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

[Penthea]

Because they didn't warn players for weeks/a month. Oh wait, they did.

You still should not remove the ability to equip already existing gear. This sort of thing renders some very hard-earned gear useless and ruins glamours. Doing this would have resulted in a tremendous amount of backlash. The best thing to do is change the requirements for new gear, which is what SE did.

Furthermore there is no point in wasting resources to rebalance accessories for old content when it has near zero impact on the new content. That would have been a lot of time and money wasted.

Of all the things to criticise SE about, choosing to not remove the ability to equip already existing gear is definitely not one of them. This is hardly a "problem" worth even thinking about. There are far bigger and deeper things wrong with the game.

[JohnSpawnVFX]

Because they didn't warn players for weeks/a month. Oh wait, they did.

You mean like the major part of players, who never read patch notes or Lodestone news?

[Magic-Mal]

You still should not remove the ability to equip already existing gear. This sort of thing renders some very hard-earned gear useless and ruins glamours. Doing this would have resulted in a tremendous amount of backlash. The best thing to do is change the requirements for new gear, which is what SE did.

All of the battle jewelry lv50 and up look exactly the same regardless of job and DoW/DoL jewelry also look exactly the same. As in, All Lv50 jewelry looks the same for all jobs. All lv52 jewelry looks the same for all jobs. These can be locked with no loss of glamour.

As for the 1-49 jewelry, what they could do is create a confirmation prompt saying:

"This equipment is not compatible with your class/job. Are you sure you want to equip?

Equip: [Check Box]

Confirm______Cancel"

We need a way to stop players and let them know the stats are not compatible with the jobs they have. Or else they will never learn. It is an issue.

[Penthea]

All of the battle jewelry lv50 and up look exactly the same regardless of job and DoW/DoL jewelry also look exactly the same. As in, All Lv50 jewelry looks the same for all jobs. All lv52 jewelry looks the same for all jobs. These can be locked with no loss of glamour.

No they don't all look the same, some have different colours within the same model. Even if they all looked the same it wouldn't change the fact that people worked to get them and taking away the ability to use them is a bad thing.

And in case you don't believe me, here is an image directly from my armoire.

We need a way to stop players and let them know the stats are not compatible with the jobs they have. Or else they will never learn. It is an issue.

Most players have the presence of mind to notice that their weapon always has a certain main stat on it, so it means that stat is for their class. They see their starter class quests award gear with that same stat. They see they can only roll need on armour with certain stats on them while they are playing a certain class. They eventually learn if they fall in to DoM or DoW based on the gear their class can equip. There is also the recommended gear button that recommends specific types of gear with specific stats.

And in SB you're forced to only equip gear for your class so even if a player managed to not notice any of the above, they still end up in gear appropriate for their class. The worst that can happen is people to not meld, or meld the wrong materia. You would have to be fantastically oblivious to meld something like mind when the game keeps throwing dex gear at you. Or something called spellspeed when you play a class that isn't a caster, and your gear has this other stat called skillspeed but never spellspeed.

This so-called issue only applies to an extreme minority. Fixing this would result in little to no noticeable improvement in the quality of the playerbase.

[Kirsten_Rev]

This so-called issue only applies to an extreme minority. Fixing this would result in little to no noticeable improvement in the quality of the playerbase.

I agree given the current state of the game, but speaking personally (and likely for many others on the forums), I very much want SE to begin introducing meaningful gearing options. Stormblood gearing, as you pointed out, is relatively ignorance-proof, but this also results in an incredibly stale progression system. Case in point, the only thing I care about with 4.4 gear is whether or not it offers me a desirable Glamour; the stats associated with the items are utterly boring and predictable.

Given that this path would require SE to implement better in-game guidance for players who don't engage with the broad out-of-game community and its resources, I want to see it done. In fact, I don't want to just stop at notifying players of useless stats: SE needs to provide us with much more detailed information about how our stats impact our performance. Diablo 3's character screen would be an ideal example to learn from.

[Reynhart]

Are we playing the same game...?

Yes, we are, the game where STR, DEX, INT and MND has exactly the same effect, so you could rename it Power and it would be a single stat, since items are already locked by jobs.
The game where no job needs to focus on both Skillspeed and Spellspeed, so you can rename it Speed, since items are already locked by jobs.
The game where VIT and PIE are only useful for determining HP and MP, so you can already use HP and MP as stats.
The game where DH and Crit are the same concept, so Crit would be enough, for the stat that randomly increases the damage and is used for some procs.
And you could remove Det, since it's nothing more than a substat of Power.

And, apparently, no one gives a damn on Tenacity, which effect is also covered by Defense/MDefense on gear and Power anyway...

And we would all play our jobs exactly the same as we are now.

[KaivaC]

Yes, we are, the game where STR, DEX, INT and MND has exactly the same effect, so you could rename it Potency and it would be a single stat, since items are already locked by jobs.
The game where no job needs to focus on both Skillspeed and Spellspeed, so you can rename it Speed, since items are already locked by jobs.
The game where VIT and PIE are only useful for determining HP and MP, so you can already use HP and MP as stats.
The game where DH and Crit are the same concept, so Crit would be enough, for the stat that randomly increases the damage and is used for some procs.
And you could remove Det, since it's basically a substat of Potency.

And, apparently, no one gives a damn on Tenacity, which effect is also covered by Defense/MDefense on gear and Potency anyway...

And we would all play our jobs exactly the same as we are now.

Gonna need clarification from the other raiders here on the other stats and to make sure I'm correct, but based on personal experience, that would require a reworking on main stats and how they are applied to combat, wouldn't they? On the tanking side of things, I know that Crit doesn't help Paladins as much as Direct Hit does. Whereas Warriors rely heavily on those sweet crits during their IR burst - in fact, it's why the preferred stats are Crit for WAR and DH for PLDs, because that is what is preferable to those jobs when it comes down to optimization.

Again, with your suggestion, it would require a reworking of stats and how damage is probably applied, and that might be far more work than the developers would find necessary, nor would it even be easy to do, considering that all the jobs have specific builds to pull the most use out of them.

[Reynhart]

Gonna need clarification from the other raiders here on the other stats and to make sure I'm correct, but based on personal experience, that would require a reworking on main stats and how they are applied to combat, wouldn't they?

No. What is applied in combat is Attack, Magic Attack and Healing. It's just that, depending on the job, your Attack is tied to a different stat. If you look at PLD, even Clemency and Holy Spirit are tied to Attack instead of the other two, and for healers, both their healing spells and damaging spells scales on MND, i.e, healing.

[Sigma-Astra]

Yes, we are, the game where STR, DEX, INT and MND has exactly the same effect, so you could rename it Power and it would be a single stat, since items are already locked by jobs.
The game where no job needs to focus on both Skillspeed and Spellspeed, so you can rename it Speed, since items are already locked by jobs.
The game where VIT and PIE are only useful for determining HP and MP, so you can already use HP and MP as stats.
The game where DH and Crit are the same concept, so Crit would be enough, for the stat that randomly increases the damage and is used for some procs.
And you could remove Det, since it's nothing more than a substat of Power.

And, apparently, no one gives a damn on Tenacity, which effect is also covered by Defense/MDefense on gear and Power anyway...

And we would all play our jobs exactly the same as we are now.

Yea sure, because single player basic RPG game stat aspects are the way to go about things here. It's not hard to pay attention to what your main and sub stats are, but sure, let's make the game 20x more simple and stupid than it was before because one person doesn't like it.

/sarcasm

Crit and DH may be the same concept, but they don't even function in the same way to begin with as certain jobs require one over the other entirely. Each one functions on a different probability rate of succeeding based off of how high your own stats are and since....every job will have a different number inflation, that's not even counting with what people meld, the numbers are not going to be the same for everyone.

I don't need my spellspeed to affect my overall speed of everything that I do if you're wanting to combine both skill and spell into just speed, that's stupid. If I'm wacking things with my stick faster instead of casting faster then I'm not being a very good mage.

I'm not even sure why we need this asinine basic stat system you're suggesting. Stats in XIV are not hard, it's not rocket science.

[KaivaC]

No. What is applied in combat is Attack, Magic Attack and Healing. It's just that, depending on the job, your Attack is tied to a different stat. If you look at PLD, even Clemency and Holy Spirit are tied to Attack instead of the other two, and for healers, both their healing spells and damaging spells scales on MND, i.e, healing.

Pardon me, but I could recall that the damage you do to enemies have four different variants. If I'm remembering correctly, that is normal, direct hit, critical, and direct critical, all of which are affected by the stats you have and a healthy dose of RNG. In fact, I remember that Crit melds directly affect BOTH the rate of crits as well as crit hit damage. It's more than just the three you are saying. While there may be some games out there in which you can just use those three as the only applicable combat attributes, FFXIV is not that kind of game. What you are suggesting would, at a minimum based on the experience I've personally had, require a rework of WARs, who rely very heavily on not only how strong their crits are in their IR window, but also the rate of crits.

Not to mention how it would affect SCHs when it comes to getting that crit on their shields when it is very much needed during high damage. I couldn't speak on the other jobs as I haven't tried them out, but I don't think simplifying matters as you've suggested would be nearly as good as you are saying they will be.