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

[Astral145]

I would prefer if they have one type of token that will be put into your currency tab like tomes after completing the raid. That way you get something every time you complete it and can eventually turn it in for gear that you need/want.

I would also like to see neutral gear drop that all of us can role on. Meaning gear that you turn in for your specific class. The dev team did this once before for some of the level 50 dungeons like snow cloak. They dropped neutral gear that you turned in for i90 gear for your specific class.

I hate seeing my inventory get clogged up with tokens. All of these tokens should be placed in the currency tab.

[MrSmiley]

I don't get how this system is convoluted, it also lets you rerun until you get the piece you want. Most mmos you can run it, see nothing, then your done. I do agree with the inventory cluitter

[Vidu]

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.

You're looking at this the wrong way - as if crafting was only released with this patch, when the reality is that any serious endgame crafter or gatherer (and when I say "Find a crafter friend" I mean someone whos already into crafting) has already done all of that. When the patch dropped all I had to do was grabbing the new mastercrafterbooks because I had half a year already to level and gear my crafters. We had about 2 or 3 months to get the ala mhigan gear and melds ready. Its nothing new and nothing that caught anyone by surprise. Nothing that just happend with this patch. I dont know how long you're playing but I was fully aware that I'd have all of 4.1 to prepare myself for 4.2.
You're looking at this, starting at zero - when in reality most people who are intrested in crafting/gathering wont start there.
Non-crafters and non-gatheres can also still supply their crafters with mats - bought with creation tomes. Get the ones for your gear and then the same amount again as payment for your crafter! Or ask them if they need/want anything that you can buy with GC-seals!
There are also low-level gathering items that are still useful for crafters and that dont require you to be a level 70-fully-melded-gatherer (for example: the current go-to raidfood, Crimson Cider, uses a lot of level 60-65 gathering mats). Just leveling one crafter and getting some HQ 290-non-melded gear should be more than enough to do weekly turn ins for Naago, earning you yellow scrips that you can spend on mats again... Dont make it so black and white with either its nothing at all or you've pentamelded the most recent gear.

...on the matter of folklore books: yeah, you need red scrips for them, but you're earning those already if you're smart and level from 60 to 70 by doing collectables. Tones of exp, no waste of leves and more than enough red scrips to buy the books, some cordials and exp-manuals.

You could also look at Sigma NM in the way off: To even get one piece of loot from there you need to level a character to 70, do all the story, do an additional quest, do Omega (I assume?), run the content and then win the piece of loot!

[Darrcyphfeid]

When the patch dropped all I had to do was grabbing the new mastercrafterbooks because I had half a year already to level and gear my crafters. We had about 2 or 3 months to get the ala mhigan gear and melds ready. Its nothing new and nothing that caught anyone by surprise.

Exactly this.

I don't raid anymore, and didn't ever want to lead a static in this game (spent 18 months creating and running an endgame LS in XI - that's more than enough for a lifetime), but if I did I wouldn't accept most of these excuses and just find a replacement. You have six or so months between release dates for Savage raids. If you can't put any sort of effort into acquiring money, materia and/or materials for 5+ months then I would be absolutely justified in doubting whether you'd actually put in your fair share of effort when it came time for progression. And now I've become a semi-elitist jerk that advocates for putting in work but still thinks the NM raid's loot system is 1) pretty bad and 2) rewards subpar gear so Q) isn't worth touching. Go figure!

And again if you're not doing Savage content, the i350/NM raid stuff doesn't really have any value besides glamour anyway.


Specifically with regards to gathering, since that's my role within a static/partnership context:
- HW Folklore books were awful to obtain. SB Folklore books are a joke. Unlike the crafter side, they just add the new items into the already existing books so you buy them once and don't worry about it again until next expansion.
- The most recent Folklore nodes (Nightsteel Ore, etc) don't require you to meld your Ala Mhigan gear with GP or Gathering, just Perception. 700 GP for Sharp Vision II/Field Mastery II + King's Yield II/Blessed Harvest II + Unearth/Leaf Turn = braindead success. You could maybe even just use the augmented Yellow Scrip stuff, I'm not sure; I grabbed the main hand tool and didn't really look at the rest.

[Galgarion]

If you're not doing Savage or EX Primals: Stop. Just... just stop. The content you're doing is so hilariously easy and the 10 ilvl bump, all things considered, is meaningless.

Hi. Normal mode raids are for people who still like upgrading their gear but either can't (or don't like to) do savage, can't swing the cost of crafted gear, or simply want to enjoy additional story content. So sorry if this fails to meet your approval. This kind of thinking is a stereotypical example of a niche gaming mentality. "Rrrrr, only the stuff I like is worth doing!"

So arbitrary.

[RiyahArp]

The context we're talking about though is leveling up a support class to obtain mats for crafted gear, not being a crafter/gatherer already at the start of the patch. If you want to try and be able to craft said pieces, its still pretty sizable effort even with being capped. If you haven't bothered much with it, you probably are going to spend a lot of time and effort otherwise. It's not really an answer to not liking the current sigma normal drops, or any form of time or effort savings.

I'm not really asking though for it to be riiculusly easy. I think it would be much easier if they just cut the parts for legs and body in half, for example.

[ValentineSnow]

IMO, anything to do with RNG is gonna be unfair to someone at some point. You can run these things 1000 times putting in maximum effort and not get your drop while someone who comes in and does nothing but auto attack gets their drop first run. Doesn't feel good.

There are a couple of systems I really enjoyed and they come from, go figure, FFXI.

The first is walk of echoes and other content that did similar things, a system that rewarded you with items based on your personal contribution, the more effort you put in, the more rewards you got at the end. There was still an element of RNG involved as you still might not get your rare drop the first time but you got more out of it than someone who came in and did nothing.

The second is a more recent content called ambuscade. Every time you run it you are rewarded with a special currency called hallmarks, whenever you reached a certain plateau of total hallmarks you got a piece of gear (new set every month) so once you reached 14,500 hallmarks you had the full set for that month.

I think some kind of combination of the two would be a great loot system. Awarding you with currency at the end of a run based on your contribution would strike a great middle ground between having you run it multiple times a week and getting the loot you want in a reasonable amount of time.

Essentially similar to capped weekly tomestones but rewarding you with gear specific to that content, unlike tomestones which are more general.

[Darrcyphfeid]

Hi. Normal mode raids are for people who still like upgrading their gear but either can't (or don't like to) do savage, can't swing the cost of crafted gear, or simply want to enjoy additional story content. So sorry if this fails to meet your approval. This kind of thinking is a stereotypical example of a niche gaming mentality. "Rrrrr, only the stuff I like is worth doing!"

Actually, everything you just said is why we have Tomestone gear. Which happens to be 10 levels higher, has no RNG, and can be largely obtained at your leisure without slamming your face into a single brick wall. I don't really know why we have gear from the NM raid on top of that aside from the glamour niche; the inevitable "wahh, I want glamglams from Savage without doing Savage!" complaint.

And I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't do the NM raid stuff; if you like doing it, feel free to knock yourself out. If you don't like it, however, then either A) don't do it or B) do it but don't complain about it.

[Melichoir]

The RNG of the regular Sigmascape is intentional and not bad. As someone pointed out, it forces multiple runs for tokens that you can use to get gear you specifically want. The Savage format is a PERK of doing savage. Do harder content, get better gear more reliably. Plain and simple. Do the easier stuff, gonna have to work it out.

[Lunafreya]

I had to run sigma at least more than 10 times this week.