Simplicity over complexity, time to change.

[Titor]

Could someone explain horizontal gear progression? I am not familiar with that term.

[Jynx]

Could someone explain horizontal gear progression? I am not familiar with that term.

Imagine this, when your fully geared up you have multiple choices of what gear you want to wear.

[Zantetsuken]

Like all things, complexity needs to be added where it will add depth to game systems.

You can streamline thing too much (What I think of the current state of FFXIV)
You can also overcomplicate things (Christ look at something like 1.0's quest system that allowed crafters to join in)

To me the game as it stands is a very blank slate, and the developers so far have decided to not do anything with it yet. The game has potential, vast ammounts of it to be correct it's up to the developers to see if they can tap it or let the game slide like every other MMO that has seen a flash of sucsess only to be shortly migrated away for the next new flavor of the month.

Without any depth this game is just a gear treadmill every update and the developers are even gating people from playing that the way they want too. Evnetually people are going to throw their arms in the air when they have nothing to do but a few raids a week.

Good points all.

As you allude to, the issues with ARR are not due to a lack of Complexity, but are actually the result of a severe lack of Depth. Conversely, 1.0 had solid Depth, but it was mired down in excess and needless Complexity and tedium (eg crafting 'item parts').

More about depth vs complexity HERE

[Exstal]

You can do some gear choices now but it's not very much. I wouldn't want it now unless we get triple the inventory space for armoury otherwise will have to make trips to the retainer every time you want to play a class for any stretch of time. Could you imagine having 3 sets of 3 different classes, in addition to your crafter's and gatherer's gear? Ridiculous.

[Moqi]

you just say no w/o real reason, just because you think it would be useless, just an opinion, but SE has the real numbers, and they said they will be looking into it, most ppl tend to call us the vocal minority, but SE has the numbers and they are listening, you can keep saying no, but SE will listen to the feedback not the naysayers, the least you can do is help us with feedback to make our ideas of your liking.

Are you even reading yourself? I gave my reasons and I gave my feedback. Game's fine the way it is, keep going in this direction. If things are gonna change? You won't find me in this forum opening threads to bring back things the way they were, I'll just leave and find a game that I like. But keep talking about numbers you know nothing about.

[Mugiawara]

This games gear progression is too one way street and then there's little to no options to make them different from anyone else in this game...I also agree, that this game
is watered down. I've never played XI or WoW but I've played plenty of MMO's and this is nice change of pace but I wouldn't mind a bit more complexity all around the boards here...
I feel like they had to do this because they needed to play it safe from the fall of 1.0...so end the end, you have this...again, it still has time to grow.
It's a good game but it really is super simple. Game has plenty of potential all in due time...whether not it gets better is up to SE.

[Renik]

Lets just think a bit, are there real character development choices in this game? the answer is no, the character levels up, you get some stat point to allocate that are no real choice because every job is based in one main stat, this is just a residual shadow of a 1.0v feature, after this all you do is gearing up after every update. This gear has main stats and secondary stats, some secondary stats can be easily converted into main stats using simple formulas, other although they are called secondary stats are just little modifications of other basic stats, i'm talking about accuracy, parry and crit.

What we are asking is for a more complex or depth system, with the lack of a skill tree or some kind of build, let's leave out cross class skills because having 5 slots for 3 useful skills in some cases can't be really considered a build, what we need is a personalization-build system through gear, this personalization can be made simple with stats like parried/blocked damage +X, critical hit damage +x... or more complex stats or minor traits like X skill+ X, MP cost -X.

Is this so bad? this is a RPG, but gearing in this game feels more like eating a mushroom in Mario bros.

We can introduce some choices w/o over-complicating it, this wouldn't change how the game is played, it would just give us reasons to think more strategically and farm other gear apart from soldiery.

[Exstal]

I'm down for theorycrafting which gear is the best setup and following that. I would not object.

[ErBear]

Could someone explain horizontal gear progression? I am not familiar with that term.

In ffxi let us take White Mage for an example. In FFXI you could be a DD whm, melee whm, or just pure casting. There was gear that let you choose how you wanted to play, of course if your a white mage you are probbably going to be healing, though for a small party you could do what ever you liked, I know my friend did.


Another example. I was a thf in FFXI, I didn't focus on dex like most people did, instead I went with STR and att with a little dex added. Reason being is I wanted to more damage per hit at level 75 I was doing up to 50 damage per hit rather than 15-20, though some weapon skills took a hit in damage because of it. I also never subbed Ninja, so I got a boost in str and att by subbing warrior.

This was all done through gear at same levels or even lower levels. Because levels in FFXI meant something. Leaping boots anyone? Level 7(or whatever) gear that you could use till end game.

It's these types of combinations that made FFXI great and where you could actually be unique from other players in how you played. Especially with the sub job system, that just added that much more customization.

I'm not a person who gives into people telling me how to play, if I like a style of play I'll do it, I don't conform, but in here everyone has no choice on what type of mage they wanna be, or melee class. There is no customization with that.

[RygaenYuui]

It doesn't even have to be very big. I mean it could start off by implementing cross class traits and further customization of character growth (you know the PVP ranking system is kinda similar to Merit points from XI...not like it isn't doable for existing abilities). That in and of itself would give the game enough complexity; however it would completely throw out the 'balance'.

But then they could always make content harder too. Outside of Binding Coil's gimmicky fights, the new dungeons so far have never been overly difficult or complex to beat. That to me is a little depressing in a way.