Level Sync feels worse every expansion

[Atreus]

Sure. And what about the players that don't try a little harder? Just for the sake of having your whole rotation, everyone's potency has been nerfed to the ground. And now you get grouped with someone that doesn't want to try any harder, they're just here to half-ass it, as the dungeon is designed to allow for, and now it's going to take you twice as long to get through. All because you had to have all your skills.

I completely get where you're coming from, but I can't get behind it. People opting to "not try" is already felt pretty hard now in all level ranges. That behavior already adds time to dungeon and trial completions and it's not going to change no matter what system you implement. The key is that the content is still as completable.

[Alice_Rivers]

There may be room to move some abilities around but the main problem with level sync is that the ilvl sync often isn't low enough to present a challenge. There's no way we're going to get level 15 content with level 100 abilities unless they decide to make a level 100 version of it and that I highly doubt they'll do, that'd be a huge amount of work for very little benefit, especially since every duty in the game is in some way or another connected to the story.

Others have pointed out - rightly - that it's not just damage potencies that would need to be adjusted, you'd have to handle mitigations, heals, damage buffs, oGCDs, the works. Besides, how would people's level 100 party buffs interact with level 15 abilites and power levels? Say we instead sync level 15 players to level 100 for their duties instead, have you tried picking up a level 70 job? Remember how long it takes to read your tooltips and place abilities? Imagine you're level 15 and getting your entire level 100 kit, would you really want that? Especially if you're going to be reduced to your level 15 kit immediately after finishing the duty, how is that fun?

[Gullis]

tell me how you would make a warrior with bloodwhetting scale down to be equal to a warrior without it.

[ovIm]

tell me how you would make a warrior with bloodwhetting scale down to be equal to a warrior without it.

that is actually a really good point - some utility gained in later levels could be a challenge not just to design around, but also for player expectations. After all, Blue Mage is not allowed in dungeons for fear of excluding players not having specific, expected skills.

Though, for that, it would be good for classes to have their base kit much earlier in the game, with traits upgrading those to the full version later on. Warrior also has Raw Intuition, for example. Could also get an earlier version of that. :think:

[Raikai]

Going back on level sync is an absolute chore as a DPSer and completely counter-intuitive to how XIV's encounters are structured.

You are supposed to build muscle memory on your kit, and that's acquired by repetition. Then you're suddenly shaken up by missing essential parts of your kit at level cap - that's really unfun and the reason why I rarely go sync on DPSers.

Ironically, due to their barebones dps kit, healers are the least affected by this, and sometimes turns out to be actually fun to play because you need to strategize a bit as you have way less healing ogcds.

[Sensui]

The worst jobs to go back on are the ones that start at 50+

Doing <lvl50 content is always terrible

[CuteBucket]

There are way too many hurdles to get through to make it worth investing in. They would be better off making the low level kits more engaging and making more traits like 'melee mastery' to just increase the potencies of a large number of actions at the same time. The new player experience matters and this is a better way to do it than allowing high level players to just curb stomp everything in one hit.

Everything mentioned in this post is why I advocate for reworking what skills we have at level 50 and making sure each job has a fully functional kit and rotation (assuming it has a rotation) at that level. It sounds like more work than "just let us have all of our level 100 skills and sync down the damage" but it really is more complicated than that. Reworking jobs to just suck less at each previous level cap takes a lot less math finagling and is much more fair on sprouts too.

I bet we can all think of jobs that feel better or worse than others to get stuck in another round of Labyrinth of the Ancients on.

[Atreus]

As I continue to play and think of solutions, I still advocate for solution #2 in the OP. I think level capping feels awful to varying degrees and at a certain point "just don't do it" isn't an acceptable answer when 95% of the game's content at this point is synced.

At a certain point we need to look at the oGCD's and defensives and say "fuck it". Older content is still faceroll and if you really want to address that, lowering the item level cap for duties is probably one of the best things to do right now.

I just can't see yet another expansion come out where we just add more things that we can't use in older content.

[mallleable]

Would not be surprised if the level cap did not increase in 8.0. That way, job leveling experience, and gameplay can be tailored to fit within a level 1 to 100 range. 8.0's MSQ could still reward EXP for level 90 to 100.

[PyurBlue]

tell me how you would make a warrior with bloodwhetting scale down to be equal to a warrior without it.

You can work out an effective HPS/DPS for any given level and then take the ratio of that value against the level cap value. Using that you'll instantly equalize long term sustained healing/damage between any two levels. What is left unmatched is burst, but leveling was never tightly tuned in the first place. You will encounter players with outdated gear, players lacking skills because of level or not doing job quests, and players with different amounts of experience. In the end it doesn't matter very much that we'll have a wide range of ability between different levels of the same class, because that's already the case.