Twinfinite Interview

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Speak for yourself. My sample size of my group pretty much despises this game's gear at this point. The reason they don't add effects - or any variation at all - is because the dev team is afraid of players feeling rejected because they don't have specific pieces of gear. This has been stated in the past.

The question to ask raiders isn't "would you like an interesting piece of gear or a good piece of gear," but "would you enjoy acquiring items more if they weren't so boring?" Getting cool stuff is exciting. Getting 2% more damage isn't, especially when you've been getting that same exact upgrade since 2014. Putting gear that's actually cool into the game might motivate people to go do the content where it drops and might actually help with player retention.

Also, making gear interesting doesn't necessarily mean giving it a unique effect. Something as simple as less MND than other pieces of its ilvl, but more VIT on a piece of healer gear is enough to make that item stand out from the endless march of Main Stat, VIT, one high substat, one low substat

And my sample size argues otherwise. I am in a lot of raid discord channels and the overwhelming consensus tends to favor BiS. The only time that healer piece with more VIT and less MND will even factor into the equation is during progression. And even then, only if you're attempting it at close to the minimal ilvl. For example, plenty of raiders meld VIT to their accessories during prog but immediately ditch it the moment they start jumping ahead of the ilvl. In essence, you've merely replaced melding with whatever method required to obtain this VIT focused set.

Putting three sets of ilvl 270 chestpieces behind A12S isn't going to make most raiders care to continuously run it unless they are already motivated to bump their numbers on FFlogs or do speed runs. Once they have the best of whichever three sets, the other two become irrelevant. Case in point, you can push 651 Skill Speed on Dragoon to more easily push for that one extra GCD-- somewhat useful in A12 to pull off two Geirskoguls-- yet the vast majority follow the standard 626 because Crit is higher, thus resulting in higher damage overall compared to a situational benefit. I am not saying they couldn't liven things up a little but adding a second gear set that favors VIT over STR/DEX/INT will be near virtually ignored for DPS jobs unless it's easier to get than the better damage stat equivalent.

Everyone copies everything, how many people can honestly say they figured coil and alex out for themselves with no use of guides?
Getting interesting gear is fun, it's still fun even if you're getting it to copy someone elses build rather than create one of your own.

That wasn't my point. Having to balance around multiple builds puts a massive strain on the developers since they now have to contend with however many builds are added. And to what end? For people to inevitably copy whatever raiders or popular youtubers do. They're already struggling to balance healers and tanks so people don't ignore one. Adding skill trees and what have you only increases their workload. I'd prefer they focus on actual content, personally.

[Brannigan]

I am in a lot of raid discord channels and the overwhelming consensus tends to favor BiS.

They favor BiS over what, exactly? The bad pieces? Well, no shit. There's only two choices in the game right now. If they were asked the question "would you prefer if gear had more variety and interesting stuff on it," I think you'd get some different results.

Also thanks for providing an exact situation where a random high vit low mnd piece would be good. Does only being good during progression (which is usually performed close to minimum ilvl) somehow invalidate its existence? What about a situation in which your healer is just a fucking baddie who gets hit by more AOEs than usual? He might opt to wear higher VIT pieces.

This is why the "everyone will just use the cookie cutter build" meme is so retarded. These games have so many different situations and types of people playing them that one build can't possibly always be the best for every individual. If it is, that's called being overpowered. Even in like WoTLK-era WoW you'd have a lot of little tweaks to the cookie cutter talent and gear builds to accommodate the little quirks of individuals and their party setups.

Yeah, there'll always be a configuration that is mathematically superior when played by a robot, but that doesn't mean devs should boil everything down to this simple garbage we have now. How is that any fun?

[Jandor]

Blade & Soul has a whole skill tree outline. Guess what happened when Jaesung, the best PvPer in the game, released his preferred setup. They copied it.

Everyone copies everything, how many people can honestly say they figured coil and alex out for themselves with no use of guides?
Getting interesting gear is fun, it's still fun even if you're getting it to copy someone elses build rather than create one of your own.

[Shougun]

Lol the gear part makes me really wonder, what I'd love to see is some more fair choice / build options (would promote horizontal play) and less stuff like accuracy. I find accuracy to be a very boring stat, get so much until you don't anymore and then you avoid it like the plague as it is basically just a gear killer and for those who don't pay attention to it just a very annoying combo killer (tl;dr, try to pay attention to accuracy until you don't, and all it offers is that you do something that everyone takes for granted already ~ lol). Enemy evasion should be based on mechanics only, imo. Like blind changed from % chance to X number of times, dodging being a mechanic and not a chance, can leave it alone against monsters though (player spells onto monsters).

I'd like to see accuracy nixed entirely, but I'd like to also see some stuff like in FFXI & even WoW, or heck Diablo 3 lol. If they don't want to make horizontal ilvl growth they could make it so the special abilities on items can be extracted, just add a few more QoL to materia system and that shouldn't be too worrisome (and make it so only one ability effect per item so you couldn't take an ability from three other items and materia it into one item that already has one). I think it's silly that there are many contents where you have to run it but you want none of the gear they offer (except for glamour/log) because the next step invalidates it all, like the next step 10 minutes away - I'm not talking big level jumps and stuff that of course makes sense.

WoW has sets (special effects), items with abilities, gem relics (materia with abilities basically), and enchanter (some abilities, some pure stat enchants), as well as trinket slots that are dedicated to this idea of items with abilities (so multiple opportunities to see "special effect" stats). FFXI obviously had special effects even. D3 is a harder comparison (different game style) but the legendary are pretty fun, albeit you quickly go from 500 options to 3 once you get near the end game / difficulty level (better than 1 imo, but you can't do whatever at the end - easily can do whatever in casual content though and it's a lot of fun).

Of course meta can narrow down some of the usefulness of effects but usually only matters in the harder tiers (like savage you'll need more specific answers, but a normal mode dungeon could be more free).

Still praying they'll make instanced housing.. Of course would like to see an Ishgard theme but you could do that in another system too and allow players to be more creative/wishy wasyhy friendly. I want snowflakes today and rainbows tomorrow! The current system makes you have to bleed yourself out before you could switch, and that's as they add hundreds more houses to servers that don't need them and missing many thousands of houses on bigger ones. There's no balance xD.

[Canadane]

Boots of +12.
Jacket of +20.


Can't wait.

[Elim]

I'd love to see acc removed.

[Aldora]

I'd love to see acc removed.

I would actually like to see them change "Accuracy" to "Crit Hit Chance" and "Crit Hit" to "Crit Hit Damage". That way we won't have to worry about missing, but think about how to optimize the chance of getting a Critical Hit and the amount of damage that comes with it. We would still be "Min-Maxing" our gear to get the most out of it, which would give good reason to add more variations of gear of the same Item Level (Tome, Raid, Diadem, etc).

[BigRed5392]

gear sets with added bonuses don't work in mmo. People will math out which is the best gear to get. My gf said ff11 had tons of that gear and people just math'ed out what was good, and players had to get th gear or would be "bad". We see that enough in ff14 with how people play their class. We don't need to had more player made rules.

sry but i rather not have a random joe insult me because im not banging my head on content i don't have fun with just for that "must have"item.

[Shougun]

gear sets with added bonuses don't work in mmo. People will math out which is the best gear to get. My gf said ff11 had tons of that gear and people just math'ed out what was good, and players had to get th gear or would be "bad". We see that enough in ff14 with how people play their class. We don't need to had more player made rules.

sry but i rather not have a random joe insult me because im not banging my head on content i don't have fun with just for that "must have"item.

/Whatever you want to do/ sets don't work, but they absolutely do work seeing as FFXI and WoW both made them work. You just had to actually think about them, can't build your gear like high on popotos and people will be okay with it. I think that's the hardest part for people to understand, just because it has an effect doesn't mean you can wear it without thought - you still have to think about your build.

FFXI was a bit strict but in both WoW and FFXI there were multiple options and the change to core mechanics you've been using for a long time is very refreshing. D3 has it similar, you could drunkenly build yourself for all of the game until you get to the later end torments then you go from like 500 options to 5 max or less but the game would be so much more boring if you only had one option.

"Omg, I need to use this ability now, the effect is so cool!" and for the next 10 hours how you play the game changes, its awesome. She's right people will narrow your choices down real fast, but she'd be wrong that they can't work or there will only ever be one path.

Also consider that if we had effects but kept our linear growth, in that each set is always better than the previous but each set has unique effects - this still changes up the play slightly and adds refreshing touches to core principles you've been using, while never actually having to consider if its better or worse because the answer is simply (is it a higher or lower ilvl?).

[BigRed5392]

snip

my g.f played ff11 for 7 years, and told me she was harassed for not having the "o-hat" (idk what that is) and black belt. She would be replaces as rmd for not having ele staves. (again idk what that is) They don't work because of community rules not allowing it. Then you had gear swaping which ppl would swap out gear with each attack. My g/f was harassed for not doing that simple due to not having the gear or inv space.

My g/f is of the opinion that playing your character, and gearing up said character should be easy. That the challenge should in the content. The reason we have a large gap is people can't master their job like people want. Simply due to how complex it is to master them, and rather not see it with gear. She is also not used to the way gearing works in ff14 and restarted a few times because of the Post gap gear grind being confusing to her.