Some thoughts on Level Sync and Abilities

[Colt47]

Going forward with the game moving on to more expansions, it feels like there needs to be changes made to how classes work when level synced, as the extremely limited move set presented to people at the lowest level dungeons is not particularly good.

I'm not sure exactly what things need to be done to make this work, but my feeling is to not worry so much about ability acquisition during the leveling up process and make it so players go out and complete quests to gain abilities. If players get to a point in the game where those abilities are necessary, they should get blocked by the content by simply not being able to continue. It sounds kind of harsh, but as long as there is some kind of indicator that tells them where to go to learn their next ability (like the archer guild or lancer guild), that would work far better than having a system where the abilities are unlocked via the job story quests, where it's easy for someone to just forget where the next quest starts.

Will lower level content be easier for players with abilities unlocked? Absolutely yes, but that is the whole point. It would also be nice to be able to unlock new looks for skills, such as Heavy shot and stone, and be able to use those looks at any level regardless of the skill. We unlock glare at level 73+, but then we have to use stone for the majority of content anyway.

I think it would be good to be able to have a ravana themed move set, with dark knight abilities that have the red butterfly glow, or have an Eden themed gravity move set for certain abilities from Astro and Summoner.

[Barraind]

They really should take a page from GW2 in how syncing down works.

Its significantly more elegant than "Lol guess you only have a couple buttons to press"

[347SPECTRE]

A lot of people cite that if they got a sprout tank, th wouldn't be able to keep up agro against dps, but with the 5.xx changes to how tanks work, that point is moot. As stated above they should really do level synch like GW2.

[TheRogueX]

With 5.0 they've neutered low-level play so badly in order to fix high level play that I don't see how new people can think the game is fun.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

They really should take a page from GW2 in how syncing down works.

Its significantly more elegant than "Lol guess you only have a couple buttons to press"

Yeah, but with gw2, you already only have very few buttons to press.

I think some jobs have more in sastasha than you get total in gw2 lol

[Alucard135]

Yeah, but with gw2, you already only have very few buttons to press.

I think some jobs have more in sastasha than you get total in gw2 lol

True. And it's understandable why here they're doing that. Just like their reasoning for not letting BLU queue into duty finder, because "some might kick you for not having a certain ability". But why not allow people who enter through party finder to have all their abilities while synced down in this case?

[Hasrat]

Because balancing. It starts getting a lot harder to tweak all the numbers when you've got more skills available while synced than you did when you were originally that level.

A BLM synced to level 20 with level 20 skills only needs to be balanced around a level 20 BLM.

A BLM synced to level 20 with level 80 skills, and now you've gotta figure out how to rebalance everything they have at 80 to be equivalent to what they would've had at 20.

The high level player with all their skills needs to play much more optimally than the at-level player just to meet the same damage output.

Any rotation flubs or missteps will be significantly more detrimental to the high level player.

And before anyone says "oh, well, that should still be easy, just tweak those potencies!" Ok. That was one example, at level 80. Need to have a different balance at 79 before Xenoglossy is part of your rotation. And another balance at 77 before Enochian gets boosted. And again at 75 before Umbral Soul. 73 before Enhanced Sharpcast. Etc etc etc. Balancing and adjustments needed every step of the way, at any point your rotation changes or improves, just to keep it all equivalent to the level 20 BLM.

Or. Instead of allllll that work. They could just sync you down to actually be level 20 and make everyone's lives a whole lot easier.

[Deceptus]

Because balancing. It starts getting a lot harder to tweak all the numbers when you've got more skills available while synced than you did when you were originally that level.

A BLM synced to level 20 with level 20 skills only needs to be balanced around a level 20 BLM.

A BLM synced to level 20 with level 80 skills, and now you've gotta figure out how to rebalance everything they have at 80 to be equivalent to what they would've had at 20.

1) All skills would be normalized by synced down weapon damage

2) Perhaps said BLM needs to learn a thing called aggro management. I have seen many who decided to skip that class (before the SB changes)

[Hasrat]

1) All skills would be normalized by synced down weapon damage

2) Perhaps said BLM needs to learn a thing called aggro management. I have seen many who decided to skip that class (before the SB changes)

Aggro is irrelevant in this example. I literally did not mention it once. No part of the "balancing" argument even considers aggro. Because that is the very last thing to worry about, when you stop to look at how it's not remotely as simple as you think it is to just "normalize" damage.

More importantly, the whole point was an example. Pick any job you like. PLD needs balancing just the same, adjusting each step of the way to keep the synced 80 PLD on par with the actual 20 PLD (or gladiator at that point). The level 80 WHM needs balanced so that it's on par, heals and all, with the level 20 CNJ. (frankly, perhaps BLM was the worst example to pick with their lack of utility. BLM would probably be the simplest to balance in this way; any other job and you've got to start factoring in party buffs that those jobs are expected to maintain as well, further complicating the balancing act)

Syncing down to any level while retaining all skills would require a monumental amount of work to maintain parity with players actually at those levels. The synced player would have to put in significantly more work just to match a mediocre new player. And if the synced player happens to be sub-optimal themselves, then they become little more than dead weight for the rest of the group.

And, again, since I'm not really sure where you got the idea in the first place, aggro isn't remotely part of this argument I'm making.

[Saidosha]

I look to it more like not needing to use a level 80 rotation for level 20 content. If you want to do that, you do you, but the presumption that difficulty should be scaled up for this possibility is obviously a detriment to the legit level 20s. Otherwise, with how frugal AoE options can be below level 40, I imagine a good number of jobs would appreciate having their moves available, albeit weakened, for if they do roll into an older dungeon.