Thread: 3.0 & Weapons / Armor.

I too have been wondering what will come up with Heavensward gear/ilvl-wise. As a long time MMO player I have no objection with the current vertical style of progression adopted by most MMOs, with this game amongst them. Though the curve could be A LOT smoother and that is where I hope FFXIV succeeds better than many other games.

To take an example out of the MMO-Titan (aka. WoW) where this development of item levels went way out of hand: The first Xpac where the item levels jumped in a fashion that the first instance of the new area dropped you equal gear than early midway of the Vanilla raid progression. And it naturally grew from there, so far this went okay but when they released the second Xpac and continued this trend, the exponential rise in item levels went way out of hand by creating an environment where your piece of end-game gear had more stats than whole set of gear in Vanilla.

Comparatively this does not matter, right? And in a system that FFXIV has (aka. the Level Sync) this does not create completely obsoleted old content in the way that it can be completely destroyed by overgearing and leveling it by thousands of miles. But I think personally and know many others who agree, it creates unhealthy numbers. When your endgame damage figures go up from a few hundreds to tens of thousands in a manner of two Xpacs, the rise is silly. Never to mention the millions going on... It simply loses its "shine". Also they could take some form of hybrid route, in the way that alongside of this traditional vertical progress *with much smaller item level increases* there would be content that would indeed require some specific gears/items/you name it, that is more optional to do.

My sincere hope is that we would see something like Heavensward end-game beginning from ilvl ~135-140. Yes this would mean that the gear collected from current end-game would carry you through the leveling progress and especially if the ilvls from 51-60 are set to begin from, say ~70, you would breeze through the early levels. And then to ask, would this really matter so much? It is the story that is there anyways that matters. This would not obsolete our current end-game gears and would not make it feel like the mentioned scenario:
"Oh, so you tackled against the great threats of Coil? And amassed a fortune in that Magitek Gear, bringing down the big guy himself! That is truly something extraordinary Warrior of Light! Here, take this Chef's Aphron for you truly are ready to face the Moles of Ishgard! A word of warning though, they bite hard..."

And if there is any worry for newer players, they could just as well go with a route of levels 51-55 taking you with quest rewards from ilvl ~70 to ilvl ~120 and then just "lock it" there and keep on throwing different kind of challenges on the way. This way, there would be no disparity between fresh high level players and those who have played longer time and amassed gear. We would just have fancy looks on us when going to knock the gates of Ishgard.
Also the Zodiac weapon quest implies something towards this kind of thing, in the way that this actual quest might continue in Heavensward. Just a guess...

My 2 cents.