Ideas and Proposals for Gearing Changes and Ideas for Roulette Adjustments

[CyphroInnudae]

Hey everyone, Cyphro here! I hope you all are doing well and I appreciate you all taking the time to read this. To preface, I've been playing FF14 since Mid-Heavensward and I've seen the game go through a lot of changes, some for better and some for worse. I have a lot of love and appreciation for it but I believe aspects of it have kind of stagnated over the course of its long run. The gearing system being one of them, and I've seen a few discussions on this matter as well.

I'm here to propose ideas and thoughts on how we can change it for the better, while still maintaining how the system itself works. I also want to run a few ideas in which Roulettes can be changed.

Gearing System/Loop Changes
Firstly, we need to increase our weekly cap for our newest tomestones. Right now it stands at 450 per week, the proposal is to increase that cap to 870 or 900 per week. Doing so will give the players the choice between 1 Body/Pants Piece with a little left over, 1 Head/Hands/Feet piece and 1 Accessory, or 2 Accessories. It would give everyone a faster option to raise their Ilvl or acquire pieces as even if they choose a body piece they will still have some left over for next week.

Secondly, allowing the purchase of tomestone gear upgrade materials in normal while reducing the cost in Savage and reduction in amount of tokens needed for tomestone weapon exchange item. I'm no authority on savage and these changes I propose are mainly what I've been hearing from other raiders and friends who have done it.

Currently the reward structure stands as thus:
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7 Weeks for Tomestone Weapon Token (Currently Ultralight Tomestone) [From Normal]
8 Weeks for Savage Top/Pants/Weapon Each
4 Weeks for Head/Hands/Feet Each
4 Weeks for Accessories
4 Weeks for Upgrade Items

For Savage that totals out to around 16+ Weeks in order to get the full gear set unless you win a piece from a drop. It also takes 7 weeks alone in order to get the tomestone weapon for 1 class which adding it all in takes incredibly too long.

The Proposal is as thus:

Normal
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Reduce Cost of Tomestone Weapon Token (Currently Ultralight Tomestone) from 7 to 4
Allow purchase of Tomestone Armor and Accessory Upgrade Items with x4 accessory tokens or x4 new token from Normal Raids

Savage
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Reduce Books needed for Torso/Pants from 8 to 4
Reduce Books Needed for Weapon from 8 to 6
Reduce Books Needed for Armor/Accessory Upgrade Items from 4 to 2
Removal of Reduction of Chests from Party Members who have cleared for the week

1/3

[CyphroInnudae]

These changes I believe will help people get gear faster while still maintaining engagement with both savage raids and normal raids. I also believe making the loot static regardless of party member completion will help foster more cooperation in the high-end raiding community in clearing content while making it more accessible for people to try out savage as well. That's about all I can think of for that, so on to the second issue. 2/3

[CyphroInnudae]

Roulette Changes
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Starting off, I want to propose a couple ideas for preventing roulette manipulation. FF14 relies on these heavily to keep content populated and, while it works most of the time, it is easily subjected to player manipulation if done correctly. I mainly talk about Gear\Ilvl manipulation when queuing into the roulettes themselves. This poses the problem of some content not being populated at all and making it quite difficult in order to get into them unless they are required for something else.

Proposal #1 : Adaptive Requirement Scaling for Roulettes
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As it states, it would adaptively set requirements on the roulette based on the Level of the Character's Class and what they have unlocked. So if a character who is say level 80 and has up to the Copied Factory Unlocked, it would set the requirements of the Alliance Raid Roulette at the Ilvl of the Copied Factory (IL 435) while still pulling from everything below Lv 80. Now say they change classes and are now Level 50, it would adapt to the Ilvl of the World of Darkness (IL 90) and require them to have that instead. Thats more or less the basic idea and should help populate other duties where players need help.

Proposal #2 : Verify Player Gear is around ~9 levels of their current class level when queuing in to a Roulette
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Simply put, system would check to make sure you are in gear around your current level before queuing into any roulette and would pull from the duty pool as normal. It's a much more restrictive option however, but would prevent manipulation.

Those are pretty much the ideas that I propose to everyone and I would like to hear any and all thoughts on it. A recap on everything talked about here is below and I would like to thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope you all have a great day!

To Recap
Change Tomestone Cap from 450 -> 870 or 900
Reduce Cost of Tomestone Weapon Token (Currently Ultralight Tomestone) from 7 to 4
Allow purchase of Tomestone Armor and Accessory Upgrade Items with x4 accessory tokens or x4 new token from Normal Raids
Reduce Savage Books needed for Torso/Pants from 8 to 4
Reduce Savage Books Needed for Weapon from 8 to 6
Reduce Savage Books Needed for Armor/Accessory Upgrade Items from 4 to 2
Removal of Reduction of Chests from Party Members who have cleared for the week
Adding Adaptive Roulette Requirements or Verifying gear level before queuing in

3/3

[NakanoTEA]

The things I don't agree on is on the possibility to get Upgrade Items from Normal Raid tokens, and on the removal of the chests reduction.

Max. ilvl gear should only be possible to get from Savage content on the entire patch they release it (as it is now). If you aren't doing Savage you don't need it, and it wouldn't be fair for Savage raiders to lose that temporal exclusivity of the reward.

The weekly chest reduction after clears could be changed to be a little bit less restrictive (like 2 chests if 6/8 didn't clear that week, and 1 chest if 3/8 didn't clear that week) but shouldn't be removed.

[UkcsAlias]

Roulette Changes
Proposal #1 : Adaptive Requirement Scaling for Roulettes
Proposal #2 : Verify Player Gear is around ~9 levels of their current class level when queuing in to a Roulette

Adaptive gear makes people lazy into upgrading (dont do this! poetics are useless as they are in many cases, this use is still a good one to keep).
And the level check alone can be disruptive if it does not restrict itself by MSQ progress (you cant demand a lvl 80 char to have lvl 70 gear if he is still in HW).

But for that, we can alter the check a bit:
- The moment you start the next campaign (for example quest 1 of ShB), it updates the requirements for this to the raids of the previous expansion (in this case SB). Note this only is for having those quests completed (we do not consider the raids themselve, as the algorithm there does fine already). And this then also includes the lower levels. This means that even at lvl 50, you must have finished the lvl 70 raids questline first to be able to queue again (would be nice if this can be prevented, but for simplicity. not required).
- For ilvls, it will look at the last of those raids, and set the treshold for that raid. And in this, it will accept 10 levels lower than the current level, including considering the cap enforced by MSQ (so being lvl 90 in ShB means it considers you lvl 70 for these checks as that is the SB raid level it enforces upon you). And it takes the ilvl that is enough to enter the 3rd raid (so all of them are included). And this then can just use a static ilvl value and update in similar method to the 50/60/70/80 dungeons roulette.

[Jeeqbit]

we need to increase our weekly cap for our newest tomestones.

If you're going to raise the cap, why not get rid of it entirely? The whole point of the cap is to make it take weeks to gear up.

For Savage that totals out to around 16+ Weeks in order to get the full gear set unless you win a piece from a drop.

If you don't win a single drop in 16 weeks that is very unlucky. I usually win enough to gear up alts.

Allow purchase of Tomestone Armor and Accessory Upgrade Items with x4 accessory tokens or x4 new token from Normal Raids

The whole point is that max item level gear is the exclusive privilege of savage raiders for the first 4 months of the tier. Maybe they could be available from Criterion Savage.

Removal of Reduction of Chests from Party Members who have cleared for the week

This could work if the members that already cleared automatically roll Need but can't obtain the item if they win it.

it is easily subjected to player manipulation if done correctly. I mainly talk about Gear\Ilvl manipulation when queuing into the roulettes themselves.

I think you overestimate the impact of this. If you think about how it all works behind the scenes, it's easy to see why something like Crystal Tower would come up more often without any gear manipulation whatsoever. This video saves me time explaining it https://youtu.be/RCoooKmF6NU?t=760

[Deveryn]

Sharing this again for emphasis: https://youtu.be/RCoooKmF6NU?t=760

Trying to combat ilvl cheese in that manner will do little to nothing. It still only takes one person with a legit low level character to force CT to come up.

[Reimmi]

The only way to combat ilvl cheese is to put crystal tower into MSQ roulette where it belongs

[PirateRyanG]

The only way to combat ilvl cheese is to put crystal tower into MSQ roulette where it belongs

And that would never work. The queues for people looking to get through the quests would be astonishing.

[Reimmi]

And that would never work. The queues for people looking to get through the quests would be astonishing.

Not really, msq roulette has very high rewards for time put in, and all the crystal tower raids are about the same length as praetorium anyways

CT is required for main story, thus should be in MSQ roulette