Difficulty format for Normal and Savage will remain in 4.0

[Nalien]

Here, we mostly agree. Savage should provide a leg up as it follows a different progression trajectory. Frankly, I think this is where they could experiment with small bits of horizontal progression to make Savage gear stand out. Problem, of course, is why cater to content only 1% of your audience does?

It's a shame SE doesn't attempt alternative means of progression... I'm guessing tomestones exist to make the game easy to pick up, after all anyone joining/returning for 3.4 isn't far behind the rest of us when it comes to Scriptures... The problem I find, is that they've made the game so easy to pick up, that it's easy to put down... I'd say a truly great MMO is both easy to pick up, and hard to put down... That's how you get more subscription fees out of your playerbase (because they're not quitting until the next major content patch), and draw in new players... People playing the game will talk about it and attract new players, people dropping the game between patches will not, if anything they'll put people off picking up the game...

Fine though, make item level meaningless in order to make the game easy to pick up... All they really need to do is create a sort of vanity progression, with items acting as status symbols... They've actually done this with PvP, but PvE they've made no attempt... Almost everything ties back to item level progression, and I can think of very few rewards that actually have any sort of prestige attached to them at this point... Gordian and Midan weapons are probably it, and that's such a small section of raid rewards that overall Alexander still feels unrewarding...

If we go back to Coil, some of that gear could have been nice, even with undersized trivializing the content, given very few still even bother with it, but... Well, anyone can buy a High Allagan Coat on the market board now, without having ever entered Coil... I'd almost be OK with this, given it could give me reason to go back into Coil to farm and craft the stuff, but as a crafter I don't see the point in these recipes... They could just as easily have made the aetherstone stuff like Gordian/Midan pieces that we cannot trade and exchange for equipment... Then players still have to actually do Coil for it, and if you see someone in High Allagan gear, you know they did Coil... Why don't I want the Allagan recipes as a crafter? Simple. They're purely vanity, there is no reason to HQ them... What's the point in having this fairly deep Quality system, when there is zero reason to raise Quality on 90% of recipes?

The two main new pieces of content Heavensward provided? Neither offer much in the way of vanity, it's really about item level once more... Diadem doesn't offer a single unique glamour, and is just designed horribly (I'd have loved a ZNM style system, where we enter and slowly work our way up a pyramid of NMs to get a specific and unique glamour... sigh...), and Palace of the Dead isn't much better... Aetherpool weapons feel like they might be another Relic style grind (there are achievements, and 51-200 has to be a grind for something), which I guess I'm glad to have, but once more, that's about item level, they might look unique, but they're ultimately just reskins of existing weapons, just one step better than what Diadem did... Both these pieces of content are doomed to become irrelevant (Diadem apparently be design, they always intended to replace it with whatever we're getting in 3.5, which is just utterly stupid...) because their main rewards are item level based, and those item levels are already pretty much irrelevant...

We've got minions, mounts, and titles as well, of course, but I just don't find them particularly compelling rewards... Minions I might if Lords of Verminion took off in a big way, which it never will... Even then, for minions and mounts you then run into issues with the cash shop... If we're doing Gordias (Savage) for the Gobwalker mount, not the item level rewards... Then the game is about collecting mounts and minions, and the cash shop becomes a form of pay to win... You cannot beat the game by collecting all the minions unless you fork over some money in the cash shop...

As I said earlier in this thread, I would very much appreciate more Relic style content... I think there is much more potential there than SE is realizing... I mostly enjoy the Zodiac weapons quest these days, it's still got its utterly stupid sections, but overall it feels like I'm working on building up a weapon, and that's great, even if it is just for vanity at this point... Where it falls apart is the Anima questline... Starting it by destroying our Zeta weapons? That's hilariously stupid... I know we can buy replicas which are exactly the same, but they're not the same... I didn't build that replica up over time, I bought it for an utterly pathetic amount of Gil... Beyond that though, the Anima weapon quest falls apart after the dungeons, ever since there has been no direction with the quests... I want to go do specific stuff, I want content to have value in that way... Instead I just have all these options and, as is human nature, I'll just do the easiest... I have not actively put much effort into my Anima weapon, where as I put plenty into my Zodiac weapon, I just don't need to go out of my way to finish the Anima weapon... Play some Feast, there's all the tomestones I need for it... As I said earlier, having two different Relic style grinds would please me quite a bit... In 2.0 we had A Relic Reborn, and that was the easy option. We also had Primal Focus, and that could have been the harder option... While the Zodiac quest had you farming Snowcloak for a Sickle Fang, the Primal Focus weapons could have had you farm Shiva (EX), while Sphere Scrolls had you doing the Roulette for maps, Primal Focus weapons could have had you doing Coil... Could even tie both weapons together at the end, to create a single ultimate weapon for the expansion, hopefully throw in some small challenges like A Relic Reborn initially had (I'd love something akin to XIs Balrahn fight)... You can tie that into item levels, and I'd certainly be for that so long as special snowflakes don't explode en mass upon the idea that the stronger weapon requires more effort to obtain, but you probably don't need to... I'm still doing the Zodiac quests, and it's certainly not for a relevant item level... I'm doing it because the quest is somewhat enjoyable these days, certainly more so than the Anima process, and because I want those weapons... Working on those glamours is a form of progression I can get behind...

Heck, going back to crafting for a second... That could even be a third form of progression IMO... As a crafter, I don't really care about making glamours or equipment people will burn... I want to make something that'll be used... I'd love it if, rather than giving crafters i250 recipes to sell, we instead got our own kind of Relic progression... Rather than going to Gerolt to make a new sword, I hope on Blacksmith and forge my own, and as the updates roll in, I keep improving it... I don't need to sell such a thing, I think the Collectors Glove mechanic could be adapted quite nicely to facilitate such a thing... Obviously crafting is also about participating in the games economy, so they'd still need to be recipes to facilitate that, but... Yeah... Give me A Relic Reborn weapons to upgrade with easy content, Primal Focus weapons to upgrade with hardcore content, and Forged weapons to upgrade through personal crafting... I would enjoy the ever loving crap out of that kind of system, and it would work for me with or without the current dead item level progression system... I'd just want the unique glamour to work towards...

True horizontal progression could also work of course (wow this post got loooong), but Yoshida seems deathly afraid of such an idea... I think this also ties back to making the game easy to pick up, if we had horizontal progression, then one level requires more gear... Even if we take something like IXs system (which I have to plug every single time), which happily dodges XIs issue of hoarding gear in the long run, you have a situation in which new players need to go obtain all this gear to catch up... It makes the game harder to pick up, because there is a bigger hurdle to jump to get to where everyone else is... They could make horizontal progression purely instance based... So rather than skipping Gordias and Midas because you can buy i250 and jump right into Creator, you cannot beat one without the previous... Gordias gear would have an effect that is almost required to beat Midas, and likewise for Midas gear and Creator... This would create a scenario in which raid progression remains intact despite the item level system...

One other suggestion I had, which I cannot remember where I posted, is to effectively give us back 1.0s physical level system back as a sort of content based Merit System, and adjust item level to effectively work as a physical level boost... Kind of like a reverse spiritbond system I guess... Gear would boost your stats, but by playing you'd permanently gain those stats and get no use out of the gear... So for example, you have a full set of i240 and that boosts your physical level to p240, meanwhile you raise your physical level by doing pretty much everything, "Kill Xandes 10 times for +1 physical level" or something akin to that... You wouldn't be able to skip something like Bismarck, which is around the time I think I came up with this... Ravana dropped the best weapons at the time, Bismarck was throw away content... With a system like this, you could get Ravanas weapon for i190, but to get p190 you need to grind Bismarck as well... Would make sense to put the physical level cap slightly higher than the item level one, else there is really just no point, but something like this would create a solid progression system that lives alongside the item level system... New players get to a similar level through item level, while dedicated players raise physical level... That's a much better way to please both casual and hardcore players... Way I've detailed it definitely has some issues, but the core concept seems solid IMO, it makes the game easy to pick up, as there isn't a huge grind to get an up-to-date item level, but it provides something that can be hard to put down, in raising your physical level...

[Kallera]

Mhm. I feel this is a big part of the issue. Even if you still ultimately lose, being able to almost turn around a wipe is both exhilarating and motivating because you have some assurance if you do make a mistake, it can be salvaged...

Totally agree. I never liked that part of this game's design for wipes, where people are just left with killing themselves, and the overreliance of hard enrages dooming an attempt before the players know it.

[bass9020]

Mhm. I feel this is a big part of the issue. Even if you still ultimately lose, being able to almost turn around a wipe is both exhilarating and motivating because you have some assurance if you do make a mistake, it can be salvaged. One of my fondest memories is back in an old JRPG where I was vastly underleveled and assumed I couldn't beat the final boss only to win with just my last character alive. With Savage, you have to be borderline perfect or the whole party wipes. That's already at first, but once the wipes start to pile on, it becomes increasingly frustrating. At least in my opinion.

Agree 100%. One person dying in a fight literally makes it a almost no recovery and starting over is what usually happens, I don't see any reason for this. Sometimes I even wonder what is the point of raise spells when raising someone mid battle won't even matter most of the time. I know some fights can be recovered but majority of the time they can't and hearing people say oh just wipe makes me think why is that even an option?

[ADVSS]

Agree 100%. One person dying in a fight literally makes it a almost no recovery and starting over is what usually happens, I don't see any reason for this. Sometimes I even wonder what is the point of raise spells when raising someone mid battle won't even matter most of the time. I know some fights can be recovered but majority of the time they can't and hearing people say oh just wipe makes me think why is that even an option?

Cant agree more, another reason to not raid, the pressure on memorizing the mechanics and executing them perfectly, where no matter how skilled a person is, they wont be able to make a difference if an "accident" occurs on another players behalf. A lot of instances are like this

[Thayos]

Cant agree more, another reason to not raid, the pressure on memorizing the mechanics and executing them perfectly, where no matter how skilled a person is, they wont be able to make a difference if an "accident" occurs on another players behalf. A lot of instances are like this

Yeah, and I'm also not a fan of games being based upon the "skill" of memorization. Take that out, and the only challenge is adapting your button rotation while dancing around.

There's very little actual true recovery in XIV. Very little actual strategy, either. I remember fights in XI where I'd be the last man standing, and I'd manage to get people up and we'd eek out the win. To me, THAT type of battle was a measure of skill, and I'd finish those fights with a much more genuine feeling of having accomplished something.

[Velhart]

snip

I didn't say random groups can't do it. Point I was making is that people will go the static route over dealing with randoms if they are able to. When I say dumb down, I mean to the point that having a static would be pointless.

[loreleidiangelo]

Agree 100%. One person dying in a fight literally makes it a almost no recovery and starting over is what usually happens, I don't see any reason for this. Sometimes I even wonder what is the point of raise spells when raising someone mid battle won't even matter most of the time. I know some fights can be recovered but majority of the time they can't and hearing people say oh just wipe makes me think why is that even an option?

It's certainly not like this with raids in other games, I can assure you. SE's raid design, rewards, and structure are probably some of the worst I have ever seen in any game that actually bothers with having an endgame raid option.

[Cakekizyy]

Dps checks and makingh a mistake should not be auto-wipe.

[Welsper59]

Yeah, and I'm also not a fan of games being based upon the "skill" of memorization. Take that out, and the only challenge is adapting your button rotation while dancing around.

There's very little actual true recovery in XIV. Very little actual strategy, either. I remember fights in XI where I'd be the last man standing, and I'd manage to get people up and we'd eek out the win. To me, THAT type of battle was a measure of skill, and I'd finish those fights with a much more genuine feeling of having accomplished something.

It saddens me to say it, but that's unfortunately not how this game is... and I doubt it will ever be. That'd require a complete redo and I doubt the higher ups and Yoshi-P are okay with that idea. What you'd like for is open and free combat, where it is unrestricted except by mechanical limitation (as in OOC limitations do not affect any given spell or ability, only cooldowns if present). That type of game is more about skill working in teams, than it is a measure of personal... which any logical person could say is more "MMORPG" than most current games of the genre are.

Old XI is just a "forgotten" category of MMORPG today, as it was hardly about personal DPS output. Yeah, you might do a ton of damage with a Soul Voice'd BRD to buff you, but the rest of your party did too. That game was more about survivability than it was simply about damage. Sure, that BLM could nuke for tons of damage right off the bat if they knew what spells to use, but the floor would be good friends with em immediately after. A good BLM wasn't simply about getting their spells down, it was about measuring how to cast to have good output while also keeping threat below the tank. The jobs that were praised the most weren't the ones that could deal tons of damage, it was the support... the jobs that made you almost permanently stronger (while in party). Along with that, the jobs that people wanted to aspire to had nothing to do with having #1 DPS, rather it was ones that could survive encounters even if their output was abysmal. RDM soloing tons of stuff when geared appropriately was very well received and popular, even if it did take 10x as long as group kills lol.

Team based reliance is a skill that modern players want buried deep under and never dug up again... they just don't want to say it because of how ugly of a statement it is. We don't have time to rely on others, so we want our challenges to be personal. We want that grouping mentality but we also want our groups to be perfectly performing so that it doesn't slow "me" down. We all want to be that MVP in a game that tries to make everyone an MVP. The old school special snowflake, essentially.

We used to look down on people like that, because it hindered our team based efforts, but times change. Today, it's quite the opposite because while it doesn't hinder, it stifles our MVP attempts. Helping others? Pfft, not gonna be recognized for that. Now if I were to be #1 on damage because those numbers are big and people notice big numbers, THAT is where I will stand out the most. **** you guys for trying to keep me down! Oppression!

[Cidel]

Mhm. I feel this is a big part of the issue. Even if you still ultimately lose, being able to almost turn around a wipe is both exhilarating and motivating because you have some assurance if you do make a mistake, it can be salvaged.

Was going to stay out of this topic, but since the conversation turned this way, I need to chime-in with how much I also feel this is a huge turn-off on current raids (and some EX fights even).

Heck, on Ifrit in 1.2x, our linkshell literally had a couple runs where everyone but a Bard of all things would wipe, but since Bard had access to Conjurer and Thaumaturge's cross-class skills in 1.xx it could raise people while kiting Ifrit around the arena while avoiding eruptions and plumes. It was an amazing feeling keeping the fight alive by a thread (especially since re-entry would require more farmed tokens to get back in). I don't think such a thing is plausible in FFXIV as it is now, which is a shame.