Horizontal progression? In MY theme park?!

[Sotaris]

I'd rather have horizontal gear. It good for a casual to go away and be up to date in few weeks but it don't really give incentives to cap tomes if you are active cause everything is replaced in a few mounts.

I liked what they did in 11. Back in Lv75 cap days aka the good days you had Byakko Haidate for years, relic was bis and op af - also hard to obtain as it should.

[Remedi]

Apologies for a kind of double post, but I thought this was an interesting enough idea that it was worth a thread of it's own rather than getting buried under another topic's rantings:

TLDR: How could we have more gear variety in FFXIV?

Rather than get blinded by how FFXI handled things, let's look a bit further back to the days of Everquest. The game was primarily horizontal progression with mild levels of verticality between expansions and tiers. The overall quality of gear was noticeably better in late tier raids such as Vex Thal when compared to old endgame content such as VP or recent but entry level content such as the first planes in PoP.

However, most endgame zones had a few pieces of 'Halo' gear, items that were unique enough or good enough to stand above other options even 4 or 5 expansions down the line. As a Shaman raiding up until the mid point of PoP, I was still utterly inseparable from my VP Robe and Snare spear and overall wore a variety of bits of gear from a content right across the game ( https://eq.magelo.com/profile/9093 ).

So, how can FFXIV pull this off? I'd go with a variant on Kisa's approach but roll it into a form of set bonuses. Let's say I have a full set of Sigma gear, consider having a set bonus that can be unlocked by wearing 2 pieces of gear depending on where the gear is from. PvP gear could unlock something like a cast time reduction on Stone. Crafted could unlock some extra VIT. Hunt gear could unlock a movement speed bonus. There's plenty of ways to add in flavour to this and it's simple enough to roll extra bonus stats in with the set bonus so that you're not destroying your main stats for the sake of these sorts of bonuses. When odd numbered patches come along with new gear, it's easy enough to bump up the bonuses slightly on the new stuff to give the raiders and min maxers a fresh carrot to chase.

Simple no?

*edit*

To clarify since the original post was a bit rushed and not as clear as it could have been.

My idea is to actually have the set bonus based off the main raiding sets aka Tome and Savage gear.

This would offer a set bonus when used in tandem with other sets within the same tier as well as offering a stat boost to bring the lower ilvl piece up to par with the main set.

So for example:

Lets take the Diamond set of healing.

It could have the following set bonus as a very rough example:

0.5 second cast time reduction on Stone IV when used with 2 pieces of PvP gear.
+100 VIT when used with 2 pieces of crafted gear.
+10% Movement speed when used with Hunt gear.

This could be further played along by adding a slightly juicier bonus with odd numbered patch content (Basically, extra crafted and 24 man stuff).

The idea isn't to make people not want to upgrade their gear, but rather reward players for earning a wider variety of equipment (and thus dabbling in more content that they otherwise might not. The crafted bonus will be king during progression, whereas it'd be easy enough to include interesting perks on other sets to take over as people get geared and don't need the VIT anymore.

Is it a perfect example of horizontal progression? No. But it spices up a recipe that's been getting awfully stale over the last few years.

Aside the obvious elephant in the room that is that we lack the inventory space to sustain an horizzontal progression, there's also the fact that SE said this is not their plan for this game and they won't do and if you like it FFXI is still there, I agrree with this reasoning since ffxi is still going and they are still adding content to it and since it's their game too they won't make a competition of the 2 games.

That said we also lack the content for a real horizzontal progression, Because it means you can safely calculate the dps of each piece and then find the most effective way to do your job since and since the content is mopstly dps centric you'll want to maximise dmg, also the substats are a bit meh atm since crit is soo strong that you want to stack it as such either the bonus sets overtakes the loss of crit or you might aswell just go with the crit pieces.

Imho we kinda have a sort of horizzontal progress with ultimate atm, since the materia synch makes so that if you want to do UCoB (and later UwU) you need pieces of gear that do not go beyond the ilvl synch, as such things like eureka, swallow compass, deltascape savage and tomestones are useful (kind of).

This is something they could do to make gear not be useless, since imho I don't think they'll cave to sets bonus since they've said many times they won't do it since this is not what they want for the game

[CreinCrein]

It doesn't just boil down to the endgame of "one set being the best"; it's about having options, sinking time into theory crafting, discovery, and all of the fun that goes along with that. Personally I'd have a lot of fun experimenting with different sets and playstyles, and I know a lot of people that would as well. Yes, there will be certain sets that are the result of 100th percentile number crunching but at the end of the day that level of optimization is not cared for by a majority of players while things like how a class plays and feels is. Giving players more choices to compliment their playstyle would be nice.

[ElHeggunte]

I'd rather have horizontal gear. It good for a casual to go away and be up to date in few weeks but it don't really give incentives to cap tomes if you are active cause everything is replaced in a few mounts.

People say you have no motivation to cap tomes because gear is replaced every 6-7 months. Fine. If we had FFXI's style of horizontal progression, you wouldn't have an incentive to obtain new gear for years because you had the best within a few months of its release (unless RNG really hated you). Now you're either not progressing your character because you literally can't improve any more or you're not progressing because terrible RNG decided you could use another Earth crystal instead of your E.Body. How is that fun? The only reason it was somewhat workable in XI is because we could swap gear in combat so at least you could make specific ability sets (like a VIT set for MNK's Chakra).

I liked what they did in 11. Back in Lv75 cap days aka the good days you had Byakko Haidate for years, relic was bis and op af - also hard to obtain as it should.

But it wasn't hard to obtain outside of fighting with the drop rate. The same goes for most of the content that dropped the best gear: the hardest part was claiming the monster or farming up the materials to pop it and then hoping it dropped the item you want. Things only became remotely difficult if you tried to low-man or your group was incompetent. Relics weren't hard either, they were just gated by how quickly you could obtain currency.

[mosaicex]

It doesn't just boil down to the endgame of "one set being the best"; it's about having options, sinking time into theory crafting, discovery, and all of the fun that goes along with that. Personally I'd have a lot of fun experimenting with different sets and playstyles, and I know a lot of people that would as well. Yes, there will be certain sets that are the result of 100th percentile number crunching but at the end of the day that level of optimization is not cared for by a majority of players while things like how a class plays and feels is. Giving players more choices to compliment their playstyle would be nice.

Yeah, options, like how we have 3 tank jobs, 3 healer jobs, 9 DPS jobs, yet the baseline parrots still couldn't keep their mouth shut about balance and just keep repeating whatever top 0.1% said like some sort of mantra. Demanding all jobs be completely equal despite the fact that XIV is probably the most balanced MMO right now at the cost of how similar each jobs operate.

Imagine adding another layer to that mess, instead of just NO SAM NO BLM NO NON-META JOBS(haven't experience any of these on JP servers, just go by what I see here) nonsense we will get NO SAM NO BLM, ONLY JOBS WITH META SETS ONLY.
No wonder SE doesn't want to give players options.

The day majority of playerbase stop pretending to care about 1% performance disparity (that only happens at the summit, which ironically don't apply to them anyway) is the day we MIGHT get something resemblance of options in this game.

[Sotaris]

People say you have no motivation to cap tomes because gear is replaced every 6-7 months. Fine. If we had FFXI's style of horizontal progression, you wouldn't have an incentive to obtain new gear for years because you had the best within a few months of its release (unless RNG really hated you). Now you're either not progressing your character because you literally can't improve any more or you're not progressing because terrible RNG decided you could use another Earth crystal instead of your E.Body. How is that fun? The only reason it was somewhat workable in XI is because we could swap gear in combat so at least you could make specific ability sets (like a VIT set for MNK's Chakra).

It was also Lv75, the cap for a long time so there wasn't a reason to get new gear (11 had as you possibly are aware of, not having iLevels until recently). 11 was also more event heavy (sky, sea, dynamis, ground kings, list goes on).

But i didn't mean this would turn into a 11 discussion, just my 2 cent on horizontal isn't all bad as people want to make out.

But it wasn't hard to obtain outside of fighting with the drop rate. The same goes for most of the content that dropped the best gear: the hardest part was claiming the monster or farming up the materials to pop it and then hoping it dropped the item you want. Things only became remotely difficult if you tried to low-man or your group was incompetent. Relics weren't hard either, they were just gated by how quickly you could obtain currency.

I shouldn't had used the word hard. It was very timeconsuming (if we talk about relic and not toah mythics) or costly if you bought all the currency.
But it was more difficult to obtain a FF11 relic compared to a FF14 relic. And much much more powerful and felt more accomplished.

[Dzian]

While there is something to be said about the static dungeon design they've been following I really disagree with the idea that there's nothing to do in this game. There is a lot of stuff to do. Just because it doesn't interest you doesn't mean it isn't there.

Wellllll. I can't deny there's a lot of content from a technical standpoint..

But only the smallest fraction of it is even remotely relevant and worthwhile.

So in terms of character progression currnetly there is almost nothing do do.
Run lighthouse for weekly drop and coin.
Cap mendacity from a few roulettes

That's it.

I could add savage here I suppose. But ifvyouve been doing that then you typically don't need to do lighthouse for anything so there's still very little to do.

99% of the content is obsolete

[Derio]

If it went horizonatal. There would be only 1 relic weapon. And then again how would that work? Unlock more materia slots? The weapon wouldnt get stronger just different in how it looks?

Same goes with leveling? How would that work for each expansion?

There are some serious problems and if they were to ever go the horizontal route it would take 2 years or more of development time to develop and implement.

[Tristann]

Well, take a look at GW2, how they handle post-80 leveling with their mastery system and how they implement horizontal gear. But I doubt, the horizontal approach would work here, because there is no variation in a job itself.

[Aylis]

I think we need a leveling experience after we reach max level. I've always said they need to add job specific materia. In that way you still have the vertical gear grind but a horizontal xp grind to keep improving.

I was thinking the same thing too. Using the OP's example of Everquest, that game did have an alternate advancement system which gave ways for players to level up more once they reached the level cap. Its why vertical progression worked so well in that game since it gave players something to do and work on other then gear.

I do love gear sets and clickies but yeah, given how FFXIV's formula for being at end game and the devs idea of rewarding players is to throw more xp at them. An alternate advancement system would be better here.