sync should be reworked

[Kydroinor]

They can keep their Sync in Dungeons, but they can gladly get rid of it, when you're out in the world and just adventuring in Free Mode I like to call it.

I like to level up, get stronger, and pummel things that once stood in my way, whole point of leveling up etc.

Shouldn't always have to be a struggle for survival.

I see Pro's & Con's on either side of peoples point of views, but I never liked Sync.

A Ninja shouldn't have to fight like a Common Rogue, and a Dark Knight shouldn't just be able to fling their blade.

Frankly they could do away with Roles, and make it like a Traditional Final Fantasy game, and I'd be happy.

Like a Monk. Yeah. They're trained to hit hard, but their bodies are conditioned to withstand blows, as they're of Mind, and body, but the system says, I'm just a damage dealer.... Nah, not cool with me....

You spend all this time getting all this good gear, getting as strong as you can, just to get one arm tied behind your back, and feel degraded.

You can still have Team Work, and not all this Tank, DPS, Heal business, and still be successful in Dungeons.....

[Zeromon]

Higher level abilities are fundamentally more powerful than lower level abilities. Even if Assize did no damage at lower levels it would still be extremely powerful, not to mention things like Thin Air (how do you nerf something that removes mana costs?), Excogitation, Chain Stratagem, etc. There are definitely ways to scale everything down, but a simple potency reduction isn't good enough. And because a potency reduction isn't good enough SE will have to do a lot of work to balance lower level dungeons to make them not unsync levels of trivial, and I don't think SE wants to do that.

I understand the want to not feel so kneecapped in lower dungeons when we get used to the end game skills. However, there will always be a compromise, and SE decided a simple unsync option is what they were going to do. I do think there is a way to allow higher level abilities to be used in a way that is balanced, but implementing that isn't trivial and will need a lot of internal research and testing to work. I don't think SE wants to create and balance new skills for lvl80 and then go back and balance them for every level below that too. Would I like this to exist? Yes. Will I defend SE for not doing it? Yes.

[MsQi]

Dozens of other games sync without changing ability sets. It's a matter of crunching numbers, testing and adjusting, like anything else in the game. The only issues are time and preference.

[Tlachtga]

While I feel like it could be possible, this will never happen. People enjoy pressing 2-3 buttons for 20+ minutes.

I'd rather SE just not bother, keep the level sync the same to keep the lazy people happy and make some savage-level dungeons instead. 4-player content, required max lvl (so you'll actually have skills) but tuned up so the enemies actually have some teeth. Maybe throw in some one-shot mechanics on bosses. Everyone's happy.

[Rongway]

Consider an expert proficiency Lv80 BLM paired with Lv30 BLM in Manor. The Lv80 BLM needs to be nerfed heavily if he can still Foul and 4xFlare, or the things will die before the Lv30 BLM can even cast a second Fire II. Allowing the Lv80 BLM to maintain a complete action set without severely decreased potencies would trivialize the presence of the BLM who actually needs the dungeon to level.

So apply those nerfs. Now also consider a different party with a low proficiency Lv80 BLM paired with Lv30 BLM in Manor. If the Lv80 BLM doesn't know how to BLM, and only knows how to Fire III > Fire II > Fire II > Fire II> Transpose, he will contribute a miniscule portion of party damage while the Lv30 BLM and the tank and healer have to pick up the slack so the dungeon doesn't last twice as long as it needs to.


You cannot balance around a fully unlocked action set in a low level dungeon.

I'm willing to pump out a full Lv80 rotation no matter what level I am. But nobody can guarantee that the other people I end up matched with in lower level dungeons would be willing or able to do the same. And with the potency nerfs that are a necessary part of exemplar-ing down, it will mean that any time you end up with someone who is not as proficient as they should be for their current real level, the dungeon run will suck. At least the way things are now, people only have to be as proficient as the level they end up syncking to in the dungeon for the run to go decently.

[PyurBlue]

The ultimate issue with this is that it'd be far too much effort for very little gain, or depending on how they scale it, making us worse off than we were before.

I disagree that it's little gain. Making all content potentially worthwhile (or at least tolerable) again sounds like a significant gain. I guess it depends on what you like to do. If level sync is good enough for most players then I guess stat sync just won't happen. That's fine. I do want to promote the idea to the devs just in case it has some popularity, and I'd want to them to implement it in a way to keeps everyone happy.

Think about it this way; so many people in the DF already can barely manage proper rotations at level 70 (The clear time difference between a full party that knows their rotations vs one that doesn't is staggering.). If Square was to scale the rotation so that you'd have to do a proper rotation in order to do the same dps as someone who only has two buttons, it'd literally be nerfing the damage output of every single player who doesn't know their level 70 rotation properly than our current syncing system. If they make it so that way lenience can be made in the rotation, then you'll have people doing 2-3x as much dps as they are now in synced content or completely overwhelming newbie tanks when you get players that do know how to optimize their class and utterly shredding away any difficulty lower end content still has.

I don't really mind who I'm paired with in dungeons, so if DPS drops it wouldn't bother me. Like you've said, people already mess up, and at low levels you can also find people using single target rotations instead of AoE. There are ways around this problem in any case. Level sync doesn't have to go away and you can choose how you'll be synced in your PF settings. Alternatively high level skills can be reduced in effect more than lower level ones.

There'd also be severe advantages vs disadvantages when it comes to tanks and healers. For example, a lvl 70 WAR would be able to utterly trivialize lower end content between self heals, IR being utterly broken with Steel Cyclone spam, and having access to their full toolkit. You would essentially have to revamp the entire combat system to be a sliding dynamic of scaling to make sure abilities wouldn't be OP at every single level, dungeon and trial of the game; something that would take CONSIDERABLE effort and is time better spent on fine tuning every job at max level.

Potency scaling does most of the work. A level 70 WAR scaled correctly would have no more DPS than a level 15 MRD (which already has Berserk Overpower). This should also impact self heals. At worst in this case, Steel Cyclone might need to be scaled more harshly than Overpower. This would also only apply to the extreme case where you sync max level to starter dungeons. It's much easier to just scale potencies between say 70 and 60. So while this does need to work for all levels, reducing stats for high level content and possibly mid level content is pretty effortless.

Roulettes are optional, so outside of wanting to do lvl sync challenges you can unsync everything else to avoid losing your abilities whenever you have to do old content.

Everything is optional, this is just a suggestion to improve roulettes for some, I don't see the harm.

Consider an expert proficiency Lv80 BLM paired with Lv30 BLM in Manor. The Lv80 BLM needs to be nerfed heavily if he can still Foul and 4xFlare, or the things will die before the Lv30 BLM can even cast a second Fire II. Allowing the Lv80 BLM to maintain a complete action set without severely decreased potencies would trivialize the presence of the BLM who actually needs the dungeon to level.

So apply those nerfs. Now also consider a different party with a low proficiency Lv80 BLM paired with Lv30 BLM in Manor. If the Lv80 BLM doesn't know how to BLM, and only knows how to Fire III > Fire II > Fire II > Fire II> Transpose, he will contribute a miniscule portion of party damage while the Lv30 BLM and the tank and healer have to pick up the slack so the dungeon doesn't last twice as long as it needs to.

Fire II AoE is about 50% of Flare AoE on 3 enemies. So definitely a loss in damage but not minuscule, the 80 BLM's contribution will still be noticeable and the gap narrows if you happen to pull bigger. You'll find players that don't AoE big packs of mobs, keep up buffs, or properly execute combos at low level already, so this BLM won't necessarily stand out. If you wanted to fix the problem, the sync could only be applied to high level skills so that perhaps Fire II is at 80-100% of level 30 damage but Flare is reduced to 50-70% damage. Flare rotation is still superior, but only slightly. You'd have a lot of leeway in doing this too because leveling dungeons are inherently unbalanced due to the need to accommodate every party composition. Is it effort on the dev's part? Yes, but not something that should entirely disrupt their ability to continue producing content for the game.

You cannot balance around a fully unlocked action set in a low level dungeon.

You absolutely can, there are many ways to do it, it's mostly a matter of finding the "best" way and if the devs are willing to implement it. You and others are making valid points and I don't want to just sweep them away, but I think that labeling stat scaling as impossible is going a little too far.

I'm willing to pump out a full Lv80 rotation no matter what level I am. But nobody can guarantee that the other people I end up matched with in lower level dungeons would be willing or able to do the same. And with the potency nerfs that are a necessary part of exemplar-ing down, it will mean that any time you end up with someone who is not as proficient as they should be for their current real level, the dungeon run will suck. At least the way things are now, people only have to be as proficient as the level they end up syncking to in the dungeon for the run to go decently.

If they're not willing to use a full 80 rotation, they can choose to keep the current level sync. If stat sync is added I don't see why that has to go. Potency nerfs can be applied in more ways than a flat % down, that's just the easiest way, so we can keep players with improper rotations from falling too far behind. I guess you can't do anything about people who have no interest in even pretending to know what they're doing, but that's already the case even with level sync.

[MariaArvana]

I don't really mind who I'm paired with in dungeons, so if DPS drops it wouldn't bother me. Like you've said, people already mess up, and at low levels you can also find people using single target rotations instead of AoE. There are ways around this problem in any case. Level sync doesn't have to go away and you can choose how you'll be synced in your PF settings. Alternatively high level skills can be reduced in effect more than lower level ones.

Again, the arching issue is that for stuff to be reduced effectively, it would take considerable time, and would have to be done on a level-by-level basis, completely re-programming every skill in the game and giving the player 50,000 new traits as that's the only way they can modify abilities in the current design of the game.

Also; you may not mind, but plenty of people do. there's a reason 'tales from the duty finder' is popular; and many posts talk about people doing barely any damage. An improperly made system (which is pretty much guaranteed to happen with a system of this magnitude) would leave DF more untolerable than before, rendering the purpose of a revamp pointless unless it was perfect on the first implementation.

Potency scaling does most of the work. A level 70 WAR scaled correctly would have no more DPS than a level 15 MRD (which already has Berserk Overpower). This should also impact self heals. At worst in this case, Steel Cyclone might need to be scaled more harshly than Overpower. This would also only apply to the extreme case where you sync max level to starter dungeons. It's much easier to just scale potencies between say 70 and 60. So while this does need to work for all levels, reducing stats for high level content and possibly mid level content is pretty effortless.

Potency scaling only works so far; you'd have to account for EVERY ability in the toolkit at EVERY level. Guess what a level 70 WAR has that a 15 MRD doesn't? Defiance. Vengeance. Holmgang. Thrill. Inner Beast. The self heals of Equilibrium and Steel Cyclone. Decimate. There's a reason I said they'd have to completely uplift the battle system to accommodate a system you want. Even if Vengeance was scaled down to 1% mitigation, that's still 1% mitigation the MRD doesn't have. Even if Steel Cyclone was 1% self healing, that's still 1% self healing the MRD doesn't have. There will be advantages the level 70 jobs have that a lower level player will not that will be impossible to fix, unless you simply nullify those abilities. and if you have to start nullifying the effects or reduce the %s on abilities to give parity (effectively nulllifying the skills), then why even bother with the system in the first place?

Another one: Arcanist doesn't get Bane ( or any aoe, for that matter) till level 30. SMN would have it, Painflare, shadowflare, Deathflare and Ahk Morn as AOE. Are you simply going to nullify the aoe on all those skills to give parity? At that point, what's the point in keeping the skills if they're not the same skills you have at 70? If you nullified the AOE on painflare, the ability might as well not exist as far as the syncing is concerned, since fester would always be a stronger single target ability.

There's also the fact that OGCD exist. Unless you nerf them all to 1 potency, that's still X amount of extra damage a non-synced still leveling job would never have.

Everything is optional, this is just a suggestion to improve roulettes for some, I don't see the harm.

Because the developers have limited time to create content between Patches. Any time they spend on this is time spent away from more pressing matters (Like making sure no job in 5.0 suffers the fates of DRK, SAM or RDM did for the longest while in 4.0), and given how most of the systems they implement have glaring issues, I doubt many are willing to sit with a broken syncing system for X amount of time before they iron out all the kinks when the current one is quite tolerable.

The only thing that needs fixing on the current system is to not ignore materia so that people can keep their VIT/STR melds for Ultimate/old content they're doing min-ilvl challenges on.

You absolutely can, there are many ways to do it, it's mostly a matter of finding the "best" way and if the devs are willing to implement it. You and others are making valid points and I don't want to just sweep them away, but I think that labeling stat scaling as impossible is going a little too far.

It's not that its impossible, it's being realistic. It would be an insane amount of work figuring out every variance (from skills to players themselves), having to balance literally everything against itself for each level of the game (When they already have trouble balancing jobs at level 70 against each other in general) for a payoff that already has a system that's at least tolerable, if not exactly favorable.

The developers have shown they prefer the route of least resistance; so anything that's not simply 'make all abilities usable at all levels with no changes whatsoever' is likely to be straight ignored for them due to the time commitment and potentiall debugging times & issues that would no doubt arise from such a massive overhaul.

I hard queued RDM from 50 to 70 because I despised losing my abilities. If someone really doesn't like losing their abilities, they can avoid roulettes.

[Nora_of_Mira]

sync should be reworked so that when it syncs your level down you do not loes abilitys they just get synced to that level.

I would personally love doing my full lvl70 Dragoon rotation (Nastrond+Geir AoE spam) in Sastasha with a lvl 15 tank. /s

[splinter1545]

I wish they would do this. As a Bard, anything that isn't level 52 feels so incomplete and awful since the job is missing an essential song, which screws up the whole flow of the job. Not to mention, below lvl 30, your rotation is basically just 2 buttons with the occasional straight shot procs.

[Rosa_Frandlia]

Let's bring up another point, healers. WHM doesn't get a shield till 66 and no one gets regen till 30. If you are a new tank who's only had 66+ healers you ask for divine bension and regen, but they aren't there as you go through Toto-Rok as you have a level 28 cnj instead. That cnj is then mana starved from needing to cast cure and cure 2 barely contributing to dps, while the whm would have been full dps mode except for regens. Do you keep that cnj or kick because they don't have a shield and regen? Do you kick the 65 whm out of Siren Song Sea as they don't have a shield?

These are also things to consider, healer balance and when they get skills. sch for example gets it's first aoe heal at 30, while medica and helios are much earlier too.