armory system useless? Mythology Cap

[Ryios]

If I level a 2nd character I will level 1 mining, and 1 botany so I can leave my miner and botaner logged in where I am farming stuff and have triple the inventory space, other than that I see no point. But I do agree that the cap on myth needs adjusted.

[ashikenshin]

the iLvL gear you get from Myth is 90. ILvL gear you will get from Crystal Tower is iLvL 80. So if you theoretically got myth per class you would skip CT and just do the content which gives you the best gear for the slots. Why wait for drops from CT when you can just grind WP with all your classes and be done for the week. You will have all the gear iLvL 90 and then be "bored" till next expansion.

(there is hyperbole there but yeah)

[StarMarmot]

the iLvL gear you get from Myth is 90. ILvL gear you will get from Crystal Tower is iLvL 80. So if you theoretically got myth per class you would skip CT and just do the content which gives you the best gear for the slots. Why wait for drops from CT when you can just grind WP with all your classes and be done for the week. You will have all the gear iLvL 90 and then be "bored" till next expansion.

(there is hyperbole there but yeah)

Nothing you said there specifically concerns alts though.

If I skip CT, get all my iLvL 90 gear and get "bored" until the next expansion - why is it worse for you, the game or the universe at large if I do the grind twice or more before I leave?

[ashikenshin]

hahahhahaha you think I care if you stay or leave? I don't give a tiny rat's ass. But, I was trying to give you an explanation on why it may be that the developers and the producer wanted the cap. You don't have everything so fast so you might stay a little bit longer.

But, yeah if you want to get bored I don't give a ...

[StarMarmot]

hahahhahaha you think I care if you stay or leave? I don't give a tiny rat's ass. But, I was trying to give you an explanation on why it may be that the developers and the producer wanted the cap. You don't have everything so fast so you might stay a little bit longer.

But, yeah if you want to get bored I don't give a ...

Ah, misunderstanding. I'm not asking for the cap to go away and I'm not asking to get a larger cap each week, I'm completely OK with the cap and want it the way it is. Just want to see one separate cap for each of my classes.

[Alcyon_Densetsu]

It's astounding to see the level of incomprehension on this topic.

• The cap is in place to make sure you need a certain amount of time (IRL) to gear your character. This is pretty much obligated in all vertical-progression MMORPG's because otherwise some people would grind too fast.
  So it will not go away, maybe be alleviated (they said the cap would remain the same but pieces of gear would become cheaper by the way). Developers refer to such mechanisms as "protecting the players from themselves" (doesn't always turn out as well as they expect, but nonetheless it's required to place limits). Also, from a business point of view, you need to make sure you have enough time to make new content before players finish the current content: hence why caps. They won't go away, unless some other ways are found to create content faster (such as player-generated content, or random-generated content, stuff like that).
• However, that this cap applies to the CHARACTER and not to a specific JOB means that, as many have stated, it renders the armory system moot, useless, it gimps your character.
  Which is why people will tend to level up rerolls (other characters) to play another job, instead of using the armory system and leveling all jobs on 1 char.
• On top of that, further aggravating the inefficiency of the armory system, is the fact that you cannot customise your job: once you've got a sub-class at 34 and another at 26, to get those spells, you're done for the job in question.
  There is absolutely no use to leveling a THM, an ARC or a PGL when you play a PLD for instance: the job design is absolutely rigid (no talents, no templates, no nothing makes two BLM any different from one another, respectively for all other jobs). Therefore, to have a fully functional job, all you need is: 1 class at level 50, another at ~34 and a third at ~26. Period. Everything else is useless.

What's hard to understand about that?…

Consequently, the only solution to make the armory system relevant is to make the cap PER JOB and not GLOBAL TO A CHARACTER. Short of that, using the armory system equates being OK with having gimped jobs: not a great incentive. Actually more of a deterrent, should all the history of video games mean anything.

People need incentives to play a game, and for a majority of players, that incentive is "power". In this game, as in most vertical progression MMO's, "power" = "gear". If you get off on something else, fine for you, but you can't deny that the power incentive is a very valid choice, actually the dominant taste in the field of video games: people want powerful characters, they want to beat the game as much as possible, they want to beat records (power, time, efficiency, whatever the game is). It's very human, too, we actually built a civilisation over dozens of centuries because we wanted to GET BETTER at everything we do. To each his own tastes, but diversity and a never-ending quest for power is what made (makes?) us great as a species. Be it in a petty video game or to send a man on the moon, you just can't deny that it's human nature in all its splendour.

Finally, to address the notion that "if the cap was per job, I would be forced to play a specific job in order to gear said job". Well… ^^; … you're entitled to your own tastes, but doesn't that seem more logical to you? That you need to use a specific "asset" (here, a specific job) in order to be more powerful/efficient with the asset in question? How is it logical that your tanking gets better when all you do is use a healer?

Think of it this way: I don't get better at maths when I read history books, I get better at maths when I actually learn and do maths.

Of course it's nice, it's comfortable to be able to gear all jobs only playing one, but it's certainly less logical than having to use a given "thing" to get better at that very "thing". It would be great to get better at maths when reading history books as well, but it just doesn't work that way. And let's not even talk about "player skill" when you gear up a tank by playing another role entirely. It's just how MMO's work: I play a tank, my tanking character gets "better" (geared), and I as a player get "better" (skilled) at tanking. I play a healer, my… oh you get it.

[NotoriousZow]

I do not like the idea of job-specific tomes. Why? Because I like the freedom of playing whatever job I want. Say I want to run a dungeon with 3 friends and they need me to be healer (maybe because my healing jobs are pretty maxed out on gear), but I'm earning tomes for a job I don't really need them on. I think that placing a job-specific tome reward system in place really limits you. I want to be able to play whatever job I want and spend my tomes however I want. You guys think that this will help make the armory system "not useless" but it in fact does the opposite. For me it will make the armory system to restrictive. I like how myth tomes are handled. I do not feel that it needs to be changed at all.

[StarMarmot]

I do not like the idea of job-specific tomes. Why? Because I like the freedom of playing whatever job I want. Say I want to run a dungeon with 3 friends and they need me to be healer (maybe because my healing jobs are pretty maxed out on gear), but I'm earning tomes for a job I don't really need them on. I think that placing a job-specific tome reward system in place really limits you. I want to be able to play whatever job I want and spend my tomes however I want. You guys think that this will help make the armory system "not useless" but it in fact does the opposite. For me it will make the armory system to restrictive. I like how myth tomes are handled. I do not feel that it needs to be changed at all.

This is a valid concern I think.

But if you think of it in terms of other games, where an alt is a separate character, you could never really earn currencies for your alt if you played your main. Debatable, but to me I think that's a hit you'd have to take. If you want to gear your alt, you should have to actively play it. Gearing through hand-me-downs and spare currencies is not my idea of how to alt.

And that the shared cap slows gearing down for a sense of progress... I think the magnitude of the scale of this is way off. By the time you can start using currency for your alt, the content is dated. By the time you can start using currency for you 3rd alt, we're probably 2 expansions down the road. And I don't see how having parallel gearing of your alts would disturb any sort of balance.

[Pooky]

The problem with raising the cap is that it will make it more of a chore than it already is. As it is, you have the feeling of "I have to get 10 WP runs done this week" every week. You really want that feeling to turn into 15? 20? Either get rid of the cap entirely, which means people will have full AF2 on multiple classes within days. Or keep the cap reasonable(which it is) so the feeling of "I need to do x number of runs" doesn't make x a terrible number.

[Alcyon_Densetsu]

The problem with raising the cap is that it will make it more of a chore than it already is. As it is, you have the feeling of "I have to get 10 WP runs done this week" every week. You really want that feeling to turn into 15? 20? Either get rid of the cap entirely, which means people will have full AF2 on multiple classes within days. Or keep the cap reasonable(which it is) so the feeling of "I need to do x number of runs" doesn't make x a terrible number.

Raising the cap isn't a solution to the OP's complain as it will not change the fact that you will still have to prioritise a "main" job; it would only add more grind for everyone actually, instead of just the people who want to gear several jobs. It's by no means a solution. The only solution would be a cap per job:

—> those who only want to gear one job would still have only 300 pts to make per week

—> those who want to gear several job could earn their 300 pts for their main, then another 300 pts for another job, and so on.