Is FF14's tome system and endgame horribly flawed?

[Archaell]

...

What if I told you that I actually support the idea of unconditional basic income? The basic is the important part.

I also support the idea of skilled casual. Player's skill should be able to make up for lack of overpowered gear... which is kinda impossible with power creeping and dps checks.

[Khalithar]

Let me preface by saying I'm not going to include "hardcore" or "casual" in my point because as far as I'm concerned those terms have become so ubiquitous the words have completely lost whatever meaning they had.


I actually like the tomestones in a sense that it gives a pretty clear path to progression. There isn't a whole lot of mystery to it, hit level cap, farm tomes for gear, and gear up. Done. The whole point of an RPG is character progression, it's seeing your little character level get better gear and grow stronger and at level cap gear becomes the only way to keep growing stronger. If they didn't add any way for players to progress there wouldn't be much reason to play, not everyone likes to raid or wants to raid highly tuned difficult content and that is perfectly acceptable so long as there is a means to advance outside of raiding. I mean, if anything it still caters to the "group or nothing" mentality as you still need to do group content for tomestones.

I can only imagine what the playerbase would say if they made combat class gearing like scrip gear for gathering/crafting where you can potentially do everything solo without the need for everyone else. I'm honestly surprised there isn't more complaining or requests about THAT, as in crafter/gatherers being able to gear up purely through solo play and get the best gear for their selected role, but I digress. I actually think it's fairly balanced now, you can call eso gear "welfare" all you want, the players that are farming savage even after Void Ark still get access to unique weapons and a unique mount that the non-raiders can't get at all. Plus until they add the weapon upgrade parts to the Ark, the savage mode raiders STILL have access to better weapons and once they add it to void ark, you'll still have access to the A4 weapons that have a unique appearance that no one else can get and the mount that drops.

I raided a lot in WoW on both normal mode and heroic mode stuff on 10 and 25 man modes and quite a bit in swtor on Story, Hard, and Nightmare. Doing the hardest stuff in those games netted me unique mounts and titles that other players couldn't get, I always felt that was enough. I still remember back in vanilla swtor getting the title for beating the raids they had in a time limit with no deaths, it wasn't easy back then and the titles meant something. To me, that should be enough.