Quote Originally Posted by Ooshima View Post
The former is what I've suggested earlier anyways, and certainly the more logical way.

I recalled that Yoshida mentioned that the purpose of Alex NM is for the masses to enjoy story and Alex Savage is for the challenge and higher level gear. The main complaint about SCoB Savage is that the reward is just a title, and people felt that for that challenge, higher level and dye-able gear would only be justified. If Esoterics is equivalent to Savage gear in item level then you are repeating that same mistake again.
This is certainly not the case at all. The comparison can't be between tomes and SCoB Savage, the comparison needs to be between tomes and coil gear in general.While SE has been pretty obtuse on how their loot/lockout systems are going to be for Alex, I can't see them making the highest tier raid gear flat-out better than the highest tome gear, based on precedent. So far, the tomes=coil gear has mostly worked: the people in statics who clear the content early and have it on farm for 3 months get gear from the raid and fill in gaps with tome gear, some tome gear, some raid gear, is BiS. Us mortals who either are unable to get a static, or are in a static but are struggling with the raid, can get the tomes to help be able to clear the raid. If you make raid gear vertically better than tome gear, not a sidegrade, than a large number of people aren't even going to bother with the tome gear.

One thing I've thought about... I was pretty certain from before that SE was going to make lockouts based on gear only, not the initial coil strategy of clear 4 turns linearly and lot on 1 piece of gear for each turn. I am now substantially less sure that this will be the case, that SE will continue with the status quo (which is a pretty blind way to keep it as it is IMO). The plus of the prior system was that a group of 8 people were able to progress through all the content quickly then have it on farm status... which lead to people only playing for maybe 1 night a week, clearing coil and capping tomes. The negative is that, god forbid, if your group had 7 or less people, or 9-15 people, or anything not a multiple of 8, it was pointless. What if my FC has 12 people? Do we make an 8 man static and leave the 4 out cold? It would make sense for the lockout to be on gear only, so that real FC's would be able to progress together, having one group of 8 go through, then maybe subbing in 4 out of those 12, and so on. In my FFXI endgame groups, we'd have raid nights but it wasn't absolutely necessary for every raider to show up, and we'd take one group on one run of whatever, then sub out people for the next thing, and so on.