Survey: What are your thoughts on the state of XIV?

[HeavenlyArmed]

@HeavenlyArmed




I've been reading through several of your posts now, especially across the Alienation of Dedicated and Skilled Players thread, and your writing has struck me as logical and thorough. But, and this is mostly just due to not being entirely sure how closely aligned you are with other posters on that thread or where your particular interests in the matter lie apart from the Mastery stat examples you have) I'd like to know more about what unique advantages you believe a new stat would bring as compared to, say, any other back-end addition or revision.

[In the interest of efficiency, I'll go ahead and leave a summary of my thoughts on the matter. Read only at your convenience / if convenient.

I'm personally in the frame of mind that FFXIV does not especially need new stats, but simply minor stat rebalancing, in order to give more even secondary stat weights for any job that does not give mechanical (e.g. trait based) emphasis to a particular secondary stat. I think of this primarily as fixing systemic oversights. Examples below.

My primary concern so far has been Skill Speed, which I would change as such:

• Skill Speed and Spell Speed have been merged into a single stat, Haste.
• Haste affects Attack Speed. (Resultantly, it now affects auto-attacks.)
• The global TP refresh now ticks at 50 TP per base GCD. All bonus TP-refreshing buffs tick simultaneously.
• Attack Speed now affects animation speeds.
• Haste now increases the mana returns from personal mana-regenerating abilities such as Shroud of Saints, Luminiferous Aether, and Aetherflow.
• The cooldowns of certain skills now scale with the GCD, such as: Cleric Stance, Defiance, Deliverance, Grit, Darkside, Geirskogul, Gauss Barrel, and Wanderer's Minuet.
• Haste now scales nearly as a percentage of the remaining GCD per point, rather than at a hard stat amount per .01 second GCD reduction. (This gives it a more linear weight, rather than performing comparatively poorly at low levels and very well at very high amounts, now that its indirect limiters have been removed. It's weight still faintly increases with time, but more so than each point of Crit and Det would be increased by having that increased rate of attack.

Apart from that: rescale Critical Strike and Determination faintly to have the same effects both on Auto-attack damage and generally. Again, the aim is to level secondary stat weights for the most part, and make Skill Speed, a mostly dead stat outside of plateaus, more viable to allow for more rotational choices through fixed oversights.

// Other / rough ideas:

However, my ideas concerning stats have gone as far as giving each secondary stat three different outputs that the player can adjust allocation between at any time (I leave balancing constrictions up to your imagination for now), e.g.:
Critical can improve: proc rate, critical strike chance, and critical strike damage bonus
Determination can improve: buff duration, damage dealt, and accuracy
Haste can improve: cooldown reduction, attack speed increase, *global tick speed* (*scrapped the last because it breaks the global, but you get the idea).

However, sadly these are instead far from easily balanceable or weight-intuitive, and would likely fall to third-party or community assessment and deduction.

...Unless of course the game itself were to beat them to it, allowing stat weights to be dynamically mapped out for an inserted sample rotation, etc., making that a much less distracting, and much more personally situation- or choice-specific aspect of the game. But that's a pipedream for another time.

The main thing I want to point out is that all of these have gameplay effects, much like if you were to go the route of making the majority of primary stats viable again for every job (while setting setting constraints to where a given skill may be deprioritized, but never excluded outright from rotational possibilities).

At the same time though, I do not think this many options are wholly necessary. The most strongly I've ever felt my stats was in Wrath of the Lich King WoW, maining Hunter prior to ArmorPen Marks domination, but honestly it felt like that may have even had one or two more stats than it needed to, and I wasn't wholly sold on the massive rotational reemphasis. I think that the less whack-a-mole cooldown attack dependence of XIV would better translate certain stat effects, but it still leaves much to be considered.

However, I realize that changes as the Skill Speed balancing stuff suggested above would do little to increase gearing interest—in fact, it would probably diminish it. That is probably because that's just not my chief area of concern. I'd personally be happy as long as we have multiple, individually enjoyable, means of obtaining useful gear. That tends to align me with content designs aligned with horizontal gearing, even though horizontal gearing itself isn't as central a desire now as it once was. At present, each job has a consistently best or worst secondary stat, which at least adds a certain urgency to seeking the best sources of gear. (This would flatten that, unless a player has a specific preference, due to his gameplay or desired combat aethetics.) However, as this tends to fall back on outside research, ariyala.com weights, or outright asking one's linkshells and the forums anyways, that doesn't seem an immense lost to me. What I seek, even if at that cost, is increased breadth of viable rotations. If it draws a little away from picking out your next progressive BiS path, by making the "wrong" choices not quite so inferior, so be it. I can't honestly say I intend to reduce the gap between slots or even really raise the optimization floor for pieces within the same ilvl, etc.; it's all just tertiary to me.

My thoughts on what stats should intend to do follow that desire for more rotational opportunities. If I can't (rotationally) feel the effect of the stat—if it simply comes out in numbers and never in gameplay—it seems wasted to me. Your Mastery examples would at least accomplish that. Critical Strike on Bard, though less so than when pure critical strike chance, does that. Skill Speed, especially when playing around with less viable, TP-plummeting builds, does that. Spell Speed will situationally accomplish that. Some of these I think could do a lot more with just a few additional tweaks to class traits, making them slightly more dependent on or changed by their secondary stats. However, there is of course a flip-side to that, in that "peak" gameplay might not be accomplishable until after a tier or so into a given expansion. As such, I'm still considering the long-term implications before suggesting any such changes to the jobs themselves.

...for the sake of comprehensiveness, I believe in creating the most possible options and synergy per button as possible. I believe that specs maximize their potential only when a necessary means of reaching that goal. Anything other use tends to streamline and remove breadth of choice in the name of aesthetic distinction (the gameplay distinction usually being already available if well developed, albeit with more shades between) which can be a worthwhile trade, but need not always come with that cost. I also think that specs come with a cost in terms of knowing your allies. There is a certain ideal band of complexity that comes with consideration of one's allies and the mechanics of a fight. I as a healer like knowing my tank's every CD and when I, most, and the given tank of that type will pop which. As a tank I like to know the same from my healer. As either, I like to know how dps will be pushed across each fight, boss or trash, so that I know my windows for mitigational needs or mana maximums, etc. When a given spec can go so far as to behave well outside of expected range, that decreases synergy. When it provides a new expected range, it adds complexity, which may yet be synergized. I realize that contradicts, to some extent, my dislike for cutting up classes or jobs into wholly distinct sub-specs as, for example, WoW has. But, it is not a hard rule for me. It's simply a point of balance. On one side you have the player-customization-first RPG elements, and if those components still can be directed, then any number thereof still works. On the other side you have your burden-of-knowledge mobas and the like, Overwatch, LoL, DotA2, HotS, that keep to a particular range and niche, although options within may still be vast.

Sorry for the massive text-wall. I wasn't expecting that all this be read. It's just there if wanted.]

This right here is the type of discussion I've been wanting to see. There's a lot of meat in this post, and I plan to get around to giving my thoughts on most of it, just note it'll likely take a bit to get all the way through. So to start off, I personally stand in a similar spot to you, where my biggest desire is to have stats that have a visible impact on how you pay your class. Now, there are currently a few ways we already have this, such as Crit on Bard for procs, Spell Speed on Black Mage since they don't feel any punishment from it due to having infinite resources AND it making the rather strict timing to keep buffs up easier, and Skill Speed on Monk and to a lesser extent Dragoon, where on Monk you can actually optimize your rotation around certain Skill Speed values and DRG in theory having this effect though the required values are less realistic for DRG. However, I feel like this isn't enough and I feel like stats such as Accuracy and Determination are almost detrimental due to how uninteresting or not fun they are. Accuracy, technically speaking, does have a very noticeable impact on your rotation... but only in the case where you don't have enough, and it just ruins your day by taking you out of your rotation. So while it technically falls into the right category, it does so in the worst possible way. On the other end of the spectrum we have Determination, a stat that is really quite boring in that it has no visible impact on gameplay, and even on the numbers due to how it works it's very hard to see the impact it has. So really, I'd like to see both at least change in some way, if not get replaced entirely. But this wasn't exactly what you asked. What you asked was what unique advantages I felt a new stat would bring over other back-end changes. And this question is a lot harder to answer.

The reasons I tend towards preferring the idea of a new stat over reworking what's currently there are fairly simplistic, and as such I'm not 100% happy with them and very willing to hear other ideas. That said, I'll explain them anyway just for the sake of explaining myself. First off, it is the request that is most commonly made, or at least it's the most common framing we see for this request. As such, I feel like it would be something that would improve player morale to hear announced, and if done right could use that momentum to improve player morale even more when it is actually implemented. Other back-end changes would not likely be able to get the same reaction out of players. The next reason is going to seem a little counter-intuitive, but I feel as though adding a whole new stat would actually be easier to pull off on the implementation side. With other back-end changes, you would need to dig through a lot of what's already there and alter it, and potentially alter it very significantly if you want to have the desired impact of making these stats more visible in gameplay. That said, ideally some changes would need to be made to certain existing stats anyway, either to make them more visible during gameplay (Determination) or to make them more viable (Skill Speed). And as I've pointed out, it's not like they haven't fundamentally changed how stats work in the past anyway, and without being so stressful that they felt the need to express to the players that it was a hassle. So perhaps this is wrong, but I still feel like adding a new stat would be more effective and less work than the amount of changes we'd need to current stats would take. Another point would be, as I've mentioned in other posts, the fact that we may need a new stat anyway, considering accuracy could end up being done away with as early as 4.0 and that would leave an open spot for a new stat to potentially fill. And as someone who really doesn't like Accuracy as a stat, I'd be very happy to see this situation occur.

And put simply, I just haven't heard a ton of ideas outside of the "give us new stats" that would accomplish the goal of stats having a more visible impact on gameplay. If more such suggestions were being made, I'd probably be considering them nearly as much. You did, however, mention one other issue with your idea. The fact that it likely would not make gearing itself more interesting, and would actually have the potential to do the exact opposite. Which raises another question in my mind. Are "punishment stats", stats that are clearly inferior to other options and may even have clear detrimental effects for players, really something we need to get rid of? Does the process of choosing your gear need to have a clear winner to some degree? And frankly, I don't have the answers to this question. It's really hard to see the effects without being able to test this, which we can't exactly do.

"However, there is of course a flip-side to that, in that "peak" gameplay might not be accomplishable until after a tier or so into a given expansion. As such, I'm still considering the long-term implications before suggesting any such changes to the jobs themselves."

This is something I actually like the prospect of. In a sense, it seems to help make the gearing process throughout the course of an expansion more interesting and the only downside would be the possibility of the non-peak gameplay being too much weaker and balancing issues appearing in the content as a result. But having something in place like this, where you need to adjust your playstyle mid-expansion due to new possibilities opened up by your gear, this sounds like it'd be fun, as it'd give players something to look forward to at the start of an expansion and reduce the monotony of playing the same job all the time. So when you're thinking about these long-term effects, remember how they could just as easily be positive as they could negative.

I think this is everything I have to say on this right now. To summarize, I think the players would get more excited about a new stat than other back-end changes, but I would like to see some back-end changes as well like making Skill Speed less of a punishment stat, though the concept of punishment stats as something necessary is interesting enough to have me curious about how this would play out.

[RobbieH]

You're also doing this a bit, talking about raids rather than raiding. You get pretty subjective in your comments on raids as well, and I can't say I agree with your thoughts on Alexander as content.

I already explained in another post why i stop raiding during A6S, i'll make a short version for you, no static and it's always the same kind of content, in 3 months all gear will be useless again and i decided to learn DRG til 3.4, i'm sick of NIN since i main it on 2.4

The raiding system isn't in very good shape either, i made a poll somewhat related to the system on reddit: http://www.strawpoll.me/10395863

Numbers speak for themselves, also what we have are recycled mechanics and dps checks, it's not fun.

There's a very low amount of people who cleared Alex Savage compared to Coil, is it because it's more difficult than coil, or is it because raiders left due to the same kind of progression we always had? It's both.

In terms of the difficulty they just increased DPS checks, with Midas they reduced DPS checks a bit but threw in more mechanics, i seriously don't know what they're doing anymore.

I want a time machine and go back to the time of 2nd and FCoB, the progression was the same with the plus of good looking gear, good story and fun fights.

[Shurrikhan]

This right here is the type of discussion I've been wanting to see. There's a lot of meat in this post, and I plan to get around to giving my thoughts on most of it, just note it'll likely take a bit to get all the way through.

No problem. Take your time. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

P.S. If you'd like to just toss up bits at a time via Edit, I can check back regularly and respond in kind.

Are "punishment stats", stats that are clearly inferior to other options and may even have clear detrimental effects for players, really something we need to get rid of? Does the process of choosing your gear need to have a clear winner to some degree?

To start from the end, I don't believe either is necessary. Keeping a larger weight range within items of the same slot and ilvl increases gear selectiveness, a kind of interest for some players. But at the same time, decreasing that range increases gear options, a very similar interest, likely for a similarly sized band of players. By own particular interest in (Skill) Speed stems from it being, to me, the most visible stat in the game (more so even than Crit on Bards, now that the chance scaling is a bit lower) but wrought with oversights that make the stat largely dissatisfying, thereby fettering what I see as the game's most gameplay-lucrative stat.

As you said, that change, as others I would potentially like to make, would take substantial effort to effect. I just feel that it is still one of the best options we have right now, or at least shares a design push with those options. Just as another example I might want, say, to increase base secondary stat scaling, while the descaling per level (to the point that a i130 level 51 would no longer be weaker than his level 50 self in the same gear—probably equal instead) and the amount of secondary stat points gained per item level (reaching a larger body of options sooner, without any game-, balance-, or gameplay-breaking effects later into the given expansion). That would require large-scale re-tuning, while SE doesn't even seem interested enough in changing Determination IVs from 6 to the standard 9 points after cutting their effectiveness per point by half. However, I do feel like that is something that's going to need to happen sooner or later. For now, I'm just looking for a more prominent, synergizable change it might fit with.

All this being said though, I do think a new stat could do a lot for the game, especially if taking the place of accuracy. A bit on that—

I'm of the opinion that accuracy is a decent stat... in potential. I just find it poorly scaled. Too much of it is a stat-sink aimed specifically at raiders, while too little of it constitutes choice or can impact gameplay. I feel like there should be less of a disconnect between raid-level accuracy caps and casual-level accuracy caps. I'd prefer that almost half of all accuracy above base, for a melee, be the deciding factor in whether you can reliably hit from the back, flank, or only the rear even on the last raid boss of a given expansion, and should that boss be moderately prone to turning, the overall effects of that accuracy be just slightly higher to DPS than competing stats, even if perhaps more so to combo-based combatants. For the sake of balance, I'd have also preferred that casters need sufficient accuracy to strike the flank, rather than the back, such as by reducing spell accuracy scaling. (Note that this would not affect magically damaging abilities like Raiton.)

I've had other thoughts on accuracy, such as having (*excess) accuracy guarantee a portion of a given combo bonus, or removing the hit/miss system roll entirely in favor of exponentially fading damage based on (missing) accuracy, where the +/- 5% SD is moved to accuracy instead. (The latter was part of a tank evasion / RNG mitigation systems revision idea, in an attempt to make Dodge, Block, and Parry more useful, noticeable, manipulable, and satisfying.) But my main concerns end with the first paragraph. I would not be upset if accuracy were to be removed. I would not be upset if excess accuracy was turned into lesser-scaled bonus Crit. Nor would I if it doesn't. Having both low-accuracy gear sets and high-accuracy sets for cutting loose farming birds with raid-mates and actual raid nights, respectively, are an entirely neutral thing to me. I mildly dislike that they're there. I mildly like being able to use another piece of gear I otherwise wouldn't.

...

Forgive my jumping around at this point, but as we seem to be mostly in agreement, I'll skip ahead to what I think partly holds back a lot of our stat functionality at this time.

At present, huge amounts of unique job utilities quickly boil down to damage, while in other cases much of the community seems to struggle with the idea of using the utilities themselves as damage-equivalency. That's horribly vague, so let me explain. DRG Jumps and Dives, Leg Sweep, Juggulate, Shoulder Tackle, Steel Peak, Blunt Arrow, Repelling Shot, the vast majority of all of these will be used purely for damage. That in itself is no bad thing—I myself like the flow of oGCDs; they augment and vary the otherwise somewhat slow GCD pace of the game while providing things to track and sync, and sometimes, if rarely, to consider utility against damage-flow for. But that last bit doesn't come all that often, such that it's gotten to the point that while a new stat might improve one's overall DPS equally through (optimal use of) Jump, the mainstay Determination and especially Critical Strike seem at least as good a choice. I worry that much of our stats' effects on gameplay are at the mercy of a very rigid playflow, one that quickly takes into equation CD, time or cycles until desync, potency vs. average output potency, and least common multipliers (+ offset). That's decently technical stuff to be running in one's head, and in many ways is what makes me love XIV gameplay. But it can also be flattening, especially when fight and class design allows such.

Determination itself, for instance, being pure damage, could not be more dull. And yet it is effective. What's funny is we can imagine a rather similar stat, eerily similar to accuracy, that would be effective in a single-player game or whatnot where, say, debuff application is not guaranteed, or may be resisted, or while buffs are not flat bonuses, but may instead be augmented. Take Poison or Deshell from XIII, for example, or imagine if you could augment your haste or crit buffs you provide yourself or others through the stat. At that point, you're looking at a densely-packed average number of casts to acheive a certain effect (perhaps varied further by the particular enemy), in ways not achieved by attack or spell power alone. But we just don't have any of that in XIV.

That's about all I have time to say for now. I will continue with your reply.

"However, there is of course a flip-side to that, in that "peak" gameplay might not be accomplishable until after a tier or so into a given expansion. As such, I'm still considering the long-term implications before suggesting any such changes to the jobs themselves."

This is something I actually like the prospect of. In a sense, it seems to help make the gearing process throughout the course of an expansion more interesting and the only downside would be the possibility of the non-peak gameplay being too much weaker and balancing issues appearing in the content as a result. But having something in place like this, where you need to adjust your playstyle mid-expansion due to new possibilities opened up by your gear, this sounds like it'd be fun, as it'd give players something to look forward to at the start of an expansion and reduce the monotony of playing the same job all the time. So when you're thinking about these long-term effects, remember how they could just as easily be positive as they could negative.

My experience with this comes, again, primarily from WoW, and primarily WotLK at that, where several specs tended to perform below average at the beginning of the expansion, and were abominably powerful at the end. Fury Warrior would be the classic example of this, as their ability to deal damage was gated only by how much damage they dealt. Output increased output. So naturally their scaling shot through the roof. (Though it may sound like I'm scornful of the design at face value, it's really only that scaling that annoyed me, and not highly even then. The gameplay itself felt pretty great, as this meant riding one's own crafted waves, rather fluidly, rather than being compressed into rigid windows. But enough on that.) Others of the endgame power-specs are less clear examples though, owing more to balance of a particular stat (Armor Penetration) or the specialization/job (though Fire's scaling improved significantly at higher levels of haste and especially crit, Arcane tended to hold a consistent lead regardless). In my own experience, my flows, my priorities, my specs, etc., did all change at least a couple times per class specifically because of my gear. That definitely added to the experience. I'm just not sure if imbalanced scaling has to be a part of that (especially when it's not even guaranteed to pan out at the end).

Now, there are certain ways these issues might become irrelevant. If a lower-performing DPS class or spec has particular strong utility elements, especially such as those that are most useful when gear, and therefore raid DPS or cheese strats, are low or unavailable, then he can be taken regardless. If gear is not replaced with or by the entry-time to each tier, then it may be worthwhile to gear a particular job that is expected to pan out only later (assuming you can somehow trust that player to stick with your group to make back that disadvantaged time—even imagining that is painful). And of course when a game has a piece of gear that can be used across multiple specs or jobs with significant transferable value, one can change their gameplay to fit new needs, experimenting with new ways to get the most out of what he has... albeit at the loss of choice of spec. We've seen this with Bards and Machinists plenty, or with Paladins and Dark Knights, White Mages and Astrologians. A bit of a mathmatical push towards a new use for one's gear or skills—noticeable, but not so strong as to deny one the option to stay his old course—can help to shake things up. But these are all really hard balances, mostly rooted in minutia among both the combatants and the content. There are certain constraints for crafting a fight that I figured SE would have considered, such as not unnecessarily making a phase last longer than a second shorter than the maximum duration of Greased Lightning, or certain timings for particular movement phases that allow tactical, well timed deployment of related skills, but even those aren't perfectly followed.

[HeavenlyArmed]

snip

Your poll doesn't mean very much, as there are tons of factors that could play into that both regarding the raid systems and the raid content itself. All your complaints are subjective. There were recycled mechanics in Coil too, and there are plenty of new mechanics in Midas.The reason Alex Savage has lower clear rates is because of a number of factors, but primarily because A3S was a much larger wall than it should have ever been in being both a heavy dps check and a very mechanically intense fight. These were scaled back in Midas, and scaled back further when A6S was nerfed. Midas is now, undoubtedly, Coil difficulty with A8S being the only possible exception, and even that could be argued considering how difficult T9 was. People also considered Dreadwyrm gear terrible looking in a lot of cases, but again, these things are subjective. You're basically complaining that you don't like the aesthetics of this Raid set and are saying that we need a complete rework because of it.

[RobbieH]

You're basically complaining that you don't like the aesthetics of this Raid set and are saying that we need a complete rework because of it.

Please quote me where i said such thing.

[HeavenlyArmed]

Please quote me where i said such thing.

Okay. Rework first

I hope they change how it is, because there's so many flaws in the current formula it's not even fun,

And your subjective complaints.

Alexander is boring and has glamours that look like they were made.

recycled mechanics, bad glamours,

with Midas they reduced DPS checks a bit but threw in more mechanics, i seriously don't know what they're doing anymore.

I want a time machine and go back to the time of 2nd and FCoB, the progression was the same with the plus of good looking gear, good story and fun fights.

[Hyperia]

Poll answered!

I have high hopes for 4.0 as in my opinion, Alexander has ruined raiding in the 3.x series.

[Zari]

Poll answered!

I have high hopes for 4.0 as in my opinion, Alexander has ruined raiding in the 3.x series.

Idk
Gordias was pretty bad but Midas really stepped it up

[Jetstream_Fox]

Nothing will be addressed until 4.0 though which is a sad thing, it's leaving us entirely in the dark on what's being discussed.

Fundamentally speaking, this game can't exactly change. That is of course unless they get away from the trinity and instanced theme park design that they have gone with so far. I think a lot of the of issues with the game are stemming from this initial design choice, the flow of funds or lack of labor has been shortened for the development team, granted this might have been a temporary issue with the coming launch of 15.

If we draw comparisons to other MMOs we can clearly see where 14 has strength and weakness. For instance, games like ESO and Star Terk, have such a emphasis on open world content. Exploring is so fun to do within those games, not because it fits within the games lore, but because you always have sense of danger. The immersion is greatly done and you feel like you are in a living breathing world, that's both perilous and giving, allowing you to basically live the words of Hydaelyn "hear, feel, think." But in 14 we don't have this, nothing in all of Eorzea allows for this, making everything seem lifeless and dull, something no Final Fantasy game should ever feel.

14 follows the theme park rule for MMOs, as has Rift, WoW, and Lotro. But as we all know WoW was the real success, because of the varying degrees of things to do within that world. Any game that follows this is going to be exciting at first, well because it's new. 14 has proven this time and time again with every new patch, it brings people together to do content, but it also drives people apart because it doesn't offer what other theme park games have, substantial difficulty levels of content.

And expanding on what I said earlier about the trinity, this forces the devs to build things almost all the same. The arena has to be a certain size, the players need to follow predetermined class rules, and everything must become a dance or life and death. In the end, no matter what they implement, nothing from dungeons to raids will fundamentally change. They can throw a new gearing system into them yes, but you're still doing the same fights to get rewarded through this system.

Touching on stats, while I did suggest adding tp/mp/hp regen as stats as well as pierce and cleave damage. Earlier in this post, the stats are the way they are because again of the trinity. So outside of a rework, which SE has shown they can, nothing really can be added to the game without changing how it's played. Looking at the highly plausible next classes Samurai and Red Mage, in theory both of these classes actually break the trinity. As a RDM can theoretically be all 3 areas AND a SAM could be both a DPS and Tank. Though as it stands there are many questions with the stats in place how they are now, like why a BRD can't have PIE, why a NIN is DEX but MNK is STR. A more experimental system is needed within this game for players to actually see the difference in stats, we can't see ACC or DET. But without a proper stat building system, we can't put something over another stat without gimping ourselves. By that I mean if I put on PIE gear as a BRD I'm hurting myself in more categories than I should, where if this were a game with builds I could effectively design my BRD to work with all of the stats both main predetermined stats and sub stats.

So where is the game good you ask? It does a great job of taking elements from both theme park and sandbox MMOs and meshing them into one weird genre, I can't call this a sandbox or a theme park, it's really a hybrid of the two and the game offers a great way to start out, by that I mean it's not ESO where you wake up go through an area and fall from the sky and get thrown into the world to do whatever. The game helps you out and it's easy to pick up, but hard to master, there are great ways to go about your battle class leveling and crafting stars out easy enough and gradually gets insane. So the game does do a good job of giving the player tools to start playing and doesn't force you into something, yes I know dungeons are in the main story and you have to do them, but the game doesn't drop you into the dungeon and say have fun! The ability to switch a class is also very unique and great as it ensures a player that they don't have to start over 100% if they feel like their first class choice isn't for them in this game. So the state of the game starting out isn't so bad, it's further on that becomes a bit of a mess which is the purpose of this post and many others.

Changing one thing also needs to reflect something else, many agree that the raids in 3.0 were very tough and the system of gearing SE implemented made it feel like the idea of raiding was a chore. As well as the basic design of raiding needing 7 people on the same skill page all knowing their role in the trinity near perfectly. Add the fact we had no training options for these fights going between phases left and right is in it's own right a challenge and often at times in new raids leads to death. So, for one group of players, the fear of being overwhelmed reduces their respective insight and drive to do that content, for another group, we have people who don't think they can do this content because they don't have as much time, so they view these fights out of reach, then we have players who feel the reward for doing this content isn't worth all the emotions that come with raiding, and yes of course, those that feel it's way too hard for them. All of these issues seem to me sound like a multiple difficulty system needs to be put into place. But there we go, changing one thing, but now we have another issues. How do we give it rewards? What difficulty drops what? How many tiers? Easy mode, normal mode, hard mode, expert mode, Master Dante Must Die Legendary Chaos Ninja mode?

The state of the game is something that can't really be summed up easily, nor will it ever be, without actually knowing what Yoshi and the rest of the team want, we can't help them, and they can't help us, in order to fix or alter the game, we need to be able to directly speak with the devs, and that is something that is not nearly discussed enough.

[RobbieH]

Okay. Rework first



And your subjective complaints.

I didn't specify gear only, i pointed it out as one of the reasons why raiding in Alex wasn't appealing to me, it's beyond me how you pick one thing and generalize it as a whole.

Read this page: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-design./page8

There's various examples.