Gearing Systems need a revamp.

[ForteNightshade]

And i still want this. Crafted gear was meant as a catchup mechanic of gear, if you didn't clear the previous tier. No? So you could start the new tier fresh. It should not be out doing the previous tier bis so fast. You know who would bother with the crafted gear? Those who didn't get the tier cleared. You know who else. Those who have BIS so they can mix and match for better stat pools.

No, actually. It was never been intended as simply catch up but rather for current progression. They essentially treat every new raid tier as a soft "reset" that puts everyone on the same foot. And they've been doing this since Heavensward. You're also vastly mistaken that people would buy crafted gear if it were the same ilvl as the previous tier's bis. They wouldn't. We know this because way back in ARR and early HW, Crafted gear was treated as "catch up" gear of sorts. Guess what? Nobody ever looked at it; to the point crafters frequently complained they had nothing to do. Considering crafting content has already taken a massive hit with how easy recipes have become, your proposed change would be a death nail to their activity. All they'd have worth making is food and pots.

As for your solutions. I'll address why most simply aren't feasible or even remotely realistic from a business perspective.

1. Increase the Tomestone cap to 900 or I'd argue 1350. What this achieves is actual choice for some people. If someone want's to blow all 1350 tomes on one job, and get gear to go ham in raiding, let them. If someone want's to allocate X amount of tomes for 1 job, and the other Y tomes for another job, let them. This allows them to be flexible in their jobs, and not shoehorned into one job. This would actually help the PF's fill faster. I can say as anecdotal evidence, due to me playing multiple jobs, I can always fill a role in PF, this leads to more PF's filling, more raiding going, and not so much sitting around waiting for a PF to fill.

1,350 is utterly absurd. Not only does it completely invalidate literally every other form of content's gear progression. It won't even achieve your desired results. With that amount of tomes, you'd be outright griefing any static or PF you joined without having both farmed out 1,350 tomes and spent all of them on whatever job you're playing. Any worthwhile static, especially midcore and above would expect their team to farm for tomes. In fact, with that amount, even the World First teams would be doing split dungeon spam for the first hour or so. Why? Because the tier itself now has to be balanced around the likelihood of players having a weapon, body and accessory all within the first day. If the difficulty were kept to were it is now, we'd rolfstomp Savage in under ten hours. Bear in mind, P1S is tuned for i570 and you want a tome cap allowing us to roll into it with several i590 pieces, weapon included.

Even 900 is quite high when you consider they want players to remain subbed throughout the tier. Most people aren't gearing multiple roles. Therefore, they obtain bis on their preferred job and have... nothing to do anymore. Case in point, back in 5.5, I stopped even looking at roulettes for months. Why? I didn't need tomes anymore, and thus, didn't care to run them. I'm actively lowering the queue potential. Granted, I mostly cap via hunts but a lot of people don't.

With all that said, I do think the weekly limit could be bumped up slightly. 600 is probably a far more reasonable middle ground.

2. Make it so books aren't worthless. Let me trade my books for other books. Example as follows. P1S books. 1 P2S book = 2 P1S Book. 1 P3S = 3 P1S Books, 1 P4S books = 4 P1S books. Given That you have cleared the fight!

We really don't need to expediate Savage drops much considering how fast statics already gear. Likewise, you shouldn't be able to purchase pieces from a floor you haven't even completed. Instead, pages from higher floors should be useable on lower tier for the same exchange rate. In other words, you could buy gloves with three P2 and P4 books. I do think, however, making it so you could exchange a piece of Savage gear for a page would be fine. It keeps drops like pants actually relevant without making things go too fast.

4. Make Savage loot work like the normal raid loot. Keep the loot tables. But make savage loot work like normal raid loot.

In what way? Since you want gearing to be lightning fast, I assume you mean allowing people to repeat each fight endlessly until they get their desired drops. That... poses a ton of problems. First, without any sort of loot restriction, why would anyone in PF want newer raiders to join their party when they can have veterans carry them? Second, it now becomes advantageous to just spam say, P4 until the weapon you want drops.

There's no reason to Timegate gear like this.

Money is the reason.

Let's use your earlier 1,350 tome cap example. Tanks are arguably the worst this tier in tome requirement. They need 2,900; 3,400 if you include a weapon for prog. So in three weeks, I'd be completely done with my entire role. Let's go one step further and take this to it's logical extreme. 16,750 tomes are necessary for the standard bis of every single role. With a 1,350 allotment, it'd take twelve weeks to gear every single job.

Congratulations, you have now rendered the odd numbered patch entirely obsolete. Anyone playing during 6.05 would have zero reason to even look at 6.1. Naturally, this assumes people actively want to gear literally every job. Which most do not. They play maybe two roles; three tops. That reduces their gear progression to a messily nine weeks. In fact, if you only care about two roles, we're on week six right now. You'd be done this week... and have no reason to care about tomes for the next five months.

Not exactly a good way to keep players subbed now is it?

[Thoosa]

I don’t think the cap is the contributing factor in keeping people subbed - I think it’s more likely that housing, crafting, rp and other activities do, so increasing it sightly I don’t think would kill the game. And because of these other activities, SE really doesn’t have to do anything.

If you’re a battle focused player, you can get full tome gear in 8 weeks?, quit the game and come back a year later and it would still be there,

[technole]

I don’t think the cap is the contributing factor in keeping people subbed - I think it’s more likely that housing, crafting, rp and other activities do, so increasing it sightly I don’t think would kill the game. And because of these other activities, SE really doesn’t have to do anything.

If you’re a battle focused player, you can get full tome gear in 8 weeks?, quit the game and come back a year later and it would still be there,

It is a factor, because you can't just clear savage one time and just take it easy or unsub. You need to gear up to BiS for ultimate and that's likely two whole months, and that depends if you clear in the early weeks. You can't go into ultimate not being i600 with a i605 weapon, that's just griefing your party. Nevermind gearing an alt job is just down to pure luck in that time frame.

[Anonicat]

--snip--

Again timegating the raiders a minority of players in the game for monetary reasons is dumb. If they want money. Timegate the story people, or RP'ers, or a bigger group of people.
Savage is already roflstomped in a day. They can atleast up the tome cap after week 1.

If you think curnrent system is designed well, when you clear the tier, and your gear is invalidated due to crafted gear being better. Then I don't know what to say.

they will start bleeding people dry from this game. It's simply not fun to get 0 gear each week. Only books, and then be locked out of raiding for the rest of the week cause PF is 2 chest only.
Surely Square Enix can come up with something that would make crafters have something to do btw. By your admission, tells us the only time Crafters have something to do is week 1 by crafting gear for people afterwards prices just fall downward fast. Very exciting gameplay i guess.

[ForteNightshade]

Again timegating the raiders a minority of players in the game for monetary reasons is dumb. If they want money. Timegate the story people, or RP'ers, or a bigger group of people.
Savage is already roflstomped in a day. They can atleast up the tome cap after week 1.

They do. Everything is timegated in pretty much every MMO. 6.1 will hint at the new direction the story is going but we won't actually know until well into 2023 what's going on. You can't timegate RPers because they make their own content. You don't even need to log in to roleplay.

15-20% of the playerbase partakes in Savage. Even as a minority, that remains a sizeable chunk of people whose sub value quickly diminishes the faster you allow them to gear. While I agree they can be less restrictive, there will always been some form of timegating.

If you think curnrent system is designed well, when you clear the tier, and your gear is invalidated due to crafted gear being better. Then I don't know what to say.

To be honest, I'm entirely indifferent to it. My enjoyment is getting gear to subsequently use to parse. My previous gear being instantly invalidated come the next raid series doesn't matter because it won't impact what I enjoy doing. At least on the raid set of things. From a crafter perspective, it'll completely destroy that side of the game. Which is still something you conveniently keep ignoring.

they will start bleeding people dry from this game. It's simply not fun to get 0 gear each week. Only books, and then be locked out of raiding for the rest of the week cause PF is 2 chest only.
Surely Square Enix can come up with something that would make crafters have something to do btw. By your admission, tells us the only time Crafters have something to do is week 1 by crafting gear for people afterwards prices just fall downward fast. Very exciting gameplay i guess.

You say this despite the game boasting record sales with every expansion and presently being the most profitable title in SE's catalogue that isn't a mobile game. When they have so many players, they literally stop selling the game because it's just that popular. I somehow don't think they're losing money.

Perhaps they can. That is entirely different argument though. For many crafters, simply playing the market board and earning more gil than they'll ever spend is fun. Hence why crafting becoming increasingly easier annoys some. It may not be exciting to you, but I'll hazard a guess many people in this very thread alone couldn't give a damn about running all five savage fights a bunch of times to parse on a website. Different strokes for different folks.