Diadem and Savage - I can't deal with it anymore

[xvshanevx]

I am +1 your thread because I do agree with you... for the most part. There are somethings that I think you might be looking at incorrectly, though.

[*]There is a serious lack of "the world is in danger" in Alexander. Seriously it seems we're chasing goblins that are looking for shinies inside Alexander. I mean wtf?[*]In Coil of Bahamut, we were dealing with the primal that destroyed the world 5 years ago. We found his minions on his damn Right Hand. We faced Nael; the fight was epic! PHOENIX in FCoB? That was a bigger thing than fighting Bahamut Prime! Alexander? Nope, no, nothing exciting. It is simply disappointing. Thordan Extreme should have been A4S in term of excitement.

I remember the First Coil of Bahamut being lackluster in story content. You are pretty much playing detective to the aftermath of the fight we see at the start of ARR; nothing super interesting. It isn't until Turn 9 where shit really starts to get good. So, what I am saying is, "wait until the story is a bit fleshed out before jumping the gun."

Diadem *snip*

Diadem is by far one of the worst things to happen in an MMO that is trying to solidify itself as a serious raiding game (or an MMO with a serious raiding scene). This content is a slap in the face to anyone who wants to take raiding seriously. Ya, and I never though about how the items in diadem will make crafted gear obsolete.

l'll end saying in 3.15 SE will allow us to get Dips so everybody will have 210 weapons. They might release new relics in 3.15 that will be iLevel 210. You know, the item we've been told it was suppose to follow us the entire time that is still iLevel 135? That's the biggest lie I've heard. we should already have iLevel 205-210 relics and Gordian weapons should have been iLevel 215, 5 iLevel higher to it's worth raiding.

During 2.x the Coil weapons were always 5 ilvls higher then the current relic. Once they were about to release the new coils, they upted the weapons +5 ilvls. This is simply SE oversight not being handled properly. Actually, the entire ilvl gearing system for 3.0 and 3.1 is terrible, and can easily be fixed if they take 30-45 minutes to come up with a detailed gearing plan.

But it's not worth raiding anymore, it will worth less raiding when everybody gets free Dips to upgrade their weapon.

I think you are raiding for the wrong reason. This is simply a "Carrot and Stick" mentality when it comes to raiding, and I would be hard pressed to believe that you might not have any reason as to why you left your static due to drama. Although, as you mentioned, if you were one of the first groups to clear AS3 during its release, then you know that skill in raid is far greater than the acquisition of gear. And the fact that players will easily receive 210 gear, either from Diadumb or free Artifact gear upgrades should mean absolutely nothing to you. Someone who is full 210 ardent and artifact gear just means they grind low tier content. I don't mean to tell you how to think and such, but I know this kind of mentality when it comes to raiding is cancerous. You cleared the content, one of the best raiders out there, and you will be getting gear that other will not be able to get; is that not enough?

[RiceisNice]

I remember the First Coil of Bahamut being lackluster in story content. You are pretty much playing detective to the aftermath of the fight we see at the start of ARR; nothing super interesting. It isn't until Turn 9 where shit really starts to get good. So, what I am saying is, "wait until the story is a bit fleshed out before jumping the gun."

Even BCoB ended on a better hook than Alexander has, with the implications of Louisoix (whom we saw first hand sacrifice himself for the legacy players) is still alive, and the threat you previously thought was stopped is, well infact, regenerating. Alexander, we quite literally have a plot token which prevents Alexander from ever becoming fully a threat, and ends on a very weak note that's best summarized as "It's not over yet!". On top of that, BCoB ended with more questions than answers, enshrouding further backstory behind it. Alexander literally has its own little plot wrapped up without a hook to the next installation and in general, lacks both the mystery and sense of urgency (which is due to it being mostly told and not shown just how big of a problem Alexander itself really is, nor does it quite help that the main antagonist is a goblin whom are general treated as comic relief related to cheesemake, has a pet cat and in general is just hard to take him seriously)

I think you are raiding for the wrong reason. This is simply a "Carrot and Stick" mentality when it comes to raiding, and I would be hard pressed to believe that you might not have any reason as to why you left your static due to drama. Although, as you mentioned, if you were one of the first groups to clear AS3 during its release, then you know that skill in raid is far greater than the acquisition of gear. And the fact that players will easily receive 210 gear, either from Diadumb or free Artifact gear upgrades should mean absolutely nothing to you. Someone who is full 210 ardent and artifact gear just means they grind low tier content. I don't mean to tell you how to think and such, but I know this kind of mentality when it comes to raiding is cancerous. You cleared the content, one of the best raiders out there, and you will be getting gear that other will not be able to get; is that not enough?

One thing to note is that Aikall said that raiding is worth less, not rendered worthless. To me, Savage is pretty shallow as it and just straight up isn't fun if you're the group that does 2 hour raid nights, three times a week and head bang on A3s with an utter lack of progression. If a group is only doing savage for ilvl210 and nothing much else beyond that, then yes, they'd have less of a reason to do Savage with the introduction of upgrade mats in void ark, and diadem in general. If it's more on the context of "for fun" or "clearing", well that's already been a huge hit/miss with savage in general due to the difficulty discrepancy between it and normal mode, if the huge player exodus as well as the all-time low clear rate means anything.

[Aikaal]

One thing to note is that Aikall said that raiding is worth less, not rendered worthless.

Pretty much. Raiding is worthless but it did become more worthless with Diadem giving better gear.

[Anze-chan]

It's the typical SE approach when they want to attract mass of desperate players to do content because lets face it, Diadem is a mess and they were right in putting 210 gear to force people to do it. Nevertheless it isn't quite fair and I'm not favoring SE's choices.


Raiders had it hard with savage but only because people were pushing it too fast and not as intended, although at this point, ironically, you can say SE had higher expectations for A3S by now with all the i205 weapons and void arc tokens. The only unparalleled reward from savage is the weapon so you should be glad SE wasn't crazy enough to give those out in the Diadem. I'm going to say that it is unfair to give 210 BiS out carelessly even if they are rare in drops. People should put more effort to get the best gear in the game and from there be able to progress in the next raiding tier. In conclusion, SE needs to stop spoon-feeding and spoiling the playerbase when it's not needed and overtuning content with ridiculous expectations. Much contradictions from your content design team SE. Please find balance.

[Aikaal]

It's the typical SE approach when they want to attract mass of desperate players to do content because lets face it, Diadem is a mess and they were right in putting 210 gear to force people to do it. Nevertheless it isn't quite fair and I'm not favoring SE's choices.

SE lacks content and they use content like Diadem to build time because they have no content. Diadem offers better gear than raid so people started grinding. SE nerfed the drop rate because it was going too fast. Diadem is a time sink and nothing more. A time sink that gives better gear than raid content.

Why do you think we still haven't got our relic in 3.x? I'm gonna tell you, it would be easy to do 1 quest and you have to collect items. It wouldn't be the first time and it's easy to code. It's likely the so-called relic that is suppose to follow you for the rest of the game (still iLevel 135 since 3.1) The relic is simply a time sink tool now. It's gonna be the same 210 (unlikely but maybe 215) and it will be better than any weapon because you'll be able to choose the stats.

It's fine they use the relic to keep people busy but I'm not an idiot and I don't like when someone thinks he can treat me like one.

[Astral145]

Actually the main stats to worry about for top tier raiding in FFXIV (based on jobs are) are INT, STR, DEX, MND, VIT followed by acc cap for each job you play. Once you cap acc then worry about Crit, Det and Skill/Spell speed. Crit, det and SS need to be balanced too much of 1 of these can be a dps loss. Here's a couple examples DRG needs a minimum of 590 ss to do the optimum rotation after that worry about balancing crit and det. However, to much skill speed on mnk or nin will be a dps loss due to tp strain so its best to balance crit, ss and det but that is up for debate.

The million dollar question is how much of each sub stat do we really need to actually start seeing a difference? The fact is crit is based off of RNG there is no debating this fact. Even if you can manage to get 1000 crit you still will only be at 30% to 40% chance to crit because the devs cap it. What the actual cap is for crit is unknown. You can go in to the savage raids with all i210 ESO gear and you will still pull very high numbers if you know your job. Even if you start mixing and matching Savage gear with eso gear your over all dps will not be that much different. If you don't believe me then test it on a dummy. Any crit you do is all based on RNG and I bet you if you did 10 tests on a dummy with lets say 700 crit then did 10 tests with lets say 600 crit it will be about the same in crit% chance. Granted you will do a little more damage with 700 crit because crit now effects the damage a crit will do but its still very minimal almost to the point its not recognizable.

This is why I would rather have traits attached to certain gear pieces from raids or eso gear or relic weapons. Like adding a 20% to 30% greater chance (35% + 30% = 65%) of doing a crit on certain skills. Or increasing damage/heals/mitigation on certain skills for the duration of the rotation and as long you keep the rotation up it will keep increasing after every final hit on that rotation till you hit a cap. If you stop for "x" amount of time for whatever reason then it will simply start over once you apply the last skill in your rotation. There are limitless combinations of traits that can be added to each job and it would really make gear hunting a lot more enjoyable then chasing after sub stats.

Sub stats in this game are a joke and really don't have that much value vs main stats especially now in 3.0.

[Yonanja]

I kinda like the idea with gear giving special effects to skills... in theory. In reality I don't think it's possible to actually make such a system balanced. It would only lead to even less of a choice in gear, since some skills are better than other ones. So BiS would be even more cemented than it is now (were it's a really small difference), considering everyone would just want to go with whatever gear gave the bonus to the "best" skills, giving gear (even on the same ilvl) a huge difference between them.

[Brian_]

I think the common and reasonable suggestion was to have special materia drop from raid content that effectively act as traits. Materia that do unique things like "reduce the CD on shield swipe from 15s to 5s," "Increase the max duration of Blood of the Dragon to 40s," or "Thrill of Battle now grants a stack of Wrath or Abandon."

It does create an issue with future gear, though. Unless removing special materia doesn't actually destroy the materia, you'll have to run old content for unique materia to meld onto your gear from the next raid tier. On one hand it extends the longevity of old content. On the other hand... I think it does so in a very forced and unpleasant way. Maybe you can move the Materia from the old raid tier to tome vendors after each new raid patch.

[Ossom]

The only problem with "Trait Materia/Gear" is that it turns the game into horizontal progression (I personally love horizontal progression, as imho it feels like it helps with immersion that this specific boss drops these super good gloves, and so you get your band of merry men and women together to go hunt it). But Horizontal Progression will not work well with the current set up Raid > Catch up > Raid > Catch up patches.

If I had boots that proc'd an auto attack or some other thing, then they would be far more useful than the 8Str or 10Str I would get from the boots of a higher iLv if they didn't have the same or better trait. So then we see that newer gear that comes into the game isn't as good as older gear. This means brand new gear is invalidated by old gear from ~2-3 patches ago. While this is common going from Raid > To Catchup patch because people who raided are geared until the next raid content. SE doesn't want use using the same boots from say Raid patch 3.0 until raid patch 3.4 when finally a better pair of boots are out.

Along with this it makes BISing a lot more important than being like 7~20 theorectical strength higher than non BIS gear of the same iLv

[ApolloGenX]

I don't know what the issue is- gear is constantly made worthless in this game... why is this anything different? If you are still playing this game for gear, surely you have learned that it has a shelf life of maybe a month at most.

As far as whether the "best" gear comes from a raid or a quest or wherever... it doesn't matter..it will be somewhere else in a month or so- so get over it. You will never hold onto the "best" gear in a game that deprecates gear so fast.

I think the "insult to raiders" comments are amusing. I wouldn't think there would still be raiders playing that had any expectations of gear or progression. This is just a vertical progression game where players are expected to spam/grind for gear... it's always just been about grinding- whether raid, 5 man, or whatever.