Gearing up is bad

[Waterscape]

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

it's not broken but it could be way better.

[Velvet_Lunarfang]

I understand what people are saying. Though after watching Xenosys talk about it it's true. You should be able to get your gear in a month nothing more. It's gated and for people who talk saying it keeps people playing no it doesn't. Just raise the weekly cap or lower the cost of tome gear. There are a bunch of classes to level and gear up anyway. I suggest watching him him for the argument. It's 2022 not 2007 I think it's time to change the narrative of getting gear

[Jojoya]

Have you forgotten how many jobs a single players character can be?????


Nothing to do........

How many of those jobs do you actually play in content that needs the current best tomestone gear?

I've got 3 jobs that I rotate between in max level content (one tank, one healer, one DPS). The rest of my jobs I mostly ignore once leveled.

You don't need BIS for every job when you're not actively playing them all.

I understand what people are saying. Though after watching Xenosys talk about it it's true. You should be able to get your gear in a month nothing more. It's gated and for people who talk saying it keeps people playing no it doesn't. Just raise the weekly cap or lower the cost of tome gear. There are a bunch of classes to level and gear up anyway. I suggest watching him him for the argument. It's 2022 not 2007 I think it's time to change the narrative of getting gear

Why is a month the arbitrary line when you won't need a full set until the next part of the raid series is released 6-7 months later (at which point many are going to opt for the newest crafted gear anyways because it will be 610 ilvl)?

As I said above, you don't need to have BiS gear for every job especially when you're already capable of clearing the existing content with lower ilvl gear.

You're right that there needs to be a change in narrative but that change needs to happen on the player side, not the development side. You do not need that gear overnight.

[Akiudo]

Well you say that but just this savage tier we had the cost of the tome weapon reduced down to 500. Clearly they are capable of adjusting tome prices.

they also removed belts, which saves another 375 tomes per job. so yea, fully gearing someone in tome gear allready is 875 tomes cheaper than it was before. that being said, sorry but people need to realize that the price of items actually is intentional timegating which one can disagree wit if so inclined, but "just letting you earn more tomestones" would completly defeat the purpose of their being a cap in the first place.

The weapon was too high and they won't adjust anything else if it was easier for u get gear you then compline there nothing to do

gotta be honest here, i do in fact appreciate the weapon being made cheaper, but i don't really see how the cost of the weapons was too high considering weapons offer more stats than legs/chest and were barely more expensive.

[Rhysati]

How many of those jobs do you actually play in content that needs the current best tomestone gear?

This is a really poor question. There are people who like to max out every single class in the game and play all of them at random. There are people that only play one.

Why do you care if someone plays all classes and wants to have them all geared up? The game is built to allow you to do this but puts shackles on you so you can't do it in a reasonable timeframe.

Me personally, I'm so tired of this tomestone system and the weekly caps that I just stopped even trying. It's too tedious for me to gear up both my Dragoon and Sage AND work on crafting/gathering. So now I'm not getting my characters geared up which means I won't do the higher content. It's not because I don't want to do it, it's because it sucks to do and I play games for fun.

[Rilifane]

I understand why people think 1000 tomes was too expensive.
The tome weapon had poor stats for almost every class, which is most likely intentional so people keep raiding longer and try to get the raid weapon because the upgrade material was quite easy to get. Tome weapon was a placeholder for almost every class until they get their real bis weapon.
So I appreciate lowering the costs, they're more in line with it being a placeholder item and people are generally happy to spend them. And it's nice for people that don't raid at all.

That said, I'm against increasing the weekly tome cap. Getting 580 gear for every class is easy enough and having better gear than that only matters when someone is actively progging later savage turns on those classes. Full 580 was fine for P3s. The cap is an important part to ensure that content doesn't get outgeared too fast. A savage tier lasts for roughly half a year and there's still the unlock period for people that want to go wild with alt classes.
The mindset that you should be able to seamlessly switch to a different class mid tier and be able to ensure that you instantly have roughly the same ilvl is a player problem of always wanting the best without restrictions.
Remember that huge content lull we had before Endwalker because things kept getting pushed back because of covid? Increasing the tome cap would essentially give us a repeat of that with every single tier.
Whether a tier is outgeared faster or the next is pushed back, the result is the same: content lull, bored players complaining everywhere and so on.

The only thing I could get behind is taking a look at the pity mechanic aka books.
For PF folks, 8 books for chest/ weapon with weapon being almost guaranteed to be bis is a lot. You have to reach the last boss first, which already takes some time. And then it's up to 2 months to get a single piece. Slightly lowering book costs is something I can see happening without a huge drawback but just doubling the tome cap not.

[KuroMaboroshi]

While I'm personally fine with the gearing system as is, I still think it's interesting to put some more thought into this.

Seems there are three separate goals with changes suggested to the gearing system, that all require separate changes and would need separate tradeoffs to be made:

• Reducing the number of weeks needed to gear in general,
• reducing the number of weeks needed to gear multiple jobs,
• and reducing the amount of pressure to keep "caught up".

Meanwhile, SE might have one or two of these two goals:

• Have the difficulty of the content decrease at a steady pace,
• and keep people subscribed over longer periods of time.

If SE fully wants to focus on the former, there are definitely improvements that could be made.

Gearing happens on two separate scales: Tomestones and books.

Tomestone gearing is and should be slow by design.

It provides a gradual drop of difficulty for those who can't clear savage, until they eventually can. Upgrade materials being a reward obtainable from the Alliance raids in odd-numbered patches supports this slow decrease. Even those who can not clear a single savage fight will eventually approach the current maximum iLevel of a patch (minues the maxiLevel+5 on the weapon slot). Tomestone gear is needed for nothing else, as the game's vertical progression ensures you want crafted gear, not book or tomestone gear by the time you go into Savage of the next even-numbered patch.

Should they not manage, then the echo will eventually push the remaining few capable of mechanics but lacking damage or healing into a clear.

This seems very much working as intended and speeding up the process therefore doesn't seem really neccessary. However, there could be plenty of quality-of-life added to it. First and foremost is the fact that your gear level does not neccessarily reflect everyone else's gear progression. You might have missed a week due to real life and been lagging behind on tomestones or upgrade materials as a result. If the overall goal is to slowly decrease the difficulty, then there is no reason why total tomestones shouldn't be cumulative, which would be a great change.

Didn't cap those 450 tomestones the first week? Whatever amount you had left over could just be added to your cap the next week and nothing would change for the game's overall balance. Players who play a lot still wouldn't be able to rush ahead of others and no one would have to worry about missing out if they miss a week. The same could be applied to weekly upgrade material drops from the Alliance raid in an odd-numbered patch, though in that case the reward for upgrade material drops would have to only be tradable for upgrade materials and be separate from other rewards purchasable with the coins.


Book gearing is an entirely different matter, as it is only accessible to those who have cleared at least one of the Savage fights.

It both fast-tracks you on your way towards a higher iLevel and actually allows you to put together your Best-in-Slot (since at bare minimum most classes at least want the book weapons). A group that regularily clears at least some of the fights will reach a much higher item level faster than by relying on tomestone gear alone, thereby giving them better odds at beating the fights that they can reach but not quite clear yet. This makes playing the game more interesting for them than if they were stonewalled by lack of damage on a fight for a month or more as might be the case if they only had access to tomestone gear. At the same time it rewards them for being able to clear at least some of the fights, compared to those who can only gear via tomestones.

So book gearing also serves its current purpose of decreasing savage difficulty as you clear savage fights over the weeks. But it's not very good at accomodating groups that have already cleared an entire savage tier. As they have already cleared, they technically don't care for what gear rewards they get, as they already have the skill to beat the fights without it.

But unlike tomestone gear, book gear (and upgrade materials) also serves a secondary purpose if preceeding an odd-numbered patch with an Ultimate fight released, as the Best-in-Slot from the Savage tier will inevitably also be needed to have a shot at that.

This is where the goal seems to be "keep people playing" than "slowly adjust the challenge of the content" the most out of all of these points:


Once someone has beaten all four savage fights, you could technically give that team their entire savage gear and nothing would be lost. What is also worth considering is that not all Best-in-Slot sets are created equal. While most uses decent mix, some classes heavily favour either upgraded tomestone gear or book gear over the other. This means that the amount of time required to gear a team will depend heavily on their static composition, especially since the Alliance raid will only be available for about a week before Ultimate releases.

If a theoretical Best-in-Slot required nothing but upgraded gear expect for the weapon, a static focused exclusively on gearing this person, that person would need 5010 tomestones, taking them 12 weeks at current tomestone cap. They'd further need 5 Coatings and 5 Twines, requiring 4 weeks of farming (though these will already be covered by the 12 weeks it takes them to farm tomestones). But if you then presume a theoretical (albeit highly unlikely) static where everyone needs nothing but tomestones and therefore an insane amount of upgrade materials is required, that's means it would take that group an additional 4 weeks on top of that until everyone had their upgrade materials.

There have been, on average, 15 weeks between the release of Savage and a corresponding Ultimate, meaning that such a group wouldn't be able to finish on time (though they most likely would use one week of Alliance raid coins to make up the difference if they carefully spread their upgrade materials out beforehand to still make it).

This isn't a problem in and of itself, but it the fact that such a huge difference in needed prep time is theoretically possible is kind of annoying. I doubt it has happened before, so as long as they are careful about it I doubt it needs fixing, but it still rubs me the wrong way to think about.

On the matter of having a catchup-mechanic for jobs you didn't gear with your raid rewards, I'd be very much in favour of this, but desining one that can not be abused to boost your item level on your original job sounds very system- or inventory-intesive, involving either multiple currencies, rewards or some other system to track which gear should be accessible.

tl;dr:

• Tomestone gearing is fine
• book gearing could use a speedup once you cleared a tier
• Catchup mechanics for other jobs would be nice

[Saraide]

they also removed belts, which saves another 375 tomes per job. so yea, fully gearing someone in tome gear allready is 875 tomes cheaper than it was before. that being said, sorry but people need to realize that the price of items actually is intentional timegating which on can disagree wit hif so inclined, but "just letting you earn more tomestones" would completly defeat the purpose of their being a cap in the first place.

Yes it is intentional time gating. Is anyone denying that? The point is to make the time gate less impactful, especially for people trying to gear multiple jobs, something explicitely encouraged by being able to level every job on the same character but discouraged by having a tight tome cap.

[Pyro2hell3]

I mean an alt job Catchup mechanic could be something as simple as when you buy say a pair of tomestone boots you get a boot token said token can then be uses to buy a differnt pair of boots but only boots

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Yes it is intentional time gating. Is anyone denying that? The point is to make the time gate less impactful, especially for people trying to gear multiple jobs, something explicitely encouraged by being able to level every job on the same character but discouraged by having a tight tome cap.

Iunno. I had every job basically in bis last tier and they hadn't even started the tome increase or unlocked savage yet when I finished.

I think gearing is fine. Plus, it's Xeno, he loves to complain when things inconvenience him.