Castrum Fluminis and item level

[ZJyn]

The biggest problem here, to me, isn't that the item level cap is what it is; it's that it feels inorganic compared to the way that it flowed in Heavensward due to how they decided to pull the dungeons away from the MSQ.

As someone had mentioned before, Swallow's Compass, and other 4.X dungeons, have a required item level that progresses in such a way that you would, if following it, find yourself pretty dang close to Castrum. They just aren't part of the main story. So a player is going to find themselves able to progress everything in the MSQ without touching any of he dungeons, trials, etc, and then suddenly... boom... they hit a brick wall.

It would have likely felt a lot more organic if they had included the dungeons as part of the Main Story, not part of the Four Lords.

[Vaer]

The biggest problem here, to me, isn't that the item level cap is what it is; it's that it feels inorganic compared to the way that it flowed in Heavensward due to how they decided to pull the dungeons away from the MSQ.

As someone had mentioned before, Swallow's Compass, and other 4.X dungeons, have a required item level that progresses in such a way that you would, if following it, find yourself pretty dang close to Castrum. They just aren't part of the main story. So a player is going to find themselves able to progress everything in the MSQ without touching any of he dungeons, trials, etc, and then suddenly... boom... they hit a brick wall.

It would have likely felt a lot more organic if they had included the dungeons as part of the Main Story, not part of the Four Lords.

I think this is a result of people saying the MSQ takes too long, so they pulled the stuff out to shorten it. (When SB is legacy you will be able to skip all this stuff due to the gear boxes they add, shortening the leveling process instead of being forced to do all this stuff to get to the next xpac)

They could put all the stuff back in, but OP would just be locked and still have to grind anyways which is his main complaint. (He wouldn't be able to get into Hell's Lid/Fractal since he would be 3 short.) After he gets those dungeons, he would be locked out of Byakko since it is 325. Then he would need another 5 levels for Swallow's etc. It would be back to ARR 2.x style where the first half of the patch story was just fluff and the second part was the actual story.

Right now you can bypass most of the stuff and you have the choice of acquiring gear the way you want to meet the requirement.

[WhiteArchmage]

I think this is a result of people saying the MSQ takes too long, so they pulled the stuff out to shorten it. (When SB is legacy you will be able to skip all this stuff due to the gear boxes they add, shortening the leveling process instead of being forced to do all this stuff to get to the next xpac)

Stuff like this makes me feel like SE is fighting a losing battle trying to please all their players. People complained Coil was too hard and they were missing out on the story: they did Normal and Savage, then people complained they had to do Normal and it was too easy and since they had the same story they had no reson to do Savage; then they complained they wanted to unlock everything at once so we got several sidequests with the Four Lords, Omega, and Ivalice; and now they're complaining that they just want to rush the story without the sidequests and can't because iLvl...