Difficulty format for Normal and Savage will remain in 4.0

[zosia]

I agree with you here.
But keep in mind how unmotivated people get if they see things that they know they will NEVER be able to get anyhow... it's always a two-sided blade.

I don't know what kind of rewards would be satisfying to you that would not make casuals feel like they are lesser human beings (exaggerating here) for not being able to clear the content (This is a serious question, I would like to know what kind of reward there could be to make endgame feel worthwhile). For me it's fine if endgame gets higher iLvl, I would have a problem with it though if the gear was completely unavailable to me glamourwise just because my life or my server makes it impossible for me to find the time or the right group to get through the content.

Well, to answer you question, for me at least, exclusive rewards. I want to FEEL justly rewarded for millions of gil spent, countless hours of frustrating progression, and keeping my raid roster filled out. If raid gear cannot be the best gear in the game, then raid gear needs to really have a standout appearence.

Look at guildwars 2, a strictly horizontal progression MMO. The skins coming from end game content are amazing! The detail, effects, and models are unlike most of the other gear in the game. Right now, the normal mode gear set spoils any chance of Midas gear having a stand out appearance.

Savage should have either superior Ilvl or amazing vanity gear that stands out over anything else offered in the game. I would be happy with ONE of those. At least with FCoB, we had some of the most unique looking gear in the game that was only obtainable through raiding. We had an amazing raid story that was only obtainable from raiding. It FELT rewarding.

To be as concise as possible, I feel raids need either the best ilvl or the best glamours. Right now we have neither. If I had a preference between the two, I would take the ilvl over locking great glamours behind savage.

You keep screaming for higher ilvl for raiders but with the current design of content you dont need it. This is me speaking about CURRENT, not about "what may come". Ok so lower tome gear 5 more ilvl's, 10 more, would you be happy? I honestly dont think you would. You say that the reward you get from savage is meaningless but it isnt ilvl that is making it that way. Its the architecture of the gear that is. Currently there is 1 bis piece (maybe two options for some) for end game players, thats it. Thats why it seems meaningless, we are ALL chasing the same stats.

Which is why I keep saying the entire reward structure needs reworking.

There is no diversity therefor it will always feel that way

Increasing the power of rewards will not increase the longevity of content, it will shorten it because once you have all your pieces you will not log in until the next patch. I agree'd about the reward structure though

Sure it would, That's the entire concept of the carrot on a stick. You keep running the content past the first clear until you get that carrot. Right now, there is absolutely no reason to farm gear past your initial clear when you can show up day one of 3.4, buy all ivl250 crafted gear, and be better off than every midas savage raider that farmed a BiS set for The Creator Savage.

Raiding has only ever amounted to bragging rights... EVER.

Nope, there are so many reasons why you are wrong here. I will just highly a big one and move on. Story. Story is a big part of what motivates a raid.

The best gear from raiding is already in the game, it just isnt as high ilvl as you want. Every bis set for people includes at least one piece from savage so I really dont know what you are trying to accomplish.

Trying to save this game from becoming Lord of the Rings Online reborn, but I am afraid that we might already be there.

this point here though
Also, a superior Ilvl in raid gear does have a purpose, it supposed to help you in the next raid tier or give you a head start in the next expansion.

Current gear already does that....

That's a big part of the problem. Current tome gear should not give you the same advantage next raid tier as a Midas savage set does. It completely kills any motivation to keep clearing Midas savage after the first clear.

Well SE did do that once. FCoB's raid gear is so over the top looking, but it is clearly raid looking gear.

I would argue that SE is still trying to make unique looking raid gear, but its just not producing the same results. Another factor is they put a lot of time and detail into non-raiding gear also which makes it blend with other gear sets. We could be proven wrong this tier if the final Alex gear looks over the top and unique.

I really really really hope The Creator offers up some good looking gear.... even typing this makes my heart sink into my chest in disappointment... Yoshida has conditioned me to never put faith in game developers. I feel like we will probably just get more plain Jane gear that is matched model wise by the normal set. My heart sinks because I know Yoshida is just gonna let us all down again :/

I wish I could just take all of your posts, translate them into japanese, and mail them right to Yoshi P. You are so on the money.

One thing I would add though is that there is somehow more incentive to normal mode than savage, even without the far higher accessibility. NM should not have gear progression that is required by raiders, and instead offer something along the lines of rare glamour and minion drops, independent of savage, or even tie it into the relic from the get go. I feel like another aspect of the NM/savage debate is that raiders are burnt out with the aesthetic and bosses of alexander before they even step foot into savage, which doesnt help the lack of rewards or fight difficulty when it comes to participation and enjoyment.

I appreciate the kind words.

I do agree with the midas normal incentives being out of whack too. You are absolutely right. How exciting can it be reaching a new savage alex floor when you have already been farming alex normal for weeks.

[Velhart]

snip

Well SE did do that once. FCoB's raid gear is so over the top looking, but it is clearly raid looking gear.

I would argue that SE is still trying to make unique looking raid gear, but its just not producing the same results. Another factor is they put a lot of time and detail into non-raiding gear also which makes it blend with other gear sets. We could be proven wrong this tier if the final Alex gear looks over the top and unique.

[yexie]

Well, to answer you question, for me at least, exclusive rewards. I want to FEEL justly rewarded for millions of gil spent, countless hours of frustrating progression, and keeping my raid roster filled out. If raid gear cannot be the best gear in the game, then raid gear needs to really have a standout appearence.

Look at guildwars 2, a strictly horizontal progression MMO. The skins coming from end game content are amazing! The detail, effects, and models are unlike most of the other gear in the game. Right now, the normal mode gear set spoils any chance of Midas gear having a stand out appearance.

Savage should have either superior Ilvl or amazing vanity gear that stands out over anything else offered in the game. I would be happy with ONE of those. At least with FCoB, we had some of the most unique looking gear in the game that was only obtainable through raiding. We had an amazing raid story that was only obtainable from raiding. It FELT rewarding.

To be as concise as possible, I feel raids need either the best ilvl or the best glamours. Right now we have neither. If I had a preference between the two, I would take the ilvl over locking great glamours behind savage.

Ok wait, but isn't the gear from alex savage higher iLvl? I mean you got your i240 a while ago, no? And the weapon is i245, the highest in the game? Correct me if I'm wrong.
I guess they would do better if the iLvl doesn't jump so much with each patch, have alex normal be i220 then tomegear be i230, savage i240 with i245 weapon, then after some month the general public gets to upgrade their stuff to i235 and weapon to i240 for example, then raidgear would actually ALWAYS be better... and it wouldn't actually matter for the general playerbase at all... because all the other content is easily beatable with i220 or less anyhow...

I'll be honest, if raiders would actually get REALLY awesome completely newly designed gear SETS I'd be upset (simply because of all the recycling that happens with gear in general), but higher iLVL plus maybe a super shiny i245 weapon or something I'd find totally acceptable.

[zosia]

Ok wait, but isn't the gear from alex savage higher iLvl? I mean you got your i240 a while ago, no? And the weapon is i245, the highest in the game? Correct me if I'm wrong.
I guess they would do better if the iLvl doesn't jump so much with each patch, have alex normal be i220 then tomegear be i230, savage i240 with i245 weapon, then after some month the general public gets to upgrade their stuff to i235 and weapon to i240 for example, then raidgear would actually ALWAYS be better... and it wouldn't actually matter for the general playerbase at all... because all the other content is easily beatable with i220 or less anyhow...

My main gripe with odd number patches (3.1, 3.3, 3.5 someday) is that there is no new raid gear, so standardizing the item level is not needed. "Catch up" gear is not needed while the current tier is still relevant. I would have even been fine with augmented upgrade items coming from niddhog EX. But standardizing everyone's gear when the next alex raid has not even come out is asinine.

I'll be honest, if raiders would actually get REALLY awesome completely newly designed gear SETS I'd be upset (simply because of all the recycling that happens with gear in general), but higher iLVL plus maybe a super shiny i245 weapon or something I'd find totally acceptable.

Well, I would prepare yourself to get upset. Lets do a quick thought experiment shall we...

The dev team knows the rewards for savage are poor. The dev team also wants to avoid any performance gaps between raiders and non-raiders. If I am lead producer that does not want to create ilvl disparities but I know I need to increase raid rewards, I would, of course, choose to double down on cosmetic rewards.

I would put into this game some of the best looking raid sets that the player base has ever seen and I would gate them behind savage. That's how games like GW2 operate. Since gear is virtually meaningless, the best cosmetic rewards come from challenging end game content. I would bet 10 million gil on the notion that this is the kind of conversation Yoshida is having with his team about 4.0 as we speak.

I'm not sure if you didn't read my whole post or if you're just ignoring it.I personally don't feel entitled to get the gear without doing anything for it, and if you get a super awesome "legendary" weapon or a certain item because you beat something super hard,I don't feel entitled to get it and I don't feel bad at all for not having it, but savage gives a WHOLE set of items that are unavailable to 90% of the players, it's not a single special item, it's a whole set and it gets farmed till everybody has theirs on each and every alt, so yea I don't think it should be anything else but a recolor with higher itemlevel, I do however think that there should be something else there as a reward at the end of savage aside from just a simple achievement.

I think most of us would just settle for an Ilvl bump and savage and normal being complete disassociated for eachother, meaning raiders don't have to run normal for prog and Normal will have no impact on Savage. Just let them exists as two separate stand alone entities.

Maybe it's because there generally is such a lack of choices when it comes to gear... There is always only ONE set of gear with a certain iLvl when a new patch comes out.
For me it makes sense there is a gap in iLvl between endgame and casual, but if you don't want a sour feeling over your effort not being meaningful, a casual or midcore player doesn't want to have that sour feeling either, and trust me, we have it too.
Grinding tomes is not rewarding, the gear that drops in the new dungeons is meaningless unless you have an army of alts to equip. By the time the weapon upgrade to i230 (7 weeks) is possible, we don't even "need" it to clear the content, since the iLvl is already high enough to faceroll through everything anyhow, the i240 upgrade now even more useless... we actually have even less to do than you.

This is what all the white knight-ing back in ARR afforded us. People wanted a game that they could play for 20 mins a night. do one 24 man a week, and stay current with the end game. When you have a player base that WANTS that kind of meta, you end up with dungeons that have no teeth, content that is boring after two weeks, and an endgame that lacks any substance what so ever.

This is what a casual 20 min a day MMO looks like. This is what the casual players wanted. Content that could be completed in a casual time frame on the casual player's terms. /shrug

We do actually already have a loose precedent for this in the rewards from The Feast's ranked mode.

Admittedly it's hard to say that's hard evidence that they'd move in that direction, because PvP's rewards in general are even less impactful than Savage's due to the item level caps, but it does show that they're willing to institute glamour sets as the ultimate reward for a particular type of content.

I often think of this, thanks for pointing it out. SE should extend the feast ranking system to raid rewards. I am not a game dev, so I can't say for sure how such a system should translate to PvE. I think we see mechanisms in wow like this where vanity mounts from HC/Mythic are guaranteed to drop while the content is relevant but are reduced to 1% drops once the next expansion comes out.

Maybe the gobwalker and fauslet should not have a 100% drop rate come the expansion. But honestly, that's small potatoes for me. I don't care who goes back to alex in 4.0 to farm vanity items.

[Ibi]

If I am lead producer that does not want to create ilvl disparities but I know I need to increase raid rewards, I would, of course, choose to double down on cosmetic rewards.

I would put into this game some of the best looking raid sets that the player base has ever seen and I would gate them behind savage. That's how games like GW2 operate. Since gear is virtually meaningless, the best cosmetic rewards come from challenging end game content. I would bet 10 million gil on the notion that this is the kind of conversation Yoshida is having with his team about 4.0 as we speak.

We do actually already have a loose precedent for this in the rewards from The Feast's ranked mode.

Admittedly it's hard to say that's hard evidence that they'd move in that direction, because PvP's rewards in general are even less impactful than Savage's due to the item level caps, but it does show that they're willing to institute glamour sets as the ultimate reward for a particular type of content.

[Nalien]

We do actually already have a loose precedent for this in the rewards from The Feast's ranked mode.

Admittedly it's hard to say that's hard evidence that they'd move in that direction, because PvP's rewards in general are even less impactful than Savage's due to the item level caps, but it does show that they're willing to institute glamour sets as the ultimate reward for a particular type of content.

I actually wonder if they might do something like this for Palace of the Dead... They mentioned a Leaderboard for Floor 101-200 I think... Create an automated reward system (because Feast didn't have one, we had to wait for a GM to send out our rewards...), have some metric to measure success in the Palace, then rank players up based on that on a weekly/monthly basis... Send out some tokens for us to farm or something... Could be interesting...

Probably just going to get "Grind Aetherpool to +99 to exchange for an i255 weapon" or something instead though... However a Leaderboard alone could peak my interest... Depends how the community as a whole embraces that though, it'll probably end up the same as the Lodestone Grand Company leaderboards, as in I've just reminded a bunch of people those even exist... Would be quite nice to aim for #1 at Palace of the Dead, then defend that position... More likely to get me interested in the content than some sh*tty item level I don't need...

[Ibi]

Probably just going to get "Grind Aetherpool to +99 to exchange for an i255 weapon" or something instead though...

That'll be from 51-100.

I actually wonder if they might do something like this for Palace of the Dead... They mentioned a Leaderboard for Floor 101-200 I think... Create an automated reward system (because Feast didn't have one, we had to wait for a GM to send out our rewards...), have some metric to measure success in the Palace, then rank players up based on that on a weekly/monthly basis... Send out some tokens for us to farm or something... Could be interesting...

There's some people that the leaderboard thing will appeal to, but it's probably going to be its own niche group (like a lot of the game's content) and most people won't pay it much attention, especially if there's nothing else tied to it.

In addition to the gear sets that you got for beating a certain threshold, I think WoW's Challenge Mode dungeons each had a unique title associated with them that the group currently holding the record (per server, maybe?) could use, and lost once someone beat their time, which was a fun perk.

[Welsper59]

I'll be honest, if raiders would actually get REALLY awesome completely newly designed gear SETS I'd be upset (simply because of all the recycling that happens with gear in general), but higher iLVL plus maybe a super shiny i245 weapon or something I'd find totally acceptable.

This is actually part of the old school MMORPG tradition. It's honestly what got a lot of us to do the difficult raids and spend more time setting them up than actually doing them lol... a lot more time. I personally don't see it as a bad thing, since effort should be rewarded accordingly. Given that ilvl currently has next to no real value to have the best of, it's not exactly testament of the difficulties endured. As you might think I'm implying, I am indeed saying that prestige, bragging rights, and flaunting hard to get things is part of nearly all real hardcore raiders agenda. While there are always a few exceptions, the rest of the bunch absolutely love flaunting their achievements as time goes on or showing off new gear.

But hey, that's exactly how most casual players are too. They love being noticed for their vanity choices or achievements, it's not much different. Hence, why it'd actually upset you to know someone else has access to something you don't, even though you technically do have access (you're not literally barred from getting it).

[yexie]

This is actually part of the old school MMORPG tradition. It's honestly what got a lot of us to do the difficult raids and spend more time setting them up than actually doing them lol... a lot more time. I personally don't see it as a bad thing, since effort should be rewarded accordingly. Given that ilvl currently has next to no real value to have the best of, it's not exactly testament of the difficulties endured. As you might think I'm implying, I am indeed saying that prestige, bragging rights, and flaunting hard to get things is part of nearly all real hardcore raiders agenda. While there are always a few exceptions, the rest of the bunch absolutely love flaunting their achievements as time goes on or showing off new gear.

But hey, that's exactly how most casual players are too. They love being noticed for their vanity choices or achievements, it's not much different. Hence, why it'd actually upset you to know someone else has access to something you don't, even though you technically do have access (you're not literally barred from getting it).

Yea I get you, and I'm generally not even against that, it's actually just something that particulary doesn't seem to fit with me in this game, which has to do with how gear progression in this game works. I also don't mind if it's single items that are totally OP and only a few hardcore people can get it. but here we simply don't have enough choices to alternate our gear. In the previous game I played I had different sets for different playstyles/dungeons, you'd hit max level and just have a bunch of choices, whereas here we just have whatever is the highest iLvl, with a little bit of freedom to go for a little more of this or that, always having to trade in iLvl for these choices.
If everybody generally has 10 different choices I really don't mind if there are a few people with 11 choices, but if there is basically only one choice it kind of becomes a big deal if there is a small elite group of people that has 2 choices.

Blah, this whole talk about the gear progression in this game left me pretty frustrated actually, because I totally get where raiders are coming from as well.

[Sparktacus]

I'll be honest, if raiders would actually get REALLY awesome completely newly designed gear SETS I'd be upset (simply because of all the recycling that happens with gear in general), but higher iLVL plus maybe a super shiny i245 weapon or something I'd find totally acceptable.

The glamor debacle could easily be solved by SE if they consolidated it entirely and made it so you could glamor any armor piece in the game without actually having it. Heaven forbid they streamline this system that is getting wildly out of hand, AND give EVERYONE access to anything they wanted (glamor wise). Problem solved in terms of unique looks.