Horizontal progression? In MY theme park?!

[Ilyrian]

OR, how WoW did "Horizontal" Progression back during Vanilla: Wanna do Naxxramas? I hope you went back and farmed Cold Resist gear or you'd get smeared by one of the bosses in there. You'd have a suit of armor you'd wear for normal bosses, but then you'd have this alternate Cold Resist gear that you'd swap in for THAT boss and ONLY that boss. Blizz promptly dumped this system in their very first expansion, because it was universally hated, nobody liked having to lug around a whole suit of gear for one boss.

Pretty sure there's a circle of hell where you have to play that way again - but as an adult with a full time job and family - for all eternity.

[KisaiTenshi]

Truth be told, most people don't seem to. Heck, I constantly see people confusing it with special effects.

That's because the carrot to doing this content is something that has persistence.

Glamour gets rid of any reason to even get gear for it's appearance. I'd love to keep using the Relic or Anima weapon if it just grew with the leveling, but when you can just throw away this hard-earned weapon with the next patch level's vendor trash gear, there is something wrong.

Really the kind of Horizontal progression I want already exists. Here's your job, if you want to play another job, you can farm the gear for it, or buy it, or whatever. You still have to level it. Other games don't offer this, and in games that have anything similar, you usually can't do everything without cash shop resets and grinding on a different skill tree.

Where I think other games make a mistake:

(Prefix) GEAR NAME of (Suffix) + (Bonus multiplier)
Rarity
GEAR NAME
Durability
Base damage/defense
Attributes (eg cold/poison/fire/thunder) resistance/buff
Modifications (eg materia)

So you're trying to use the same weapon, and apply 5 different modifiers, while risking destroying the gear or modifications. The most aggrivating version of this I saw in both Mabinogi and in Wizardy. Both games you can destroy the gear by applying the prefix/suffix blessings/curses, and you can destroy it by the incompentent repair guy with a 90% (more like 30%) repair rate, and you can destroy it by modifications. You have less than a 2% chance of getting all these things right. Then there's dying which is another RNG.

Like I enjoy the complexity to a point, but not when RNG is involved. FFXIV removes this complexity down to a single thing, the materia. For all intents a NQ is +0 and a HQ is +1 in terms of other games descriptions, and the blue/green/pink gear rarity is completely meaningless.

What I'd like is that gear meant for one objective (eg MSQ, PvP, Raiding) have it's own horizontal progression bonus that otherwise is not relevant to the other gear. So PvP and Raider gear is different, they're both ilevel 375, but the raider gear would be better for raiding, hence why it's rewarded from raiding, where as PvP gear is better for PvP and is rewarded from PvP. If you go back and play MSQ content with any of those gear's, it's still ilevel 375 gear, just it's bonus may not have any practical use in the MSQ content.

Let's say for example, that you can apply a PvP buff prefix, and a raider buff suffix to the gear, any gear. This buff is permanent much like materia, but it's only active in that content. That gives the player an incentive to play that content on their main to acquire the gear most relevant to playing that content, while not hobbling them in any other content. Especially since MSQ content is relatively easier from the overgeared ilevel alone.

The existing system actually can support this by having a "prefix" and "suffix" materia slot that applies a permanent buff or debuff. The buff's don't necessarily make the fight easier (the buff might just be cosmetic sparkles and rainbows) but you could have things like float permanently applied to nullify one mechanic that otherwise is a KO.

Switching gear between mechanics should expressly not be a thing.

[KaldeaSahaline]

At this point you could just create a rune system for skills like D3 instead of relying on materias. That said while I would agree that materias could be better, this doesn't really adds to gear variety. Unless we start making materias slots color based and more complex. More like FF7 perhaps at that point some pieces of gear could have some more interesting effects. Maybe like linked materias slots where by taking your examples you could link avenger's shield, heavy shield and shield lob together.

Why would I want to use a rune system like D3 when Materia is literally the same system within context of the source material and a prime candidate for rework.

It does add to gear variety (or at the very least a degree of horizontal progression). I did indicate that different pieces of gear would have differing number of sockets and colors, and while I didn't spell out the concept of linking, the idea was inferred from my concept. I.e. that you could socket x number of Red Materia that empower the same ability.

Regarding interesting effects on gear, my design doc posited a system much like D3's Kanai Cube in that you would convert gear as an alternative way into Materia to equip effects and you'd be limited to x number based on your equipped gear. I really liked the concept, but I wasn't able to identify an implementation I liked.

So called "horizontal" progression doesn't get rid of that, because it wouldn't be progression at all otherwise. All it does is to take the generic "combat" progression line and feathers it into multiple sub-purposes that each progress "vertically" individually.

Speaking strictly personally this is also how I define horizontal progression. Multiple systems of power accrual, rather than a singular.

Ideally I would have liked to have seen Materia as a robust progression system.

I would have also liked to have seen Chocobo's be another, but that ship has sailed.

Assuming that flying didn't exist, the idea was that as you level your Chocobo he gains new abilities (like now), but these abilities are actual useful things in the outside world. The ability for your Chocobo to sprint, glide, slide, climb, etc. These improvements would later allow you to explore areas in the maps you couldn't before (think like WoW treasure hunting). This would be in addition to the combat abilities your 'Bo would learn.

[Remedi]

Why would I want to use a rune system like D3 when Materia is literally the same system within context of the source material and a prime candidate for rework.

It does add to gear variety (or at the very least a degree of horizontal progression). I did indicate that different pieces of gear would have differing number of sockets and colors, and while I didn't spell out the concept of linking, the idea was inferred from my concept. I.e. that you could socket x number of Red Materia that empower the same ability.

Regarding interesting effects on gear, my design doc posited a system much like D3's Kanai Cube in that you would convert gear as an alternative way into Materia to equip effects and you'd be limited to x number based on your equipped gear. I really liked the concept, but I wasn't able to identify an implementation I liked.

I don't know why you would, but the idea is essentially that, tough I did admit you could go with a ff7 system


That said there still remains the elephant in the room of jobs beign so static that you need to remake them one way or another.

Frankly as said the problem with horizzontal progress doesn't lies only in the gear but in about everything in the game.
As such I think they might just need to remake the game so that horizzontal gearing works and MORE importantly they should change their vision of the game, like 24 man are essentially catch up, dungeons catch up and so on. Not to mention that gear is useless outside of raiding since there's plenty of zones in the game where your gear means nothing

[Dzian]

The content is grindy enough, why do you want to keep it relevant for longer? lol

People already complain about having to run older dungeons for roulette... do you think people still want to be raiding Bahamut's Coil for gear that is still relevant today? Some people raid it for S&G or roulette bonuses, but not for the drops. Do you think it's healthy to force people to continue raiding it for the rest of the game's lifespan?

The biggest reason people complain about running old content is the games design means there's always so little content to actually do...

There is so little content that's relevant at any given time. That players literally have very few things to do.
Presently for example outside of roulette. The only content worth doing (casually at least) is the lighthouse 24 man raid and maybe the tsuyo ex. As a result they're the only 2 things players have to do. So it's no wonder they run them to death... there is nothing else to do..

Many players will probably have done that lighthouse raid hundreds of times by the time 4.4 comes out... Because that's why they get sick of old content..

If you had a larger variety of relevant content it would generally all feel fresher for much longer because each individual one wouldn't be done as often...

When there's only 1 or 2 things to do. They both get run to death very quickly. Especially if someone has to run lighthouse a dozen times each week to get there drop...

[Remedi]

The content is grindy enough?.....For real?

[RaideDuku]

This thread again.

*sigh*



Again, there is not enough statistical complexity to this game to allow for any horizontal progression. To do so would require a complete redo of the system, which would mean every fight and every enemy would have to be rebalanced to accommodate the new system. The odds of this happening are pretty near nil.

[Ilyrian]

This thread again.

*sigh*



Again, there is not enough statistical complexity to this game to allow for any horizontal progression. To do so would require a complete redo of the system, which would mean every fight and every enemy would have to be rebalanced to accommodate the new system. The odds of this happening are pretty near nil.

Thank you. You said it way more concisely than I could.

[Brill_]

I would like some horizontal progression, but it won't work in this game for 2 reasons:
1. can't change gear in combat
2. there's only 1 tactic for every fight, DPS

Because of enrage timers, every fight is a dps race. So every gear build comes down to what gives you max dps. Kiting, enfeebling, and other tactics that worked in ffxi don't work in this game. With that in mind, I'd like more options for obtaining gear. Right now you can raid or you can tome grind.

[Nyxn607]

I would personally like to see a talent tree system specific to FFXIV. This way you could have a ninja for example that can sepcialize in Ninjutsu's for added effects (DPS oriented). Or they can specialize in stealth talents that would make Hide more useful than it currently is (Stealth oriented). Or as a third option they can specialize in finding more weakness in enemies to use more trick attack like de-buffs and other de-buffs (support oriented).

This suggestion would require a rework to the current combat system, so it most likely will not be very well liked. However, it would allow more variety in play styles and allow people to try out different builds to help with burn out and stagnation.