Item level compression in Heavensward?

[Linadae]

While I don't like the whole item level foolishness, I don't exactly miss all the fiddling I had to do back in WoW.

As a tank, I had so many stupid caps to hit. Like accuracy, block, and that whole crushable thing. Bleh...I wanted to play an mmo not a spreadsheet. And god forbid a new piece of tank gear dropped...I had to triple check to see if it was an upgrade THEN I had to go back and fiddle with all my enchants and gems again because that gear pushed me under one cap while pushing me over another...

What I miss is the bonuses from FF11. Or even the bonuses you get in WoW when you get the full set of tier gear. Something fun that makes a piece worth keeping around a little longer than just the next patch.

[Priwia]

I just hope that the top gear we have now will be useless from level 52/53 +, so we need new gear to level from 50 to 60.

[Ultimatecalibur]

I just hope that the top gear we have now will be useless from level 52/53 +, so we need new gear to level from 50 to 60.

That is the worst possibility

[kyuven]

I just hope that the top gear we have now will be useless from level 52/53 +, so we need new gear to level from 50 to 60.

what'll most like happen is our current gear will be enough to carry us, but around level 55 we'll start to see gear comparable to iLevel90 or higher, and at 60 the basic dungeon drops (that people will complain are too easy) will be better than Augmented Ironworks by a wide margin.

[Waliel]

I just want to avoid being ilvl 200 by this time next year. Whatever they can do to alleviate that, like adding in horizontal item progress, would be very nice.

Seeing this, I remembered once asking what exactly is horizontal progress in similiar thread, but forgot about it. So I went through my history and saw I actually got an answer to it and I'll just adress it here. This is what I asked and got:

Sooo one set that you never replace? Random pieces that are good for only spesific fights? There's something about horizontal progression that I just can't wrap my head around. How does it even work?

These threads make me think that maybe Squenix should've just kept the ilvl hidden and a lot more people would be happier, I think.

It seems that FFXIV is your first mmo then, all fine friend I'm going to explain it a bit deeper then . There is an incredible amount of possibilities to make the gears armory working into an horizontal progression design like :

- adding partial and full set bonus on "named-gears" with skills/stats/jobs stats/etc,
- being able to improve your best equipements with specific enhancements (in this case it could be materia but why not something else too !),
- re-using your previous piece of gear into a specific craft as a base material to make it stronger or more specific (stats wise) into something you are aiming for,
- storyline achievement gears that are just "too good" to replace, like a ring or an earring (is Rajas Ring ring like a bell for everyone? xD),
- legendary weapons questline, no, I'm not talking about our current relic weapons , they actually missed the opportunity by making them a "catch-up weapon" before getting the last "top tier endgame weapon", it's lame, very bad design to me x.x, last coil shouldn't drop them directly, it could be mandatory to "beat the hardest boss" to improve them but nothing related to the system we have now.
- mixing endgame crafting material drops with non-tradable items in order to craft powerful equipements,
- funny armory with weird, bizzare, odd, untypical stats like enhancing your chocobo exp gain rate or your "skills" while watering your personal garden plants xD

To be honest, this is just a couple of exemples of what we could get, there is no limits to a game designer / developer creativity.
That's why the current gear treadmill is looking a bit pathetic to say the least :x, new major update : player n°9255478 will replace his full armory ilevel 110 for ilevel 130, the differences? more base stats number and that's it, see you in 3-4 months to do it again.

My first MMO was actually Earth & Beyond. I do say, however, that I never played XI.

From what I gather from that list, horizontal progression is either over powered gear or exactly the same as vertical, but crafted items instead. Is the point that most upgrades should come by somehow using old gear as base, applying some magic on it, and getting a shiny new piece of gear? How is that not vertical and making old gear obsolete when you finally get your new piece? I don't see how set bonuses or enchants have anything to do with either, as you can just apply them to both, and upgreadable Legendary weapon just screams vertical to me. Or am I just thinking too literally about the words?

Anyway, I wouldn't mind seeing crafting materials dropping from raids, though, and I don't have a problem random gear that helps with Chocobo xp and the like.

Help a cat out here, will you?

[kyuven]

Horizontal progression

From what I understand, or at least what I gleaned over my own time playing other MMOs, horizontal progression is NOT what the guy who answered your question. That's just vertical progression via different means.
Actual horizontal progression is when you're given more items with different stat allocations, such as one item having more DET but less DEX, or more defense but less VIT, and the like.
But it doesn't matter, because the BIS mentality will always exist. SE's devs realized this and simplified it. There will always be a "golden path," so wasting time making 20 different items for every class, 19 of which no one will ever, ever use, is a waste of resources.
Thus, vertical progression. Vertical progression is when one item you get in one area that is more difficult than the previous is fundamentally and unequivocally better than one from the area before it. The best example for "horizontal" i can think of is comparing the Nexus weapon to the High Allagan weapons, or the Augmented Ironworks gear with the Dreadwyrm gear.
Having played a game where the weapons actually DO require beating the hardest raids (sometimes multiple times), I will say that it's not something I particularly care for anymore. I've seen some pretty heated arguments over those things.

[Ultimatecalibur]

From what I gather from that list, horizontal progression is either over powered gear or exactly the same as vertical, but crafted items instead. Is the point that most upgrades should come by somehow using old gear as base, applying some magic on it, and getting a shiny new piece of gear? How is that not vertical and making old gear obsolete when you finally get your new piece? I don't see how set bonuses or enchants have anything to do with either, as you can just apply them to both, and upgreadable Legendary weapon just screams vertical to me. Or am I just thinking too literally about the words?

Horizontal Gear Progression is where gear increases the amount of content you can do without increasing the Character's overall power to much. Currently there are three pieces of content that you might seek to have BiS for: FCoB, i80 PvP and Uncapped PvP. All three have different secondary stat needs and limits. By collecting more gear you can enhance your capabilities in each, but do not grow more powerful. One gear set will not rule them all. If new content was added that needed different gear, but that different gear does not overshadow existing gear then you have horizontal gear progression.

[Aunkah]

I think a solid solution to this would be make up-gradable af gear like they do with alexandrite on relic weapons allow players to stat out a base item with materia and drops from raids and dungeons. this would also eliminate alot of items being waste of development time as they are crap for itemization but great for ilvl/main stat.

[Waliel]

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I think I understand it now - at least much better than previously. Cheers.

[Saccharin]

The whole reason other games like wow did it after several expansions is the numbers get so big it takes cpus longer times to process the damage and healing done. But its not until you are doing like 1 million dps that you actually need to do it. Because in a expansion people want to see bigger numbers, not to be set back down to a lower ilvl just to get back to where they previously where.

Nono, I get that. I wasn't arguing. lol Really mostly hoping that the devs are planning ahead on this issue. It got way out of hand in WoW, and the problem will only compound over time with each consecutive IL crunch.

Actually that was not why the item squish happened. It's no surprise that Word of Warcraft's code is 10 years old, probably even older. The damage and health numbers are presumably stored as a 32 bit number. No matter how big that magnitude of the number it still takes the same time to process it.

The big problem with the gear was that players' damage was increasing at an exponential rate; the further along the exponential, the steeper the increase. At the end of the last expansion, Mists of Pandaria, damage was in the hundreds of thousands per players. Now for those that don't know a little about computing a 32 bit unsigned number can have numbers just over 4 billion. The problem that Blizzard ran into with WoW is that you want an encounter to last a certain amount of time and you work out the boss damage per second and multiply that the time and by the number of players. For the last tier the bosses health was much greater than the four billion health. What they did was have the boss heal up in several phases to give him more health. This wasn't sustainable in the long term so they did what was called the item squish. The item level has almost nothing to do with it.

These were good consequences to it like the power inflation was less so people in lower gear were not blown up with people in the latest gear. Tanks could cope with players in latent raid gear who didn't output 10 times the damage - WoW has a 5x threat [enmity] modifier on tank abilities. With each tier having four difficulties and the difference currently being twice the damage Blizzard have admitted that they will have to do a squish in the future again.

Blizzard like that something is always an upgrade and that means you have to make the next tier up high to ensure this. FF devs should resist this as much as th4ey can. is it a major problem if last tier is useable in the last. I don't think so. Considering the quest gear is ilevel 55 and we're ending on 130 ( or is it 135) it's fair to be worried about inflation but the actual ilevel number is immaterial really.