Request : In Stormblood, allow us to gear without tomestones

[Shurrikhan]

I honestly think there's a fair bit of benefit to time-gating, in that it allows easier content tuning and doesn't further force absurd hours of grinding upon any would-be raider. That said, it'd be nice if Stormblood at least found more ways to accomplish that than the exact same tomestone system we'll have seen for 5 years. If the weekly farm seemed a slogging grind, imagine if there were uncapped non-raid sources of gear that you'd need to farm for ilvl (or item weight) before you're even allowed entry into the 'up and coming' raid groups.

More importantly than that for me though, I'd like to see some real alt support. The whole "all classes on one character" aspect does little when only one job can realistically be maxed at a time during progression. In my opinion, gearing alternates during progression should not be gated any more than catch-up would be a patch later, if even that. I really don't care if another player with more time can bring every one of his jobs from 240 to 243 in the first week of a new tier while I can only move one job to that point. It's his time, and it's not forcing any extra grinding out of me just to be invited to a raid.

As for your exact suggestion, the main issue I see with this is that where in a tombstone system, you could feasibly make a far larger range of (up-scaled) dungeons relevant for meeting your quota, making the dungeon gear relevant in and of itself would make those runs last only as long as RNG requires, and it again comes with all the annoyances that RNG usually carries. Granted, you could have two modes for dungeons, and maybe even add on scaled difficulty settings, so on and so forth to give you seemingly less grindy options for getting gear, means that require less time but more skill, etc., which would certainly be a benefit. How much of one, I'm not certain.