Is FF14's tome system and endgame horribly flawed?

[Starbirth]

This question has been on my mind for quite some time and I have always focused on the benefit of it through keeping new and returning players caught up on the current content, but does it also reduce the desire to raid and strive to complete raids for the wondrous shiny things at the end?

Since the redesign SE frequently updates it about every six or so months to make the face-roll dungeons give the new tomes to exchange for current raid quality gear. This also makes the dungeons become trivial quite fast. I believe in your normal MMO with a large group based endgame (raids) you usually have difficulty tiers of content such as Dungeons > HM Dungeons > Starter Raids > Intermediate Raids > Final Raid. This type of system is also accompanied by the gear treadmill where you must obtain most of the gear within your current content to progress to the next tier of dungeon or raid. To compare this system to FF14 it would look like this:

Dungeons > HM Dungeons > Primals > Raids.

With SE's system the difficulty and gear gaps between the 4 and 8 man content seems to be extremely chaotic with it changing many times over a few patches. This becomes a problem when you have very easy dungeons that give better gear than the Extreme Primals which is currently the case. It essentially looks like this for gear:

Dungeons (i160) > Primal Bismarck (i175) > Dungeons (i180) > Primal Ravana & Alex NM (i190) > Same Dungeons(i200) > Alex Savage (i210)

While all content gives tomes to some degree the dungeons offer the most for your time and is the preferred method of choice to obtain them in a timely manor, but the fact they give them at all for high end raid quality gear is giving most players tools for work they are not ready for. In terms of difficulty it looks like this:

Dungeons (i160/i180/i200) > Alex NM (i190) > Primals (i175 & i190) > Alex Savage (i210).

As you can see there is a major gear distribution problem among the different difficulties of endgame content. The most notable one being dungeons giving i200 over the next two tiers of difficulty. I believe this may be affecting the community in a negative way when it comes to players interacting with each other on both sides of the difficulty spectrum having the appropriate gear to clear the hardest raids.

I cleaned it up and thank you for telling me.

[Iromi]

You can edit your first post to bypass the character limit btw!

And yea things do need to change, was hoping they were going to fix that with the expansion but nope..it was 2.0's system all over again despite how many people said they disliked it!

[Jican]

Edit post bypasses the silly character limit

[Seryl199]

I think tomestones were damaging to 3.0 in particular. They were copied over right from the 2.X era, both in theory and execution, and offered rewards far greater than anything but the highest content, but were only released after many players maxed their characters and geared them to i160-170, grinding the very same dungeons we'd grind for Eso's, with some going farther still to i180.

With Alex NM released alongside Eso's, but offering rewards lower than Esoterics, NM gear was only valuable to certain players, those that wanted to exceed i180 immediately, and those who wanted to gear alts. Players knew from past experience with tomestones that, eventually, they could get superior rewards from Esoterics, Esoterics would become easier to get, and, ultimately, that Esoterics will uncap in a few months.

It lent an eerie feeling of disposability to any content that doesn't offer Esoterics (all level 50 content), and it made the gear itself feel disposable, because the only thing between you and a higher ilevel is time, not skill. Once you've invested the time to gear up, a new color tomestone is released, and the treadmill begins again. The gear treadmill isn't evil, it's a great hook for subscribers. The tomestone treadmill, though, is a bit tired. Rowena must be swimming in the damn things by now.

[Fevelle]

This is called gear distribution. They need to have a system to reward good gears to players that do not raid/don't do hard content.

[Ultimatecalibur]

I do not think the Esoteric tomestones were the problem. I think is was more the 65 ilevel endgame jump with 3 separate farm periods (4 weeks Law, 5 weeks Alex(NM), 13 weeks Eso), 2 of which as you pointed out are repeating previously completed content.

In my opinion there should have been a 4th level 60 dungeon (tuned for i142 to i150 and paired with the Aetherochemical Research Facility) in 3.0 and Neverreap and The Fractal Continuum should have been delayed until 3.05.