Twinfinite Interview

[Misutoraru]

this is what my g/f was talking about.

she was around in 1.0 with the blm group only, garuda fight as a group of blm would burn her down with a higher success rate due to an exploit.

the worst offender would be GW2
99% dungeon party require specific skill build and certain set of equipment
GW2 Supposedly to be very versatile offering different combination of skill sets, yet when the community found out the 1 way better than other, it become a disease spread across the whole universe and killing one of the most interesting game, and I hope it will never happen in FFXIV

[Jandor]

the worst offender would be GW2
99% dungeon party require specific skill build and certain set of equipment
GW2 Supposedly to be very versatile offering different combination of skill sets, yet when the community found out the 1 way better than other, it become a disease spread across the whole universe and killing one of the most interesting game, and I hope it will never happen in FFXIV

I played GW2 & that never happened to me. Me and a friend both ran builds we came up with ourselves, never got any grief for it.

[KokonoeAiyoko]

I don't care about customizable stats per se, but what I do care about is having gear with unique effects and traits. Think of like a Rod that does more damage with an elemental spell of that specific elemental day, or a Rod that boosts a certain elemental type attack. How about feet armor that make you run faster, but has low stats? or how about armor that extends the duration of certain abilities or buffs like Blood for Blood or Medica 2? How about having actual elemental weapons and enemies taking more damage to certain types of damage and resisting certain elements?

So many variables that could be added but are not for some reason. Things even casual players could pick up on and enjoy.

[Niyuka]

Gear doesnt exist in a vacuum. The reason we dont meld our gear is not complexity, because as a whole, Yoshi is right, people dont generally do complex stuff when they dont need to.

Gear exists in the context of content, and if the content doesnt ask you hard questions that you answer through proper gear optimization, its a complexity just for its own sake, and should be done away with.

Current dungeons and raids never require those melds or extra stats. In very few raid encounters do you ever hit the gear cap. I have successfully done, within 2 weeks of returning after leaving in 3.1, Baelsars Wall + Sohm Al hard under their item limit. (none of the group had more than 228), and it was not hard.

The content is too easy for the gear complexity to matter. Make the content numerically harder, and people will adjust. WoW had a MUCH more complex gear system during its prime, and 11 million players adapted.

[Serilda]

I love unique effects on weapons. What I don't love is how they then lead to really weird minmaxing. FFXI was an extreme example as you could switch gear mid-combat, so you'd have your shoes of +1 damage to sneak attack macroed in with sneak attack then you'd switch to your boots of +1 damage to trick attack macroed to that. Black mages carried eight different expensive staves everywhere to maximise their bonuses for each element rather than specialising in an interesting way, and every spell had a staff-swap macroed in if you wanted to do the most damage. It was sort of stupid in terms of lore - who changes clothes that often? And the best players had tiny inventories because of sheer amount of gear they carried everywhere they went to deal as much damage as possible.

FFXIV has a different system so it would never be quite that insane, but you'll still end up with people wanting to switch gear in between encounters and arguing when someone pulls too quickly for them to change their pants. I like the idea of changing gear around for certain fights or playstyles as-is (e.g. fending accessories to allow for clearing a fight with a particular strategy) but abilities need to be balanced very carefully or it just ends up overcomplicating things for no reason.

[LineageRazor]

Folks go on and on about gear optimization in FFXI, but that simply wasn't a thing most of the time. Why? Because gear was hard to get. Sure, you could theorycraft out the best possible setup, but when each piece of that dream team equipment requires months of dedicated work to obtain, not even the l33test of the l33t were going to expect you to have every single piece - and anyone insisting that everyone needed to have a Relic weapon (for a very long time, THE best weapon for most jobs, generally requiring at least a year of work to make) would be laughed off the server.

Additionally, very little of the endgame content was tuned to the point where it couldn't be beaten unless the majority of participants were decked out in the best of the best. Even if most of the alliance had one or two endgame pieces at most, if they knew the fight and they knew how to play their jobs, they could win. The only difference top-tier gear made was that they could win FASTER, and with a reduced chance of failure due to bad RNG.

This game, on the other hand, practically throws high-grade equipment at you at every turn. It's so easy to gear up, that the devs have to add artificial barriers to keep the fights challenging - specifically, enrage timers. FFXI had enrage timers, too, but not for the same reason; enrage timers were added later on specifically to prevent players from holding valuable monsters for extended periods of time, to ensure that when those monsters respawned it would be during a time period favorable to them (or, in the case of certain infamous monsters like Absolute Virtue and Pandemonium Warden, to prevent groups from risking their real-life health whittling the monsters down over a period of dozens of hours rather than deal with the monsters' mechanics). Enrage timers are a mechanic that I detest; when learning a fight, you should be able to take as long as you need to to win. Your reward for practice and perseverance is that you're able to win faster.

At any rate, the prospect of gear becoming even SIMPLER is a depressing one, but honestly gear is so incredibly boring even now that it doesn't bother me all that much. Bring on the one-stat system! Get rid of STR DEX MND INT VIT PIE. They are a mockery of true RPG stats, where each one has some kind of effect, even if a given job benefits more from some than others.

[odintius]

Gear becoming even more simplified -.- Jesus at this point just take all the stats away and just give pdef and mdef and be done with it. Wasn't expecting anything close to what ffxi did, but adding gear set bonus or hell trait/ability enhacement materia isn't overboard imo. /sigh

[Ogulbuk]

Gear becoming even more simplified -.- Jesus at this point just take all the stats away and just give pdef and mdef and be done with it. Wasn't expecting anything close to what ffxi did, but adding gear set bonus or hell trait/ability enhacement materia isn't overboard imo. /sigh

Adding set bonuses may actually be a way of simplifying progression. Instead of even allowing for the possibility of "Alexandrian boot with Scripture gloves may result in 2 more points of the stats I care the most..." you out right say "progress to get the full set and you will unquestionably have The Best Full Set" (BiS may become an obsolete term.)

To be honest, in a world were we got to manage a single character's inventory for so many jobs, I welcome a simplified equipment system. If managing equipment for multiple jobs was not a thing, then I would be much more open to ask/beg for gear set lines that are designed specifically for PvP, or Raiding, or Dungeons.

[Naunet]

Adding set bonuses may actually be a way of simplifying progression. Instead of even allowing for the possibility of "Alexandrian boot with Scripture gloves may result in 2 more points of the stats I care the most..." you out right say "progress to get the full set and you will unquestionably have The Best Full Set" (BiS may become an obsolete term.)

Not necessarily. If you balance the set bonuses properly with the secondary stats on alternative pieces of gear, there comes a point where you have to weigh which is better - more of a main secondary stat, or the benefit provided by the set bonus. Granted, this still often ends up with people figuring out an "optimum" configuration.

I like how WildStar handles their class rune sets. When you manage to reach a level in gear where you can slot your class rune set, it often can lead to completely changing your rotation for dps, or changing the way you approach healing/tanking, or encouraging you to swap out one ability with another, or whathaveyou. It injects some variety in how you can build your character as your character progresses post-level cap.

[Shougun]

Not necessarily. If you balance the set bonuses properly with the secondary stats on alternative pieces of gear, there comes a point where you have to weigh which is better - more of a main secondary stat, or the benefit provided by the set bonus. Granted, this still often ends up with people figuring out an "optimum" configuration.

I like how WildStar handles their class rune sets. When you manage to reach a level in gear where you can slot your class rune set, it often can lead to completely changing your rotation for dps, or changing the way you approach healing/tanking, or encouraging you to swap out one ability with another, or whathaveyou. It injects some variety in how you can build your character as your character progresses post-level cap.

I'll be honest when I played I got super side tracked by housing so I didn't get to that much end game (which is probably why I toddler about here sometimes saying SE needs to look at that game's housing and change their current system into FC Garrison project - a big fat long term group project, WS Housing was THE BEST system I've ever seen). Anyway lol, the second point you make is where a lot of the fun of runes/relics (WoW's ability materia basically), enchants, glyphs, set bonuses, ability affixes, passives, trinkets, etc, etc littered in examples and proven in other MMORPGs to work and imo are great fun because they take what you've been doing for the last 100+ hours and tweak it.

Everyone has made legitimate points that while developers and players sometimes make it seem like you have "over 200 different choices" its more like 3 - the other ones will get you in trouble once you're in real content, but the point is you have THREE different styles of playing the thing you love playing. Its not about abandoning a job you love, its about changing up slightly what you love so its still fresh. Also would like to add you could be aboslutely goofy and not get in trouble in a lot of content in WoW, people only started to care in content that was actually moderately challenging - so you could still do what you thought was fun for some portions of content, and then in the more end game stuff you still had 2 to 3 choices.

Which feels great~ Heck, even when it doesn't "change" the rotations - it doesn't give you "3" different choices, but just makes their effects different, it's still great fun to see how you can incorporate that change and feels fresh on the last bit you've been playing around with. I remember making an on hit hunter for a short while way back when, although it was actually OP enough that Blizzard nerfed it lol, I had like 4 on hit effects and a double hit sword - basically looked like I was a rogue but I also had a pet lol.

What Ogulbuk was saying though I think is that SE could still be linear growth and make things simple on player's, because the newest gear would always have the best or at least the best in combination so you'd always know what you want to collect next - the ability affix idea works both in linear and horizontal ideas. As I said before I personally dont want to see years worth of horizontal because I'm a casual poop (used to play WoW hardcore lol), but I would like shorter term horizontal options. Like primal gear not immediately killing the one previous to it.

I'm not saying it has to be talent trees, or item bonuses, but these changes to what you love and not saying "stop playing what you like to get a different feeling" are awesome. I love sphere grids and a FFX meets FFIX could be interesting, but I fear the aspect of collecting items might make people less desired if they haven't for example collect Ifrit's Brand from the primal fight 2,000 iLvLs ago lol. I imagine it'd just be much easier to balance if they added it to the items themselves like many other major MMOs do. For both a materia based system or the FFIX/X example it may help to just let you sell them on the MW as well - so people can choose to do old content or not (anyway, strictly based on items would be the literal easiest to balance and manage for players and devs).

Still want to see a sphere grid just because they're cool but I think Duelle's suggestion for a aesthetic merit system would function better for that, so people still have something to look forward to at max and gain some neat aesthetic options.