So anyone else tired of grinding tomes weekly for gear?

[Kallera]

Personally, I can't say I'm tired of it as such. I mean, I rather farm tokens that lead to a guaranteed reward than farm things and may not even see my reward in over hundred runs. I had that a lot in early WoW. Wasn't fun, neither for me, nor the people who came help me on my farming runs. Sure, there was a big celebration when it dropped, but only because the suffering was finally over and we could go and do something fun instead...

Depending on the end game community, Tomestones don't exactly alleviate this, particularly if you are gearing to participate in content past the dungeon runs.

[Aniforani]

I wouldn't mind repeating dungeons if they had some randomization to them. Add some secret rooms, rare spawns, and random quest npcs. Start the dungeon with the players separated, maybe include a portal to a dungeon that cannot be entered otherwise. Pop another party in there for a PvP deathmatch to enter the final chamber. I don't want to know whats behind the next door, let it surprise me.

[MugenMugetsu]

I feel that the weekly tomestone cap should be abolished. The common argument to that would be that if everyone can get all the tomes they want as quickly as they want then that could cause people to get all their gear and unsub for a period of time. This is a nonissue. I think this thread alone has served to provide examples of why people are interested in letting their sub lapse, possibly permanently. I feel that in this particular instance, with our Armoury system, and the ability to be any one of 13 jobs, we should have the freedom to level, and gear up, any of those jobs, that we choose to, at our own pace.

I feel that if I want to grind hard and collect 3000+ tomes of lore in a week, that should be my prerogative, and there shouldn't be a system in place that would prevent from being able to do so. It seems that this imposed limit on the number of tomes one is able to acquire is, while in theory, good business practice to keep us running on the treadmill, keep the subscriptions coming in, and to allow SE as a company to continue to increase their revenue. However, if the voice of a few on the forums can be theorized to represent a much larger number of voices which are left unheard, it seems that regardless of what restrictions are placed on the number of items that can be obtained weekly, regardless of what they are, there will be those that are content and there will be others who are left with a sour taste in their mouth. Subs will be lost. Subs will be remain. It really doesn't matter.

What it really comes down to, at the end of the day, is whether or not the playerbase is having fun. I think it's come to the point, going on 3 years now, that placing weekly restrictions on the number of items that one can acquire is more of a negative thing that ultimately serves no purpose other than to slow our progression to the point that when we have finally reached a place where we are content with the gear we have acquired, for the jobs we wished to acquire gear for, the gear is made to be largely irrelevant, aside from the fact that it can be used to progress in grinding out new tomes for new gear.

This is, from what I gather, what the playerbase is getting tired of. This is where there needs to be a change. We, well I guess I can't speak for everyone, but a lot of us, are tired of working hard for months on end to gear up our jobs only to have to replace all the gear that we just spent a large amount of time to acquire with new gear. Add to that the fact that with the current gear allowing for materia to melded to it, a lot of us will have dumped quite a large sum of gil into placing materia on the gear that we will be replacing. It's almost as if placing materia on the new gear is pointless other than to make you feel better about the gear, and your stats, as unless you do Savage or are looking for an edge in EX primals, there's no point in the additional stat boosts you get from the materia as the current content doesn't require those additional stats in order for you to be able to easily clear the content. Also, in regards to materia, I feel that we should be able to unslot materia from items that we have had that materia melded to so that we can use the materia we purchased with our hard earned gil on other gear as we acquire new gear. Then again, I feel that this opinion would most likely be unpopular and somewhat unreasonable as the materia is "melded" to the gear and also a gil sink which helps to encourage a stable and healthy economy. I understand a lot of people rely on spiritbonding and then converting gear into materia and then selling that materia on the MB as a source of income and being able to reuse materia would not be good for those that do rely on materia as a source of income so I certainly don't expect there to ever be a system implemented that would allow us to reuse materia after it has been melded to a piece of gear. However, even though I am by no means poor, in game, I would love to be able to save upwards of 600k for an equipment upgrade by reusing materia I have already purchased, and melded to a piece of gear I am replacing, by unslotting it from the piece I am replacing and melding it to a new piece of gear.

New content is largely DoA as new content, such as new dungeons, are typically tuned to ilvls that are less than the ilvl of the average player attempting the content on their main job so any new dungeons added are faceroll content and offer very little in the way of rewards or challenge. It's not the gear that drops from the chests that gets us excited, unless it's a nice new glamour, and it isn't even necessarily the tomes we get from running the new dungeons that gets us excited. In my experience, it's finally getting that new piece of tome gear, and upgrading it with materia, or whatever upgrade item is going to bump up it's ilvl that gets me excited, that and the off chance that it's a cool glamour.

The two dungeon EX Roulette is getting really, really, old. I, for one, am so very tired of queuing EX roulette daily only to end up in Antitower for the umpteenth millionth time. We need more dungeons in EX Roulette to provide us with more variety to keep us excited about playing. I don't know how long it takes to fully create a brand new dungeon, but with patch cycles becoming quite boring, it seems that having 2 to 3 patches a year that add 3 or more dungeons would be a good move on SE's part and it would keep us more entertained between patches. We're already well overdue for a new 24 man dungeon. Void Ark has been out since November 10th, and here we are 4 and a half months later and it's still the only high level 24 man raid that we have available to us, which most of us have already ran a ridiculous number of times to the point that it's really not that much fun anymore and more of something we feel obligated to do so we can get our Farthing and our Matter and possibly gear drops for upgrades or glamour. I would assume I'm not the only one who feels that it's a bit much to expect your playerbase to be content with the same 24 man raid for 4 and a half months and counting.

A lot of posters in this thread have mentioned being FFXI vets, and I too spent over 3 and a half years in Vana'diel and I honestly feel that the dev team for this game could learn a lot from the successes of FFXI and I strongly feel that they should brainstorm with the FFXI dev team when it comes to creating new content. To repeat what others have said, gear in XI was something that after acquiring it, that piece of gear could last you for years. When you obtained that piece of gear that you worked really hard to get it felt like a true accomplishment not an, "Ok I grinded tomes for a couple/few weeks I'm gonna buy me a new shiny." There's really no real sense of accomplishment with the vast majority of gear acquisition in this game and I feel that needs to change. No, I'm not suggesting that XIV be turned into XI-2. I'm not saying that at all. I just feel that there needs to be more creativity when it comes to creating new content and taking examples that have worked very well in the past for XI, or any other MMO for that matter, and then applying those ideas with a FFXIV flavor to them could work really well in breathing fresh life into the game.

In conclusion to my long winded rant, I'm losing faith that we'll ever see any other systems in this game to break the mold from being on the same gear treadmills and 5 years from now it's going to be the same thing, everyone will be ilvl 600+ and there will be something like 12 relevant pieces of content to do, at most, with roughly 40-50+ dungeons, 12+ primals, 16-20 floors of Alexander, 6-9 towers, and a ton of other content that will all be irrelevant due to the way that the system is set up. This to me is sad. Very, very, sad. Also, in 5 years any new players hoping to really experience this game as it is intended to be experienced are not really going to get to have the experience that a very large number of us have been able to enjoy. I would be surprised if they would even be able get their MSQ progression done in a reasonable amount of time due to the fact that old content required for MSQ completion would be so very old at that point that no one would be running it anymore.

I guess only time will tell. I really hope that a Community Mod can bring this thread to the attention of the Dev Team, and more importantly, Yoshi P. These forums are a place for player feedback. Yoshi P has always stressed that he is very interested in player feedback as a means of improving the game. Well, here's a great deal of player feedback in this thread. Let's just hope our voices are heard and that we're not all in here just talking to ourselves and hope that our comments do not fall on deaf ears.

P.S. My apologies if my post seems to be a bit all over the place. I'm at work and was interrupted several times while posting this.

[Pomelo]

It is so boring, and red scrips on top of that, then mchachi matter, and then alex gear too, those are the tick boxes.

Then its other stuff, but I'm so bored of keeping on top of the tick boxes, that I don't feel like doing other stuff.

[missybee]

While I am not personally tired of Lore just yet, I am definitely not jumping for joy every time there's a new tomestone we have to get 450 of per week. I feel like the system is a bit tired, but I don't really know what SE could do to breathe life into it.

This is the system we have in the interim though, and I really suggest doing a variety of activities to cap weekly. The Feast is generally a quick, albeit occasionally infuriating way to get lore. Bird farming is also...pretty equally infuriating, but it works?

I'm not really doing a good job of selling this stuff.

I was definitely in the same position as you in 3.1 though, OP. I had actually unsubbed for a time. When 3.2 rolled around, a few friends decided to get together and attempt to form a Midas Savage static, and I feel like that really helps keep me motivated. What will keep you excited about the game is unique to you though.

I completely understand the XI nostalgia though. It's kind of a shame that XI has changed so much! Though, having a Trust harem is kind of awesome.

[Thyranne]

It'd not be so bad if there was more variety. Why can't they create a Crystal Tower roulette that gives you 35 or 40 tomestones of lore? It'd be as much a expert dungeon (not roulette) drops but it'd create more variety and probably be slower. Why does the level 60 roulette give so little tomestones of lore? Or even better, merge the level 60 roulette with the expert roulette. If you get any of the dungeons from patches 3.0 or 3.1 the run would be faster but give less tomestones.

[Tabmow]

yup,same here.finding myself not logging in as much atm.

[Myriads]

Part of the problem as I see it, is that we have a mixed player base of old school and new school players. The things that made FFXI 'work' were often things unique to the era of the game. And XIV lives in a different era where many people do not have the time to spend they once did. So it has to offer a different play experience. Now some do have that time to invest just like in 2005, and this new experience will always be coming up short for them. But the majority don't. So we live in a compromise. And no one is happy with compromises.

People seem to want horizontal gear options. But since gear gets trashed so fast, that is not an option that is feasible.

So why not offer horizontal progression another way? We have the Minion, TTT Card, and Mount, and music menus in place already. How about adding something called, oh... Runes. That drop from Bosses, trash, common world mobs, world NM's... basically EVERYPLACE.

More in next post... 1000 characters is... annoying.

[Ibi]

I'm just tired of it. Seriously. Just not all that interested in savage for some reason.

Not to suggest that I disagree with the general premise, but if you're not interested in Savage, why do you need to cap your tomes every week? Everything else currently in the game can be beaten in i210 without too much of a struggle, so getting new gear serves only to a) be prepared for 3.4 and b) provide character advancement.

The four raiding/limited-tome tiers the game has seen so far have last 30 weeks (mythology), 31 weeks (soldiery), 34 weeks (poetics), and 33 weeks (esoterics). A full set of gear currently costs a total of 5890 tomes.

Even using the shortest of those ranges, that's just 197 tomes per week in order to fully gear a job before the next set of gear is added. That can be achieved with just three expert dungeons per week (assuming you do absolutely no other content that awards lore).

Worth noting that this is wrong? You can get all the lore weapon in 3 months. You have the option of forgoing the proper way of getting them by doing easier content for a longer period of time.

Tomestone is a raid drop; you don't need to use midan gears.

There are currently 13 jobs in game, so in order to get all the lore weapons a raid group would be need to give every single tomestone they get to a single person. I suspect there aren't too many groups that would be willing to do that.

Getting every member of a static even just 3 weapons would take 24 weeks, or almost six months.

Gear doesn't get trashed as fast (although times are changing) so you gear up once with workable gear then work hard for BiS which is optional or trophy-like.

Generally speaking, the longer gear is expected to remain current, the longer it takes to acquire it. In FFXIV, gear is replaced roughly every six months, and you can generally expect (outside of the start of a tier, when Alex normal provides a quick intermediate step up) to get a new piece of gear every one to two weeks.

In FFXI's level 75 cap era, to provide a counter-example, gear remained current for several years, but you'd be lucky to get a new piece of gear every one to two months. My Salvage group, for example, obtained a total of 33 completed items between approximately a dozen people over the first 19 months of the event, running it an average of three times a week. That means everyone was getting a drop from that event (we'd be running other events like Dynamis, Limbus, Sky, Sea, etc. also) once every seven months, running it three times a week.

At this point, I don't even know how they'd go about fixing the problem. They've dragged along the same path for so long that I'm starting to think they're out of ideas. I do think it needs to be done, however, and before people start to tire of the storyline which is the only thing that has kept some of us subscribed.

Diadem could have gone a long way to fixing it if they'd been even a little bit creative in it's implementation (that was certainly my hope prior to 3.0). Unfortunately, they chose instead to tie the rate of rewards to how fast you could kill things, with nothing else even being a factor.

There have been many good suggestions from many people on other things they could do with it, so hopefully 3.3's iteration will address this some.

[Zumi]

No it works great and we are getting new end game content to do every few months.