Ideas for fresh new content

[Caitlyn]

Hey guys,

I just want to bring some of my ideas and want to know, what you guys thinking. Maybe those ideas may be adventurous, but maybe it could bring some fresh new elements into this game.


DUTY ROULETTE: EXPERT
My problem with that are as follow:

1. There are just 2 dungeons in any patch. It gets pretty boring after a few runs, because you only do the same 2 dungeons all over again.
2. The word "Expert" implies, that it must be some kind of challening dungeon which requires more skill and effort. But in fact, its quite the opposite. There is no challenge at all.

My idea: Remove the Expert Duty Roulette and put all level 60 dungeons together.


NEW DUNGEONS
What do we have at the moment. Its the same linear way with 3 bosses and some trash in between. So, what about to have some REAL Expert-Dungeons?

1. Random-Dungeon: A dungeon which is generated randomly. Even the positions of the endboss and the start-position of the adventures are random. You have to explore and find a way to find the boss. Some extra loot also waits at random positions.

2. Split-Dungeon: A dungeon, where you have to split your team at some points. You have to interact in a mix between solo- and teamplay. Even boss-battles could be seperated floors, where tank on the top and DPS on the bottom. Healer must switch between floors to reach all players.

3. Time-Attack-Dungeon: Like Wanderers Palace or Steps of Faith, you have to finish some objectives within a certain time-limit. You have to jumb trough gabs or reach higher areas. Traps and Monsters are in your way, too.

4. No-Class-Dungeon: Just a dungeon where you can enter as you like. You can join as 4 tanks or 3 Heals + 1 DPS. Any combination is allowed and possible to clear this dungeon. You can grab special status effects on different places to boost your damage, defense or recover Mana and Life.


LEVEQUESTS
They should be more attractive. Even for level 60 characters.
1. Level 60 Levequests with a higher difficulty (ilvl 220+ or something)
2. Higher reward such as pets, mounts, cards, allagan stones and red/blue scripts
3. New tasks. Like to be teleported in some kind of mini-dungeon and beat the boss
4. Better large-scaled Levequests (10 leves = 10x reward, but higher difficulty)
5. Get additional leves as reward from your challenge log and duty roulette


LIMIT-BREAK
Just remove the Limit-Break and give every player its personal LB like in PvP. Having your own LB gives you the possibily to coordiniate your attacks and/or chain them for heavy damage or special status effects. Even bossfights could be different, when all 4 DPS must hit their Limit Break on 2 different targets. You also should have the option to choose between 2 different Limit Breaks, for example: Bard can choose between Heal-LB or Damage-LB.


CLASSES AND SKILLS
1. Remove classes and add jobs. No one ever uses a class any more, if you have your jobcrystal. You actually dont really need a class, like Machinist or Dark Knight.

2. More cross-skills. Just unlock more (or all) skills as cross-skills, even job-skills, too. You dont need to increase the maximum of 5 or 6 cross-skills-slots, but there could be much more variety and costumization, when you have to choose from a larger pool of additional skills. It gives you an advantage to have more classes at 60.

3. Upgrade PvE-skills. Like PvP, just give us the possibility to upgrade our skills. Its like a simplified version of a skill-tree. Instead of spending attribute-points to your status effects, you can use them for your skills. Like having an shorter casttime for clemency (PLD) or higher proc rate on fire I (BLM).

4. Dont add more skills. Playing with gamepad makes it already pretty hard to put all skills in your crossbars. Only some tricks and macros make that possible. But with the next expansion (and additional skills), this could be an impossible task. The only solution is to add new traits instead of new skills and/or to add skills as a replacement of older skills. Like Split Shot II for Split Shot.

5. Bard. Before Heavensward, this class was played by so many players because of its moblity. Then came "Wanderers Menuett" and alot people quit playing Bard. In my opinion, "Wanderers Menuett" should be removed from Bard and increase the damage output of some skills if both DoTs are active.


ITEMS
1. Glamour-NPC. There are countless threads of having extra space in your inventory or retainer banks. But there could be an alternative way. One way could be some kind of NPC where you can deliver your clothes/gear. In reverse, you can now buy this gear from this NPC every time you need it for glamour. The advantage of this is, that you have more free slots in your inventory and retainer banks and you can also access your collected clothing only from this NPC. Some kind of boutique in Uldah or Mor Dhona with several NPCs would be nice solution.

2. EXP-Pots. Yes, I know what we are all thinking here. But let me explain first.
My idea is to have an NPC where you can obtain one empty bottle per week. If you activate it, all obtained EXP within 30 minutes will go into this bottle instead to your character. After 30 minutes you will automatically get an EXP-item. This item can be used on other classes and disappear after its usage. The amount of the collected EXP will be stated in its description. You can also sell it on the market board, so that players with no crafters/gathers have the chance to earn some extra gil.

3. Sandals. No one takes a bath in his own rooms having his sandals put on. It would be nice to be able to walk barefoot.

4. Allagan Tomes. It was a nice idea back then in 2.0. But after 3 years (or so) it gets very old. I mean you farm your tomes to reach your cap every weak. You buy some new gear, but with the next 1 or 2 patches comes even better gear. It makes the whole farming/grinding quite senseless, because you can get your gear in no time, if you re patient enough.
I mean, look at it: philosophy, mythology, soldery, poetic, law, esoteric and lore. Isnt that enough? Thats why we should change that. It would be nice to be able to upgrade our gear, instead of farming new ones. Or to remove the weekly cap completely as a first measure.

QUESTS
There are so many quests right now. Main-story, side-quests, beast tribes and more. Only a few of them are pretty nice, like Hildibrandt or Edda Pureheart. But in fact you just skip most of them, because there are just mindless.

1. More variety on sidequests. Even beast tribe quests are much more fun than sidequests. At the moment its just only kill-or-bring.
3. Too many sidequests. Man, please reduce the amount of them. Churning mists was hell! It fells like an neverending story.
4. No story at all. Please keep focus on telling better storys. There is no impact, if you dont do the quest. Eorzea will still be the same, if you dont help NPCs to fight against dragons. Only the Ixali beast tribe quests gives you a small hint of progression.
5. Rewards. Just make it more attractive. That few gil and gear is ok, but nothing special. If you reduce the amount of sidequest, you can increase their rewards (EXP for example).

My idea: Just a huge amount of small and mindless sidequests, just add some bigger questlines with story and more variety with emotes, escort and riddles. Increase the reward, maybe a special pet, mount, weapon or what-ever.


So. Sorry, for this huuuuuuge wall-of-text. What do you think? Do you have some ideas? Maybe some DEV could read this ^^.

[Kurogaea]

Ideas are too good and innovative. Won't happen. jking lol. I like these ideas, especially the exp pot thing, though I'd rather have multiple amounts of them without the weekly limit. Its rather annoying waiting when your constantly gathering exp 24/7, thats like 2 lvl 50-60s right there. I also reaaaally wish they'd at least consider your dungeon ideas. Actually it'd probably work better if dungeons were actually dungeons and not hallways, although its still a neat idea.

[Laerune]

I like the Limit Break idea, what I would suggest is to give Tanks and Healers the option to have two versions of their Limit Break, one is a DPS and the other is their role. As a healer, unless we need LB3 ress (which is very rare), I never use Limit Break, I wish we had the option to let all the players use their own Limit Break, like main Final Fantasy characters, everyone there has their own Limit Break.

[Belhi]

God. I wrote out a really long response and bloody Explorer crashed D:

Well a summary is simply this.

Some of the things your looking at are things they are already working on in one form or another (such as random dungeons with the Palace of the Dead and more variety in quest mechanics which is an issue with their game systems)

Some of the things your looking at aren't really viable for a number of reason, from game balance to technical limitations to the cost and amount of development time it would take to create and implement.

Some of the things your looking at I disagree with, particularly in the quest section. If while there are plenty of Junk quests if you think there is a lack of good story in side quests I think you might not have looked too hard. Sidequests are where the bulk of the world building is done. Even in the terrible set in the Churning Mists there was a couple of ones with decent story.

[Kurogaea]

God. I wrote out a really long response and bloody Explorer crashed D:

Well a summary is simply this.

Some of the things your looking at are things they are already working on in one form or another (such as random dungeons with the Palace of the Dead and more variety in quest mechanics which is an issue with their game systems)

Some of the things your looking at aren't really viable for a number of reason, from game balance to technical limitations to the cost and amount of development time it would take to create and implement.

The Palace of the Dead is most likely NOT going to be random since they're like it. There's plenty other examples but you get my point. mentioned "We'll be adding more floors as we update each patch" They wouldn't need to do that if it was randomly generated now would they?

Also, balance, technical issues, and development time shouldn't be any of our concern unless we're dev team members. If they can make it, they can balance it, plan it, limit it.

Lore is subjectevely entertaining. Not sure who would want to listen to moogles talk about nuts and a broken monument since the beginning of time as well as the composition of their name types (they talk about this stuff, I don't even) but some people like it. I have plenty of other examples but you get my point.

[Caitlyn]

Main story quests, sidequests like Edda or Hildibrandt and Beast Tribes are ok how they are. Those quests are fun and telling a story. I m very fine with them. I love to see a good story. Thats why I like to do longer quest-lines than stupid single-quests.

So, what about those quests where you just find 3 flowers and never talk to this NPC anymore. Most of those mindless sidequests are just boring and even not entertaining. They sure give you a small amount of exp to level up ONE character a bit faster. But at the end, its nothing special.

Especially in Churning Mists, picture that:
1. Talk to moogle, collect 3 flowers.
2. Bring moogle 3 flowers, grab your reward.
3. Moogle is happy, so you never talk to him again
4. But instead, you unlocked 7 more quests T_T

[Felis]

Especially in Churning Mists, picture that:
1. Talk to moogle, collect 3 flowers.
2. Bring moogle 3 flowers, grab your reward.
3. Moogle is happy, so you never talk to him again
4. But instead, you unlocked 7 more quests T_T

The tasks were silly, but we read the quests for the story and not the tasks

Not that he want those flowers is interesting, but why he want them.

[Caitlyn]

I ve found some new ideas or changes. I updated my first post.

LEVEQUESTS
They should be more attractive. Even for level 60 characters.
1. Level 60 Levequests with a higher difficulty (ilvl 220+ or something)
2. Higher reward such as pets, mounts, cards, allagan stones and red/blue scripts
3. New tasks. Like to be teleported in some kind of mini-dungeon and beat the boss
4. Better large-scaled Levequests (10 leves = 10x reward, but higher difficulty)
5. Get additional leves as reward from your challenge log and duty roulette


CLASSES AND SKILLS
4. Dont add more skills. Playing with gamepad makes it already pretty hard to put all skills in your crossbars. Only some tricks and macros make that possible. But with the next expansion (and additional skills), this could be an impossible task. The only solution is to add new traits instead of new skills and/or to add skills as a replacement of older skills. Like Split Shot II for Split Shot.

5. Bard. Before Heavensward, this class was played by so many players because of its moblity. Then came "Wanderers Menuett" and alot people quit playing Bard. In my opinion, "Wanderers Menuett" should be removed from Bard and increase the damage output of some skills if both DoTs are active.


ITEMS
3. Sandals. No one takes a bath in his own rooms having his sandals put on. It would be nice to be able to walk barefoot.

4. Allagan Tomes. It was a nice idea back then in 2.0. But after 3 years (or so) it gets very old. I mean you farm your tomes to reach your cap every weak. You buy some new gear, but with the next 1 or 2 patches comes even better gear. It makes the whole farming/grinding quite senseless, because you can get your gear in no time, if you re patient enough.

I mean, look at it: philosophy, mythology, soldery, poetic, law, esoteric and lore. Isnt that enough? Thats why we should change that. It would be nice to be able to upgrade our gear, instead of farming new ones. Or to remove the weekly cap completely as a first measure.

[Belhi]

The Palace of the Dead is most likely NOT going to be random since they're like it. There's plenty other examples but you get my point. mentioned "We'll be adding more floors as we update each patch" They wouldn't need to do that if it was randomly generated now would they?

They outright said that it would have an 'ever changing Layout'. It has a set number of floors to reach the bottom but the layout of the floors changes every time.

The added Floors means they will be extending the dungeon's length to be deeper in further patches.

Also, balance, technical issues, and development time shouldn't be any of our concern unless we're dev team members. If they can make it, they can balance it, plan it, limit it.

It is our concern in regards to setting our expectations. They can make it, they can balance it and they can plan and limit it, but all that can come at a unreasonable price, such as substancially longer breaks between patches, Limitations on mechanics and so forth.

For example with the LB thing. IF everyone had an LB they would need to either balance content so you needed the LB or substantially nerf the effectiveness of the LBs. If they didn't, the strength of everyone having personal LBs would potentially break the content and trivialise mechanics. However if they balanced content so you needed to use them effectively it would mean one screw up by someone and either it would be a wipe or at the very least you would be waiting while they charged up their LB gauge again. That would be REALLY frustrating in pug groups. If you did the later it kind of undermines what makes LBs flashy. They just become a fancy CD which dps at least would use on CD.

Lore is subjectevely entertaining. Not sure who would want to listen to moogles talk about nuts and a broken monument since the beginning of time as well as the composition of their name types (they talk about this stuff, I don't even) but some people like it. I have plenty of other examples but you get my point.

The Moogle quests, which were done badly, didn't just focus on nuts. The Pomguard quests showed the lengths and dangers the moggles went to, to keep a promise to Hraesvelgr for a thousand years, even knowing it was futile and a loosing battle, just so Hraesvelgr had someone who stayed true to him and preserved what was precious to him.

Im not saying all the quests are good or even particularly good lore. There are a plenty of duds. But as far as world building goes they act as a really good tool and flesh out and give the world depth. That's one of the things about an MMO you cant get in other media. You can literally build a deep world where places you go and people you met all have their own stories that all interweave.