Level Syncing isn't the best solution

[GunksFoy]

Snip

1. Most players wouldn't even notice at that level. Especially new players who aren't parsing, and any vet of MMOs knows endgame is where it's at. But I already ceded that a compromise was necessary.
2. I honestly have no idea what "copy-driven progress" is. But you're wrong. Experience is the best way to learn, and having most of your skills at level 15 would do wonders for players leveling up, as they don't have to change their rotation every 5-10 levels.
3. No one is going to be excluding new players from leveling dungeons because they don't do enough DPS. My suggestion was to give EVERYONE all of their class skills immediately, not just players at max level. If you're going to excluded a new player from a leveling dungeon because they don't have the top level understanding of the job, then you would have excluded them anyways. No way to promote toxicity, though I feel this point was due to a misunderstanding of my suggestion.
4. All of the content is mostly invalidated anyways. I can do leveling dungeons in my sleep as is. I did Sunken Temple of Qarn on White Mage last week and the tank pulled all the way to the first boss and we survived. At level. I agree they could be more difficult, but that doesn't mean they can't be fun by letting us have more skills and some semblance of a functional rotation. This is a casual game unless you're in Savage, and the leveling dungeons reflect that. Giving us more skills doesn't change that. They would be scaled anyways.

The early game is already severely skewed by virtue of balance being for endgame. All the jobs feel handicapped at low levels due to their rotations being so vastly different at 70, and this is only going to get worse. The only real exception to this is White Mage and Scholar (maybe Astro, haven't played it) since they have the same DPS skills at level 20 as 70 (save a few), just less powerful. Healing skills is the only fundamental change. It needs to be roughly balanced, but being able to rip through Sastasha in 12-15 minutes instead of 30 doesn't deter new players. If anything, it attracts them, as the early story and leveling will be much faster. This is the sort of balance I mean. Obviously jobs need to be roughly balanced, though it's far less important at 30 than 70. For example, red mages are extremely powerful early on due to having many of their main abilities at low level, yet are one of the weakest DPS at 70. The jobs don't need to reflect themselves at 70 damage-wise. However, I personally know 4 or 5 people that have picked up the trial, and quit because the early game is too slow and boring. And they're right.

[kikix12]

1. Most players wouldn't even notice at that level. Especially new players who aren't parsing, and any vet of MMOs knows endgame is where it's at.

Most players are not "MMO veterans". And even "MMO veterans" won't slog through a crappy early stages of a game just to get to the end game, seeing as they won't know whether the end game won't be even worse.

The only ones not affected are those that already have a reason to play end-game, like a friend that invites them and can vouch for end-game being good.

And you saying that I'm wrong on this point is pretty amusing, seeing the number of games that go under due to players not sticking to them because the early stages of the game don't appeal to them.

2. I honestly have no idea what "copy-driven progress" is.

Humans are copycats. If someone is doing something better than you, you copy him and thus become better yourself. That works on a subconscious level. In group content, if you manage to notice another player playing better than you with a class you use, you're very likely to start mimicking him...unless he's an asshole. At later stages of the game it's a bit too hectic to depend on it, true, but early on it's far easier.

My suggestion was to give EVERYONE all of their class skills immediately, not just players at max level.

They way you worded it seemed to imply something else. That it was the original posters idea, but limited only to class skills. And under that assumption I answered.

If you mean that lvl1 character will have ALL of the class skills, then that's another problem. Lack of any progress from 1 to 30. That too would have players lose interest in the game at early stages, reducing player retention.

4. All of the content is mostly invalidated anyways. I can do leveling dungeons in my sleep as is.

If it's broken, fix it. Don't break it even more. As I said earlier, the current way it works is most certainly broken, but it is broken LESS than the suggestions being put forth.

The sync function should be better fine-tuned to make players find some challenge in all of the content. At that point, the experience reward should be set more appropriately. This is what pisses me off in FATE's. The higher the level of FATE the less relevant the few levels above it are. At lvl30 FATE you can already be pretty badly beat-up by the enemies, not much less than at lvl50 FATE. But the experience you get for similar level of difficulty is absolutely horrible. If you're syncing down the players stats and skills, you need to sync up the experience accordingly. The time taken to clear a FATE, the feasibility of clearing it solo and the like should be taken into consideration, not the original level of the person. Since that original level does not exist in the FATE. The same is in dungeon. If the sync would make Sastasha a challenge, it should give experience at about 70%-80% of duty that's 3 levels below you. Less because it's easier to play your character well, but still viable since it would be challenging.

But it's not. It's a cakewalk even with syncing. And that's a problem that needs fixing.

I agree they could be more difficult, but that doesn't mean they can't be fun by letting us have more skills and some semblance of a functional rotation.

That's the problem. I am all for making fundamental parts of the class available early on, as I said before. But not the entire toolkit (not even from the class alone). There still needs to be some instant gratification for leveling in the form of skills. But an AoE, some sort of cooldown and at least one full rotation, one ranged attack should be already available at lvl15. This is something I can get behind. Dumping of skills...not.

The early game is already severely skewed by virtue of balance being for endgame.

Yeah. The moment Stormblood hit, playing below 50 for all classes went from bad to horrible. But that's proof of what I am talking about, not you.
Developers of FFXIV simply have this ridiculous notion that you promote that end-game is "where it's at". And that's what kills early stages of the game, even though technically if they were fun two years ago, they should be fun now as well. There is nothing in humans brains that makes old content unfun until AFTER it is done repeatedly. It's the developers that do it by making the old content play differently than it was designed for to cater to the end-game.

I enjoyed leveling classes before Stormblood more than I do now since the point at which the classes seem to have a fine selection got pushed back by at least several levels. And for some classes, they lack core, class-defining abilities until their 70th level altogether...

It needs to be roughly balanced, but being able to rip through Sastasha in 12-15 minutes instead of 30 doesn't deter new players. If anything, it attracts them, as the early story and leveling will be much faster.

All dungeons are set for 15-20minute mark, in general. And it's going to be that way with new or old players. The only way to exceed 20 minutes is to have a player that absolutely doesn't know what he's doing (like a tank that never uses Flash/Overpower and only attacks a single target all the time) and/or a full team of badly undergeared people. Only way to do it faster than about the 15 minute mark (it varies from dungeon to dungeon slightly, Sastasha for example have a lot of walking and stopping points with keys etc., so it takes longer even unsynced than other dungeons) is to have a totally spot-on team that is not only fully decked out but also goes about their business nearly-flawlessly.

The early dungeons are a slog only because you lack AoE attacks. Later in the game dungeons are a slog only if players don't USE their AoE attacks. Or are severely undergeared. Fights themselves are rather short. Hauke Manor for example is going to take you ~8 minutes (...or was it 10 for Hauke?!...sorry, I don't remember which, but roughly 5 minutes less than doing it with a good party if memory serves) unsynced, provided you have spammable AoE attacks and go from one wall to another. Even if you one-hit everything, there's just not THAT much you can cut on other than the bosses. And bosses are actually the most fun part of the dungeons.

So, yes for redesigning classes to have well-thought of kit from early on. No for sync that gives any player a skill that another player does not. And no for no skill gains for the entire early game.

[GunksFoy]

Snip

I think we agree fundamentally, just differ in implementation.


This is exactly my point though. The game is abysmal at level 1-50. It didn't used to be so bad, but between loads of story that never seems to end (even if it was good when it came around, having to slog through all of it at one time and not have it spread out is mind numbing). And I think having more abilities early on, and more thinks to do besides auto attack and press 1-3 buttons would go a long way to fixing that.

I don't that I agree on this in this situation. I rarely pay any attention to the people I'm playing with unless I notice their DPS is very low or insanely high, and then I'm either checking to see what they're doing differently, or asking them/trying to help them, depending on the situation. Honestly, without a parser, most players don't even KNOW they're doing it wrong. I was a prime example back in 2.0 as a dragoon. I assume what I was doing was right, until someone told me that it was wrong. It was my first MMO and I failed to understand some of the tooltips, even though I read them. No amount of watching other people would have told me that what I was doing was not right.

Fair enough. I agree it has it's problems, but so does any solution. The devs have to work around, and try to make the beginning intriguing. I'm not sure what to do about level progress honestly. But if I had to choose between spamming Impulse Drive for 11 levels or not getting skills every few levels, I'm taking the former.

I don't think you need to make them "as challenging as a level 70 dungeon". Having the skills and scaling the potency to make you roughly as powerful as we already would be at that level, but having more abilities. You could even use to solve all the problem of level progression. Grant traits that increase skill potency as you level. As good as getting skills? No, but it's something. Not the perfect solution, but just spitballing. But why not scale up the experience based on your true level rather than the level you're synced to? They already do this with Leveling Roulette, giving a bigger bonus at the end for being a higher level to roughly compensate you for getting a lower level dungeon, but it would make getting lower dungeons less punishing. The biggest problem I foresee with this is that players would find the most efficient dungeon to run and spam that, reducing the value of having so many leveling dungeons.

Sure, I'm up for alterations to that suggestion. Basically, we need more to do in Sastasha than press 2 buttons. Many ways to solve that. Though I don't think having the full class set impacts dungeons too much except maybe tanks, since many of their major skills come from the class and not the job.

I mostly agree. I leveled everything to 50 in 2.x and it was way more fun that leveling now. But we are all just spitballing ideas. History has shown that SE isn't going to heed anything we say if they ever decide to fix it lol.

Sastasha and Tam-Tara can easily exceed the 20 minute mark, even if you aren't doing the extra rooms/mobs. Some of the others aren't as bad, but pre-30, many of the dungoens can easily break into the 25-30 minute time frame. Especially with new players. Stone Vigil is another one, but it is also much more fun because you have many more skills, including some AoE depending on Job. Later on it is pretty consistent on the 15-20 minute time frame.

To address your last sentence: Agreed, Agreed, and tentatively agree. I think they need to get creative with it, instead of making all skills be gated behind level. But as I said above: History has shown that SE isn't going to heed anything we say if they ever decide to fix it lol. So, /shrug

[Vrankyl]

It's more than just damage too though. A lot of ogcds for classes are beyond over powered for lower level dungeons that aren't potency based. As someone said earlier Triple Cast for BLM. It doesn't matter how far down you scale Flare's damage, a Triple Cast Flare is still going to demolish anything an appropriate leveled BLM can pull off. Why would you want to deal with the new lvl 25 Gladiator in Toto-Rak when you could just bring in a lvl 70 PLD who has access to Clemency, Bulwark, Hallowed Ground, Circle of Scorn, Total Eclipse, Shield Oath, Sheltron, Holy Spirit, Passage of Arms, Cover, in addition to a full combo kit? Or why would you bring the lvl 25 Conjurer when you could just bring the lvl 70 WHM who has Benediction, Divine Benison, Tetra, Assize, Asylum, Holy, Thin Air, and Presence of Mind. How do you balance that? How do you prevent people from completely alienating new players?

[stebo104]

@OP. I take it your brand new to the game and lvl boosted your char.

[Rhomagus]

I actually support this suggestion or something similar. Also, in my opinion, the whole level syncing option not only helps populate old content, but effectively intermingles veteran and rookie players.

There are multi ways that SE could go about this. With the massive rework to jobs to dial back the amount of available buttons for controller players this inadvertently changed synced and minimum ilevel content. This is a bit concerning for those who wish to go through the game again and experience the original balance that was in place for the games old end game content.

I've seen depictions of a "syncing up" option instead of minimum ilevel. While there are balance issues to take into consideration, this would incentivize replaying old content by breathing new life and options into older content.

I prefer the OP's idea of a full rotation sync'd down. It's nice to be able to use a full rotation and really drive home that muscle memory not only for current endgame content but to see what slight advantages could be discovered by using a full nerfed rotation on lower content. All in all, the old content is already "broken" as is. I think the OP's solution, if implemented wisely, breaks it no more than it's already broken, and the pros outweigh the cons, not only from the individual perspective of the endgame veteran, but also from the perspective of the lower level rookie and the game's populace as a whole.

Being able to "look cool" is something this community greatly admires. It's also something that SE positively reinforces, and not just for the surface level reasons either.

"Looking cool" gives the player a sense of ownership over their character. Looking cool also gives the dev team the chance to showcase their work. Looking cool also entices lower level players. Normally I wouldn't put so much stock in that last point but it shouldn't be overstated. I remember even way back in 1.0, I was running leves with my linkshell buddies and we were recruiting new players. One of those new players was absolutely floored with the look of my Dragoon at the time (I was only wearing AF1). Nonetheless this rookie player was impressed not only by how cool I looked (btw "I" didn't look cool, Akihiko Yoshida and the dev team developed cool looking and stylish armor and characters but I digress) but he was also amazed at what I could do (Mainly just jumping on mobs from a distance.)

To veterans it's basic stuff, but to someone who is currently running through the slog of early game, being able not only to see what a character can look like, but what a character can do at max level is quite a treat from a rookie players perspective.

Now also take into account that lower level players in the current game that don't buy jump books are stuck in pretty much dead zones. While the rookie players are exiled to areas no longer populated, they spend most of the game alone...

Until they get in a dungeon.

As of now, they only get a glimpse of how cool a character's armor looks, but, if veterans had access to their full kit, not only would they get to see such amazing armor designs, but they'd also get to see the awesome animations and spell effects that go along with it.

The only adjustments to OP's suggestion I would make are that, you shouldn't be "more effective" at level than when you're synced down, as this is already not the case. Not only does ilevel severely throw the current level sync balance out of whack, but even most sync'd dungeons have a max level that fresh players just unlocking the content haven't even reached yet. So the argument against sync'd players being overpowered is already moot. New players don't actually care at this moment. They just want to get the dungeon complete, which is vastly more important than balancing it for "at level" rookies.

A rookie will be better served by having a full rotation displayed by a veteran player. The veteran player would be better served by further cementing their endgame rotation in to muscle memory. The development team would be better served by having more instances of their content put on display (especially the battle and animations and effects team). The populace is better served by mitigating rookie burnout in the way of giving players going through the slog of redundant fetch quests something to look forward to whenever they see a high level character of their same job pulling off amazing acrobatic feats and flashy skills.

The rookies aren't concerned with being competitive at low levels. They are more concerned with fully actualizing the character they created and the OP's suggestion only helps to cement that incentivization structure into a veteran heavy game.

Great suggestion OP.

TL;DR Rookies want to become veterans, not be better than veterans. Veterans want to finely tune their muscle memory. Dev teams want to display their work. OP's suggestion fulfills all three.

[NanaWiloh]

I have played Whm and now play Ast, trying to balance their full 70 tool kit to work at low levels would be a headache. Level sync'd healers and tanks are already op in low level dungeons using the few skills they have, give them their full kit; Pffft you may was well being sending gods into low level dungoens with unsync level players. I don't have to explain how powerful Aspected benefict+time dialation+bole+ tank CD's are all combined. New players don't need to be impressed by level 70 skills they need to learn to use the skills they have first, not spend their time in a dungoen idolizing a high level player. Hunts and PotD are the places to go for new players who wish to experience high level play. If you are at 70 and want your full rotation run a 70 dungeon!!

[Rhomagus]

I have played Whm and now play Ast, trying to balance their full 70 tool kit to work at low levels would be a headache. Level sync'd healers and tanks are already op in low level dungeons using the few skills they have, give them their full kit; Pffft you may was well being sending gods into low level dungoens with unsync level players. I don't have to explain how powerful Aspected benefict+time dialation+bole+ tank CD's are all combined. New players don't need to be impressed by level 70 skills they need to learn to use the skills they have first, not spend their time in a dungoen idolizing a high level player.

They won't be utilizing that low level rotation for very long, and because it's a boring rotation, their more inclined to quit the game because of it. One of the bigger complaints of WoW converts is that the early game mechanics are too slow, and the devs response is always, "You'll appreciate the 2.5 second GCD once you get your full kit." As you already stated, sync'd players are OP as is. Rookie players don't care about learning obsolete content, nor should they be. Their just trying to get through the game (which is the purpose of Duty Roulette in the first place), especially with so many veterans not even reading their tooltips as is and not understanding their rotations to begin with, learning lower level rotations is actually wasted time and effort, while you'd get much more bang for your buck displaying a jobs potential first hand. This far outweighs the ever decreasingly few moments they'll be tied to a rotation which is outdated and obsolete severely quickly.

Learning low level rotations serves no one.

[Zephera]

I don't think any change is currently necessary, besides it sounds like it would be a nightmare to balance. Any time spent on balancing this suggestion is likely better time spent on new content.

[Rhomagus]

I don't think any change is currently necessary, besides it sounds like it would be a nightmare to balance. Any time spent on balancing this suggestion is likely better time spent on new content.

Ya, we could have Diadem 3 by now if it wasn't for these pesky QoL changes for a veteran heavy game.