Thread: Patch 2.2, Accessibility, Difficulty Levels, and Throwing Away Content

The people who are arguing for more vertical progression, making everything accessible etc. have no right whatsoever to complain about the sad state of crafting, folks buying wins from mercs/PF excluding people who aren't fully geared and experienced, or a general lack of variety at endgame.

All of those issues are a direct result of it. The only real requisite to content being reduced to item level and having the gear to compensate for otherwise ridiculously overpowered fights. And for what? To do it all over again in the next patch?

Originally Posted by Zumi

Personally I like vertical progression it gives me something to work for. Horizontal progression and side grades or gear thats weaker then current tier like Crystal Tower was kind of useless for me because my Paladin had all 90 gear when it came out meaning I had nothing to gain from doing it.

Let Yoshi know there are us players who like vertical progression and enjoy working toward getting newer stronger gear.

Horizontal progression does not necessarily mean gear would be weaker. That's bad horizontal implementation.

If you did not know, Labyrinths of the Ancients was planned to come out before Coil did (or together with Coil) in which case it would be: hit 50 > Darklight > LotA i80 gear, one loot per week > Coil one loot per week. I fully agree that bringing it after Coil was rather pointless, good for gearing an alt though, still way too late.

Not only bringing it after coil, but keeping the lockout on it when a lot of people had already been clearing coil.

One of my biggest gripes with this game continues to be not only the lack of endgame content, but how difficult it is to gear multiple jobs. I'm SICK AND TIRED OF BEING TOLD I CHOSE THE WRONG JOB. It's rarely said in those exact words, but that's generally what I run into every day on Excalibur. Oh, too bad so sad, you're not a tank/healer/ranged DD so no farming the gear you want on DRG, that you need to be able to consistently clear Coil and Primals. Oh and too bad you only get 1 shot at loot per turn each week, and only 1 drop from CT as well so good luck gearing your other jobs!

The level of short-sighted design is mind boggling - it's like they learned nothing at all from XI in some respects.

As of design choice in many ways I think XIV going the wrong way & wasting time development content which is going to be replaced quickly. They should put all there focus into making Crystal Tower open world Dungeon & keep Bahamuts Coil the way it is. They should stop developing small scale Dungeon content and if they do don't make it a raid but open world dungeon. Main reason is small party scale dungeons & crystal tower equipment is replaced quickly by each patch and also to many dungeons already out for that item level. Also development Speed is on the low side because of creating these side dungeon content.

Bahamuts Coil least in Part 3 should be 24 man Raid content from there on out. Mainly because Crystal Tower is ment for more of casual base and useally don't have time to create 24man party & alot of problems come from using duty finder cross server with higher chance harasment players & weaker players required.

Releasing hard/extreme mode maybe slowing the development of creating new content. Simple fix is not to release the content at the lower difficulty mode at launch of a patch. If content is too hard lower difficulty next patch. This still shouldnt be needed since difficulty is lowered with release of job adjustments,better equipment and so on.

Originally Posted by Hvinire

Greetings everyone,

To clarify specifically about dungeon difficulty, as the game progresses, we're planning to offer players the Echo buff to make themselves stronger in order to challenge older content, not necessarily just lowering the difficulty of the dungeon or encounter itself. Also, those who wish to complete the dungeon without assistance may remove the Echo buff.

While there are no plans to give bonuses to those who cleared content before the addition of the Echo buff, we did submit the feedback that some of you had for more horizontal progression on rewards.

Im fine with Echo Buff on = No Rewards from chests & no Phil or Myth. If players want access to top content sure they can get there naked.

I'd agree to giving people who have cleared T5 a bonus, providing every person who ever did hamlet and got their original relic in 1.0 gets a unique weapon or different model than the current lolrelics.

Originally Posted by Duelle

This. Not to mention that horizontal progression doesn't really work in a game like this unless you're willing to add gear with similar stats of the same ilvl but different textures (which, given Glamours wouldn't be a bad idea but I know some dummy-heads out there are under the delusion of getting gear with +healing potency and +refresh and +haste, which belong in poorly-balanced games like FFXI).

So what you're saying is - FFXIV is the pinnacle of balance?

Originally Posted by Caraway

I, for one, am glad SE's doing it this way. Why? Because there's story content in them thar hills!

But seriously, SE has locked story content behind the hardest difficulty events in the game. Now that the rewards are being outdone by something better, them making the story and the (what will be) mid-tier rewards available to players is only an increase in accessibility. This is something SE's doing that I've not seen many other games do and it's fantastic. It was one thing I was honestly upset about with EverQuest2 in that a lot of important story events happened through the raid content and I had come along to that game after the fact so couldn't really see it anymore. No worries here.

The story content isn't that great. Also there isn't much in Coil you're missing, as far "story content" goes. Over all SE isn't doing their job properly and this is Final Fantasy 14 version 1.0 all over again.We all know what comes next.Another world ending^-^