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

[Alahra]

EX primals were never gating coil though.

I didn't say they were gating it. I meant gateway in the sense that the original three EXes provided a further way for less hardcore players to become acclimated to 8-man content and more raid-like mechanics. And as I've said elsewhere on these forums, EX primal rewards past the first three have always been atrocious (even Shiva was pretty terrible in the end, though some of the bracelets were itemized well enough that they had some value), and I think part of the reason for that is that they took the wrong lesson from the "failure" of the original three.

Rather than keeping the difficulty closer to the original three and putting meaningful rewards on them, which will inspire people to push to clear them who might not otherwise, they've lowered the difficulty and lowered the value of the rewards to match. Ramuh EX and later Ravana EX were probably the closest primals to the original three in terms of complexity/difficulty, but both of them were released with ultimately lackluster rewards (Ravana had meaningful weapons for perhaps a month, but beyond that, learning the fight wasn't particularly worthwhile since tomestone weapons were available). I've not attempted Thordan yet since I didn't see the point in learning the fight only to replace the weapon with Anima a month later), so it sort of falls into the same category as those two (with Yoshi-P notably saying that the next EX Primals wouldn't be as difficult as Thordan—so we're probably back to the same old thing for those).

[UBERHAXED]

I didn't say they were gating it. I meant gateway in the sense that the original three EXes provided a further way for less hardcore players to become acclimated to 8-man content and more raid-like mechanics. And as I've said elsewhere on these forums, EX primal rewards past the first three have always been atrocious (even Shiva was pretty terrible in the end, though some of the bracelets were itemized well enough that they had some value), and I think part of the reason for that is that they took the wrong lesson from the "failure" of the original three.

Rather than keeping the difficulty closer to the original three and putting meaningful rewards on them, which will inspire people to push to clear them who might not otherwise, they've lowered the difficulty and lowered the value of the rewards to match. Ramuh EX and later Ravana EX were probably the closest primals to the original three in terms of complexity/difficulty, but both of them were released with ultimately lackluster rewards (Ravana had meaningful weapons for perhaps a month, but beyond that, learning the fight wasn't particularly worthwhile since tomestone weapons were available). I've not attempted Thordan yet since I didn't see the point in learning the fight only to replace the weapon with Anima a month later), so it sort of falls into the same category as those two (with Yoshi-P notably saying that the next EX Primals wouldn't be as difficult as Thordan—so we're probably back to the same old thing for those).

Yeah but that's called progression. You do the intrinsically easy fight (bismark) then move to the harder fight with a better weapon (ravana had the best weapon in the game) to prepare you for the next tier of fights (the raids which were released later). What you're really saying is that no meaningful rewards should have come from tomes (which actually they threw a curve ball here since it didn't require a raid drop) or the anima weapon. I don't particularly disagree though, weapons should come from progressively harder battle content, with the easiest offering the worse rewards and the most difficult offering the best rewards. When they start making weapons come from other sources, they start messing up progression, which is what they outlined and are going to fix in the opening post.

[Alahra]

What you're really saying is that no meaningful rewards should have come from tomes (which actually they threw a curve ball here since it didn't require a raid drop) or the anima weapon.

That isn't really what I'm saying at all. Primals can still provide meaningful rewards even if they don't provide weapons (some of the old i90 Primal Accessories were best in slot, after all). Tomes essentially have nothing to do with it.