Stormblood. Balancing leveling content and rewards.

[Millen1]

I would first like to start by saying I really enjoyed the SB release, the story and I have even replayed the main story a second time. In the close to two months SB has been out there are a few issues I have noticed and would like to share a positive opinion on how best to fix one of these issue. Please also excuse the writing, English comp is not a strength and I did try to clean this up before posting.

Starting with the daily roulettes, they are once daily and then wait for the next day to do them again. Often the adventure in need is almost always a tank but more recently it has become healer. For the leveling roulette, this should not be a once daily event. As tank or healer we accept our instant queues, do the leveling roulette once daily and done. After this as a tank or healer we can go on to spam whatever dungeon we want with a near instant queue. This system is broken in many ways and leads to insane DPS queue times. Where do the dps go? Often to PoTD and PvP for leveling to enjoy much faster queue times than they would ever see in any dungeon content. Spamming level 51 to 60 in PoTD and often wasting other player’s time in PvP as they are there for the xp, they don’t care about the win or loss. Why would anyone care when they can have a five minute queue for PvP or a minute queue for PoTD versus a 20 to 60 minute queue for dungeons regardless of their job. Skills learned in PvP and potd towards level 70 and end game, ZERO. This goes for all jobs, tanks, healers and dps. PvP uses different skills than PvE content.

How to fix this? I believe that removing the once daily reward for leveling roulette is a good start. Tanks and healers leveling will keep leveling as fast as they want while dps will have a declining number of tanks and healers in the queue over the day. Second reason to remove the once daily reward on leveling, spamming the same dungeon as a tank or healer gets boring fast. Allowing all jobs, tank/healer/dps to queue unlimited for leveling roulette may help to reduce dps queue times; it also reduces spamming the current dungeon you are on to continue leveling. There are many great leveling dungeons that span from the start at level 15 to the last one at level 69. While there are a few dungeons in there that some or all of us may dread getting, it is better to do a roulette than spamming one dungeon until being able to move to the next dungeon or burn out. The other benefit to leveling through dungeons is learning your job and team skills that will be needed in end game content. Variety is nice to have when leveling and leveling roulette gives us this once a day, why not make it unlimited so that all jobs can level without getting stuck spamming one dungeon. Next, keeping tanks and healers in the leveling roulette in my opinion is a good thing for dps and would hopefully lower the dps queue time. Why is lowering the dps queue time a good thing? Why have dps use PvP or PoTD as their only reasonable way to level a job? They most likely don’t want to be there and this can take away from those that really enjoy PvP. As for PoTD, it started as a great place to try out a new job and get some xp for the job before deciding if you wanted to play the job or not. Now PoTD has become the fastest way to get through leveling and no real chance to learn much about your job in content and how it plays in a party. As to if players actually read a guide or look at the tool tips, I doubt many do.(this is not meant to single out dps as more than enough healers and tanks don’t read the guides either.)

Next, change the reward system. Remove all xp from PvP. PvP should stay PvP and for those that like it with separate rewards more in line with the spirit of PvP content than PvE. PoTD should remain as is for now with rewards. Add a level 70 dungeon roulette with a reasonable reward close to the expert roulette reward and make the new roulette unlimited. This new roulette would allow those of us that are at level 70 and bored of the same 3 dungeons to cap weekly tomes in a different way and with more content. This new “level 70 dungeon roulette” content would contain all leveling dungeon including the level 50 and level 60 dungeons. Some dungeons are required to move forward in FFXIV. This would be a nice way at level 70 to do other dungeons, help those out that are stuck in less played dungeons and still be able to cap our weekly tomes in a reasonable time. The current 100 verity and 5 creation in leveling roulette is lame, even more lame that it is once a day. I can’t speak for other players but allow me at level 70 to keep doing a variety of dungeons I have enjoyed over the years in a roulette and a reward close to the expert roulette would be great. Honestly how many tanks or healers currently hop back into in a leveling roulette after doing it once because they are bored and feeling like doing some random dungeon for no reward? I don’t. I don’t count cracked clusters as a reward as they can be gotten fast through hunts.

I have played as a healer main since ARR beta. I play both whm and sch. When HW came along I added astro to the list of healers. I picked up Dark Knight in HW and while I have leveled all 3 of my healers to level 70, I currently main drk in SB.

Thoughts and constructive feedback are welcome. I do hope I did a decent job at laying out a good idea for leveling in FFXIV and balancing rewards with content.

[Acidblood]

Hmm, personally I'd prefer they just increase the rewards for levelling roulette if you enter solo (to move the queue along as quickly as possible) with a capped job that is 'in need'; e.g. Tank in need = 30 top level tomestones + 50 second level tomestones + 120 low level tomestones (graded up as the reward for 'expert' increases).

Not sure about making the roulette bonuses unlimited though, as one of the issues with 4.0 is that DPS jobs now outnumber Tank / Healer jobs 3 to 1 while still only allowing a 2 to 1 ratio in dungeons (to say nothing of SEs utter failure to make Tanking / Healing any better than it was in 3.X, and in some cases making it far worse)... basically, even if the bonuses where unlimited, and assuming all jobs where equally played, there would still be a Tank / Healer vs. DPS imbalance simply because there would be an extra 3 DPS for every Tank and Healer that queued.

[RitsukoSonoda]

Also factor in a large number of healers and tanks will not party with randoms due to previous experiences making the number of available tanks and healers solo queueing smaller.

There really isn't a solution SE can do that will fix the problem because its something caused by the player base itself.

However the idea of no longer awarding job exp from PvP I agree with. Reasons being that people appear to be botting the frontline roulette since it was added and the number of players that are getting to lvl 70 content and still don't even know their basic rotation has increased. It already became a bit of an issue since people started leveling jobs exclusively from PotD as it doesn't prep people for proper mechanics and battles rarely lasted long enough to begin using a rotation.

[Yuella]

they made a mistake of making light party 1 tank 1 healer and 2 dps. it should always be 1 - 1 - 3 like WoW because that's the distribution of the whole MMO playerbase.

[Blanchimont]

Roulette bonuses are just awful unless you get the adventurer in need with a Cracked Cluster at level 60+ and that is because the cluster can be traded for materia that is useful or you can sell for 100k+. For me, the problem is that level 50-60 is essentially the time when I absolutely do not want to touch the leveling roulette because it comes with no reward at all. The bonus from the roulette equates to less than a single mob kill at a higher level dungeon because of how exp requirements scale. It needs to give at least the daily experience bonus every time in order to be worth it because that way you will be guaranteed you at least get experience comparable to a dungeon at your level. Level 50/60/70 dungeons will fall into this problem as well. They just give terrible rewards for their level when you compare them to others. The level 50 dungeons give awful experience that is equal to like dungeons half of its level. The level 60 dungeons do not even give double the experience of level 50 dungeons. The level 70 dungeons will have the same problem in the future and on top of that, mobs there do not drop gil either to further compound the problem. The gear they drop is also very pointless because the 310 gear are very easily accessible due to the low tomestone cost. Ultimately, they will need to scale the rewards of all dungeons up if they want people to run them for the sake of helping others.

If they change the rewards to tomestones though, there will be another problem. That problem is that the reward will be rather useless. Creation tomestones are capped at 450 a week anyways. There's not much you can do with Verity. Poetics are decent only if you are making Atma/Anima weapons. Unless the creation tomestone cap gets removed (probably never, I only remember the cap being removed one time at the very end of ARR just before HW hit), this reward will not work.

My suggestion for level 70s running roulettes requires them to fix the experience rewards across the dungeons first. My idea is to reward them with the blue/yellow rested experience that can be used for any class. Every point of experience you should have earned becomes bonus experience that can be used towards leveling any other class regardless of whether it is a War, Magic, Hand, or Land class. It's something slightly better and makes it so that the experience can help you level up easier in the future, or you can use it now to level up an alt.

I want them to keep experience rewards in PvP. Right now, I do not even want to touch dungeons as a healer. I hated it so much that I used Summoner for PotD to 60 and PvP to 70 in order to get the class to 70. Scholar in itself is an okay class as I learned when doing trials with my free company, but I hated playing it in a dungeon. I absolutely hate the wall to wall pulls in dungeons and it basically turns my healer into a heal bot. At least by having PvP give some experience, it gives you another way to level up your character and people who enjoy PvP can still go in. It is also a good place to grind light for Atma and aetheric condensation for Anima weapons. I also do not think that a lot of people want to return to a time when queues took something like 20+ minutes for PvP either. It would be great if they increased FATE rewards to make them worth it too. It would give another way to level up as well.

The problem of the AFKers in PvP is something else entirely. I personally blame it on the reduced rewards and how it is related to the length of a match. The longer a match goes, the worse rewards you get for losing. Instead of rewards scaling up, they scale downward for the losing team. This is very discouraging for a lot of people. There's no incentive to try when you're losing and you might as well just feed the other team and that's what some people are doing in order to get matches over with faster. Instead, PvP should be rewarding everyone based on the length of the match. The more competitive and close the match is, the better the rewards will be. Instead of people rushing to try to end matches ASAP and quitting when they're losing, it's an incentive to try harder and at least stall the team that's winning. At the same time, it is very hard to intentionally stall a match.

[RealKingKami]

Because of terrible coding for PS3 compatibility, FF dungeons are run with 2 dps instead of 3. this is one of the main reasons for long q times. This can't be fixed without a massive overhaul that SE will never even think about undertaking.

[Catsby]

Party config stuff

This. Dungeon experiences would be WAAAY more enjoyable if;

1) More DPS were allowed into the group
2) Jobs bled into other roles allowing players to pick up slack when the minority or 'less popular' roles are hard to come by.

[RitsukoSonoda]

This. Dungeon experiences would be WAAAY more enjoyable if;

1) More DPS were allowed into the group
2) Jobs bled into other roles allowing players to pick up slack when the minority or 'less popular' roles are hard to come by.

The dungeon experiences as now are fine as long as you don't get matched with bad players via DF. The underlying complaint is specifically the DPS queue because over half the game's population sits in that role and the number of players in the other 2 roles that will only run those roulettes with premades to avoid randomly getting bad party members.

[Jelly_Baby]

I believe that removing the once daily reward for leveling roulette is a good start.

I main tank and I ONLY do daily roulettes because of the bonus. if you remove it, I wont be doing any which will lead to longer queue times for DPS.

Just a thought.

[Terkhev]

I agree with most of it. The only thing I'd change is daily bonus - it's just too big to be spammable.