Content release

[Ayer2015]

So, are we ever going to see a real change in how content is added to this game? The 3-4 month schedule is perfectly fine for patch releases, however the content that comes with those patches leaves a lot to be desired regarding character progressing. Having ilv increase every 6 months makes odd number patches feel stale after a week or two. I just feel like our dev team spends so many resources on random systems that could be better allocated to repeatable content with actual character progression goals.

[Hasrat]

Define "actual character progression goals."

[Rinuko]

Been like this more or less since ARR. I don't expect them changing that anytime soon. Didn't people finish the content in 4.1 in days? I havn't even done MSQ apart from unlocking Skalla cause i dont have an urge to do so.

Only they added after that is savage raiding which a minority can do, same thing with Shinryu Ex even though its a bigger base that Coil Savage.

I really hope 4.2 brings something good like... Eureka (though probably Diadem 3.0) and maybe new Deep Dungeon in Ruby Sea?

[ZodiarkFC]

If you can accept the simple fact this MMO is a vertical progression game, this conversation wouldnt be happening. horizontal games unfornately are a dying breed

[Rinuko]

If you can accept the simple fact this MMO is a vertical progression game, this conversation wouldnt be happening. horizontal games unfornately are a dying breed

Yeah and its a shame. I liked the horizontal gamestyle they had in XI. Able to use gear that was year old and still being BIS was a nice feeling. Able to take a break and when come back you dont have to play catch up

[Zojha]

Define "actual character progression goals."

Being one accessory closer to the ultimate outfit *cough*

Real talk: To talk about character progression goals, you first need to talk about character progression. What is character progression? In general, something about your character gets bigger and that's typically either the pool of character abilities or their power.

Increasing the power of abilities is commonly facilitated via gear, not by powering up the character as such. Strip (in private) and you'll notice your stats as lvl 70 dude are so poor, you couldn't compete against a mob of that level.
Increasing the ability pool for a given job only really happens during the leveling process - after that, acquiring new abilities only goes by leveling new jobs and those are mutually exclusive with the abilities on other jobs.

The prior form facilitates zero new gameplay - The numbers go up, but the way you play doesn't change and you might just need a parser to even notice the effect. It's often not very satisfying until you step down from Olympus and realize you can now one-shot things you once had big troubles with.
The latter is often much nicer - It can facilitate new gameplay and the new spell you got creates immediate satisfaction with the flashy new effects, but it's often a living nightmare to balance as people use spells in ways the devs never intended and find undesirable. It's also harder to scale, as you have to create actual abilities every time, instead of just upping a number in a calculator.

Some games (like WoW) put the latter form of progression onto gear via Trinkets you can either activate, or that activate passively in combat for a special effect (Buffs/debuffs, damage procs, CC removal, stacks that transform you into a beast... whatever).

Goals then pertain to those basic concepts: Power or Diversity.

Let's talk about power first.
Increasing your power in FFXIV is a simple process: You acquire gear of a higher item level which has more stats than gear with a lower item level. How you do that is set: Farming tomes and farming savage, with a cap that changes every even patch. The highest goal you can strive for at the moment is i340, which either requires raiding or farming the 24 man raid for a couple months, one 10 iLvL upgrade per week. So the neccesary tome farming to upgrade aside, your progression goals here are: Clearing Rabanastre, Clearing Deltascape Savage (once a week each). If you don't enjoy raiding, you limit yourself to i330, which puts your progression goal at capping creation tomes until you are full i330. You probably already reached that goal on a single job.

Now for diversity.
This is simple in FFXIV as well: You level your alt jobs and your progression goal is level 70. There are several ways to get XP, so the way to the goal is quite diverse, but the goal per job is quite limited. You can repeat that process a couple times until you got everything at 70, then it's done and over with until the next expansion. There are no goals for this at "endgame" - the endgame is the end of the line there.


Progression goals are going to particularly lack if you are playing only one role/job, because you'll get like 5 new abilities on the road, then get your gear rather fast and then have nowhere to go with that job anymore until the new gear comes out. Playing and gearing multiple jobs alleviates that quite a bit, because you can repeat a given progression goal multiple times, but as said prior, gear upgrades can feel quite underwhelming regardless because it's hard to discern the difference of the upgrade with the bare eye and the weekly caps are not to designed to support many alt jobs.

As such! I'd imagine if someone wants more progression goals, they either want higher item level gear to grind, or more abilities to play around with. The latter is typically suggested via items - trinkets, special effects, whatever -, the prior pretty straightforward in its own right.

[Alien_Gamer]

I've never understood peoples desire to chase higher ilevels. Once you hit the character level cap (70) the literal only thing that changes with ilevel is the size of the numbers. No mechanics change, no abilities change, the way you play your job doesn't change, you ONLY get bigger numbers. Why not just cap the ilevel and make successive gear about glamour? At least thats different each patch.

[Remedi]

Considering how SAM opener changes depending on playstyle and skillspeed amount I do not agree with that statement

[BluexBird]

I think you're expecting too much out of this game. In a lot of ways, FFXIV is extremely limited compared to the other MMOs. One of the good things it has going for it though is the fact that you don't have to make a new character to try a new class. Unfortunately, unlike most other MMOs, each and every one of these classes pretty much has a fixed playstyle, and there are no items or skill sets that you can choose that will change that.

For instance, some MMOs will give you a bunch of different skills, and you are able to pick and choose between them to come up with a playstyle that you want. Others even take this system even further, and add gear in such a way that, depending on what gear you pick, your playstyle will change significantly.

A good example of this is how in GW2, a single class can have more than 5 different playstyles depending on which weapons you decide to take, what armor sets you decide to use, and/or what traits you choose. And the system is done in such a way that it's hard to determine which playstyle is the "best". Especially when the ones considered the best might not even be the most fun to play. This gives the game a lot of replayability, since if you can eventually just try out new playstyles. For each and every single class, none of which are in any way similar to one another.

In FFXIV, the closest you can do to this is pick up a new job. Which you then have to grind to level 70, and then gear up all over again. Yay? And once you're there, that's it. Yeah sure, you can have the tough decision about whether you're gonna go with skill speed or direct hit into your materia slots, but it's always pretty clear which one will be the best, to the point that it will show. And even if it didn't, it wouldn't change the playstyle, which is the important thing here.

So in the end, unless you do decide to pick up new jobs, the only really interesting thing left in the ACTUAL game (housing, glams, collecting stuff are kind of an aside), are the bosses and raids (and to some extent, the story) they keep adding from time to time. Because let's face it - once you're max level, max ilvl, and mastered your job, it's only going to matter if you have new challenges to overcome with it. Until those come out, there is nothing but waiting to be done.

[Felis]

Add glamour to endgame progression.
"Glamour gear X over gear Y and get buff K"