Archaell’s thoughts about possible adjustments to the gear system

[Archaell]

Hello, everyone. Today I would like to share with you my thoughts about a little bit different route the itemization and crafting could take. I am not a game designer or anyone important, just a player who likes to write suggestions to make the game interesting and fun.

1) Weekly tomestone cap

As much as I would like to say remove it entirely, for the time being we have to keep them… but they could be a little bit less tedious. I approach this point with a simple thought – the older the tomestones, the more we should be able to farm.

So instead of making 450 tomestones every single week, each week the cap could increase by 50.

Example:

1. Week = 300 tomestones; 2. Week = 350 tomestones; 3. Week = 400 tomestones etc. etc.

This would make it a little bit easier for new players to catch up, while also making it easier to gear up alts… at this moment. My next point is making alting even easier.

2) Slot based higher tomestone unlocks instead of gear

If you are like me, you like to change jobs a bit to make things fresh. The current issue is that in this game gear is impacting the gameplay too much, so it isn’t as easy to shuffle them on regular basis. Things like ilevel requirements in PF make it even more obvious. Not enough ilevel? You can’t bring the job. You can create a new party, but it makes everything harder… if you can even enter the instance.

What do I mean by unlocks instead of gear?

Instead of buying the esoteric chest piece with esoteric tomestones for the paladin, we would buy a permission to buy all the chest piece gear with the law. This way we could gear up several jobs at the same time, as the weekly cap would be limiting only the character progression instead of job progression.

Example:

With esoterics we buy the permission to buy the head gear, and then we are able to spend law for the white mage hood, paladin crown, machinist goggles etc. etc. without waiting several weeks, and without slowing down the progression of our main job.

3) Crafting should be part of the game

As the previous changes could make crafting even less viable, I suggest crafters would craft gear only for the glamour… but they would instead be able to craft item level upgrades for the gear acquired through tomestones.

To increase the control over the gear, each piece of gear could have a limit of how many times it could be upgraded, while requiring a specific upgrade.

Example:

Instead of crafting leather boots, the leatherworker could craft an item that would increase ilevel of bard’s esoteric boots to ilevel 205.

It would look something like this: Increase an item level of medium armor boots from 200 to 205.

Now the crafters have to get their materials somewhere, which is my next point.

4) Monster Dungeon Hunter

We have the issue with dungeon gear being outdated before it is even released, don’t we? Then why not make the dungeon gear mainly usable for glamour?

Instead of doing dungeons to farm the gear itself, the dungeons could drop materials, which the crafter would use to create the item level upgrades. Together with putting few materials in the law tomemstone vendor’s we could improve the relationship between the battle jobs and crafters even more.

5) Grab your weapon and do your trials – actually do your trials to grab your weapon

Trials and relic quests should be the main source of weapons. Meaning that weapons should not be available from the tomestone vendors.

6) Everything together

Imagine that a new tomestone patch gets realised. So what would we do? We would start farming tomestones again.

The first thing as always would be to buy ourselves lower tomestone gear. Check.

Then we would start farming the lower tomestones and materials, which could be used to upgrade the lower tomestone gear, while working on our higher tomestone unlocks, which would follow slower but the same progression of acquire an item and then upgrade the item.

We would also do trials to get new weapons and with the help of crafters upgrading these.

With each new patch better upgrades should be available for the crafters, which would send the battle jobs back into dungeons to farm the materials (and to trials so that they have weapons to upgrade.)

7) Savage

Now the question is how to make the savage work with this system. It could be a little bit tricky, yes, but I think it could follow similar path.

Instead of gear itself, savage would also drop slot unlocks, so that we keep alt jobs in mind again.

One slot unlock per a week.

Alongside this the savage could also drop materials and “savagestones”, which could be farmed all day long. The savagestones would be used to buy the gear. The materials could be used by crafters to create upgrades for the savage gear.

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And that’s it. I have to admit that it could be either really good or really bad system, but nevertheless I would like it seen tested.

[xXRaineXx]

...N..wha..?

[Natashio]

I'm going to paraphrase Yoshida here and say, "This is too complicated."

[Archaell]

I'm going to paraphrase Yoshida here and say, "This is too complicated."

It is a little bit complicated... but it wouldn't be that hard to get used to it.

Farm tomestones > buy ilvl 100 hat > farm materials > craft the upgrade > upgrade the hat to ilvl 105

It would make crafters more involved, instead of crafting being somehow its own game.

[lydiah]

I don't particularily like points 2 and 7.

However, sign me up any time for 1, 3, 4, 5 (especially 1 and 5).

[enthauptet]

I think if you do incremental tomestone cap increases you should at least be able to buy something so start at whatever an accessory costs. Starting it lower just increases the amount of time. With your method you would have 1050 tomes after 3 weeks vs 1350 at the current level. Maybe a better method would be start at the accessory cost then increase up to chest piece cost. (I know they will never want you to be able to buy a weapon in 1 week)