Low level gameplay: A growing problem

[MrKusakabe]

Has anyone played a MMO where you get a full kit of skills right off the bat? You know why we need to trickle feed skills in? Because you master the class as you go. You get comfortable with one set, then we add another button, then another.

I agree on this one. I remember with a smile (yes, I do smile right now while typing) that I had a flowchart for the first Red Mage spells and how/when to get into melee and all that. Now it's all muscle memory. I also yelled in joy when reaching level 54 and the Vercure icon sneaked into my skillset without my notice. A couple of days later, when I learned when to use Vercure without losing much DPS but still override my mistakes/healer issues, the sexy Verraise icon found its place above Vercure. The same with Jolt, Jolt II and impact. My Lalafell literally learned how to get better at red magic, and it felt so good. Instant full skillbar or within 2 days? Lame. And anti-climactic. And not very logical lore-wise.

However, the very first dungeons often have a weird skill problem when you lack a finisher. E.g. on Red Mage again, I often can Corps-A-Corps, but not Replacement. So I dash in, do my one-skill melee rotation and then...back up by walking.

Maybe they should trickle feed skills but in reasonable bunches/sets that make sense.

As healer, I think it's even more important to realise you start with small, single-target spells and then you get a small AoE heal. Now you will learn about emnity, mana cost etc. and why you whould use which spell in what situation. So many White Mages out there that AoE spam to heal up a party and I can watch the emnity shift with every cast - instead of single-target healing us which is much safer. At this point I often think that these people just bought potions and rushed/skipped the learning process you talk about. Before we could control our faeries better, there were so many Scholars that had their Eos/Selene on auto-pilot and the first encounter made her AoE heal. Because they probably never knew they can actually stop that. But how was that important? Because when you are limited in skills, you are happy with the little what you have.

Sincerely,

[gumas]

I legit feel like over half the quests pre-heavensward could be pruned and nothing meaningful would be lost. Way too much busy work.

i also feel like the dev need to put a force "summary" or something like "previously on ARR arc" to anyone who decide to use jump pot and skip the entire story...

only to break the mood and ask to everyone/party/guildy "who is this guy, why this guy so important" like... you decide to skip the story and now you asking? really annoy me sometimes.

[PyurBlue]

You know why we need to trickle feed skills in? Because you master the class as you go. You get comfortable with one set, then we add another button, then another.

It's fine if you learn that way but it's not necessarily the best way of mastering a class. Even if it's helpful to pickup one skill at a time, pacing can change things significantly. How long does it take to adapt to having 2-3 buttons? I feel like the first 15 levels can be skipped entirely without issue. I know that whenever a new class is added to FF14 I avoid roulette specially to avoid being level synced. I queue directly for the highest level dungeons I can so I can take in the class skills as a hole and properly account for them. It hasn't caused me any problems diving into a class at 30, 50, or 60. I greatly prefer it to starting at level 1. Even when I was a new player, skill pacing felt extremely slow.

Why am I correct? I have played with to many people who buy skips and don't even know the core rotation let alone slamming them with something like MCH.

Out of curiosity have you tried to find skip players that understand their class? I've run into some that have bought skips for their first class and took the time to learn. They're not experts, but basic rotations don't take long to grasp. I don't think skipping to high levels is a problem. It's all about a player's willingness to learn.

[Kuurei]

I Can't Cast Meteor At Level 10: The Topic.

[BatLW]

I Can't Cast Meteor At Level 10: The Topic.

Impressive how skillfully you dodged the point.

[Vaell]

The big gripe for me is locking the skills you already know because your level is scaled down. Just let us use all of our unlocked skills even when scaled down. I don't care if you have to scale the numbers down dramatically to make this work either. Letting you use all the skills you have unlocked would go a long way to keeping the game fun inl ow level dungeons, and new players seeing all the cool skills you learn later could inspire them to keep playing when they might otherwise quit. It's a win/win for everyone, and there is no logical reasoning behind locking all the fun skills you already have. It is completely backwards.

[Vercinotrix]

The big gripe for me is locking the skills you already know because your level is scaled down. Just let us use all of our unlocked skills even when scaled down. I don't care if you have to scale the numbers down dramatically to make this work either. Letting you use all the skills you have unlocked would go a long way to keeping the game fun inl ow level dungeons, and new players seeing all the cool skills you learn later could inspire them to keep playing when they might otherwise quit. It's a win/win for everyone, and there is no logical reasoning behind locking all the fun skills you already have. It is completely backwards.

It would be nice. I seriously never want to do content below 72 as a BLM anymore.

And below 70 GNB just feels downright slow and boring.

[Mugear_bahamut]

snip

My previous post.

As I mentioned in another thread, the boringness with synced instances can be solved by limiting potency instead of limiting skills when synced.
Although some harassment might come from leveled players to first-time players(due to lack of skills), so SE obviously doesn't implement this.
I still hope they do this because the main reason for this boringness everyone suffers from is the lack of skills.
In altering this, you get to train with the same complete skill set you do at max/higher levels even though the potency is minimized.

I hope this comes off right lol

If anyone is wondering how this can be done, basically, you take a skill potency(ex. 800) and you are leveled max(ex. 80),
you divide the skill potency 800 by level count 80 andit goes --> 800 / 80 = 10
So that skill potency will be "10" at level 1. Let's say from level 80 you sync to a level 55 dungeon...
You take that level 1 skill potency "10" and multiply it by dungeon level (54) --> 10 x 55 = 550
Therefore, that skill's potency will be "550" in a level 55 dungeon.
All this while your skillset is a level 80 skillset with the potency reduced.
It will be just like doing a level 80 dungeon at a low level!

The disparity with noobs and high-level players will certainly be noticeable if you have different skill sets and the same potency.
The solution to this is to leave the low level potency for unsynced players as it is right now and only do this math with synced players.
This way, low-leveled players will have higher potency to make up for the lack of skills.

[Barraind]

And the holy trinity.
Neither will ever be fixed.

Given that its down to the generic duo (Theres no meaningful crowd control, and they're moving farther and farther away from it ever being relevant), im not sure thats really a thing hampering it.

In the same way this game proves over and over that its not designed for long, grindy campaigns (Eureka was great at showing that its the opposite of fun to press a button every 1-1.5 seconds for 2+ hours), its also not designed well as a dungeon crawler.

[Supersomething]

The problem is similar to that of WoW, especially with their most recent expansion. Significant ability prune stripped away a lot from classes and consequently the enjoyment of the leveling experience. New players are already expected to go through well over 100 hours of main story quests just to play the current content and adding on top of that a less than stellar leveling experience is not a great way to sell the product to new players. I find it hard to convince any of my friends to play this, not just because of the long story requirements, but also because how slow this game plays at the start. In fact I go so far as to warn them how this game will start out for them, and to not bother trying blow through it because it will not be enjoyable.

New players have only a few avenues. Purchasing story skips and job boosts to get to the good stuff when there class begins feeling interesting, or grinding for 60-100 hours of content to get to the same point. Unless you REALLY like Final Fantasy I suspect most people do not find this type of gameplay enjoyable. Again, WoW is facing exactly the same issue with their ability prune and in fact it has become so bad there that you can go 10 levels while leveling and have nothing to show for it except for some minor stat increases.