Skills should scale down in lower content NOT be greyed out.

[KariTheFox]

If people had the option to do low level content with a sprout - who has none of thier higher level abilities. Or a downscaled level 90 character, I think we all know who the majority of the playerbase would want to do leveling roulettes with. A party of downscaled level 90s would be able to clear content so much faster than any sprout. Having actual low level players in your group would be a huge waste of time.

And given leveling roulette is for low level characters and new players, creating a system that makes them the clearly inferior players to be grouped with sounds like a terrible idea.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

It wouldnt be unfair if the abilities scaled, like I said.

A level 90 WAR has upheaval, whereas a level 30 WAR has no upheaval. How do you intend to scale that? By making upheaval do 0 damage? Since even 1 potency is 1 more than that 30 WAR can do do the fact the skill is an OGCD that a 30 WAR has no equivalent for.

A level 90 DRK has TBN, Shadow Wall & oblation. a level 30 DRK has none of those, putting the 90 DRK at a titanic survivability advantage and letting it do double or triples pulls that the 30 DRk would fall flat on its face on. How do you balance that, by making TBN give a 1 HP shield? Make Shadow Wall reduce damage by 1?

A level 90 WHm has:
-regen
-medica 2
-Benediction
-Afflatus Solace
-Asylum
-Assize
-Tetragrammaton
-Divine Benison
-The bell
-Temperance
-Afflatus Rapute.

a 30 WHM has Cure 2. How do you intend to balance every single one of those OGCDs above?

And if your solution involves nerfing those skills to the point they may as well not exist then I'd have to ask..what was the point?. If a job has to be neutered so hard on its abilities to even remotely achieve parity, you're no longer playing that same job as you were at 90. You're playing a 30 job with a bunch of dead buttons that may as well not be there, leaving your whole system utterly pointless.

Potencies are but a tiny, mere fraction of the gigantic iceberg that would be the nightmare of trying to balance every job at varying levels compared to the level of a new player in the dungeon. It would be a colossal undertaking to get all the balancing correct, and also be a colossal waste of time & resources. Then what happens when a new expansion comes out, or a rework to a job happens? they have to do all that work again. For something they already have a perfectly functioning system for. The devs will NEVER allow high end kits in low end content, full stop. They've said so in liveletters. If you don't like it, don't queue for roulettes.

The niche that actually stop queueing roulettes purely because they can't use their full kit is so low that it isn't even on the dev's radar. And if it somehow grows big enough to be an issue? they'll just buff the reward to the point its impossible to ignore, and a vast majority will jump back over the fence and it won't be an issue again. People love huge EXP investments for the time they spend, even if said time is utterly boring, as long as its more efficient than the alternatives. Look at Praetorium, or how people will subject themselves to 6+ hrs of Zadnor pre-dungeon buff to level a job from 80 to 90.

Edit: Not to mention the fact it can't be a singular, universal flat scaling for any level. a 70 WAR does considerably less damage & mitigation than a 90 WAR. so they'd have to scale a 70 WAR's potencies & a 90 WAR's potencies differently so that they reach parity with the 30 WAR. meaning you'd have to scale every single level to every single dungeon/trial/instance level across the game. You do understand how ridiculous that is, right?

[Mikey_R]

Dragoons at level 15 do 255 potency per GCD, Dragoons at level 90 get close to 390 potency per GCD, this takes into account the standard 10 GCD rotation Dragoon has including the Power Surge buff, however it does not take into account the myriad of oGCDs Dragoon has access to including all the buffs which is just going to push it even higher, I wouldn't be surprised if it was over double the potency. Then you have the fact Dragoon has no AoE at level 15 compared to it's 3 step AoE rotation at 90, which does 147 potency per GCD per enemy hit. Even if you gave Doomspike to Dragoons at 15, that is only 110 potency per GCD. You just cannot effectively make an easy formula to easily reduce potencies to a level where you wouldn't faceroll a dungeon.

About the only thing that could work is the actions upgraded via traits, like Stone > Stone 2 etc. Assuming you are level 82+ and get synced down to say, 15. You could reduce the potency down to 140 (potency of Stone 1) but keep the animation of Glare 3. It would still look like you are using your full kit, but the potency is adjusted to that level, so it works. However, you cannot do this with every action as the vast majority of them do not have upgrades in this vein.

At the end of the day, you aren't in that dungeon for long, so does it really matter?

[SchrodingersWaffle]

I feel like they really do need to allow access to the full kit in lower level dungeons. Not having access to your full kit is boring, feels bad to play with, and messes with your muscle memory.

However the point that people have brought up about the completness of kit for higher levels vs lower levels making runs with lower level players feel like a slog in comparison is a very valid point so I think the solution for that is two fold.

1) Lower level classes, tanks and healers in particular, need to have access to versions of certain parts of their kits way earlier than they currently do. Things like Fated Circle for Gunbreaker, Lilies and Assize for White Mage, to name a few.

2) Damage for higher level players who are syncd would need to be scaled down severely, enough to make up for the kit and potency differences.

If both of those things were done, I think they could reasonably allow players to keep their kit while sync'd down with no issue.

[Somnolence]

SWTOR has the sync where abilities are retained when syncing down, but to compensate the damage is nerfed a lot, so you have to do proper rotation while somebody low level can do basics and easily match your damage (to be fair, that game front-loads abilities at lower levels so no job feels as basic as chars in FFXIV in Sastasha). There is also sync upwards for lower level PvP bracket. Problem with this approach is that balancing is a nightmare and the devs had to do so many different iterations, there was even an instance where going naked (e.g. unequiping gear) resulted in bolster giving superior stats.

So I think it would be very complicated to change FFXIV to this system. Fundamental issue is that in FFXIV with new levels devs streamline jobs and remove abilities which often dumbs them down on lower levels. Some poster here on these forums made a nice suggestion to re-introduce removed skills and make them upgrade to current ones, e.g. have old stoneskin back and upgrade to divine benison, that sort of thing.

[Quintessa]

Or just give everyone AOEs under 20.

[Risvertasashi]

Low level damage and healing dealt is balanced around the limited kits we have available at that point in the game. A full kit at those levels would be brokenly overpowered, not to mention being a major turnoff for newer players having higher level people who can now basically solo the dungeon blasting past everything and not being able to enjoy the experience.

If having less buttons really bothers you, don't queue for the leveling roulette.

For some reason, when I try to explain this is why level 90 tanks shouldn't have so much healing as to make the rest of the party not even necessary in dungeons, I get a bunch of people trying to explain why I'm apparently wrong...

[Averax]

I don't mind the lack of buttons that much. It's not like i'm in there forever.

However they could stand to give melee a low level aoe.

[DinahDemiurge]

A level 90 WAR has upheaval, whereas a level 30 WAR has no upheaval. How do you intend to scale that? By making upheaval do 0 damage? Since even 1 potency is 1 more than that 30 WAR can do do the fact the skill is an OGCD that a 30 WAR has no equivalent for.

Other MMOs figured it out. Are you saying SE are incompetent and have no creativity? I disagree with that.

[Form3r]

I would like this change, but at the same time can see the clusterfuck this could cause, because now you'd have people rolling into Satasha expecting their healer to have their full toolkit and if they don't the more irate amongst the higher level players would ragequit the instance the moment someone is lacking their preferred skill (Like say a White Mage/Conjurer without Holy)

Whereas the Duty Roulette is there to help fill out instances people need to complete for their progress, we already have people deliberately unequipping gear to force certain instances (Like Crystal Tower for Alliance Raids)