Variance in player skill is hurting FFXIV's itemization design.

[FoxyAreku]

That answer is so BS tbh. World of Warcraft has had effects on gear for over a decade and no one has ever thought people were too unskilled to use them or whatever.

[Iromi]

When he took away our stats at the end of 1.23, he reassured us on the alpha forums to relax, that they will come back. Please do not back peddle..that would make me very sad, I have been waiting since 2012 for our stats back :/

[VirusChris]

I feel like this is a kinda lame that we're not given some special ability or bonuses for our gears. I like to add something to my playstyle which is why I wish the Raid and Relic weapons had something special to make them... well... one of the most powerful weapons in the game. Did the FFXI Legendary Relic have special abilities as well?

[Iromi]

yes, the FFXI relics had special weapon skills even. Very rewarding for the work put in I really hope they listen to the forums...and consider putting this stuff in. Getting a new piece of gear where just the numbers go higher gets rather stale.

[Yukiko]

When he took away our stats at the end of 1.23, he reassured us on the alpha forums to relax, that they will come back. Please do not back peddle..that would make me very sad, I have been waiting since 2012 for our stats back :/

They are still a bit behind, some things from alpha are not implemented yet...
Just look at quest-tracker and when they implemented it, finally on last patch we can "again" disable quests from tracker.

[Vaeria]

Kirin's osode, Kraken Club, Sphari, etc...oh how those items called for blood, sweat, time and luck. But each opened up a whole new world of possibility. The rewards for hard work and effort should still be there to some larger extent. Still..considering how high the elitism aspect is even now with same stat gear and whatnot..guess itd increase 10 fold if we got really cool stuff lol.

[Brian_]

I don't get why people have interlinked impactful and hard to get. What is wrong with making impactful and unique gear accessible?

You know what I really hate right now? I hate being able to go through the data-mined equipment lists and putting together a BiS list before playing a single second of a new patch. Day 1 people establish gear purchasing lists that have optimized ordering and you just follow that. You basically sleep walk through what should be a defining aspect of an MMO. That's how boring gear is right now.

Now, imagine that they threw in some materia with unique properties purchasable with locked tomes. Accessible because they just cost tomestones anyone can get. Now, everything changes. BiS lists could change based on how effective the materia are. Purchase ordering might be very different. The point is that people won't know until they actually play the game and thus you're actually excited to get in the game and play around with stuff rather than sit in front of Ariyala or XIVdb. There is more to look forward to as people test and report results rather than just refer back to the stat weight science. It's about the buzz and the interest. It's about getting people thinking about and playing your game.

And in a different vein, like I said in the opening post, I don't think it's bad to leave behind a portion of the players. Whatever happened to the carrot on the stick mentality? People are removing the carrot from the stick and wondering why things have stopped moving. When you pander to the lowest common denominator, your game stagnates.

[GavynG]

I am getting sick of hearing Yoshida's excuses for some of these things.

Just. Do. It.

He treats this game like a simple social mobile game.

You would think as a developer that they would WANT more depth in their game.

[Masekase_Hurricane]

Yoshida: If there were specific items that had that boost or an added ability, we would want a situation where that item needs to be hard to obtain by farming or making the drop rate extremely low and that’s not really productive either. In this game we have people of all skill levels. Different players have the freedom to choose which content they want to play and so the development team wants to make it so that no matter how each player plays the game, they can still end up at the same strength and be on an equal playing field. That’s what we keep in mind when deciding the strength of an item. Adding anything special like stats or abilities on weapons is quite dangerous and so we avoid that kind of situation.

Could still make it equal by having the gear come from something like synergy, where anyone could augment new stats onto gear or weapons.

[Urthdigger]

My biggest fear about implementing more varied stats, as a veteran FFXI and 1.0 player, isn't necessarily the notion of "You must have this or be kicked" TBH I always saw more discrimination on job choice than gear. No, my issue is with making new gear relevant.

Varied stats worked in FFXI for two reasons: Gear swapping (which I don't wish to see come back for many reasons, mostly inventory bloat), and a lack of endgame options. At endgame in the CoP era you had HNMs, Dynamis, Sky, and Sea. Same goes for 1.0, you had a whopping 3 endgame dungeons (Cutter's Cry, Aurum Vale, and Darkhold), faction leves (Not even sure if this dropped anything useful), Ifrit, Garuda, and Hamlet. Compare those to FFXIV, which tosses out a couple of new dungeons and a raid every major patch.

The issue with varied stats is that gear tends to stick around a lot more. Leaping boots have been brought up earlier. O.kotes stuck around forever for my MNK. I was using a number of grand company pieces in my set in 1.0. Heck, one can also compare this to games like Diablo or Torchlight 2: How many times have you guys hung on to a low level piece of gear forever because the RNG never dropped another item in that slot with that all-important stat you needed?

The problem I foresee with more varied stats on gear is that new stuff comes out, and while it has more stats it doesn't have more of the RIGHT stats, and is regarded as useless. Never upgrading my body piece past my AF because healing potency +10% is just too good to pass up. New dungeons being run once for the story completion and then never again.