Some thoughts on Level Sync and Abilities

[Colt47]

Going forward with the game moving on to more expansions, it feels like there needs to be changes made to how classes work when level synced, as the extremely limited move set presented to people at the lowest level dungeons is not particularly good.

I'm not sure exactly what things need to be done to make this work, but my feeling is to not worry so much about ability acquisition during the leveling up process and make it so players go out and complete quests to gain abilities. If players get to a point in the game where those abilities are necessary, they should get blocked by the content by simply not being able to continue. It sounds kind of harsh, but as long as there is some kind of indicator that tells them where to go to learn their next ability (like the archer guild or lancer guild), that would work far better than having a system where the abilities are unlocked via the job story quests, where it's easy for someone to just forget where the next quest starts.

Will lower level content be easier for players with abilities unlocked? Absolutely yes, but that is the whole point. It would also be nice to be able to unlock new looks for skills, such as Heavy shot and stone, and be able to use those looks at any level regardless of the skill. We unlock glare at level 73+, but then we have to use stone for the majority of content anyway.

I think it would be good to be able to have a ravana themed move set, with dark knight abilities that have the red butterfly glow, or have an Eden themed gravity move set for certain abilities from Astro and Summoner.

[Barraind]

They really should take a page from GW2 in how syncing down works.

Its significantly more elegant than "Lol guess you only have a couple buttons to press"

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

They really should take a page from GW2 in how syncing down works.

Its significantly more elegant than "Lol guess you only have a couple buttons to press"

Yeah, but with gw2, you already only have very few buttons to press.

I think some jobs have more in sastasha than you get total in gw2 lol

[Alucard135]

Yeah, but with gw2, you already only have very few buttons to press.

I think some jobs have more in sastasha than you get total in gw2 lol

True. And it's understandable why here they're doing that. Just like their reasoning for not letting BLU queue into duty finder, because "some might kick you for not having a certain ability". But why not allow people who enter through party finder to have all their abilities while synced down in this case?

[frostmagemari]

They really should take a page from GW2 in how syncing down works.

Its significantly more elegant than "Lol guess you only have a couple buttons to press"

Personally, i wouldn't mind it if they took a page out of how Blizzard did it's scaling. They were able to change the legion mobs (especially in dungeons) where you would have a level 100 and a level 110 fighting a boss, and rather than the 110 just stomping the enemy, they would both act as if they're fighting a to-level version of the mob (both damaging it and getting damaged by it accordingly); and in the dungeons themselves, the inter-party abilities like heals would also get the same treatment (so a level 100 can heal a level 110 and heal them as if it was being tossed out by an appropriately leveled player). The only part where it fell short was accounting for ilvl, but that doesn't mean sqe couldn't try to improve it for that.

Either way though, whether they do something like this or something that is just their own; it needs to be improved to be better than it is. The higher the level cap go, the more the problems you encounter by doing lower level dungeons will be exasperated because all but a small handful of dungeons you can do are made for the max level players.

[347SPECTRE]

A lot of people cite that if they got a sprout tank, th wouldn't be able to keep up agro against dps, but with the 5.xx changes to how tanks work, that point is moot. As stated above they should really do level synch like GW2.

[TheRogueX]

With 5.0 they've neutered low-level play so badly in order to fix high level play that I don't see how new people can think the game is fun.

[Nora_of_Mira]

With 5.0 they've neutered low-level play so badly in order to fix high level play that I don't see how new people can think the game is fun.

if they're new and low level, how do they know what they are missing?

[PyurBlue]

if they're new and low level, how do they know what they are missing?

They won't know what they're missing, but they could get bored of pressing the same few buttons repeatedly. I remember from my leveling experience that I didn't want to upgrade from THM to BLM because I lost my healing which gave me less to do in dungeons. Granted I shouldn't have been trying to heal people as a THM, but looking out for other players' HP while DPSing was more fun with such a simple rotation.

[Hasrat]

Because balancing. It starts getting a lot harder to tweak all the numbers when you've got more skills available while synced than you did when you were originally that level.

A BLM synced to level 20 with level 20 skills only needs to be balanced around a level 20 BLM.

A BLM synced to level 20 with level 80 skills, and now you've gotta figure out how to rebalance everything they have at 80 to be equivalent to what they would've had at 20.

The high level player with all their skills needs to play much more optimally than the at-level player just to meet the same damage output.

Any rotation flubs or missteps will be significantly more detrimental to the high level player.

And before anyone says "oh, well, that should still be easy, just tweak those potencies!" Ok. That was one example, at level 80. Need to have a different balance at 79 before Xenoglossy is part of your rotation. And another balance at 77 before Enochian gets boosted. And again at 75 before Umbral Soul. 73 before Enhanced Sharpcast. Etc etc etc. Balancing and adjustments needed every step of the way, at any point your rotation changes or improves, just to keep it all equivalent to the level 20 BLM.

Or. Instead of allllll that work. They could just sync you down to actually be level 20 and make everyone's lives a whole lot easier.