Two things FF14 can adopt from Guild Wars 2.

[Alexandre_Noireau]

For 1 to happen they would basically have to frontload giving all skills at a very low level so people have everything by the time they enter dungeons.

No they don't. Seriously, this is one of the few games with a sync system that deletes your skills, quite literally, as if our character got amnesia or something.

[Berethos]

Yeah, games like Guild Wars 2 figured this out years ago.

Figured what out?

How to lower damage/effectiveness of skills based on your level that you've been lowered to? XIV does that with how abilities, weaponskills, and spells rely on the interaction of potency and attributes.

How to balance a larger number of abilities? I'd argue they haven't based both on how a number of builds are just not effective or recommended, and the overall lower amount of abilities per class to choose from and that you have, at most, about 10-12 to choose from, depending on the weapons you have slotted.

How to balance a tank's threat gen, what healing the healer needs to do, and DPS requirements to both do damage and manage their own threat? When did GW2 decide to start using the trinity approach again? Last I checked, outside of some specific raid fights and one more traditional healer "elite specialization" they still rely on personal ability to survive through things like dodges or self-healing, and pumping out as much damage as possible. The issues our design has with balancing abilities in a group content setting at various levels is not one that GW2 shares because the group content is not designed the same way.

[kikix12]

No they don't. Seriously, this is one of the few games with a sync system that deletes your skills, quite literally, as if our character got amnesia or something.

Lore-wise, you are doing the dungeons in your memory through the echo...hence why you can interact and stuff.

As for mechanics, yes, they do.

Imagine a lvl15 bard and a lvl70 bard doing Sastasha. Ignoring the fact that the former doesn't have AoE yet while the latter does (how you deal with this disparity?!) and gear (it's going to be mostly synced anyway)...how do you imagine syncing the abilities down?

If you sync them to the point that the low level bard is just slightly weaker or comparable, suddenly playing a lvl70 bard in lvl15 dungeon becomes WAY HARDER. You need to be a real pro to keep up with a rookie that never played the game before. If you sync them to the point that an unskilled player, that does not use half of their kit of bard, well or at all can compare to a rookie...you end up with the pro roflstomping anything in its path.


You cannot just compare in-game skills. There is a large variety of PLAYER skills that makes a huge difference. That difference increases with skills gain, so a rookie in Sastasha is going to hit almost 100% of their classes potential no matter what they do, while a lvl70 can go anywhere from 10% to almost 100%. How do you balance both 10% and 100% to fixed 100%?!

[Drakkaelus]

Figured what out?

How to lower damage/effectiveness of skills based on your level that you've been lowered to? XIV does that with how abilities, weaponskills, and spells rely on the interaction of potency and attributes.

How to balance a larger number of abilities? I'd argue they haven't based both on how a number of builds are just not effective or recommended, and the overall lower amount of abilities per class to choose from and that you have, at most, about 10-12 to choose from, depending on the weapons you have slotted.

How to balance a tank's threat gen, what healing the healer needs to do, and DPS requirements to both do damage and manage their own threat? When did GW2 decide to start using the trinity approach again? Last I checked, outside of some specific raid fights and one more traditional healer "elite specialization" they still rely on personal ability to survive through things like dodges or self-healing, and pumping out as much damage as possible. The issues our design has with balancing abilities in a group content setting at various levels is not one that GW2 shares because the group content is not designed the same way.

While that's all very interesting, I was just talking about downscaling the level of your character without stripping all of their abilities.

I'm not sure how the amount of recommended builds in GW2 has anything to do with that. I'm sure that game has balancing issues of it's own, as any game with the amount of variables that RPGs/MMOs tend to have is bound to get them. But if I had to choose, I'd choose the system that doesn't make me want to hang myself when I get tossed into low-level content.

[Berethos]

While that's all very interesting, I was just talking about downscaling the level of your character without stripping all of their abilities.

I'm not sure how the amount of recommended builds in GW2 has anything to do with that. I'm sure that game has balancing issues of it's own, as any game with the amount of variables that RPGs/MMOs tend to have is bound to get them. But if I had to choose, I'd choose the system that doesn't make me want to hang myself when I get tossed into low-level content.

The snark about the amount of recommended builds was mostly just sarcasm aimed at the idea that they've really figured anything out more than other devs have (except for updating the game while servers are live - THAT is an achievement worth mentioning on their end). It was also the least important part of my response, and the least relevant to the idea that they'd figured out downscaling in such a way that was relevant to downscaling here, as your post clearly implied.

"Figuring it out" for them is different than figuring it out for us, for the reasons I mentioned.

Great for GW2, good job that their devs worked out how to downscale their levels for their game. That doesn't mean jack for us, since their approach to group content design and balance is significantly different from the one here.

Though if we're really being honest, they haven't actually figured out how to downscale levels while letting you keep your abilities, as for the most part you have most of your abilities in that game before you reach the first dungeon (that last skill slot opens up at 31, Ascalon Catacombs is the first dungeon at 34). At that point it's just tweaking numbers...the way FFXIV does when they are item level syncing you in a dungeon like Ala Mhigo.

[reivaxe]

You only want TWO things from GW2??? OP .. I'm shocked.

1- Every color on gear should be dyeable. GW2 gives you slots for all the parts of your gear ...

2- Glam should be account wide.

3- They should take a look at GW2 open world fates.

[Neri]

uh how would you balance the dps damage and tank enmity combo if you scale them down though?

Let's say at lower lv, dps has like 1-2 1-2 1-2 for combo for their maximum damage. If scaling down you would need 1-2-3(maybe4 to some dps job) which take 3 gcd to complete compared to only 2 gcd. And the tank which only need 1-2 for their enmity with 2 gcd now need 1-2-3 with 3 gcd.

[Clover_Blake]

As someone who doesn't care much about technical aspects of gear and numbers, and cares more about the adventure and the experience, I've always said that the one thing every game should learn from GW2 is the way the world works.

Traveling around GW2 was a true adventure for me. The events in the map were really dynamic, with real consequences for gameplay (like how a settlement being captured becomes enemy territory). Exploring was rewarding because you'd actually discover secret places, with their own stories and adventures. FFXIV tried to imitate this a bit with FATEs, but FATEs are nothing in comparison.

PS: Dyeing system too, please. It's the absolute best I've seen in an MMORPG so far.

[MsQi]

Lore-wise, you are doing the dungeons in your memory through the echo...hence why you can interact and stuff.

As for mechanics, yes, they do.

Imagine a lvl15 bard and a lvl70 bard doing Sastasha. Ignoring the fact that the former doesn't have AoE yet while the latter does (how you deal with this disparity?!) and gear (it's going to be mostly synced anyway)...how do you imagine syncing the abilities down?

If you sync them to the point that the low level bard is just slightly weaker or comparable, suddenly playing a lvl70 bard in lvl15 dungeon becomes WAY HARDER. You need to be a real pro to keep up with a rookie that never played the game before. If you sync them to the point that an unskilled player, that does not use half of their kit of bard, well or at all can compare to a rookie...you end up with the pro roflstomping anything in its path.


You cannot just compare in-game skills. There is a large variety of PLAYER skills that makes a huge difference. That difference increases with skills gain, so a rookie in Sastasha is going to hit almost 100% of their classes potential no matter what they do, while a lvl70 can go anywhere from 10% to almost 100%. How do you balance both 10% and 100% to fixed 100%?!

Everyone else does it (Rift, SWTOR, DCUO) . I could be wrong, but I think it involves math? But seriously, Sashtasha is not a tightly tuned raid where differences in performance matter much.

[kikix12]

Everyone else does it (Rift, SWTOR, DCUO) . I could be wrong, but I think it involves math? But seriously, Sashtasha is not a tightly tuned raid where differences in performance matter much.

...You clearly did not understand anything at all from what I wrote. Differences in performance in Sastasha don't matter much because there's just no difference in performance. You have two or three attack buttons there. What variety in performance you expect to have?!

If you will allow lvl70 to keep their skills, the difference in performance will be MASSIVE. More massive than it is between the two lvl70's. That's because in Sastasha it is very easy to have a flawless run as a DPS (aka dealing out ~100% of possible damage). In lvl70 content, as lvl70, it is almost impossible.


It is exactly MATH that makes that clear. That's because there are needles for high level classes performance but there are none for the low level classes performance. You cannot match "needles" with something that does not have "needles". The only solution that wouldn't make the lvl70 either strictly superior or strictly inferior is the game automatically changing the DPS output to "the average" regardless of what skill you use. But at that point, why even bother?!