SB is great, but are there any plans to shake up the endgame formula?

[Sylvaneste]

Except you don't have to actually level anything except goldsmith if you want, you can buy the ingredients that you can't make. It encourages people to trade things/gil. Maybe there is a weaver that needs goldsmith materials. You can sell to him to buy the materials you need for goldsmithing.

This game is being extremely generous by allowing you to max out every crafter. Very few MMOs even let you do that. Crafting is beyond easy in this game.

It is not about getting the materials, materials are easy peasy to get. It is the cross class skills required to pull off high end crafting.

Steady hand 2
Hasty Touch
Muscle memory

These are all Cooking skills.

[Vexander]

I always feel the need to ask...

What would you rather have as opposed to what we have now?

[Galaktica]

The only thing that really, truly bothers me still is the whole gear situation. I can hardly remember HW launch so I'm not sure if they did something similar, but when I saw there was no cap on Verity tomes, I got super excited only to be informed later on that this would be a temporary thing and we would be back to weekly caps in a few weeks. When you play multiple jobs like I do, the lack of a weekly cap is relaxing. I don't need to worry about logging on every week or doing my dailies. I can play how I want to play because I can gear up at any time. When there is a cap in a place, you almost feel compelled to log on just to get stuff done so you can keep al your jobs geared.

This problem only multiplies when you throw in gear upgrade tokens which I assume are still going to be a thing? And like...can we as a community sit down and talk about this for a second? How was there not an enormous outrage over the way HW gear upgrading was handled? When you could finally upgrade Shire gear, you had to run all THREE 24-MAN RAIDS to get the tokens needed to upgrade ONE piece of gear of which there are TWELVE pieces of gear PER JOB. Why is this okay? I understand they wanted to keep all the raids relevant, but this seemed like overkill.

To top it all off, the development team has some weird fascination with putting out all the great looking gear, but then not letting you dye it until you jump through a bunch of hoops after waiting for 3 months, if they let you dye it at all. I actually think a lot of the AF3 sets are great and would love to wear them, but once again, I'm not a fan of the default colors. And once again, we won't be able to dye them until whenever they deem us worthy. I hope they allow us to dye it in the patch next week, but I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they made us wait until 4.1.

[Zish]

I'm not sure if the devs read the feedback here or not, but I really hope they do.

I want to echo the OP's thoughts.

Once you get to 70 and complete the story, gear up, do ex primals, do Omega.. (all of which can be done in the span of a couple weeks) you're really not left with much else to do, in many forms.

I understand lockout out power progression to an extent, but you need to give players some incentive to do things. There needs to be many more carrots than there currently are. If we can't gain power, at least let us work towards cosmetics. Whether it be gear or mounts or pets.. I don't know, something.

I also feel that the outdoor zones are vastly underused. I felt this was the case in HW was well. For DoW, they are useful for hunt marks and rare FATEs. That is all. There is no reason to explore, there is no good reason to stick around in them, they just feel so incredibly empty.

[Zish]

WQ's are literally Fates except they give actual end-game benefits that has caused massive burnout for its player base just like it did here when we had to do Atma farming(nobody liked fates after that).

I wanted to reply to this, because I also believe a version of WoW's world quest system would be extremely beneficial to XIV.

In many ways, world quests are NOT like FATEs.

World quests work like so:
Each day, there are certain active quests in each zone.
You go to the area, do your work by yourself or with others, contribute similar to a fate.
Fill up your personal WQ bar, and then you get your reward.

There is also a bonus in which one area each day will give you a special reward if you do a certain number of WQs in that zone, adding even more incentive to jump out and do them.

The main difference here is that players can pick and choose when to do these world quests, where as FATEs come and go, have timers, and have contribution shared between everyone that is active there within the time limit. FATEs are vastly more restrictive in this sense.

FATEs are honestly starting to look very dated.

[Tyaku]

One of my main gripes with endgame gear, and gear in general, is that having the same dull stats on every piece of gear is not interesting at all. I'm so tired of the next level of gear progression being just some more crit, ss, det... Why not gear that enhances traits or abilities, or affects auto attack, or something. Gear is so boring in this game.

I also think some kind of merit point system with points gained similar to experience points would be good for endgame that allowed us to further develop our max level job by acquiring enhancements to our current abilities and traits.

But yeah, endgame is so boring.

[Kazama]

I always feel the need to ask...

What would you rather have as opposed to what we have now?
(0)

Personally? I'd rather have this v2. It didn't have this treadmill flaw. If XIV's endgame & gear progression were like it's predecessor I would be hooked forever. SB has had some fun elements but SE is not going to change endgame until it causes the game to fail, and, that will likely never happen as only a fraction of the players even care about it beyond the easy mode raid. Unfortunately, a horizontal model is literally out of the question for FFXIV and so it will always continue to be a gated gear treadmill only worth playing right after patches if even then.

Personally, I'm just playing it until Destiny 2.

[Clicked]

People asked for horizontal progression since before 1.0 release but that's not what the dev team intends on doing. The want the treadmill because it allows for a constant stream of rewards and every patch they can release bigger and bigger carrots. It's much easier and more sustainable because vertical progression can continue forever whereas horizontal progression starts to have limits.

But still, would at least be nice to have horizontal progression within level caps. So 4.0 gear would be just as valuable as 4.2 gear, etc.

[Ciderfox]

Yea, I didn't to play much during release so I thought I was going to get far behind. Last Saturday I finally hit 70 and farmed Susano and Lakshmi all day. Now I'm fully caught up and at ilvl 316 and I feel like I have nothing to do but level another job. I wish I felt like I had a reason I could keep playing my RDM instead of leveling another class. At least Destiny 2 beta is out next week to break up the staleness.

[Lunafreya]

I really hate to be this person but there was something that said Stormblood would have 3x the budget of Heavensward and VIRTUALLY NOTHING in the game has changed. What's the point of an expansion if all you do is clone Heavensward with a new set of paint? I expected more questlines in terms of sidequests to get unique gear! I expected that maybe this tomestone stuff would be gone and we'd have other ways to get unique gear. Make ex primals drop full sets of gear... uniquely themed with the fight. You did it well with the HW tomestone of lore gear with the primal sets. Can we do something more like that but without this tokens nonsense? I grow tired of doing the same SAME SAME god damn things in the game. I have not touched a roulette in forever because verity is pointless. The same crap is coming upon us on the 18th, lol. I hope people enjoy waiting 7 weeks for a weapon that could have just been locked on a hard fight but nope all they do is savage for a unique weapon and primals. It's boring and I dont see myself lasting.

I love this game, I really do but I can even see that this formula is dull as heck.