Mixing up the formula - Will Eureaka be the answer?

[BubblyBoar]

It's weird that people still don't understand why Diadem 2.0 went the way it did. One of the complaints of 1.0 was that it was just standing in one area and zerging the same few mobs over and over until the time limit. There was no structure, so everyone went to the easiest and faster method and got bored of it. So to add structure to it, the devs gave a reason to actually move around to different islands and locations and fight different mobs. They did this by marking them with big blue glowing circles called fates. It's the same respawning mob spam as before, but with structure added to it. It was "just fates," but it was still the same thing as before. 1.0 just didn't have the fate marker over the mobs like 2.0 did.

What happened that made 2.0 fail? A certain niche of people got exactly what they asked for. They hyped it up as something and people that didn't want that thought they did. Once they got that content, they realized the didn't and never wanted it, so they stopped doing it.

[Altena]

The thing with Abyssea was as great as it was in itself, it offered the first pieces of gear that was better than most 75 gear that did not take 1/2 as long to obtain as that 75 gear. Without the super buffs, abyssea was still pretty challenging content that allowed players to make steady consistent progress. The option to level to 99 practically faster than anywhere else or being carried to 99 pretty much made other outside options seem slower.

Well that's just exactly it. Probably the biggest / most glaring issue wit that content in XI was that it made a large portion of reasonably difficult to obtain gear - obsolete. And by fairly cheap / easy to obtain items as well..
That and EXP was just too fast in there. They were probably the biggest take-home notes from Abyssea.

The smart thing it did was have multiple zones of the content. If Abyssea was confined to one zone without time limitation parameters, there would be lag and over population issues at a more frequent rate. Assuming SE did bring over an improved version here. I would hope SE keep that in mind when designing it.

I imagine it would be instanced (similar to diadem) with a player cap per instance. Instances are fine for the most part, the issue with the current formula is that we are confined to (mostly) 4, 8, 24 man content (with the exception of PvP). And all of the content aside from Diadem are dungeon crawlers or individual trials.

If it doesn't use recycling ilevel like the rest of the game.

How could SE make it a relic upgrade style content that doesn't become so good it has most players playing it versus other contents sparingly?
Could experience point parties or even skillchains become a thing in this version?
Should the super buffs come into play here?

Lots of questions.

I imagine iLvl would still be a thing. Just reasonably comparable to tome/raid gear. They could even have it at equal iLvl but one less meld slot or something. That would honestly be enough to encourage people to aim for raid gear.
My thought would be aetherial gear similar to Diadem (perhaps less random), however in addition to that - add in some form of currency that drops from the mini/zone bosses that you can trade in to upgrade your tome gear.
I understand the need to make raids still worth doing, and it's a difficult thing to balance.
However in saying that, I never liked the concept of forcing people to raid to upgrade their tome gear - because raiders would generally try and chase BiS anyway. So their reward is essentially getting BiS with gear that exclusively drops from raids.
Raids should still be top tier. They should also be more difficult. Unfortunately with the stat reworks, horizontal progression is even less likely because the lines of BiS are a lot more blurred.
I am saying that as someone who used to raid quite often (but a lot less these days because of a declining level of interest).

Skillchains / bursts were a good design in XI first and foremost, but they just wouldn't work in this game. Not sure if you played 1.0, however they tried a similar system early on (Battle Regimes?) and it just didn't really work and was very clunky to use. Now that the battle system has changed completely, that sort of system would have even less chance of working now. Skills are too heavily rotational based and just bluntly - just would not work.
I am not pushing to make this game more like XI. I am just pointing out how well the content that some people proclaim destroyed that game - would fit extremely well in this game, partly for the reason that the design of XI was inherently so different to XIV to begin with.

I think remove the EXP element from it entirely. Treat it as end-game content purely for progressing your gear and relics. We have plenty of other effective ways to gain EXP in this game and I don't really think we need any more.

As for the superbuffs / atmas, I posted this in an earlier response..
They could add optional quests while you're in there that take a bit of effort to do, however give the entire party a temporary buff (eg. 10% damage increase, 10% damage mitigation etc).
I guess the best example is what they tried to do with Diadem, however instead of forcing it on people - make it optional. You can put in the effort to get all these extra buffs and kill the bosses, or just skip all of that and go kill the bosses without them.

Final note, is that I am pretty certain I am going to be disappointed with Eureaka but a person can dream a little can't they?
I am dying for some new content that doesn't flop so hard. I think Abyssea-esque content would just fit so nicely..

It's weird that people still don't understand why Diadem 2.0 went the way it did. One of the complaints of 1.0 was that it was just standing in one area and zerging the same few mobs over and over until the time limit. There was no structure, so everyone went to the easiest and faster method and got bored of it. So to add structure to it, the devs gave a reason to actually move around to different islands and locations and fight different mobs. They did this by marking them with big blue glowing circles called fates. It's the same respawning mob spam as before, but with structure added to it. It was "just fates," but it was still the same thing as before. 1.0 just didn't have the fate marker over the mobs like 2.0 did.

What happened that made 2.0 fail? A certain niche of people got exactly what they asked for. They hyped it up as something and people that didn't want that thought they did. Once they got that content, they realized the didn't and never wanted it, so they stopped doing it.

I can't say much for Diadem 1.0 because I was actually taking one of the aforementioned breaks at the time. When I came back (few weeks after it was released) my FC basically told me that it sucks and not to bother with it. So I never really tried it.

I think the problem was more that there was no purpose to killing the mobs.
Killing mobs in the FATEs beyond the quests gave you very little. The rewards were pretty hogwash and extremely random at best.
Speaking of rewards specifically, the reason people did it was a chance for the weapons. However the Emergency Quest was just a random pop, and the players in the zone had no control over it. It just popped every now and again.
There was little reason to actually sit there and grind the FATEs.

As far as structure, they could have done it a number of ways. However they chose to recycle the FATE design. They really shot themselves in the foot with this one because FATEs have a pretty bad stigma associated with them in the first place.
Adding structure could have been done much better than how they chose to go about it.
For starters, the emergency quest was a good start - but why was it completely random?
Make it so that if you kill boss A, B & C the emergency quest pops.
To pop boss A, you need to kill mobs x,y,z. Repeat for different mobs for bosses B & C and you have yourself a tiered boss system.

Pair that with reduced RNG and decent filler rewards and it might have actually been worth doing.
However I can't count the number of parties I went with where all they wanted to do was clear the quest and wait around for the EQ.

[Alleo]

What happened that made 2.0 fail? A certain niche of people got exactly what they asked for. They hyped it up as something and people that didn't want that thought they did. Once they got that content, they realized the didn't and never wanted it, so they stopped doing it.

Well in the end both versions are just zerg fests. The first one was the dino island and the second one was fates. Anyway you just had to kill monsters mindlessly in both and instead of making that big monster spawn by having teams going at fates all the time it would just randomly spawn. So instead of still killing something, you just did your objectives and most people stood around and waited for it to spawn. And on top of that if it finally spawned you might not be able to kill it depending on the numbers of people that are there and the amount of bad players in the groups...and if you finally finished it, someone randomly got a random weapon. Nothing from Diadem 2.0 is really much fun. I am not really sure who on the team thought that this would be better liked than the first version.

Also I am not sure if anyone ever asked for it to be just like fates. People wanted group content that is more than just mindlessly killing things. They kinda wanted more "personal" hunts that would spawn after doing things. Not something that only appears randomly and is barely possible depending on the numbers.

[Sandpark]

Well that's just exactly it. Probably the biggest / most glaring issue wit that content in XI was that it made a large portion of reasonably difficult to obtain gear - obsolete. And by fairly cheap / easy to obtain items as well..
That and EXP was just too fast in there. They were probably the biggest take-home notes from Abyssea.

Well here it would either make other gear obsolete if too strong or be obsolete itself if it was too weak in an ilevel system.

I imagine it would be instanced (similar to diadem) with a player cap per instance. Instances are fine for the most part, the issue with the current formula is that we are confined to (mostly) 4, 8, 24 man content (with the exception of PvP). And all of the content aside from Diadem are dungeon crawlers or individual trials.

Multiple instances of the same content, otherwise we get Ixion all over again.My issue is all the content is either solo or group and no dynamic in between for all content.

I imagine iLvl would still be a thing. Just reasonably comparable to tome/raid gear. They could even have it at equal iLvl but one less meld slot or something. That would honestly be enough to encourage people to aim for raid gear.
My thought would be aetherial gear similar to Diadem (perhaps less random), however in addition to that - add in some form of currency that drops from the mini/zone bosses that you can trade in to upgrade your tome gear.
I understand the need to make raids still worth doing, and it's a difficult thing to balance.
However in saying that, I never liked the concept of forcing people to raid to upgrade their tome gear - because raiders would generally try and chase BiS anyway. So their reward is essentially getting BiS with gear that exclusively drops from raids.
Raids should still be top tier. They should also be more difficult. Unfortunately with the stat reworks, horizontal progression is even less likely because the lines of BiS are a lot more blurred.
I am saying that as someone who used to raid quite often (but a lot less these days because of a declining level of interest).

Skillchains / bursts were a good design in XI first and foremost, but they just wouldn't work in this game. Not sure if you played 1.0, however they tried a similar system early on (Battle Regimes?) and it just didn't really work and was very clunky to use. Now that the battle system has changed completely, that sort of system would have even less chance of working now. Skills are too heavily rotational based and just bluntly - just would not work.
I am not pushing to make this game more like XI. I am just pointing out how well the content that some people proclaim destroyed that game - would fit extremely well in this game, partly for the reason that the design of XI was inherently so different to XIV to begin with.

I think remove the EXP element from it entirely. Treat it as end-game content purely for progressing your gear and relics. We have plenty of other effective ways to gain EXP in this game and I don't really think we need any more.

As for the superbuffs / atmas, I posted this in an earlier response..
They could add optional quests while you're in there that take a bit of effort to do, however give the entire party a temporary buff (eg. 10% damage increase, 10% damage mitigation etc).
I guess the best example is what they tried to do with Diadem, however instead of forcing it on people - make it optional. You can put in the effort to get all these extra buffs and kill the bosses, or just skip all of that and go kill the bosses without them.

Final note, is that I am pretty certain I am going to be disappointed with Eureaka but a person can dream a little can't they?
I am dying for some new content that doesn't flop so hard. I think Abyssea-esque content would just fit so nicely..

This is my opinion.

I think while the ilevel has served it's purpose so far, reasonably is in the eye of the beholder.Some people believe raiders should have the end all/be all BIS. I think having a global ilvl will eventually obsolete another content because while the ilvl always raises the content does not.

The currency trade in no matter what it is called would be the same thing as Ilvl as long as it is global and it recycles. My want is for each content to have it's own set that is good in that particular set of content and not usuable in other content. For example, PvP has it's own BiS, raider's should have their own BiS, and eureka or abyssea have it's own progression items and boons.
PvP would give PvP specific boons, Raids would give best group boons, eureka best solo boons, etc.

Perhaps Abyssea could be it's own self contained content with horizontal progression. The gear is not upgraded or recycled like current ilvl. It only powers up and is called +1,+2,+10,+100, or +1000. This content is for people who want a reason to play for hours upon hours and here it would be possible if the gear and boons are self contained. No raider would feel cheated because the gear they earn raids is the best in it's purpose which is super difficult instanced content.

Abyssea type Horizontal proposal:

• You get an option of 3 gear sets per job which differ from one another.
• Set 1: Earned via merit points, each merit point grants you a currency.
• Set 2: Earned Via challenging instanced content within the zone/zones, think of a guildleve like fight. Outside players can see you but they can't participate.
• Set 3: Earned via an special instance you have to farm abyssea to gain entry to the most difficult abyssea content

Breakdown of how stuff could work:

• The gear power ups +1 thru +1000, this is the ceiling.
• Super Buffs typically traits are boons granted based on difficulty and are rare in this content.
• Job skill customizations are earned via experience points in this content, think of this more similar to these experience points being called merit points aka job customization versus Champion points from ESO which are global character buffs.

I don't propose this content to be available for normal experience points or be accessible to low levels. This content is only accessible to max level players. And from that point you are earning merit points, super buffs, and specific gear sets all not messing with the outside meta since this content is self contained. All this super power only works in these particualr special zones.

Final Note:
Skillchains would work here but they could never work the same way. Awhile ago I posted an idea how that could happen. It basically would require a system similar to Limit Breaks, except you have to build your own special proficiency to access a higher tier of synergistic party weaponskills and spells using an enchained system. Which might sound confusing but really it is not much different from building up gauges in the job gauge, only difference is the skills can combine with other party members.

Look at the link for a read. I am not saying XIV has to have anything skillchain related to implement an abyssea type content, only that it could work. And if my skillchain idea is too confusing or difficult to comprehend or you just flat out don't like it. Then Claire Pendragon suggested in that link to just have a personal LB that allows 8 seconds to synergize with another player if another player follows up with their own.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post3806707

[Cidel]

I'm very apprehensive about how Eureaka turns out. I was initially hopeful at its announcement, but as time went on and content had been released, I'm not particularly confident that they know what significant parts of their playerbase wants or dislikes.

Diadem turned into a giant level 70 FATE-chasing zerg instance with the "carrot" being a cluster-you-know-what boss that highlighted the "dangers" of large amounts of random people from the Duty Finder by letting one mistake snowball into an unsalvageable waste of everyone's time. All for the reward for one random person out of all the alliances with a random weapon they might not even be able to use. Its no wonder pretty much everyone said "forget it" almost the same week Diadem re-launced. Yeah, there were other "tasks and activities" and small little knick-knack prizes in the new Diadem, but lets not kid ourselves: they were all lackluster.

Early on they mentioned long respawning/ timed bosses for Eureaka; is anybody else getting red flags from this? Look at the Ixion fiasco the devs just recently had to "solve," and that only had a glamour item at stake; could you imagine progression/ exclusive gear? There's so much animosity over something as trivial as hunts- I can just picture the outrage over not being able to get to a monster like this either because the area is full of timer-campers or not being online at the exact minute it spawns within a 2-day period (again, Ixion highlighted both).

Add Sky, Sea, Besieged, and Campaign. Wow me, do it better than before in this version and give players something constantly to progress towards without needing to queue up, actually bond with FC members or same server players. Hell, throw in a party synergy system so meta isn't about who can play with themself the best via rotations.

So much this. When are we going to get meaningful endgame content you can participate with people in your Free Company and linkshells (or even just server) with more/less people than exactly 8? Back in ARR it was asked when we would be getting larger-scale content for say, Free Companies, and their response was an incredibly bewildering excuse that they "didn't want to inconvenience people in small Free Companies by making content like that." I guess that means linkshells and statics aren't a thing. They can design endgame for strictly 8 people to play jumprope-or-die with each other weeks on end (with carefully-planned party compositions) but are afraid some people lack the capacity or means find any larger group of people through various outlets to participate in content with? I don't buy it.

[Altena]

So much this. When are we going to get meaningful endgame content you can participate with people in your Free Company and linkshells (or even just server) with more/less people than exactly 8? Back in ARR it was asked when we would be getting larger-scale content for say, Free Companies, and their response was an incredibly bewildering excuse that they "didn't want to inconvenience people in small Free Companies by making content like that." I guess that means linkshells and statics aren't a thing. They can design endgame for strictly 8 people to play jumprope-or-die with each other weeks on end (with carefully-planned party compositions) but are afraid some people lack the capacity or means find any larger group of people through various outlets to participate in content with? I don't buy it.

I honestly think it's less about having larger scale content, and more about having content that isn't bound to the 4/8/24 rule.

PotD was a step in the right direction with the fact that you could go in with 1-4 players.. Diadem attempted this with a free party composition as well, which was great.. It's just a shame that Diadem was just god awful for so many different reasons, many of which we have already covered.

This game truly does lack the ability to just go do meaningful endgame content that progresses your character, whenever you want, without being bound by some form of lockout or cap.
Furthermore, it lacks the ability to play with a small group of friends.
In saying that, it also absolutely does lack mass-scale FC content - however my biggest point here is that the strict party comp has to get blown out the window..

[LineageRazor]

My expectations for Eureka are pretty low. I know that it is intended to be the medium for advancing the Stormblood relic weapon - and I also know that the previous relic grinds were simply too magnificent a resource for SE to simply pass them by. However things turn out in Eureka, I'm pretty convinced that enormous amounts of grinding of low level content will be required. Still, I suppose it's best to wait and see. Maybe SE will have something clever in addition to the massive grind.

Well that's just exactly it. Probably the biggest / most glaring issue wit that content in XI was that it made a large portion of reasonably difficult to obtain gear - obsolete.

I find it very odd when people say this, because it's simply not true. FFXI gear was not at all like equipment in FFXIV; there were many pieces of gear that were viable WELL beyond their level. Heck, there were choice pieces of level 10 equipment that weren't out-of-place on a level 75 player! The top-of-the-line gear at 75; Salvage, Abjuration, and so on, were still great pieces to have at 99. You'd still be macroing in bits of Hecatomb gear for weaponskills no matter what junk you'd managed to scrape together in Abyssea, because the STR and Acc on the stuff was still leagues ahead. RDM's Pimp Hat took a long, long time to replace, as well. Those are only a few of many, many examples.

It wasn't until Seekers of Adoulin that the stuff actually started to become obsolete. That was the point at which the game started to introduce item levels, and the stat boosts from that by necessity blew anything 99 and below away. It is the point at which gear in that game became almost as boring as gear in this game. It's also the point at which SE introduced and began to flesh out a glamour system, basically the only good reason to bother with lower level gear from that point onwards.

But, no - pre-Abyssea gear was still powerful and useful, even with all the higher level gear Abyssea tossed at us.

[Sandpark]

My expectations for Eureka are pretty low. I know that it is intended to be the medium for advancing the Stormblood relic weapon - and I also know that the previous relic grinds were simply too magnificent a resource for SE to simply pass them by. However things turn out in Eureka, I'm pretty convinced that enormous amounts of grinding of low level content will be required. Still, I suppose it's best to wait and see. Maybe SE will have something clever in addition to the massive grind.



I find it very odd when people say this, because it's simply not true. FFXI gear was not at all like equipment in FFXIV; there were many pieces of gear that were viable WELL beyond their level. Heck, there were choice pieces of level 10 equipment that weren't out-of-place on a level 75 player! The top-of-the-line gear at 75; Salvage, Abjuration, and so on, were still great pieces to have at 99. You'd still be macroing in bits of Hecatomb gear for weaponskills no matter what junk you'd managed to scrape together in Abyssea, because the STR and Acc on the stuff was still leagues ahead. RDM's Pimp Hat took a long, long time to replace, as well. Those are only a few of many, many examples.

It wasn't until Seekers of Adoulin that the stuff actually started to become obsolete. That was the point at which the game started to introduce item levels, and the stat boosts from that by necessity blew anything 99 and below away. It is the point at which gear in that game became almost as boring as gear in this game. It's also the point at which SE introduced and began to flesh out a glamour system, basically the only good reason to bother with lower level gear from that point onwards.

But, no - pre-Abyssea gear was still powerful and useful, even with all the higher level gear Abyssea tossed at us.

Well sort of with a caveat. That 75 gear that used to dominate was still applicable because SE added ways to upgrade alot of that old gear if you stuck around.

But by then it was already too late, top that off with the beginnings of mmo casualization and other things.