Thread: The Current Status of FFXIV Patch 3.1 and How to Address it Moving Forward

Originally Posted by Dzian

horizontal progression would also allow for a greater variety of content as well, creating content where sword a is better than sword b but also content where sword b is better than sword a. and maybe content where sword c is better.

And then you play more than one class. Gearing (and inventory management) is now hell.

Horizontal progression isn't all it's cracked up to be. It's nothing but vertical progression along multiple purpose lanes. You still improve your gear vertically, except you now optimize independent gearsets for specific situations (such as specific skills, in the extreme case). The main difference to leveling (and equipping) multiple classes is that you do it all on one class.

Actually, the progression here is really quite similar. Sastasha might no longer be relevant for your monk/nature resistance gear, but still for your conjurer/fire resistance gear. And after that there are still a few good gladiator XP/ice resistance pieces there. But after running it through for all the pieces/classes, you're done with that content and never have a reason to visit it again. This goes up to the point where you have the BiS pieces for all classes/situations. That's the moment when you're "done" and can leave the game until better items come along. Which in a horizontal model might never happen. In a vertical model, it's guaranteed.

That said, putting both on top of each other quickly results in gear overload. Not to mention that you'd increase the effort of getting gear for off-classes by multitudes. Lockouts make it a pain already, that would probably kill off the whole thing completely.

Yeah, i'd rather not go back to coil, and the expectation that, unless I am lucky enough to be pugging this on release I can look foward to having jack all to do, and the raider still going "filthy casuals shuld gitgud." I certainly did not feel coddled when I was running t13 with failure after failure for a month before heavensward, with all the stress and worry that came with it.

You got your harder raid, and it tore people apart, and there are still those insisting on even harder raids. There is some truth to the fact that due to the sharp curve of difficulty the raids might as well not exist. If they are so damn insistent on keeping raids the most important thing in game, they need to change their approach away from the overtuning of savage, or all the gordian shininess in the world won't make people care about doing it.

Originally Posted by FeliAiko

Gordias Savage is certainly not what people asked for. Additional hardcore content outside of raids, perhaps, but not what raiders ended up with here. In a recent interview Yoshi mentioned how the feedback they got from SCoB was that it was too hard, so they released FCoB only to be told it was too easy. Now the logical step to take for your fourth raid would be to make it between your second and third raid in difficulty, not raise it to the level of your first Savage raid.

This is largely how I feel. SCOB was just a little too hard for my tastes, personally, which made raiding err more towards the side of stress than the side of enjoyment. FCOB hit the mark fairly well, but I could stand for it to have been a bit harder. In between should have been where they went to begin with.

The underlying reason they made Gordias so high was to prevent another 7 day clear. Well, they got what they wanted there (at the expense of the remaining raiding population). Now they apparently aim to make Midas in between Second and Final Coil difficulty, which they should've done for Gordias in the first place.

This had ripple effects throughout the game, really. The ease with which people cleared FCOB led them to come down hard on the viability of crafting as an advancement method, and seems to be one of the reasons they changed the overall structure of gear drops in Savage itself, too. (Whereas the pieces used to be spread throughout the turns, they're now all very strictly tiered based on the floor, which means raiders who hit the wall that's AS3 may never see some of the more iconic pieces (namely, the body pieces). This also may have been why we saw the tomestone weapons positioned not as a comparable alternative that can be acquired more easily (5 item levels below the raid weapon, but obtainable just by clearing the first two raid floors), but as an item on equivalent level. That left a lot of folks without a solid way to advance their weapon, putting a lot of hopes on the Anima questline that were undoubtedly not going to be met for some players.

In short, I feel like the team's ego got in the way of them continuing to use the overall structure that had been so successful in the past.

Ideally, they'd get rid of the two tiered mode of raiding too, or at least have a similar structure to Second Coil/Savage Coil instead of Easy/Hard. Making a non-challenging raid just because people missed out on the Coil story was silly. If the raids after Echo, maxed gear and nerfed mechanics was still too much for players, then they should've just accepted their apparent limitations and watched the scenes on Youtube or asked SE to release a special cutscene video of the story.

Normal mode shouldn't even be Normal mode--it should have been a (Story) mode and had no impact on gear progression. Farming Alexander ad nauseum for gear that was made irrelevant in only a months time was incredibly draining. Even more dedicated raiders were tired of Savage before they ever set foot into it because they knew they needed the gear from the original version to clear it, and Alexander Normal wasn't exactly engaging content.

Originally Posted by FeliAiko

Ideally, they'd get rid of the two tiered mode of raiding too, or at least have a similar structure to Second Coil/Savage Coil instead of Easy/Hard. Making a non-challenging raid just because people missed out on the Coil story was silly. If the raids after Echo, maxed gear and nerfed mechanics was still too much for players, then they should've just accepted their apparent limitations and watched the scenes on Youtube or asked SE to release a special cutscene video of the story.

You would think that. It is absolutely silly that SE would make a poorly made raid structure just so people can get that few minutes of cut scenes. Then justify it by putting progression gear in there you grind and fight other people for in a poor attempt to create some reason or longevity to it. It lasts a month or so into the patch, people already become sick of it, then it becomes dead content. Yep, that is the mode we want over actual challenging content for raids. Way to go SE!

Originally Posted by Alahra

Yoshi doesn't mention any changes to the normal mode for Midas, but I'm really hoping they structure it in a better way, especially if they're going to make us do it to have a chance at Midas Savage.

As far as I know, they're keeping normal mode the way it is for Midas. Something about yoshi being satisfied with how normal mode gordias turned out because of the high clear rates. The compromise is that they're going to make Midas savage less difficult.

The people that are going to (are already?) complaining about there being no hardcore content are those who don't want to do anything but raiding instead of looking out at the beautiful world of Eorzea and learning about its people, culture, and history.

I'm a fan of the lore/visuals etc in this game, but of course the people that want a variety of challenging content in a PvE game aren't going to be interested with a variety of non-challenging content instead, and vice-versa. However, the casuals and lore junkies get class, job, and sidequests, Moogle and Beast Tribe quests, sightseeing logs, crafting, gathering, targetable and non-targettable NPCs, seasonal events, Relic quest... all on top of the MSQ.

Those looking for a challenge get... Extremes and Raids. Except casuals wanted to see the story of raids too so let's have the raid structure changed to give them an easy mode version and throw everyone else into an overtuned hard mode nobody of worth asked for.