Job progression pacing and how it affects old content

[TheMightyMollusk]

Tighten the item level sync. We outgear everything so horribly that it trivializes a lot of content.

[PangTong]

Well, they redesign the classes so that the current expansion is the leveling experience and all stuff previous is just filler till you get caught up to the new hotness. With that approach you are kinda forced to stretch things out awkwardly.

That kind of approach might make sense if this were a game where you just jump straight to the current expansion and all the previous content gets left behind, but in XIV new players have to go through all that old content and veterans also play that content via roulettes and leveling alt jobs. I think that's a very good thing overall, it would suck if old content just never got touched again once a new expansion came out. So it'd be really nice if they could keep that content from becoming unfun due to wild imbalance. Even if they don't change the pace of learning job skills, just fiddling with enemy HP and damage output could go a long way. I also think it's nice to get at least a few new skills in the upper levels, otherwise it doesn't really feel like your character is growing, but the game is currently in an absurd state where nearly a full half of a job's actions come after level 50.

Most of that trivialization is due to experience. And gear, of course. It has nothing to do with job skills.

It's true that this has been a problem for a long time now, and in fact I made a similar post 2 years ago after 5.0 released. It is most definitely not due to experience though. Jobs just straight up do more damage in old content than they did when that content was new, even accounting for ilvl and echo. The players by and large have not gotten better, and that's immediately apparent when you do level 80 content where things are actually tuned properly. Bosses in lvl 80 dungeons take 2-3 times longer to defeat than bosses in 50/60 dungeons even though you're getting ilvl synced down in both cases. Compare how long it takes to kill things in Antitower or Xelphatol to something like Grand Cosmos or Heroes Gauntlet. It's not even close.

Tighten the item level sync. We outgear everything so horribly that it trivializes a lot of content.

That would help for endgame trials, raids and alliance raids which for some reason sync you to max ilvl for the expansion instead of max ilvl for the tier. But overall gear is not the main culprit particularly in dungeons and leveling content, player damage calculations are simply tuned significantly higher. Even if you go into content with min ilvl and no echo, you're still MUCH stronger than when that content was current. If you do Syrcus Tower you will never see Glasya Labolas' platform mechanic even on a min ilvl run unless you have players doing bad DPS on purpose.