Poll: Would you Like to see a change in the current formula of FFXIV

[Anienai]

They could introduce new soul crystals in place of talents trees.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

They could introduce new soul crystals in place of talents trees.

They did that with smn/sch, and have said tehy wont be making that mistake again.

[Anienai]

They did that with smn/sch, and have said tehy wont be making that mistake again.

Ah, okies.

My bad.

[Zojha]

They did that with smn/sch, and have said tehy wont be making that mistake again.

And to be honest: I'd rather have a new job than a talent tree of an existing one anyway. If only gearing them wasn't so iffy with the lockouts... >_>

[Shurrikhan]

And to be honest: I'd rather have a new job than a talent tree of an existing one anyway. If only gearing them wasn't so iffy with the lockouts... >_>

This is one of my biggest points of contention with FFXIV. It sells itself as an alt-friendly game, yet the only advantages it really yields is bonus exp, not having to relevel cross-classes, and not having to redo the MSQ, and at the cost of ALL time-locked gear progression. Virtually all raid, casual raid, and currency gear really needs to be dedicated to a single job, the rest picking up the waste and spares, whereas other MMOs' multiple single-class characters can each raid and gear up. It feels like another one of those things that would have made sense in the build-your-own job system of 1.0, especially since gear was less class-locked back then and atrocious RNG was your *only* barrier. But now it feels out of place and, worse, in conflict.

It's not typically a crucial issue, just as other players of MMOs wouldn't typically be able to keep up to date nearly as many jobs as we have access to, and slightly overgeared farm parties here can pick up decent alt gear easily enough, but it's still... awkward. It's that wall-cabinet everyone hits their head on from time to time, or that strange but not quite ugly lawn ornament that the grass would look barren without but doesn't otherwise have a reason to exist. But a lot more complicated to replace than either...

But then, what would a practical alternative be? 1 piece of loot per job per week? That would feel like we're trying to get people to run some 20+ casual raids per week? All currency-based gearing is done via upgrade items onto job-specific gear and each set can go through only whatever value in upgrades per week? That'd feel every bit as out of sync, just because of the sheer chasm between the time the average player wants to put in and what's seemingly encouraged (whereas, oddly enough, if the same space for gear progression were there without those little clues of deadlines and the like, it probably wouldn't go nearly as noticed). And that's not even mentioning how stale the re-running of our content gets as is, just between the weekly and relic grinds.

We could go for a softer splitting of gear, such as might be achieved through multiple main stats per job and all gear being simply tank, LNC-optimal all DoW, all DoW, or all DoM, as before, so that you can end up gearing a few at a time with each upgrade...
...though then our item sets would look like a similarly odd conglomeration or else lose identity, and likely fewer models would be made per ilvl (unless they decided to give more secondary stat choices per item level tier). And of course there's the massive challenge of balancing stat-niching, such as with the evasive GLD/PLDs of 1.x, as compared to much more offensively-stated Tanks, something SE only just tore down the remainder of (apart from parry avoidance) for better or worse.

We could go for even further reduced stat complexity, effectively combining stats further or making class-based stats on the same item so there are only 5 gear sets—ranged, caster, melee, tank, and healer—down from 7 to 13, but that'd do nothing for gaining alt gear in multiple roles and would partially strip, rather than just revise, class identity.

As a sub-category of that, you could go ahead and open up the sets while keeping them ideal only for one, such that anyone could technically wear heavy mail (at penalty) and tanks could wear lighter armor for lesser defense but slightly greater offense, such as by increasing tank base potency but then diminishing everyone's output based on increased armor class, while perhaps DRG and tanks are less effected by those negative armor-based output multipliers.

You could simply allow an extra piece or whatnot of loot from certain sources that cannot be taken for the same job you already got loot for. A band-aid, but possibly decent.