Quote Originally Posted by Hasrat View Post
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.