Thread: Reset Item Levels in 4.0?

Originally Posted by LineageRazor

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Had it worked, horizontal progression wouldn't be largely seen as a complimentary spice compared to its counterpart. Gear lasting years isn't necessarily an example of success, especially given its incredibly situational usage. The whole reason content like that has been downplayed over the years is people typically dislike it.

In virtually all MMOs nowadays there isn't an "incorrect" sub-job, hence my original point. FFXI had combinations that people flat out refused to party with due to their inferiority. Monk may lack the utility of Dragoon or Ninja in FFXIV, however you will rarely see it outright excluded. Our only closest example was Paladin pre-3.2, yet even it found some love. That just wouldn't have been in the case in FFXI. Gear did suffer a similar issue because you were expected to have grind out certain content if it were deemed better. Compare that to the more straight forward methods you see in FFXIV, WoW and etc.

FFXI existed at a period where MMOs scarcely had an audience and Square didn't given a hoot over balancing jobs. You simply cannot get away with that now. At least not if you expect to make money. And as someone else mentioned, it isn't coincidental the strictly vertical focused WoW utterly eclipsed FFXI despite releasing almost two years later.

Originally Posted by Mithrahn

Short-term = Workload multiplied
Long-term = Workload lessened.
Because horizontal progression requires less 'updates'/'patches' and is more longer lasting than 'vertical progression'
But I shouldn't be surprised anyway, people nowadays are very short-sighted and only think short term.

Actually, no. That workload remains multiplied because any new job or tweak to abilities must be balanced alongside the several hundred potential effects people can choose from. Applied to gear, this becomes even worse since without vertical progression, you need constantly new ways to incentive content.

Or perhaps people simply aren't interested in horizontal progression? Just because you happen to like it, doesn't mean everyone else does.

Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

None of this speaks to the sheer difficulty of balancing a game with numerous weaving paths. Dragoon currently has 27 ability you will actively use. If every skill offered just two additional options for us to choose, you've effectively tripled the developer workload because they now have to assume every possible combination, lest one setup becomes overpowered. STR tanks are an example of what happens there.

Short-term = Workload multiplied
Long-term = Workload lessened.
Because horizontal progression requires less 'updates'/'patches' and is more longer lasting than 'vertical progression'
But I shouldn't be surprised anyway, people nowadays are very short-sighted and only think short term.

Originally Posted by Mithrahn

Because horizontal progression requires less 'updates'/'patches' and is more longer lasting than 'vertical progression'

That's not true - imagine for just a moment you could buy each of those horizontal items on a vendor. How long lasting is that? Not very.
Now imagine every single 5 iLvL upgrade at endgame would require an effort akin to the Anima - the whole current questline, not just one step. How often do you need to update the iLvL?

What decides how often you need to update is how easy gear/experience is to acquire - in both systems.

I personally can't say I like the term "Horizontal progression" in the first place - Progression is a one way street. You progress, you regress or you don't move at all. And the thing that keeps things "lasting" is called "stagnation". Our job levels have lasted us for way over a year now, precisely because there's no progression. You can progress on a "new" job, but the old one doesn't progress. That is what keeps the level "relevant", very much like the gear in FFXI. Horizontal progression would better be called "Mass Progression" or something akin IMO.

I mean, they could just divide all item levels by 2, but then fresh 50s would have ilvls have their level? It was approximately ilvl ~=~ lvl until endgame, at which point it's necessary in a vertical gearing system that ilvls increase enough to provide real incentive to do the new content given. You can argue about how long leveling should take compared to endgame, whether there should be gearing bonuses that could carry across from leveling to level cap, (mostly) horizontal vs. (mostly) vertical progression, but candy path / carrot on a stick will remain, whatever its form.

The idea is that every 5 ilvls adds x% of stats, and that amount necessarily compounds over time. But shorten that bonus and the gear's hardly worth raiding for. More than our ilvl, which will increase mostly linearly, it's probably our dps you should worry more about apparent inflation in, as it will be increasing more exponentially with that ilvl. But, I'm not sure there's any point in fretting over either. Sure, 2.x was measured in the hundreds, 3.x in the thousands, and 4.x will likely be in the tens of thousands and so forth, but what's the issue with going from a "320" dps to "3.2k" to "3.2万" to ".32m" to "3.2m" and so forth?

If anything the amount of dps we're lose when fully geared out from the last expansion as we gain our first few levels, for diminished secondary stat conversions, annoys me more than that.

no point in doing so. first of all the gear needs to be the way it is now for ppl that don't have the expansion or else there would be just 1 lv50 set, 1 lv60 set and so on.

2nd: for horizontal progression to work you need content that warrents the need for several gear pieces of the same strength. e.g. one piece let's you take less water dmg, while the other boosts your damage output against voidsend enemies. that would lead to serious inventory issues. and if you don't need that special gear to clear content there is no point in having it in the first place and you end up with just the easiest optainable gear you can get. and this you will wear through the whole expansion...

Item levels will keep growing and growing, because that's how this game was designed to be, item level was never meant to match character level, and you can see that even in low level gear



In a few years we will be past ilvl 600, and there will be nothing wrong with it, other than people who still don't understand that ilvl is just meant to point out there's a stat increase and has nothing to do with character level.

Originally Posted by Khalithar

Well there is the issue of stat inflation. Sooner or later they will have to do something about that as the numbers will get pretty crazy. Just as an example, in WoW, when the Cataclysm expansion came out they did a hard gear reset and my endgame geared tank in Wrath of the Lich King (the expansion prior to Cataclysm) went from around 22k-23k HP to nearly 200k+ in raid gear in Cataclysm. While I don't think SE will do that drastic of a stat increase, there's going to be a point sooner or later where they will need to do a serious ability prune/stat squish to get things to a more reasonable level.

I don't understand the anecdote, if you went from 22k HP to 200k HP then they did the opposite of what you say they did, they inflated stats.