Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[Shurrikhan]

In regards to level cap dungeons, older trials, and other examples where max ilevel seems to eliminate most of the outgoing damage, what if the game went through an ilevel squish?

Honestly, I don't think it'd make any difference? In the end it's just number-aesthetics. The devs will decide the actual value of each upgrade based on what they think will be perceived as fair/sufficient (different concepts, I know) motivation for doing higher-level content; whether they compress the number thereafter or not will be irrelevant to the relative difficulty of content.

Assuming they follow through and reduce the 'real-(power-)earnings' rewards for past progression, sure, that may make it a little easier to catch up... but it's a harder way to do that than just decreasing the costs of uncapped tomes, making Normal Raids spammable a half-patch earlier, no longer requiring the last-tier Normal Raid weekly weapon drop for past weapons, etc.

And if the intent was instead just to limit how ridiculously we overgear content, the solution is simpler still: just reduce the maximum ilvl before sync.

When we would otherwise hit 4-digit item levels, I expect to see former gaps of 10 reduced to 5 and former gaps of 5 reduced to alternating 2s and 3s, sure, but... I can't think of anything that uniquely solves beyond keeping that little number in the corner of our Character Sheets from overflowing into another graphical section, if that's even a risk.

[ty_taurus]

Honestly, I don't think it'd make any difference? In the end it's just number-aesthetics. The devs will decide the actual value of each upgrade based on what they think will be perceived as fair/sufficient (different concepts, I know) motivation for doing higher-level content; whether they compress the number thereafter or not will be irrelevant to the relative difficulty of content.

Assuming they follow through and reduce the 'real-(power-)earnings' rewards for past progression, sure, that may make it a little easier to catch up... but it's a harder way to do that than just decreasing the costs of uncapped tomes, making Normal Raids spammable a half-patch earlier, no longer requiring the last-tier Normal Raid weekly weapon drop for past weapons, etc.

And if the intent was instead just to limit how ridiculously we overgear content, the solution is simpler still: just reduce the maximum ilvl before sync.

When we would otherwise hit 4-digit item levels, I expect to see former gaps of 10 reduced to 5 and former gaps of 5 reduced to alternating 2s and 3s, sure, but... I can't think of anything that uniquely solves beyond keeping that little number in the corner of our Character Sheets from overflowing into another graphical section, if that's even a risk.

I was thinking your stats would actually reflect this shift. For example, if we look at The Aetherfont which has a minimum ilvl of 605 and no ilvl cap... The 605 healing coat, the Manalis coat, has a Mind stat of 293. Meanwhile, the 650 Credendum healing coat has 374 Mind (Eorzea database isn't showing the 660 gear yet). This is a difference of 81 Mind, but if the stats are also cut alongside an ilvl shrink, the equivalent of the 650 Credendum coat would instead have a difference of 41 (rounded up)--a Mind stat of 334 instead of 374. In other words, the difference between your stats at minimum ilvl and maximum ilvl would be halved, shrinking how much more powerful you can get over any given piece of content.

[Shurrikhan]

I was thinking your stats would actually reflect this shift. For example, if we look at The Aetherfont which has a minimum ilvl of 605 and no ilvl cap... The 605 healing coat, the Manalis coat, has a Mind stat of 293. Meanwhile, the 650 Credendum healing coat has 374 Mind (Eorzea database isn't showing the 660 gear yet). This is a difference of 81 Mind, but if the stats are also cut alongside an ilvl shrink, the equivalent of the 650 Credendum coat would instead have a difference of 41 (rounded up)--a Mind stat of 334 instead of 374. In other words, the difference between your stats at minimum ilvl and maximum ilvl would be halved, shrinking how much more powerful you can get over any given piece of content.

I agree that that should be done, but that would require that the devs who have thus far run this as one of the most time-gated treadmill-ish of MMOs would be comfortable halving the size of the 'carrot' they offer for progression.

You can impact those stats without impacting ilvl, and similarly you can impact ilvl without impacting those stats. They're independent from one another.

For my part, I'd be happy just reducing the maximum ilvl for most content, especially that of key story encounters (think Loldon and Endsinger basically missing her final phase). Heck, I'd be fine with content having a maximum ilvl equal to or barely over what they reward.