All dungeons should have minimum ilevel requirements?

[MomomiMomi]

Just get rid of gear. POTD and Eureka it doesn't even matter to have it because the ilvl cap is so low on the latter. POTD even reduced all the stuff to essentially two stats, attack and defense.

There's no real choice aspect in gear, you either have it or you don't. You can minmax stats, but thats only particularly valuable for one kind of content in the game, savage. You can actually do most content at the min ilvl, and that's generally when it's the funnest.

they could just give us materia for boosting stats or what have you, and all gear be glamour. We literally just had an expansion for where half of the levels you could use one set of shire armor. For alts you could use it all the way to 70, if you skipped the dungeons over doing level capped roulettes and other ways of exping.

Pretty much this. I've been saying it for a long time now: stats are so meaningless that you could remove them completely from gear and it wouldn't change much of anything. It would bring positives to the game, actually. The only real negative would be that plenty of people play only for gear despite now meaningless it is.

[AppleJinx]

I would just use command missions for leveling an alt in place of leveling roulettes at this point

[Jijifli]

Pretty much this. I've been saying it for a long time now: stats are so meaningless that you could remove them completely from gear and it wouldn't change much of anything. It would bring positives to the game, actually. The only real negative would be that plenty of people play only for gear despite now meaningless it is.

Should they remove durability too? Causes issues with clearing when people don't repair. Gil isn't worth anything anyways.

[KisaiTenshi]

Should they remove durability too? Causes issues with clearing when people don't repair. Gil isn't worth anything anyways.

Durability is a check against botting unfortunately. SE probably should remove all the nameless repair NPC's, and make people repair their own gear. Problem solved. Can't find someone to repair it? buy new. New Gil sink found. s/

[MomomiMomi]

Should they remove durability too? Causes issues with clearing when people don't repair. Gil isn't worth anything anyways.

Well if gear had no stats, durability wouldn't have a use anymore!

[KageTokage]

Durability is a check against botting unfortunately./

Which doesn't actually work because bots can easily be scripted to repair their gear the moment they get a "low durability" warning.

[AngelCheese77]

You can level really quick if you keep up with side quests, so I can see the annoyance of people not having the right gear for lower level dungeons. But is it really that bad higher up?

I only ran into such a thing once, where the tank in DD had level 20 gear for some dang reason. I ended up leaving the group, since I was the healer and the 2 DPS were friends of the tank who could apparently do no wrong in their bad gear.

[Nihility]

You can level really quick if you keep up with side quests, so I can see the annoyance of people not having the right gear for lower level dungeons. But is it really that bad higher up?

I only ran into such a thing once, where the tank in DD had level 20 gear for some dang reason. I ended up leaving the group, since I was the healer and the 2 DPS were friends of the tank who could apparently do no wrong in their bad gear.

it's not that bad but when it happens it's pretty painful to deal with. ilvl requirements don't even need to be very strict you know, just something to strain out the blatantly unready

[Kayiko]

The first few dungeons it isn't a problem. But getting a tank in a level 50 dungeon with less health than the healer is a problem. Even if that healer is synced from 70 that makes it way harder then it should be.
I'd say anything above 30 should have a ilvl for dungeons or such. So people can use the items that give exp bonuses below level 30 still.
Even still it should near the level required to enter the dungeon.

[KisaiTenshi]

Which doesn't actually work because bots can easily be scripted to repair their gear the moment they get a "low durability" warning.

Not if they haven't leveled crafters. Like with THIS game, that is easily the way to neuter the bots efficiency.

This is not a serious suggestion because of how it would screw over legitimate players, but just think about it...

Remove all the repair NPC's, A L L of them. In other games, bots tend to just run endlessly even when their gear breaks because the bare-hand damage of whatever level they are at is more than enough to keep beating on monsters, and doesn't actually prevent the player from attacking with broken gear. If there were no repair NPC's, then the bots would be forced to keep buying gear, and that's where you stick them a second time by removing all NQ gear from the merchants, remove all NQ gear and Allagan metals from quests.

Then to bring it back a bit from horribly annoying, allow the retainers to repair certain gear for free if they are assigned a DoH job at the right level, all other gear gil costs for them to "go and find someone to repair it for you". Bots will not have the time to level DoH retainers by the time they are hopefully booted.

Like for all intents, the reason durability even exists, in any CRPG, is that it's something that originated in Ultima Underworld. It's existed in some shape before then, but UW actually had items like weapons, food, and doors degrade over time (you could attack wooden doors instead of finding keys.) That was by design because UW had fixed resources. Monsters once killed, didn't respawn, and neither did anything you threw away. MMORPG's have infinite resources, so durability has been just a way to get players to return to the city or hub instead of constantly trying to beat down a door for 24 hours straight. In freemium games they tend to be a way to soak the players for more money by adding item destruction as a risk if you don't pay (let me count the number of items Ferghus from Mabinogi destroyed something.) Gear durability wasn't even in Pen-and-paper RPG's until the 2000's.

Every MMORPG has it. But maybe we should consider why we still have it. Like all Ultima's had "food" as a resource, in a CRPG, but in Ultima 1-8 it was simply a check against the player, again mindlessly hammering on something for hours without returning to town. Food in Ultima 7, I believe actually gave buffs, and that found it's way into UO, and most games subsequently removed the need to eat, but kept the buffs from it. (Mabinogi, if you don't eat, your maximum stamina is lowered.)

Perhaps gear durability needs to evolve as well. You can repair it to 199% if you repair it yourself, but it doesn't really add anything. In fact on ARR's release, repair costs were more than double, and players were speed running dungeons to try and save costs.