An end to the gear treadmill

[ForteNightshade]

I like the general concept, can't say I agree with all of the details(Battle Leves? Really?). I will always have to disagree though with keeping crafted gear in a position where it both completely resets gear progression AND makes normal raid gear obsolete on day one. It just doesn't seem logical to do Savage in that system unless you plan to do Ultimate, or it is the final tier and you'll be taking the gear into the new expansion. And, it's just bad allocation of development resources to release normal raid gear with a lockout and then have the same ilvl gear from crafting with no lockout. Why make normal raid gear at all if you're not even going to make it worthwhile to go after?

The original idea is the crafted gear comes at a cost. Taking a look at the market board right now, it would several me 4-5 million gil to full gear a tank. For a more casual player who really only does roulettes, normal mode is a free alternative. Yes, there's a weekly cap limit but that's the balance. Do you want to pay for immediacy or opt for the longer but entirely free alternative.

Doing Savage is largely for its own sake. I do Savage because I enjoy a challenge. Which is also why I like logging on a certain website. It offers me built in replayability by essentially trying to beat my "best score". It's no different than say, the Pokemon Nuzlocke I'm doing at the moment. There's no inherent benefit to making a Pokemon game harder but the enjoyment of overcoming a much harder challenge. Especially on the significantly harder roms available. As for resources. Normal mode gear is literally the Savage set but undyeable. There are zero additional resources being put into that gear. Making the whole system quite cost efficient, actually.

TBH coming from WoW this game already has an amazing form of gearing up. Unless you meant to catch up to people who do all their weekly stuff every week and a new player comes in like 2 months later than I can understand the frustration there but... i'm pretty happy. Unless we wanna fix how we can gear our alt jobs since i find it impossible to casually gear more than 3 jobs at a time within a single patch. Not saying i'm disagreeing with OP or anything but like gearing in my opinion is very easy and i'm happy for it. But I do agree that materia grinding is a bit of a annoyance.

Coming from WoW, I can imagine this gearing system is quite a bit of fresh air. Alas, for those of us playing the game for several years now, it's become a long and stale system due to it literally being the exact same system for more or less a decade. While I wouldn't want them to delve into WoW's constant reinviting of the wheel, I will commend WoW for at least trying new ideas. Gearing in FFXIV is ultimately quite boring, especially if you raid. Case in point, Healers basically look at gear, see if it has Piety and avoid it like the plague. This makes your BiS entirely predictable. From that point on, it's kill x Savage boss y number of times while waiting 4-6 weeks to buy tome gear. It's certainly an effective system but hardly an interesting one.