Where is the "never before seen content"?

[polyphonica]

Theory Crafting/min/maxing as of now is almost pointless in this game, because the way stats are handle right know is beyond ridiculous. You just grab and equip the one with the higher ilvl and don't even look at it.

Honestly, I feel like this is 100% the intention. They've tried to make it so that the casual player only ever has to look at one number (Item Level) and be okay for every content they'll try. The other stats are sort of like the "advanced" mode for people who want/need to mess with melding at the beginning of a raid cycle, but are otherwise unimportant. For better or worse, I think they would probably say that this was a way of reducing "friction" to the end-user, and to ensure that all jobs could complete all content in a relatively even/balanced way.

They did experiment a little bit with the characteristics in Diadem, if you recall, but I suspect they found that it caused more problems than it solved, so that may be why we're not getting too much more of that outside of the niche melding metagame.

And yes, maybe some of them would be better that others, maybe some ellitist people would create PF saying "X set needed for Y" , but wouldn't it be better to risk some balance issues and have variety, than staying in this blank and dull system ?

Again, honestly, I think they would say no. It's a simplification they chose to remove friction, so that casual players would never have to worry about this. As soon as you add it at all, it creates this dynamic I think they were purposefully trying to avoid.


All this is part of why I believe this "casual who returns occasionally to catch up on the story" is a larger target audience than you'd think if you listen to the forum or other communities (like Reddit, etc.), and one of the more important target audiences in their development process. If it weren't the case, it seems to me they wouldn't make so many design decisions focused specifically on making their life easier. This seems, on the surface, counter to having a subscription-based game where you would want to encourage/reward dedication and longevity. (Their version of this is basically seasonal cosmetics, but even those they sell on the cash shop a year later -- so even then people who take breaks can catch up. The subscription-duration rewards were also nerfed so people could catch up. At most you'll lose your house, if you had one, and that's about it.)

In any case, I guess we'll see what happens. As I said before, if they decide to keep the game running for another full story arc of expansions after 5.x, they'll probably have to shift the direction somewhat. (Wouldn't surprise me Yoshi-P himself starts pulling back a bit after 5.x to at least have someone else take the director role.)