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

[HyoMinPark]

All of this is exactly one of the reasons why I made up that post a while back. The one about all the different paths to gear that's max ilvl, meaning gear that simply has the level and different stats not actually being the raid or Augmented Tome Gear. I also edited in to the OP.

What you are failing to realize here is that maximum item level does not necessarily mean the best (the i370 Aiming body exists, after all). Did you miss where I said BRD has 2 builds currently that sacrifice i370 pieces for an i350 piece and an i360 piece? And they aren’t the only job that has done that this tier. As it stands, it’s not just Tomestones or Savage as your only options, and “highest item level” does not always mean “the best”.

I’m not opposed to adding more options, but they may not necessarily be “the best”—considering that gear stat configurations are chosen by algorithms that assign substats on each piece of gear based on what stat combination hasn’t been chosen yet, they could end up “the best”, “the second best”, “bearable”, or “absolute trash”. Getting “the best” may still rely on either raiding for the piece, or settling for something “second best”; I hope you also realize that.

I want to be able to get something nice from more content than just raids or dungeons. No matter what we do, in the end if we want to be i370 or i400 we will have to deal with having things we don't really want. We shouldn't have to deal with extra Skill Speed if we don't want Skill Speed. We should have way more options. FFXIV even right now has the content to reward some things. Like the Peak Crafted Gear and Primal Jewelry I mentioned.

I’ll use BRD as an example again—there already are options for the BRDs that don’t want the 983 Skill Speed that comes with the High Crit build: the High DEX build, which has less skill speed, for example. I’ve even seen some BRDs talk about taking the i350 crafted belt to reduce the Skill Speed (BiS sets favor the Augmented Tomestone belt), and to allow for more Crit melding, as that’s their preference. And these are orange-percentile BRDs; they’re good players. There may be slight damage variances, or there may not; I didn’t follow up to see if that was tested.
Damage variance on BRD is already a significant thing even with BiS because of RNG, to be fair.

There are 3 builds for MCH in Sigmascape all with varying degrees of GCDs so that they can have a GCD (which is dependent on Skill Speed) that gives them the least amount of clipping with their latency, since MCH is so heavily affected by ping with regards to their Wildfires.

These options exist; the various gearsets that currently exist all boil down to preference as they all have similar damage outputs (i.e., High Crit and High DEX will net you roughly the same amount of gain, hence why they’re both viable builds despite one sacrificing main stat in favor of a substat—even though Crit basically counts as a main stat for BRD at this point because of how much our job revolves around it).

If some MCH decides they want to try and create a build with 3,000 Skill Speed and 2,500 Critical Hit, they should be able to. Who knows, maybe something hilarious will come out of it.

At that point, all other MCHs are looking at that MCH and scratching their heads. Such a build is not only impossible within the confines of this game currently, but also a detriment to that MCH’s performance. Skill Speed and a MCH’s core rotation do not allow for such “crazy builds” without severely impacting the MCH’s damage performance (e.g., GCD clipping). Skill Speed and Spell Speed are not stats that can allow for such “crazy builds” because of the way they function within this game—not without severely impacting the player who chooses to go down that road, and not in a good way.

I just hate not having more than 2 options.

Your ire seems to stem from the fact that these options (there are more than 2 for BiS for multiple jobs; I’ve said that multiple times) require raid gear and aren’t completely reliant on gear you can get outside of raids. But, as I said above, even if you did add in Primal Accessories or some Super Augmented crafted gear, they still may or may not be “the best” for your job; “the best” may still be locked behind raids.

If you only cared about item level, this wouldn’t be an issue. But you clearly do care about more than just that. That’s kind of why your MCH example confuses me—you obviously care to some extent about substats and how they affect a job (otherwise, I don’t think we would be having this conversation), so why start suggesting that it should be possible to do something so completely suboptimal?

Lots of people out there don't go by what theorycrafters say though. Just like lots do go by what they say. Even if something is subpar, the player should be able to make that decision especially if they aren't raiding Ultimate since I bet even a MCH with 3,000 Skill Speed can beat Kefka with a team of other players with botched gear. Players with odd stats can make their own groups. Otherwise why have options at all if the best way to go is the way to go? Just have VIT/STR/DEX/INT/MND and call it a day.

I question why a player would willingly pick something subpar, if they are aware that it’s subpar. I can at least understand if they are unaware of how subpar something is, but if they already know? Why willingly choose it?

There are plenty of options for several jobs this tier with regards to BiS—BRD has 5 different BiS that they can choose from, each with varying amounts of DEX and Crit, the two stats that are most important to them. MCH has 3. Healers have tons depending on their preferences (High Piety? Low Piety? Determination build? Crit build?).

The options are there—they just aren’t off the wall like you’re suggesting here, and yes, they rely on raid gear. But that’s the way the algorithm fell. If you don’t think they’re there, I would suggest you doing some research; all jobs currently have multiple options for BiS, and there are decent options for non-BiS or pseudo-BiS if you look;I just doubt you’d want them because they aren’t “the best”. It’s not cut and dry. The only difference between those and what you’re suggesting is that none of them are “crazy builds” that also make the jobs absolutely horrible to play (because 3,000 Skill Speed on a MCH would make it horrible to play), and none rely exclusively on just Savage gear or just Tomestone gear.

It doesn’t matter if the 3,000 Skill Speed MCH can clear God Kefka if he’s hindering a party while doing so. Clearing isn’t all that matters when you’re playing with other people, and I get tired of hearing the “Well, we cleared!” argument after a run where two people carried six. If he wants to play with others who love botching their gear, then fine; but if he tries to join parties or statics with players who care about things like optimization because “we’re still going to clear, chill”, then no. That’s not okay.

The theorycrafters proved that raw damage is always better than elemental. Why have elemental weapons then? But we do have elemental weapons.

If you’re referring to the ARR elemental weapons (e.g., the conjurer and thaumaturge weapons that you can craft that all have elemental resistances on them) and not the ones from Pagos, those are there strictly because they’re a remnant from 1.0. When the developers ported 1.0 over to ARR, they didn’t delete any of the existing items because they didn’t want to cause issues for players that returned that may have had those items equipped or in their inventories—e.g., say a player had equipped one of those weapons on their conjurer: they didn’t want the player to return and suddenly not have a weapon, so they left them in the game. Elemental resistance had a bit of importance in 1.0, but that was removed with ARR, making any gains null and void. If you’ve noticed, elemental weapons stopped being a thing after the base 2.0 game; you don’t see them anywhere else.

If you’re referring to the Pagos weapons, they’re supposed to be there to serve as a base for the next step of the mess the Stormblood Relic Questline is. But they aren’t elementally aspected last I checked, because elemental resistance has no gains in this iteration of the game. After all, 4.0 removed all elemental materia as drops; any left over are from people who were simply carrying them beforehand.

At least the players have that choice. Some will listen to what's out there, some won't in the end. But they can still beat the hardest content.

Players already have choices. You not doing your research to see that isn’t the fault of the raiders, the developers, or anyone else.