Sorry Yoshi, but if you award the best weapon in the game by winning the lottery...

[LalaRu]

...When a novice who does not necessarily knows how to play their class has the same chance as someone who has spent many hours learning their class to get the very best piece of gear in the game, something is incredibly wrong.

That was the selling point of GW and it didn't seems it gone "terribly wrong".

Anyone who is playing XIV ARR from the very start remembers it wasn't too much hard to get one of the best weapons in game, the relic weapon, bested only by latest raid's one.

Giving the chance again to get a top tier weapon without being in top 1% playerbase, is imo a welcomed balancing, because the higher level weapons were starting to be an exclusive for anyone with too much free time to play, and it also is a clear "stop" signal to the too much people that were thinking to be the only "elects" that "deserves" that gear.

[Iromi]

I raid and do the hardest content and this stuff don't bother me one bit. If you want gear and stuff to last...well that was 1.x, and most people seem to make fun of it and look down upon the good stuff in 1.x and FFXI. *shrug*

[St0rmchild]

Giving the chance again to get a top tier weapon without being in top 1% playerbase, is imo a welcomed balancing

The anima relic wants to have a word with you.

[Violyre]

Can I have your stuff?

[Sicno]

Because it's another way (= rng) to give items along with relic (= time) and the raid (= effort).

But WHY would you add the RNG way for getting a weapon BETTER than the other options? There are times where RNG makes sense and times where it doesn't. Just imagine if at the olympic games besides the medals and cash rewards for winning the competitions they would also award platinum medals and cash rewards bigger than those of the gold medals to random athletes who participated in a special competition right before the closing ceremony, regardless of how they performed, just like a lottery and by being there. Tell me if that would make any sense.

[Hyrist]

The anima relic wants to have a word with you.

Anima relic was never designed to hold top tier for long anyways. Remember it has the smallest window of relevancy even without the inclusion of Coven weapons. The trade off is that they have some of the most interesting glamours in the game (subject to taste, of course).

[Nerisu]

Giving the chance again to get a top tier weapon without being in top 1% playerbase, is imo a welcomed balancing, because the higher level weapons were starting to be an exclusive for anyone with too much free time to play, and it also is a clear "stop" signal to the too much people that were thinking to be the only "elects" that "deserves" that gear.

That doesn't mean that it needed to be ilevel 280. 270-275 (with glowy effects for glamour) would have worked well for everyone.

[Dreggit]

(OT does anyone ever look at the tags at the bottom of threads?)

I understand the sentiment in that those that worked hard on their il275 weapons and see why those complaints are valid.

However, with the expansion more or less around the corner. Is it really that big of a deal?

It's true that a weapon is the most important piece of gear for pve/pvp content but in about 2 months or so all this won't even matter anymore.

With all the exploitable more easily advantageous stuff that players do daily to get an advantage over other in allll forms of content, this is the not, in my mind, a big issue.

As I've noted before elsewhere, complaining rarely gives way to solutions but perhaps giving alternatives that'd make it a better would provide a more positive approach to a solution.

I get tired reading through pages and pages of complaints. I can't imagine what the devs feel going through all the different languages forums as a whole. I'd rather see alternative solutions to improve what's already there

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

Why would it be wrong? The attitude you are exuding is self-entitlement. There's no other descriptor. You basically make an argument to deny other people from content purely because you don't like having bad luck. That's a horrible foundation upon which to stand when it comes to game philosophy. If your enjoyment is fixated upon having something someone else cannot because of some arbitrary standard, then what does that really speak about the behaviors we're encouraging in game design?

The problem of loot and value needs to be re-assessed on a foundation level.

I've been growing into the philosophy of late that MMOs lately have had it backwards - Gearstats should not be the reward, but rather the preparation for the challenge. After all, if the true definer of the reward is supposed to be skill and dedication, then providing additional stats to only the skilled presses a hand on the scale of opportunity.

Instead of being upset that your trophy no longer has top stats (that was always going to happen anyways). Instead perhaps delight in the fact that there's another trophy out there to obtain - it's still going to be hard. Yes, some people will get incredibly lucky and get it sooner. But that does not devalue Alexander Weapons - that devalues Coven weapons. Alexander Weapons are trophies for those who work hard in raiding. Diadem weapons are for those who endured and got lucky in Diadem. Anima weapons are for those who persisted and worked their way up the Anima chain.

Three different methods, three different trophies. That's it. Obsessing over stats that never remain relevant for long really does put to question the desires of the person attempting to obtain it.

I get what you're saying there, but the fact is, the Diadem weapon completely breaks the formula.

Anything worth getting in this game takes time, skill, effort, or varying degrees of all three. Raid weps are the Skill-Effort reward, relics are the Time-Effort reward. If you got a 280 on day 1, that negates time. If you were dead on the ground the whole fight, or afked in Diadem til the emergency mission, that negates effort. And the Diadem itself doesn't require anyone to be necessarily skilled either. So it's a balance breaking item. This is where the issue lies. You really can't polish it up and try to say it's a good thing purely because it's another option. There are generally already 5 options when it comes to weapons: Raid, Relic, Tome, Primal, and Crafted. Again, all 3 require some measure of time, skill or effort. The 280, honestly, doesn't.

[St0rmchild]

Anima relic was never designed to hold top tier for long anyways. Remember it has the smallest window of relevancy even without the inclusion of Coven weapons. The trade off is that they have some of the most interesting glamours in the game (subject to taste, of course).

Nine days (due to a development accident) is a little on the short side though.
Especially if the expectation was 'good until 4.0'

It's not so much 'omg top tier' that bothers me to be honest -- it's that up until now, reward was pretty much linear with either effort or difficulty (or both), and that even if you weren't particularly good, you still had the chance to participate in the majority of content and eventually even out with the people who were -- maybe not at the point of relevancy, but still.

Diadem has the chance to set a rather dangerous precedent of breaking this, to break that linear effort/reward scale, and that's my biggest issue out of this.

Until now I've found that FFXIV is remarkably egalitarian - no matter what you play, how you play - if you put in the effort, you can earn enough rewards.
Sure, being a damn good player gets them faster (ie why raid tiers are a patch ahead of the general population) but -- you need to be that damn good player.

And that just got broken.