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

[Imuka]

1. Unwanted stats can be balanced if you mix your gear. You don't have to get full tome gear + weapon to play effective in current content especially if you don't raid. As for your example with the BLM weapon: The so much wanted spell speed can be gained by the suzaku weapon which is completly fine, or you balance it out with your melds. Someone who doesn't raid doesn't have to min max stats at all, even most people who raid wouldn't need that if they are not going for pure parse runs.

Only if a Player would start to favour 370 Gear over 390 Gear, in a Game, with only a vertical Progression System. The Problem is, that the Devs create undesirable Gear on purpose to fill the Slots. And a Weapon should never ever come with undesirable Stats in any way. Heck, not even normal Gear should go for that.
Non Raiders have only one way of Progress: Raising their Numbers.. Which is also the only way for Raiders...or better said for everybody, because this is the only way to Progress in a Vertical Game.

And some here wonder why a Part of the Non-Raiding Community shows so much hostility against Raiders? In this Thread you could see how people started the "Raiders deserve vertical Progress and the best Gear. Non Raiders deserve shit. Not even good shit, just scrapyard Shit." Mindset.
We could demand a Gear System that is fun for everyone from the Devs, but then again someone says "No Non Raiders deserve no Gear fun!".
Some want fun for everyone and some just want fun for their kind.

Building a good gear is not a mechanical Task it is a though Process. A Person could not be mechanical strong enough to Clear Savage 1, but still be able to calculate the best Gear and creating a 2 Class System is not a solution.
Raiders get 400 and their Classes gets the best Substats, the right Skillspeed and Non Raiders should just throw together something with the 370-390 Gear and be happy with it. With mish mashed Substats, that don't work well together a crude Skillspeed, that makes Rotations unfun and no concept of vertical Progress.
Then why should non Raiders even do anything in the Game, if people deny them this vertical Progress?

There are people who are able to calculate the best Builds for Games like Path of Exile, while at the same time not being able to clear the hardest Content. There are also Raiders who clear Savage 4 with little work, but would horribly fail to create a good Gearset or a good Rotation and they only live with Notes, Guides, PDfs, etc. made by other Reddit Users.
Imagine how the Game would look like if we deny non raiders even more vertical Progress: They log in let somebody craft them the new HQ Gear, put Materia in it, run 5 Rounds of the new Primal and are done with the Patch in just an afternoon.
Keep in mind, that not only the Raiders pay this Game, the Non-Raiders also pay the Game. This is exactly like with Fighting Games, not only the FCG Players pay the large Bill of the new Game, the Casuals do. Because of that, a Game must be fun for non Tournament Players or Non-Raiders.

Because of that, we need a Gear Progression System, that is fun for all Players, not just for Raiders.
The most people who don't go into Savage know, that they won't get the best Gear, but from my View, they also deserve to be able Build a good Gearset.
Like I said not the best, but a good one which fiels viable, not something that looks like a Car build from several Parts of other Cars on the Scrapyard.
Just let the clever people min max, but the Devs act like everybody who does not go into Raids is to dumb to notice, if a 390 Weapon is just bad in every way.

People often ask, "Why do Non-Raiders want better Gear if they don't go raiding?".
This is like the Question "Why do Raiders need Loot from the last Savage Fight?", because the cleared the hardest Fight, why do they need better Gear now? Because they also like seeing their little Numbers grow.
It is simple, because Humans enjoy seeing Numbers raising. People who play Destiny 2 and mostly stay in PvP, still like to see their Gear Level rising, even if a better Armor has zero impact in PvP. Because, when the only Goal in a Game is, to raise those Numbers, the only Progress is raising those little Numbers.
Otherwise Raiders would not demand Loot, because clearing a fight should be Reward enough. But they like it, like every other Player in the Game.

Despite the Risk of sounding like a broken Record. The Maingoal of the whole Gear System should be fun for everyone, no matter what type of Combat Content they play.
People should be able to build a good working Gearset at 380, 390 and 400 at the moment.
390 does not need to be BIS, because 400 would be BIS, but the 390 Gear needs to work for it's own and not have slots be filled with Substats that are just bad for a Class.
There is no fun for Players of they change their Weapon, Armor and Accesoires from 380 to 390 and just feel no real difference in Numbers, because their Substats work against each other.
I would even drop the 380 of Omega Normal Mode and put it on 390, the same Level as the Tome Gear.

2. Not only a part of the raiders are toxic as hell, there is also a good part of the non raiding community that is toxic as hell and this part is even bigger than the part of the raiders. The only reason the toxic raiders get mentioned all the time is because the people of the non raiding community are much more vocal about stuff like that.

The Non-Raiders are more vocal outside the Game about it, not inside the Game. I met enough of the Oucasted of the Raiding Community over time.
The guys, that freak out, as soon, as something goes not super smooth. The people who insult ingame, on Discord or Teamspeak. The guys who really freak out in the Chat, like somebody killed their Dog, when it was just a simple wipe.
There are also toxic people in the Non-Raiding Community, and they also freak out, and none Person is better. Please don't make it look like they Casual Community is what ruins the Game. Both Toxic Parts share their Part of this horrible envoirement.
The good Raiders stay away from their toxic Outcasts, and play with their Parties and Friends, but those Outcasts are that Part, where the Non-Raiders have often their first Contact and most contact with people called Raiderss. While the non toxic Non-Raiders often run normal stuff, like Dungeons etc. with Randoms.
Now imagine being a Non-Raider and meet Toxic and non Toxic "Casuals", and then meeting in 3 of 4 cases again on the people "outcasted" of the Raiders. People get the Picture that Raiders have a large Group of toxic Players. At the same time, it does not help, when Raiders here, start their "Non Raiders deserver shit" Propaganda.

3. SE does make raids easier for the people who didn't go raid before because it was to hard for them, not because they have to create less content because of it. They started with less content even before they started to make raids easier.

Back in Coil and Alex nearly nobody of the Non-Raiders complained that they wanted easier Raids. Alex 1-4 was the opposite, I saw Raiders complain, that it is too hard. Now we reached a Point of "Everybody can Raid. Everybody should go Raiding!". And this is because we have such a huge lack if midcore Content for Players. We allready lacked that before, but instead of fixing it, they thought "Hey, if everybody goes into Savage, they won't notice, even if we reduce the amount of activities".
We have only 1 Dungeon for every uneven Patch and some people blame Ultima for it, and there might be something behind it, because for everything we get, they take something away.
But from my View, their long Term Goal is, to make everybody go into Savage, to strech the small Content even more.
I noticed how little in ARR & HW people who did not Raid cared for Raiding, but since SB, suddenly so many people want to do Savage. And the reason is in the Game, not in the Community.

5. I would prefer if they would go even a step further so that you would've to need a certain amount of points to become a mentor in the first place.

This would change nothing, if you demand them to Grind something to achive this Status, because the most horrible Mentors in this Game are often those people who are very good at grinding Stuff.
The flaw of the current System is, that the requirement to be a Mentor is grinding and nothing else.
Others demanded that people who cleared Ultimate shoule be Mentors...but does clearing Ultimate Fights make somebody a good Teacher? No, not anywhere.
Being mechanical good at the Game, does not make anybody a good Mentor. Heck, I even know some people who are good at the Game, but if they talk 5 Minutes to a Newcomer, that Newcomer would move back to Steam and instantly hit the Refound Button.
We need a System, that makes the Players spend Time with those Newcomers and maybe even get invited by those into a Party. The Goal is, that mentoring should be fun for those who like to teach and not for those who like to get achivements and Stuff.

[Melichoir]

Only if a Player would start to favour 370 Gear over 390 Gear....in a Vertical Game.

They create 'undesireable' gear as a form of balance in a few different ways. They dont want you so hyper stacked with crit or DH or what not that every piece of gear has the 'optimal' amount of these stats. It would actually make things super easy. They also give access to teh best gear to players who are able to clear content earlier than those who dont. That is a more mechanically driven aspect than gear. That is a fair system because it rewards players who are better at the game for their skill than those who struggle. It's not that lower skilled players wont have access to better gear, they do get access to that gear, just a bit later in the content than the better skilled players. As a point, if you have full ilvl 400 tomestone gear, I guarantee you could clear the savage content even with semi sub optimal stats on some of the gear.

Also, balance wise, tehy want to make sure there is some mix-and-matching going on. Meaning, they dont want raiders to just use raid gear, and non raiders to use tome gear. They want to keep raiders engaged with non raid content, so that does mean still doing dailies for the tomestone gear that fits that slot best.

And some here wonder why a Part of the Non-Raiding Community shows ....... fun for their kind.

I rarely see this form of argument. I more often see people saying "If I play the hardest content in the game, I should be rewarded for doing so over the player who can just run DR:Expert and Trials 4 days of the week." And the difference in reward should be substantial enough to demonstrate the difference in skill. As much as this argument that "there are raiders who want it all for themselves," it is easy to turn around and say there are non-raiders who think they should have access to all the same gear without any effort applied. That would also be incredibly unfun and unfair to players actually doing work to get access to better gear sooner.

Building a good gear is not ......people deny them this vertical Progress?

The game is, as I said before, designed to reward players EARLIER if they complete the hardest tier content and not deny outright people. You can get ilvl 400 gear, but you need to wait further into the content patch to get access to the upgrade items through the alliances unlike raiders who can get those drops via books or actual clearing the Savage fights. Youre not stuck at iLvL 390ish, but rather gated from higher iLvL till later in the content. You can get passed that gate by improving your mechanical skill and clearing the harder content. And this is just a thing that all games do - those typically with better mechanical skill reap better rewards than those who dont. And that is fair to players who are simply better at the game. Unless your point is to just say "Hey, mechanical skill should be of minor relevance. All that matters is people try." That is just tearing down the best players in favor of making nice with the worst.

At the end of the day, if non-raiders want that sweet gear, they need to go do the content that provides it. Just like everyone else. And instead of making excuses about how bad non-raiders are or how hard it is, we should be encouraging people to get better and brush up on their mechanical skill - a "Lets make people play better, instead of lowering the bar."

There are people who.....made by other Reddit Users.

I am strongly under the impression that most people who clear Savage content on a regular basis know how to build their armor sets and have a pretty good fundamental understanding of the game in that regards. And most of them talk with one another and theorycraft all this out. And that information isnt locked behind some wall or in some ivory tower. Its freely accessible, with lots of guides actually talking about the breakdowns of skills or stats or etc. There are discord servers where you can literally go and ask questions of people who understand the content and how they came to certain conclusions. And they will tell you more often in a very nice way. That is as long as you dont go in and say "Nah, Everything you say is 100% wrong. Im right, I just have crappy pugs and you just have the privilege of having a nice static."

Imagine how the Game would look like if we deny ....Tournament Players or Non-Raiders.

You keep framing this up as a 'two-class' system with no ability to move between the two groups. As if raiders are the gatekeepers that are denying the plebs from having any fun. Raiders arent stopping non-raiders from raiding. The fights are. Theyre designed to be difficult. And you need to step up your game, just like ALL the people who cleared current raid content did. However, it sounds like the point your making is that SE is designing stuff to specifically cater to only a particular segment of the player base and sneering at anyone who doesnt meet its requirements. The truth is SE wants people to play the content. They want non-raiders to become raiders. They want players to push themselves. That takes effort on the players part. I dont see how arguing for a new system that rewards more or less the same thing for players who dont push themselves vs players who do is some how a good system.

Because of that, we need a Gear Progression System..... is just bad in every way.

A 390 weapon is superior to a 370 weapon on virtually all cases. Primary stat and Weapon damage advantages mean a hell-of-a-lot. Is a 390 weap going to be as good as a 405 weap? No. Thats fine. Again, youre able to get that 405 weap by improving and clearing the harder content. Or! by doing the anima weapon which will supposedly award you that same weapon level. Again, this is goes back to my earlier points - people who beat the harder content get access to the better gear sooner.

People often ask, "Why do Non-Raiders want better Gear if they don't go raiding?"..... like every other Player in the Game.

Its not just seeing better numbers, but that better gear translates into an advantage in the next tier/xpac, as well as farming that content becomes easier for things like mounts. People definitely do like bigger numbers, but I dont believe that most raiders are in it for that at that point. A lot of raiders enjoy the challange of it.

Despite the Risk of sounding like ....the Tome Gear.

You have to balance out whats fun for everyone vs what rewards players for their efforts. You can get a solid 390 set by grinding out tomestones and not touching savage at all. And that doesnt require all that much effort other than running the DR:Expert a few times a week. Experts arent all that difficult. So if you want the biggest, baddest numbers, you gotta fight the biggest, baddest bosses. Which are there for everyone. There is no gate other than getting a basic iLvL together and learning the fights - most of which are scripted to a T.

But what youre describing would promote a system of best-bang-for-your-buck. That is, why should I grind out substantially harder content if I can just do expert roulette a few times a week and still get fairly comparable gear.

The Non-Raiders are more vocal outside the ...."Non Raiders deserver shit" Propaganda.

There are toxic people at every tier. This isnt even an issue of 'Toxic Raiders' and the casual interactions. Ive had plenty of runs in non-raid content over casuals who will not even put up the slightest bit of effort to make things easier on the group and start getting angry when being called out on it. Ive been called an elitest for telling another player once that "Hey, if you arent going to MT the fight, please dont pull early." Ive run into my own fair share of bad and toxic 'casuals' - the kind thatll scream at you for doing mechanics wrong but regularly fail said mechanics because they dont know what theyre talking about. Seen plenty of that. But I know that they dont make up the bulk of the player base.

I know that there are plenty of casuals who dont understand certain things do to not ever being told or learning it wrong. I see them often enough. And the truth is, MOST of those people will change their play style with a bit of polite conversation. Some wont, most will though. This cuts both ways. While there are toxic raiders, casuals need to start engaging with raiders in a more constructive way. Most raiders, contrary to popular myth, will gladly discuss things with you if you ask them politely with the intention of improving. Cause frankly, the most cynical and blunt reason is it makes their lives easier if the player base overall was better. But the more charitable (and I feel the deep down true reason) is that people want to have fun playing thsi game with everyone and raiders want to see people improve and play with them too. Most raiders will say its cool if your a casual but you want to get better and do raiding. Theyll point you to the right guides and resources. Theyll answer questions and talk with you. Show the initiative to be better than you were yesterday, and most raiders will give you props for that. Casual players also need to reach out and interact with the better raiders. And that will take some humility for some.

Back in Coil and Alex nearly nobody of the Non-Raiders complained that they wanted ....not in the Community.

Alex 1-4 is not a great example due to how extremely fine tuned those DPS checks were. At that time, people were literally stripping their tanks down to the bare minimum HP in order to maximize damage just to meet DPS checks. Those fights, for all the cool things they had, also had major design flaws - something the raiding community picked up on really quickly. From my perspective, they substituted the mechanical skill of Coils for ridiculous DPS checks in A1-4. From my understanding, the latter end of Alex was top notch though. Still had DPS checks, but it was more mechanically focused.

And thats the crux of a lot of the savage content. Its mechanically focused. Something you can learn to play and do. If you sit there and study the fights and know your skills and work with a group, you can do it too. Everyone can do these fights. Chaos will Always go into fire phase after he does his damning edict. He will always do water if he starts with Long/Lat at the beginning. Fire always transitions to wind, and Water to Earth. He will always cast Chaotic Dispersion at certain points in his fight. These fights are highly scripted. It just takes you sitting down and learning the script and playing along and adapting to it. Is it easy? No. It is hard. But it's not outside of anyones real skill, so long as they put the effort. The irony here is that Raiders know this fact. They firmly believe that anyone can do this content - even casuals. It's only some of the more vocal casuals who say that its impossible for them.

Beyond that, the content release formula has been pretty stable for a long while. Even considering HW. I would say things appear more lackluster thematically for SB, but thats just how this xpac played out. Maybe a more tightly knit and focused story on either Ala Mhigo or Doma wouldve been better, but at this point its whatever. But there is a wierd perception that there is 'less' to do in SB. I dont think thats the case, particularly since were about to have the same amount of dungeons, diadem-esque things, raids, and alliance raids along with trials in SB as we did in HW. It just seems things appear more lack luster, or have been. Honestly, the Burn is a breath of fresh air for me cause it feels like an expert a little bit. But thats just opinion.

This would change nothing, if you demand them to.... achivements and Stuff.

This is a weird segway but for the mentor system, youre essentially saying that there is no qualifications difference between someone who beat the hardest content and someone who did not. It's a wierd statement to make. It's like saying someone whos an expert in surgery and a doctor is only as good as a person who reads webMD when it comes to teaching. That the doctor is no more qualified than an internet reader when it comes to teaching a subject. Not to say that every doctor is a great teacher, but it is worth noting that the doctor is more likely qualified to teach a subject like surgery over the guy or gal who just reads webMD.

You also keep trying to distinguish 'mechanical skill' and understanding as if theyre mutually exclusive, when its probably closer to the truth that most of those with the mechanical skill to clear savage on a regular basis are also pretty well rehearsed with how the game works from a stat/gear/skill point of perspective.

[Ilan]

Too much text

1. For what do you really need 390-400 gear? For nothing. You only want it and if the stats are so crappy that your rotation doesn't work, you'll take 10 ilvl below. No one needs the highest ilvl to be able to play the game if you know how to play your class, you are fine with a mix of 380-390, i don't know why people always need the best gear if they don't do the hardest content or can't even play their class good enough that 10 ilvl and better stats would matter at all (not talking to you personaly because i don't know you).

2. Excuse me, but this is bull. I've seen far more of these non raiders that can't behave because most raiders keep to themselfs, i'm not talking about these players who have maybe o10s down they are still not raiders.

3. If you would be able to see all old threads, you would see that a lot of people complained that savage is too hard and they want it easier. Of course people complained about gordias because it was way overtuned because the dps checks where way to tight for people who are not absolut hardcore raiders. Now raids get easier so that they are available for more people, especially for the ones who didn't dare to go in there before. But guess what? People complain again.

4. The problem is that no system would change anything really. If you are a player who is really out to help new players you'll get ignored, flamed or accused of beeing an elitist for giving tipps how to play a class properly or for explaining how mechanics work. So why bother at all to make a change? A lot of mentors just want the mount and the crown and a lot of new players don't want help because you don't pay their sub. I for my part have never seen a community in a game that is more willing to help someone who is new, but i also have never seen so many stuborn players that straight up refuse help and beeing rude if someone tries to help them instead of booting or flaming them.