We Really Need To Talk About The State And Path Of FFXIV

[AngelCheese77]

Catching up with this thread, I do feel that Squeenix is behind the ball when it comes to glamours and the like.

They need to be able to be worn by all races, genders, and classes. This is 2018. This isn't a game with gender or race locked classes like other eastern MMOs can have. This isn't EverQuest from 1999.

If a person works to get a piece of armor or weapon, then they should be able to wear it on whatever class they want to.

They could just make the glamour toilet remove all restrictions when the item is placed in it. If they can make it so you can remove a piece and make it back into armor .... /shrug

[Magic-Mal]

See all of this could be solved if we simply had more paths to get gear of the same ilvl but not the same stats. Say there's 4 sets of i370 available all gotten through different methods..

Tome i370 Chest: Critical Hit/Skill Speed
Raid i370 Chest: Critical Hit/Determination
Other i370 Chest #1: Critical Hit/Direct Hit
Other i370 Chest #2: Skill Speed/Determination

That's horizontal progression. Raid gear isn't even the best gear because the whole set itself isn't BiS it just has high ilvl. As HyoMin said earlier, there are a ton of things that are better than raid gear to make BiS sets. Which is what I was referring too. More options to progress but not getting raid gear. I'm talking about other gear.

If your BiS involves a raid piece you will still have no choice but to do that raid to get it. And there's nothing wrong with that. Issue is that if you don't want the raid piece and the tome piece is trash, you can't have a backup C and D. Maybe backup D comes second to Raid while tome is dead last. Or maybe Raid somehow comes second to backup C so you'd rather get that instead when the patch rolls out. No different than Tome vs Raid. We need some progression like that.

[Edax]

That's fair enough. But you don't need top of the line i370 gear to not be a burden in Sigmascape NM; you can easily be a great contributor in i350. Since you wouldn't repeat it aside for glamour, we're still left with: why be so focused on battlecraft progression, when being progressed in crafting already lands you at a battlecraft progression of two steps below maximum, which is easily enough gear to handle the next two to three major patches?

I guess I don't like the idea that being a crafter somehow makes me a lesser player?

[Dualgunner]

I guess I don't like the idea that being a crafter somehow makes me a lesser player?

How does being a crafter make you a lesser player? By what metric? Battlecraft gear strength is not the measure of a player. In battle content, their ability to manage their rotation amid mechanics is. Gear makes your numbers bigger, but you're in no way a lesser player for not having it.

You probably have bucketloads more gil than I do. Does that make me a lesser player than you? Come the start of next tier, on day one your gear will vastly outstrip mine. Does that make me a lesser player than you? Also you have to keep in mind that Raiders come clamoring to crafters like you because day 1, crafted gear is damn near mandatory to getting through the tier; yes day one of 4.4, all the gear from 4.2 to 4.3, including the Ultima weapons, will be obsolete.

[Edax]

How does being a crafter make you a lesser player? By what metric? Battlecraft gear strength is not the measure of a player. In battle content, their ability to manage their rotation amid mechanics is. Gear makes your numbers bigger, but you're in no way a lesser player for not having it.

You probably have bucketloads more gil than I do. Does that make me a lesser player than you? Come the start of next tier, on day one your gear will vastly outstrip mine. Does that make me a lesser player than you? Also you have to keep in mind that Raiders come clamoring to crafters like you because day 1, crafted gear is damn near mandatory to getting through the tier; yes day one of 4.4, all the gear from 4.2 to 4.3, including the Ultima weapons, will be obsolete.

The ability to manage rotations amid mechanics is not a tangible metric. Most players are judged by what they wear in this game.

[Dualgunner]

The ability to manage rotations amid mechanics is not a tangible metric. Most players are judged by what they wear in this game.

Not a legally tangible one, anyway.

Judgments based on gear are hollow and not worth paying attention to. Not to mention that, when you'd be doing something like a new normal mode raid, you'd probably have better gear than 90% of the other players with you who neither raid nor craft.

[MoroMurasaki]

Too much of this game's content is tied to combat to go down that road. MSQ, new duties and new raids, I need decent gear if I'm going to experience them. Since I don't endlessly repeat duties and raids, I don't really benefit from those reward systems and my less experience with those raids and duties require me to go in with better gear so as to not be that much of a burden to the team.

Would you honestly be okay if people could progress their crafting and gathering gear via combat-based options? You're basically asking that you be allowed to get top-tier gear for the content you don't spend as much time in but if they did this in reverse as well it would completely crash the market and your gil would definitely stop piling up.

In my opinion crafters already have enough of a gearing advantage because they can begin a patch essentially at the soft ilvl cap.

[Lorgana]

See all of this could be solved if we simply had more paths to get gear of the same ilvl but not the same stats. Say there's 4 sets of i370 available all gotten through different methods..

Tome i370 Chest: Critical Hit/Skill Speed
Raid i370 Chest: Critical Hit/Determination
Other i370 Chest #1: Critical Hit/Direct Hit
Other i370 Chest #2: Skill Speed/Determination

That's horizontal progression. Raid gear isn't even the best gear because the whole set itself isn't BiS it just has high ilvl. As HyoMin said earlier, there are a ton of things that are better than raid gear to make BiS sets. Which is what I was referring too. More options to progress but not getting raid gear. I'm talking about other gear.

If your BiS involves a raid piece you will still have no choice but to do that raid to get it. And there's nothing wrong with that. Issue is that if you don't want the raid piece and the tome piece is trash, you can't have a backup C and D. Maybe backup D comes second to Raid while tome is dead last. Or maybe Raid somehow comes second to backup C so you'd rather get that instead when the patch rolls out. No different than Tome vs Raid. We need some progression like that.

Like I said before I agree that there needs to be more variation in gear for people but if you're going to give casuals equivalent level gear to raid before releasing the raid lock on tomestone upgrades I'd say there would need to still be some hefty effort put into getting said gear. I'm talking like old school RR relic phase stuff where it would take you days/weeks of mind numbing prog to get past one stage of it, multiply that for each individual armor piece and then yeah maybe that would be fair game.

[Sigma-Astra]

I'm all the way for different variations with the gear in having other sets besides "Here's our tome set and here's our Savage set", but I'm on that mindset still with a lot of others where players don't need the raid progression gear simply because they spent [X amount of time] doing this piece of content over using actual skills and coordination in Savage content like some others were going on about.

There's literally no good reason or excuse to give a player that wants to burn through their time and energy playing Eureka, expert dungeons, or other means....over someone that has to be on the ball constantly during a fight like Guardian and make sure that they know their own job far more intuitively than the average player.

And yes, I say that even though I haven't completed Guardian myself and probably won't ever before the next tier simply because my team is a bit of an uncoordinated mess, but I will never say that I deserve the gear dropping in Guardian because I spent X amount of time in Eureka, crafting, gathering, or whatever else I did that day.

Even if I spent thousands of gil and hours decorating my house, I still don't deserve those Diamond Casting Pants because we hit enrage at 15% T______T

/siiiiigh

[Magic-Mal]

Like I said before I agree that there needs to be more variation in gear for people but if you're going to give casuals equivalent level gear to raid before releasing the raid lock on tomestone upgrades I'd say there would need to still be some hefty effort put into getting said gear. I'm talking like old school RR relic phase stuff where it would take you days/weeks of mind numbing prog to get past one stage of it, multiply that for each individual armor piece and then yeah maybe that would be fair game.

Sure, let's imagine there's a thing called Expert Runner set or something. It's i370 set with stats different from the i370 Tome and Raid gear. Each time you do Expert you get a token that's needed to get a piece. Doing it, I dunno 20 or 30 times, gets you a piece of choice of Expert Runner. That'd be cool. Or a Heaven-On-High Climber set where you get a token by getting to floor 100.

Heaven-On-High Climber could come out on an even patch .5 while the Expert Runner set comes out on the catch-up patch. And all the devs would have to do is make the system to aquire the gear. They don't even have to design new sets if it's that much work.

Also things like Eureka need to come out at .5 patches or slightly earlier. Not 1 month or less before the next cycle.