A potential rework to the level-sync system.

[Frizze]

Does the echo give the WoL aethzheimer?

Ok, so in the story of this game you went into Sastasha once at around level 15(and you might have gone back at level 50 for the remix). Your character didnt make a return trip, let alone potentially dozens of them via leveling roulette. You didnt have a reason to, the pirates were found out and driven away. The echo allows you to see memories and essentially relive them. So thats what all those duty roulettes are from a story perspective - youre re-living the original run you made at level 16. From a gameplay perspective, as has been covered, leveling roulette is a way to keep lower level content active so that new players can get their clears and continue the story. Their perspective is the one that matters, and you being exponentially stronger then them is seen as a bad thing. So you go at the same level they do - this will not change. The devs have tools and reports that monitor how quickly roulettes/dungeons spawn and how populated the que's are at all times of day on all servers. If you think the rewards arent enough to deal with being synced down, stop running these duties. If enough people do that, the devs will boost the rewards until the ratios are back where they want them to be. The MSQ roulette has been boosted like this several times to keep castrum and prae from being the bottlenecks that end new players, and if leveling(or trials, or anything else) starts to become a problem they will do it again.

[kiagenwa]

Ok, so in the story of this game you went into Sastasha once at around level 15(and you might have gone back at level 50 for the remix). Your character didnt make a return trip, let alone potentially dozens of them via leveling roulette. You didnt have a reason to, the pirates were found out and driven away. The echo allows you to see memories and essentially relive them. So thats what all those duty roulettes are from a story perspective - youre re-living the original run you made at level 16. From a gameplay perspective, as has been covered, leveling roulette is a way to keep lower level content active so that new players can get their clears and continue the story. Their perspective is the one that matters, and you being exponentially stronger then them is seen as a bad thing. So you go at the same level they do - this will not change.

People trying to justify their POV then I forgot about Lore XD
So it's like we're reflecting our past actions through Echo and got exp for it.

On gameplay, I think removing high level skills make sense. Skills were there not only for damage/healing, but also for utilities.
While it may not go to the point where new players getting kicked for it, it will certainly feel different.

Also, don't forget that new players (to game/role) can be clueless on how to play their role (maybe not so when there's only 3-4 buttons, but things can get more complicated?). Getting them to witness veteran play will give them an idea how to effectively do it.

[Hasrat]

Getting them to witness veteran play will give them an idea how to effectively do it.

Y'know, this argument keeps coming up, and honestly, I don't think I have ever in my many years of playing this game paid enough attention to what another player is doing to say "Oh, maybe that's how I should be doing it."

First of all, for every player the newbie may witness playing "effectively," they're just as (probably more) likely to be watching someone not being particularly effective/efficient.

Second, the new player experience is much more likely to be focused on what they are doing and trying their best, not so much on watching the rest of their party.

And third, anyone that has player effects turned off/reduced will pretty much almost never even know what the rest of the party is doing. The only time I've actually known to help anyone out with rotation is BLMs, usually in Stone Vigil, because you can see what they're casting at all times.

Besides, how's the new player going to learn to play "effectively" by watching veterans rolling with skills and rotations that the new player doesn't even have access to?

[Penthea]

Besides, how's the new player going to learn to play "effectively" by watching veterans rolling with skills and rotations that the new player doesn't even have access to?

Oh they'll just google "white sparkly attack white mage" and magically get instantly directed to a page that talks about Glare without much of any digging needed.

Stupid jokes aside, I have watched players and thought "oh, maybe I should try that" but this was long after the point of being a new player. This was when I recognised what the spells were because I had them already for quite a while so I was able to understand that they did take a different approach to me. Furthermore this is also when I was in the position of being able to pay attention to what someone else was doing. In fights that demanded a lot of my attention I didn't have much time to keep a close eye on many of the abilities someone else used.

And honestly even today, from a healer's perspective, I don't know what melee dps are doing a lot of the time because they rarely have castbars showing up in the party ui. I have to read their buffs and pay very close attention to their ability animations to figure out what they're up to. It's pretty easy to spot what casters are doing because they hardcast so much, but even then it's impossible to see everything because they also have instant casts and not all of them leave an effect behind like a dot.

Players learn best by the act of doing, and they learn best by learning their class gradually instead of jumping ahead several lvl brackets and trying to figure out how to use spells they don't even have yet. Sure some curious players do look up what classes can do in higher lvls, but in my experience I have only seen players who are not new to mmos do this frequently.