Normal mode raids: please don’t settle on this loot system...

[Maero]

The rng in this game in general is one of the worst and i among many others always need to run xamount of times more then player A just to get something.
I do not foresee them ever changing the system.

[RiyahArp]

Yeah, you were an omnicrafter/gatherer if you are in crafting endgame and able to make armor on release. But it's not particularly fun for someone to level a craft to 70 just to hope that whatever scrip mats sell well now don;t get devalued like hell in a month; ala mihgan infusions already are down 50% from their value, and soon will approach zero because yellow scrips in the long run are useless, same as creation mats. You can make near infinite supply of them. There's no guarantee.

And it really isn't fun running Sigma Normal more than once a week; its a boring tier compared to others except for the third fight, even if it is visually striking. The gear is already limited by a weekly cap, same as rabanastre; not much reason it needs to also be gated by a part cap.

[Driskus]

I kind of wish they would just go with a single token type too. As soon as I saw the same loot system we already had in deltascape, I just shifted gears and started collecting mats for a full set of crafted gear. At this point I'm just collecting whatever parts I can get. I could see why they did it in a way though, considering the queue times have been fairly long even as healer (around 15 mins minimum). Delta at this point used to pop within 3-5 mins at most.

[Zojha]

The loot system is fine as is.

If everything was "fine as is" because "it could be worse", nothing could ever get "better". We'd still be stuck in the stone age, debating whether to use bronze or not with some people going: "Don't be spoiled, things are fine as is, you could have nothing at all!".

The way I see it, the system could use improvements, especially in a pug context. 8 should be the absolute maximum amount of runs you need to do, because that's the worst case for a premade where everyone wants the same thing and that only drops once. The best case is two runs. So the goal runs should be somewhere in between. How to facilitate that? Up to debate. I personally would go straight for fixed tokens and trade-ins.

[Reinha]

One poor system being worse than another poor system does not mean the first isn't worse than it needs to be.

Personal loot, for instance, is yet another commonly used loot distribution in MMOs and faces downsides only in situations where a static is consistent across a tier and vying for early progression.

I have played with personal loot and it is the same level of garbage as random gear drops. It's still a gamble to get an item at all and then also to get it for the right slot. In some forms of personal loot whichever drops you don't want to use can't even be passed on to someone else so that they have a better time looting. If you can't get loot for a job you aren't currently playing then personal loot forces you to play lower geared jobs in order to get gear for them. This is not the case with tokens and tomes.

The system we have for normal 8 man raids isn't poor at all. You can get one or more pieces you can use every week, for any job and any slot regardless of what job you run the raid with. You have a 50% chance to get any token per kill and the average amount of runs it takes to get all tokens per week is two per boss, 8 total. This amount of RNG is totally bearable. You can do with even fewer runs if you collect your tokens in a different order than other people. It is a very small amount of work and takes only 4 weeks to complete (per job) when combined with tome gear.

I honestly don't see what issue people could have aside from not getting to select a piece from the loot list after only one weekly kill for all four bosses. I doubt any game has such a generous loot system for their main PvE content.

[Taika]

I don't see a fault in current system, other than the tokens eating inventory space. You are guaranteed at least 1 drop of each item on the loot table every single clear. If you want to be as efficient as possible and eliminate a chance of bad luck, form a premade group and farm a floor until everyone has received what they want for the week. If you want to optimise it further, form a group consisting of people who want different items.

I like being able to plan which item I will get which week.

[alimdia]

It's too hard to do this to make 4 star gear for yourself. The caps are so high that only a full set of HQ white gear overmelded moderately (but with t6 crafting materia in the main slots) will give you the stats to HQ it. You're looking at 20+million as a one time investment to be able to get that; even augmented scrip gear won't work. And even then unless you can make all parts and gather them you are saving maybe 50% or less on the cost of the finished item if you buy HQ mats.

They are 3 stars and gearing up to that point isn't costy at all, you can do it with Vs and IVs purchased with red scrips. And it's definitely possible to make 3 star gear using augmented, you just can't use the same rotations roaming on Reddit, maker's mark exists as a safe way to craft things when your stats or CP are low.

[Zigabar]

Snip

Find a crafter-friend. Treat them nicely!

This right here is the solution if crafting is 'too hard' or 'too expensive' for you. My static group has 2 people who don't craft. They treat me and our other crafters nicely. They offered to level gatherers and bring us mats. It's simple, easy, and your crafter is probably going to make you good DoL gear as well as DoW/DoM because everyone benefits.

[Deceptus]

SE loves their overly complicated, convoluted token systems. Way back when they first added this system at the start of Heavensward I made a post about rather than having specific items (that take up inventory space) for each type of gear we can get they should have instead just made all the gear purchaseable with the same item. One for belts/accessories; two for boots, gloves and hats; 4 for pants and body pieces. The total time to completely gear someone out in normal mode raid gear would remain the same but gearing would no longer be subject to highly competitive pieces for maximum efficiency or needlessly filling our inventory with garbage if we mess up our priority, miss an instance or just straight up lose the RNG war.

The dev team really loves their convoluted systems, and they really don't like changing things after they've already been implemented so I'm not holding my breath about this terrible system being addressed any time soon. Would sure be nice, though.

This is a really smart idea.

[RiyahArp]

This right here is the solution if crafting is 'too hard' or 'too expensive' for you. My static group has 2 people who don't craft. They treat me and our other crafters nicely. They offered to level gatherers and bring us mats. It's simple, easy, and your crafter is probably going to make you good DoL gear as well as DoW/DoM because everyone benefits.

You need to get two gatherers to 70 and unlock the regional folklore books for them, which take 50 tokens from rowena, aka 2500 red scrips each. You also need to gear those gatherers pretty high, because under a certain amount your HQ chance for those node items becomes 0, making it much harder for your crafter friends to make the HQ ingredients needed to HQ a 4 star piece. And you need your crafter buds to have all crafts at 70, for a set of gear due to splitting it up among the differnt crafts.

I mean, people are kind of pooh poohing effort. You're not going to be able to make a full set of 3 star crafting gear HQ for yourself as someone who doesn't already have crafts leveled to cap or without sinking decent time in stuff; crafting is too interrelated to be easy to do so. The only reason the prices remain low currently is that the demand for crafted gear is very low; most people just ignore it unless they needed to raid the first week, and even at low prices, you're probably doing at least 15 mil gil work of gil or effort.

It's not really an option for a player who isnt into crafting. A ot of the gearing options in this game kind of suck. At least eureka hopefully will help combat players to gear in an actual combat way, without BS.