds self-imposed challenge or dynamics, making it a lot more varied than FFXIV dungeons can achieve.

but I also don't generally enjoy Raid content, so FFXIV's focus on regular release of low-man/midcore content is much more appealing to me than WoW's Raid-focused model. I also prefer FFXIV's "smaller" Raid scale, which means that FFXIV has been the first MMO where I've actually been interested in raiding to a significant degree (current Savage Alex notwithstanding because of the difficulty level).

This is sorta where you need to hit both sides of the spectrum, and not hit the extremes of both ends (which they are doing consistently). My server population has significantly diminished because of the mass transfers off just for the raiding scene. Lower population leads to lower number of crafters, decreasing the supply of crafted items (especially with specialist recipes) and a dead open world, making for a really not so fun time.

But as far as 2.x content goes, you're probably out of luck. They've already touched on roughly half of the content HW brought. We'll likely see a stage that touches on the Primals in some way, and one that touches on the Levequests in some way. Anima already interacts in a small way with Diadem (the crafting mats come from there), but they'll likely tap that in the future, too. If they were already using all of these things in this first step, we'd be retreading 3.0 content again and again, and personally, I'd much rather revisit a little of the older content in each stage so I'm not getting burnt out on the freshest stuff that more rapidly. At least then, it's a trip down memory lane through something I probably haven't done in awhile (or at all, in the case of Beast Tribe quests).

As far as relic steps is concerned, they have not touched on level 60 content, trials or EX primals directly (sans the roulette), or ARF (which desperately needs attention, and it's not bloated with long cutscenes like praetorium anyway so I don't see a problem with it being lobbed into a lvl 60 roulette), temple guildleves, or centaruo marks (which can also be obtained from daily hunt marks if you wanted to take a daily approach on it). They've been re utilizing the content within the 2.x cycle just fine for the entirety of the relic steps.Your bolded statement I honestly don't have a problem with, that's the norm they had established with 2.x's relic questline. I just don't like the idea of going back to the 2.x cycle for anima quests again with that in mind.

There's also the matter of what the steps require. They could do something like Animus books for 3.x dungeons, FATEs and temple leves (and the eqvuilant of what we have now would be anima books that send you back to do 2.x fates and dungeons). Like not exactly doing the books, but similiar on concept like how step 3 mirrors the broad approach, open ended of zodiac

And don't forget that they are adding implementations to PvP (and I think diadem) in 3.2, so it's another perspective...something like obtaining Nacl compound from a random match making or frontlines in celebration of it.