We Really Need To Talk About The State And Path Of FFXIV

[Dualgunner]

Variety topic threads are difficult especially when one of the topics is as heated as this.

[SenorPatty]

Not like the thread's going to matter soon anyways. Once 4.4 hits in September, it'll be buried until it gets necroed like, six months later.

[SeraphStray]

I disagree with the raiding portions. Raid gear should be the best gear. I say this as someone who doesn't raid often. I don't expect to run my roulettes, get tomes, and then get the best gear. That's not fair to people who are putting in the work to learn these crazy fights.

With regards to layouts of raids: I did like Coils, for example, being laid out to where you had mobs to fight to get to a boss, and more area to cover before you got to a boss. That was neat.
But when it comes to dungeons themselves, I don't want sprawling dungeons like in ARR. I don't do leveling roulette because I risk getting an ARR launch dungeon. Same reason I dont do msq roulette. I think the dungeons as they are atm are okay. Sure, they could change up some music and what not.

Concerning actual patches and dungeons...yeah I don't know why we're getting less dungeons this time around. It sucks. I remember during HW I took a year long break and came back and felt like there was a ton of stuff (and there was) to get caught up with. Lots to unlock.
Then I just recently (two weeks ago) came back to SB and...Im surprised at how little I have to unlock after being away since before 4.1 dropped.

As for flying, I do agree there. I liked ARR because if you were going somewhere, you had to think about if a FATE would spawn on your location or what monsters were normally running around there etc. Now, as OP said, flying over things...well, it's just what you do. And as a result, if there are any dangers, they don't matter.

And with regards to flying and maps as a whole, I do agree that because flying exists, so that maps have to be bigger, therefore there's a bunch of emptiness. I liked going to new villages/towns or whatever. That was neat. I haven't read this whole thread, but I hope the thoughts on flying were shared amongst everyone, because I do feel flying took a lot of charm from the game.

I think there is a lot of work they need to do with the game overall. I don't know if maybe they got maybe too comfortable and are resting on their laurels or what. There needs to be more gear (not reskins), there needs to be more thought put into the areas, and if that means getting rid of flying..then we'll get used to it. There needs to be more dungeons released like there used to be. And...if that's too much work or whatever, they need to relay that to us and let us know what changed.

[Ilan]

Have you found six other people who are willing to do the hard raids without tools?

can look for them, probably should just pf it with that condition.

You would've to do that also without any guides because people who made these guides used 100% "tools", hell even watching a guide is "cheating".

/s

[HyoMinPark]

I haven't really poked my head around here much in weeks... But when a couple friends linked me to this recent trainwreck, I want to ask.

How in the seven hells did the usual suspects manage to derail a perfectly good thread talking about this game's content design/cycle problems into yet another parser/raider debate?

If I may:

When I came into this thread, it was talking about gear progression, which was a point in the opening post. That then devolved from a back and forth between a couple individuals—myself included—to “Why should raiders get the best gear just because they do the hardest content? Why can’t everyone get the best gear? Why can’t crafters make the best gear?” Following that, the conversation shifted to Theme Park MMOs versus Sandbox MMOs thanks to comparisons of FFXIV to games like RuneScape. Somewhere in the middle of that, an individual posted a comment saying that they “agreed with the OP that raiders [were] killing this game”. And then, the usual anti-raider crowd showed up, because that’s always inevitable. And now, we have this mess.

I should have probably kept my mouth shut, but the generalizations against raiders—which, I am a raider—just irritate me. Especially since they’re almost always character attacks, and the people typing such comments have never interacted with any of the raiders they constantly love to hate outside of this forum (at least, with the Aether/Primal individuals). And, after a long day in class (first week back, in which I already have a metric crap ton of homework...and in which I’m already feeling the pressure of this semester), I was just in a foul mood. So I apologize if I was unnecessarily rude in my posts, and that I contributed to the continuing derailing of this thread.

[Magic-Mal]

I've finally gotten myself caught up on each post in the thread since pages piled up extra fast within 2 days. So now I feel I can post about something for real...

There's been alot of talk gear and how raider gear should only be for raiders and what all that. It feels like it was mainly going in circles instead of discussing a solution? After reading the whole thing in full, I do have an idea of how that something could work similar to what I posted long ago but it was buried fairly quickly. Varied Gear Sets.

The same thing has been repeated 100x already: "If you want raid gear then do raids". That statement is made useless because of the fact that players can get top ilvl from farming hunts and 24-man from odd patches. And it's been this way since HW and I guess raiders don't mind it right?

I ask, what defines "raid gear" or "raid level"? Is it the ilvl of the gear or the gear from the raid itself? Is tome gear not "raid level"? It certainly isn't raid gear because it's not from raids. Why has this been overlooked? In terms of the discussion, yes, I do not believe raid gear should not be able to be crafted. That's silly. Having new "raid-level" options isn't silly at all to me. Especially during a catch-up patch, with top ilvl gear being available to non-raiders. There is more to best gear than raid gear and more to best gear than ilvl. What we need are options from many kinds of content to encourage true BiS sets that raiders can make so they can be as strong as possible. Which in turn, means they have incentive to do all content instead of just raids and expert roulette for tomes then unsub.

My idea is this, I repeat with some modifications to it:
Raid Path: Stays the same as it always was. Raids offer raid gear that is ilvl cap. i340, i370, i400, whichever when completed. They have their own designs and whatever. No changes.

Tome Path: Stays the same. Although I wish they could remove the unique tag on gear so we could finally have duplicates. Not being able to have duplicates where we have multiple jobs using the same pieces of gear but wanting different melds is just horrible. Oh, and tome weapon upgrades really should to be made available much earlier than a month before next raid cycle. It's pretty pointless otherwise.

Crafter Path: I do believe there should be a path that crafters can take to get highest level gear. It would mix it up to see some new top ilvl pieces to choose from. We already have the crafted gear upgrade system, which was welcome. Why not come out with an i360 step and i370 step? With the i370 being untradable of course. Peak Crafted armor. Example:
1. Craft a HQ armor piece and hand it to the exchange to get the tokens
2. Aquire Thavnarian Rains to get the piece upgraded to i360 Augmented
3. Now you must repeat #1 and trade in the i360 piece however, the other trade-in item must be crafted. The craft should be difficult to create. Craft the mat and trade that with the new tokens to get the HQ i370 Peak piece. This process will need to be repeated for as many times you want an i370 Peak piece.

Also, having a 2nd crafting recipe to create the same trade-in item but with ingredients dropped from raids would be nice as well. On the even patch, Recipe A with raid mats would be available first. On the odd patch, recipe B without raid mats will be available. This would broaden out the horizontal progression and set building to have more gear pieces with different stat mixups available.

Primal Path: I was pleasantly surprised to see Lakshmi jewelry available during 4.0. That was an amazing addition! Why the heck was it discontinued? Having Primals drop jewelry would make them relevant to gear-building again. Even patch Primals can give jewelry the same ilvl as normal raids and default crafted jewelry while off patch Primals give jewelry with the same ilvl as upgraded tome jewelry, Peak Crafted jewelry, and Raid jewelry.

In other words... Byakko would give i350 jewelry along with the i350 weapons and Tsyukoyomi would give i370 jewelry along with her i365 weapon(although just making the weapon i370 would be better to be honest..) for example.

24-Man Raid Path: Need I even explain this? For goodness's sake devs allow us to upgrade gear gotten from 24-man raids. Make them require the same upgrade tokens as tome gear. Or if you must stretch the time, implement ways to upgrade 24-man Raid gear on the .5 patches that release content like Heaven-On-High. Make it so Heaven-On-High drops trade-in items needed to augment 24-man gear.



With all of this in mind, we end up with Augmented Tome Gear, Raid Gear, and Peak Crafted Gear released on even patches with raids without devaluing the raids themselves while adding more incentive to crafting + raid AND adding more options to creating the perfect BiS, along with primal jewelry for the beginning raiders. Then comes the odd patch with Primal jewelry and weapons at ilvl cap for incentive and gear-building while allowing non-raiders to get Augmented Crafted gear and Peak Crafted Gear. Shortly after, the mid X.X5 patch releases with 24-man Raid Gear Augmentation.

By the X.X5 odd patch we have 4 different armor options of equal ilvl, 3 different weapon options(not including raid as that's always 5 ilvls above) of equal ilvl and 4 different jewelry options of equal ilvl. All having different stats from each other which would bring incentive to do ALL content to reach absolute BiS. Not just for casual players but raiders as well. As that undoubtedly includes the completion raids for perfection. The horizontal progression we could definitely use.. Sounds like a dream right? I know. I just woke up myself.

[RiyahArp]

That isn't horizontal progression if you have best in slot. Best in slot in this game is worthless; the moment you step into heaven on high, into an instanced roulette that isn't expert, into a fate or seasonal event, into pvp, BiS doesn't matter. It's just a mathematical optimization that gets used in a few things and really doesn't involve progression horizontally; that's why it can be removed completely in so much content without it being affected.

You're asking just to make BiS take longer by splitting it up among more activities. Real horizontal progression should instead give options for players to use to lets them enhance or specialize in things. If you grind dungeons a lot, dungeon gear should enhance your ability to do them. If you fate a lot, gear should have set bonuses that enhance fighting in FATES. As it is now, there's really no customization you can have. You either get tomes if you are casual, get crafted if you are rich, get savage if you raid, or mix from all three.

If you want horizontal they need to be not afraid of people having different builds. Content is easy enough for build choices not to matter casually, and in hard content people trend to bis anyways, making whether builds exist or not a moot point. Just asking people to do all the content to get a slightly better armor set doesn't really matter to me; i can do everything i need in unaugmented 24 man gear as easily as augmented.

[Magic-Mal]

Snip.

Sure it doesn't make a huge difference having gear right now but that doesn't mean we can't get new content to use the gear in. Just because it doesn't matter to you doesn't mean it doesn't matter at all. If that was the case the top ilvl wouldn't be i370 because you don't even need i370 to beat the raids. People make BiS because they like feeling powerful. They like seeing big numbers or feeling extra fast, whatever their motive is. As long as the content doesn't have an ilvl sync BiS can be used in it, regardless of if you personally think it's useless.

I like feeling strong in current dungeons, trials, 24-man raids, NM raids, Savage raids, and side content. Why? Because I like feeling strong. If you don't want to augment anything and keep everything at default i350 and default i360 tome gear that's all your decision.

[Sigma-Astra]

That isn't horizontal progression if you have best in slot. Best in slot in this game is worthless; the moment you step into heaven on high, into an instanced roulette that isn't expert, into a fate or seasonal event, into pvp, BiS doesn't matter.

You really need to stop saying this. It may be worthless to you, but to others, it's not. You're projecting your opinions as facts again.

[Mahrze]

snip.

Just log out, mate. It's in your best interest, really.