End game and crafting: a topic for discussion

[Illmaeran]

Heya folks,

With Massively having all their end of the year awards or "awards" being.erm, awarded, I've been thinking about MMO endgame features and FFXIV specifically a bit lately. To start it off on a positive note; I *LOVE* FFXIV CRAFTING. It's one of the best in any of the few MMOs I've played. Props to the designers for that.

Idea for discussion-

Remove gear drops from all progression/endgame dungeon and raid content and replace them with items to upgrade crafted AND basic class relic gear to an appropriate ilvl and appearance. In fact, do this for ALL non-crafted/class relic gear in the game.

Say you just hit lvl 50 and have your shiny new set of relic gear. Hit the dungeons or DF farm raids (aka CT/ST) to get nifty materials to upgrade your gear.

Got a crafter to 50? Make a set of awesome crafted gear equivalent to class relics and hit the content for upgrade materials.

Not a crafter but have the mats and want to upgrade your gear? Do a fun short quest line to upgrade.

Got the mats and you're a crafter of high enough level? D I Y baby.

New raid/ilvl tier? Oh look, the crafters get new patterns to make the entry-level gear for that tier.


Your thoughts?

[Chambers]

You're funny. I like you.

[MomomiMomi]

I do think they should have more combination of dungeon/raid drops and crafting, but it shouldn't include all drops.

[Walnootje]

My thoughts when i read this: Is this a troll thread?

If not you are indeed a funny guy.

[Eidolon]

Remove gear drops from all progression/endgame dungeon and raid content and replace them with items to upgrade crafted AND basic class relic gear to an appropriate ilvl and appearance. In fact, do this for ALL non-crafted/class relic gear in the game.

Crafting has no place in Current End-game content. Crafting is merely a gateway - you should be able to get all Entry-level gear crafted, but once you have that, there should be -no- more gear that comes from crafting.

It's, to me, like PVP and PVE. I do not want to have to PVP to get PVE gear. And I do not do PVE to get PVP gear. Keeping the worlds seperate means that each side gets to enjoy their own. Crafters enjoy crafting because they can make i110 gear that is useful for people trying to maximize within the cap (End-game raiders.) PVP'ers enjoy PVP because they're not being held at gunpoint to do PVE anymore (At least if I recall correctly) to get their gear that doesn't serve them in PVP. PVE'ers love our PVE because we don't have to deal with crafters, PVP, etc unless we -choose- to (Crafters, getting better armor sets / perfectly optimized)

Right now the balance is perfect. Kindly; keep crafters out of raids unless you plan to make my parties 10 man to accomodate them putting the work into the fight with us (Special Crafter Mechanic: Craft an item in 10 seconds or wipe the raid! :P Also it costs 10 mil per attempt for the crafter. /trollface)

[Illmaeran]

I was, and am, indeed serious. However, I was just tossing ideas out there for people to talk about and see what other ideas come out of the discussion.

I feel strongly that raiding, and PVP too, should offer rewards commensurate with the difficulty of the content/time invested, so please don't think otherwise. What I would love to see is more synergy between crafting and other content. Making entry level or "gap filler" gear is nice and all, but it seem to me that there could be more to it.

In no way, as one posted mentioned, should a DoH class be allowed into a raid.
That being said, having raid specific material drops that a player with a high enough DoH class could use to upgrade gear would be a nice acknowledgement of the effort it takes to be a highest-tier crafter. Having a separate small quest for an NPC to do the upgrades if people don't want to bother with finding a DoH or leveling a DoH class to do the upgrades would be another nice touch.

Again, these are just crazy-ass thoughts I figured I'd throw out there to spark discussion

Hope you all had a wonderful holiday; whichever one you celebrate this time of year.

[MilesSaintboroguh]

Crafting gear should be an option that can yield big payoffs if you play your cards right (look at the world firsts when they did the final coil fresh). People who never invested in crafting classes should not be punished for making that "mistake", nor should people feel like they have to go hunting for materials just to upgrade gear (you already got enough of that for relics).

[Shadex]

Yoshi and Square have always been very staunch that they designed this game to be a WoW clone. It was intended to be a very superficial, surface level action game intended to cater to the quick fix, raider heavy player base with a Final Fantasy wrapper. Unfortunately, unless they decide to change their mind on that crafting will never be anything in this game than an obligatory addition to appease some requirement to include 'some' crafting element.

As the comments in this thread have shown support for this kind of a change will be very difficult as they already have an entrenched player base that enjoys the end game drop/token grind and are going to fight tooth and nail any concept that would include having to either level or god forbid, talk to a crafter. As more of these players grind out and leave we may eventually see Square interested in focusing on the needs of the long term crafting types but honestly by then some other better crafting game will have launched and they will all be gone anyway.

[MilesSaintboroguh]

Sorry Shadex, but I don't agree with making crafting mandatory for the sake of not restricting people on how they can progress. As I said, crafting gear should always be a comparable option, but never a mandatory solution to gear overall.

[Enis]

Well, you are a few years late OP.

Tanaka's 1.0 was like this, all gears were crafted and the NMs back then (Great Buffalo, Uraeus, etc.) drops mats so you can craft the rare gears.
Crafting was a very important part of the game and almost everyone was forced to craft at least for your own repairs because the repair NPC's price was crazy high.

It was a fun experience and I do like the idea because having a piece of gear drop directly from a monster kinda makes no sense to me.
Having the material drop, like Uraeus Skin dropping from the Uraeus and you bringing it to a crafter to make it into the Silver Tricone seems a lot more reasonable.

But then again, not everyone likes to be forced to craft and the economy were controlled by the crafters back then.
If you didn't know a good crafter or is a good crafter yourself, you are pretty much screwed.
People actually called it Final Crafting Fantasy back then before Yoshi-P took over.

Oh, those were the days....