A potential rework to the level-sync system.

[Intellion]

I've been playing FFXIV ever since 2.0, and after about 7 years of playing this game, I think it's time that the game's level-sync system got updated/reworked.


To get to the point, I think the level-sync system should be changed so that when endgame players get placed in older, lower-level content, especially in roulettes, their character levels and item levels still get synced to match the content... but at the same time they still get to use ALL of their unlocked skills, and I mean ALL OF THEM, including their Lv. 80 skills.

Now why am I proposing this, you ask? Because quite frankly, a common complaint I've been seeing among endgame players every expansion is that playing lower-level content is boring and brain-dead. Based on my experience, I feel that what exacerbates that feeling of dullness in lower-level content is not the endgame players' synced item levels still being too high for the content in question (resulting in mindless tank-n-spanks), but rather, being prevented from using the endgame skill rotations that they worked hard to unlock.

Of course, some of you might say that such a system would completely break lower-level content, but in my opinion, I don't think so. As I stated in the earlier paragraph, even if you sync endgame players' skills as well, their synced ilvls still end up being too high for older content anyways, which leads to mindless tank-n-spanks. In other words, even with level/ilvl sync, endgame players already break older content anyways.



So why not reward them for reaching the endgame and just let them use all of their skills even in older content? That way, even if the content is still brain-dead easy, at least the endgame players get to actually continue using and practicing their endgame rotations outside of endgame raids, expert roulette, or Stone/Sea/Sky.



For example, as a DRK main, I sure would enjoy leveling roulette a lot more if I can still use my AoE rotations, The Blackest Night, and Living Shadow even in dungeons like Sastasha. And don't even get me started on Alliance Raids roulette, where 9/10 times, you'd end up in Crystal Tower or Void Ark, which in my opinion are the two most painfully boring alliance raids in the whole game. At least those two raids would be even slightly more engaging if I was just going ham on the bosses with my super-long Lv. 80 rotations.


In addition, I think endgame players using their endgame rotations on lower-level content would serve as a nice encouragement for sprouts to reach the endgame, especially when they see their seniors unleashing long, flashy combos with lots of explosions, despite being level-synced to dungeon-appropriate levels, while the sprouts are stuck spamming the same few attacks.

In conclusion, I'm not asking for the level-sync system to be removed, since I fully understand why it's in the game. I'm just asking for it to be reworked so that it rewards endgame players more than it punishes them.

[Mesarthim]

You're not the first person to suggest this and at this point you won't be the last. I'll just repeat what others have said every other time this has been brought up:

"It isn't fun spamming more buttons to be equal to someone who only has access to a 2 button combo."

May or may not be paraphrasing. Then you open a new can of worms about people being rude to others because they don't have access to certain abilities etc something something. tl;dr There are flaws to your suggestion as "nice" as it sounds.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Of course, some of you might say that such a system would completely break lower-level content, but in my opinion, I don't think so. As I stated in the earlier paragraph, even if you sync endgame players' skills as well, their synced ilvls still end up being too high for older content anyways, which leads to mindless tank-n-spanks. In other words, even with level/ilvl sync, endgame players already break older content anyways.

And by allowing players to use their full capstone kits, that may just exacerbate the problem.
Sure in theory, DPS roles may be the easiest to 'balance', albeit with a lot of rework considering stuffs like potency creep and such. But how will they balance the other, especially tanks & healers? Since you mentioned DRK I'll use that as one of the example and few other:

1. DRK's [The Blackest Night] -- how will they balance this ability to lower content...say, Sastasha?
2. Tanks invulnerability cooldowns and their self preservation abilities.
3. Healers healing potencies and their plethora of instants & abilities? WHMs will be the most noticeable due to the fact having CNJ as a the first potential healer class at the start of game, and their pre-50 kits vs lv50+ kits.
4. Several classes' buffs such as DNC's [Devilment], DRG's [Battle Litany], BRD's [Battle Voice], etc.

Additionally, while I can understand how you come up with the idea that newcomers that may be encouraged, there's also the other side of coin of this. How do you know---or should I say: ensure that these newcomers will be encouraged instead of being disappointed of not having access to those flashy skills yet? Because there are certainly portion of players that do not enjoy getting 'carried' all the way through their gameplay, they exist. Considering how SE is trying so hard to not let any kind of 'meta class' emerging nor imbalance occurring, it feels like implementing this new system would be the last thing they would like to do.

I don't fancy getting my arsenal of skills greyed out...but to avoid that I just avoid queueing into lower duties and roulettes when I don't want to.

[Asari5]

i mean, theoretically, they could just synch the max lvl players more strictly to weaken the more to make up for their stronger skills. i dont think a lot of people would mind at first view... but that would make another kind of people upset... the ones who dont want to work more for the same amount of dmg just because they are at max-lvl.


my personal opinion is thast they just should synch down every content more strictly (for everyone, without keeping the skills) . espescially the content from previous lvl caps. but also all the other stuff. make people in lota synch down to like 10 ilvl above min ilvl... and not 130 (?). it would instantly become more fun. Yeah there would be more deaths, especially in the beginning.... but deaths arent bad... its just a game. learn from it and do it without to die the next time. also... i've seen a lot of players stop playing because its too boring (not like boring, that would be alright, more like boring boring). I mean, the game starts slow, pretty much everything is slow in the beginning.... but its not at all encouraging if you have this epic battle against ifrit or this amazing 24-man raid where you have almost zero thinking to do... just because you dont die. thats not how it works.

[Vahlnir]

I'd love to have access to my full kit synced down, but I doubt it'll ever happen. If it's part of their plans though, the upcoming stat squish would be the perfect opportunity to address this. Probably not in the cards but you never know.

[Intellion]

And by allowing players to use their full capstone kits, that may just exacerbate the problem.
Sure in theory, DPS roles may be the easiest to 'balance', albeit with a lot of rework considering stuffs like potency creep and such. But how will they balance the other, especially tanks & healers? Since you mentioned DRK I'll use that as one of the example and few other:

1. DRK's [The Blackest Night] -- how will they balance this ability to lower content...say, Sastasha?
2. Tanks invulnerability cooldowns and their self preservation abilities.
3. Healers healing potencies and their plethora of instants & abilities? WHMs will be the most noticeable due to the fact having CNJ as a the first potential healer class at the start of game, and their pre-50 kits vs lv50+ kits.
4. Several classes' buffs such as DNC's [Devilment], DRG's [Battle Litany], BRD's [Battle Voice], etc.

Additionally, while I can understand how you come up with the idea that newcomers that may be encouraged, there's also the other side of coin of this. How do you know---or should I say: ensure that these newcomers will be encouraged instead of being disappointed of not having access to those flashy skills yet? Because there are certainly portion of players that do not enjoy getting 'carried' all the way through their gameplay, they exist. Considering how SE is trying so hard to not let any kind of 'meta class' emerging nor imbalance occurring, it feels like implementing this new system would be the last thing they would like to do.

I don't fancy getting my arsenal of skills greyed out...but to avoid that I just avoid queueing into lower duties and roulettes when I don't want to.

I think with regards to skill balancing, maybe a compromise could be created.

Maybe SE could implement an update to the level-sync system, where endgame players still have access to their whole kit post-sync, but also implement a rule where any skills that, under normal circumstances shouldn't be accessible yet in a content's level range, gets their potency halved or something. So for example, on a Lv. 30 dungeon for a synced endgame player, any attack skills or healing spells higher than Lv. 30 would get their potency halved, and mitigation skills like The Blackest Night would get its damage absorption percentage halved as well (maybe 12% instead of 25%). Same goes for mitigation skills like Shadow Wall (only 15% mitigated instead of 30%). Of course, skills that fall within a content's level range would be unaffected and remain un-nerfed.

That's just my take, though. I understand the balancing concerns regarding this, and I also understand that a compromise like the above would be super complicated to program and would take time to be implemented. If such a compromise is still not enough, then I'd gladly take another safety measure, such as syncing the ilvls of endgame players to only 10 levels higher than the content's minimum ilvl at most, if it means we still get access to our whole endgame kits. Anything that would make lower-level content less of a snoozefest for endgame players is overall beneficial in my opinion, and I truly believe it's possible to find a compromise.

[Hasrat]

The point of the level-sync system is to achieve some sense of balance between new and veteran players. There is almost no conceivable way to balance an end-game kit with an at-level kit.

I'm feeling lazy, so I'm just going to copy/paste the posts I made to this same topic when it came up last week.

Personally, think this system works fine as is. The difficulty with scaling abilities lies in scaling player skill. The point of syncing is to maintain some semblance of balance. There is much great difficulty in attempting to balance a level-cap job with an at-level job. The at-level job has very few buttons to press. The level-cap job has very many (usually). Worse, the scaling would need to be balanced at nearly every single level, to account for new skills and traits. Every job gets that final piece of kit at level-cap, so balance to that, but at level-cap-minus-1, you have very different potency, needing a different scale. Additionally, you run the risk of having bad/mediocre level-cap players not fully utilizing their kit. If the scaling balance is meant to take into account a certain expected skill level, and players fail to meet it, you will find duty progress severely inhibited.

These reasons and more, in much more detail, always come up when this idea is presented. Bottom line, it's a considerable amount of work that constantly needs checked and rechecked, and it's just not remotely worth the effort when the current system achieves the balance goal with much less trouble.

Additional point, I made my first post with a very DPS-oriented mindset. But previous post raises probably the winning point. There is genuinely no way to scale down a full-kit WHM to a at-level WHM with nothing but Cure and Medica. Tanks and healers especially all have (mostly) a wealth of oGCD skills for utility/weaving. It may very well be nearly impossible to truly balance most of those to be roughly equal to a synced/at-level player. Back to the WHM example, literally the entirety of the level 80 WHM kit would have to be scaled to equal a level 15-18 WHM in Sastasha, with nothing but Cure/Medica for heals, and Stone(II) and Aero for damage. How do you scale Benediction? How do you scale things like PLD Cover, Clemency, Hallowed Ground?

In theory, this miiiigght be possible. Big maybe. But it involves sorta... distributing the nerfs to potencies across the board. It's not enough to simple scale down potency numbers of everything equally. To balance for a oGCD damage skill, you'd basically have to work out its potency/second, and applying an appropriate nerf to the entire rest of the kit to compensate/balance for it. Might possibly be the same for AoE. And, back to previous point, these are balancing passes that would need to be done at every point where a skill is changed/added for every job.

The result is basically that, in low level duties, you're required to play your job much closer to perfectly, just to match up with a mediocre low level player. And a mediocre high level player will quickly find themselves to be dragging the group down.

BLM is coming up a lot (and it's one I'm most familiar with). I'm really bad about always using Sharpcast. But, Sharpcast undeniably adds some additional potency to the BLM rotation. To account for that, the rest of the rotation needs a small nerf, to keep me balanced. The more I neglect to use Sharpcast, the more I'm punished for missing potency I'm expected to be using.

Failure to balance/nerf in this way results in a much bigger gap between mediocre and skilled players than currently exists, which I would argue goes against the intended design. As is, playing a job at-level perfectly absolutely contributes more to the group, but the gap isn't so wide that mid-range players with under-utilized kits just start feeling useless. Yes, I should really be using Sharpcast and Swiftcast and Manafont and Triplecast more (and I don't always use Ley Lines on cooldown). But, the difference between me and someone playing BLM perfectly is only something I'd personally be worried about in Savage/Extreme content, which I'd argue is a bit outside the scope of this discussion (and is content I don't jump into much anyway).

[Frizze]

Short version: Unlikely. The devs care about balance, and this would be much harder to balance then you think it would - if not downright impossible.

Long version: I dont feel like typing a long version today. Search the forums, this comes up frequently enough.

Final note...

I'm not asking for the level-sync system to be removed, since I fully understand why it's in the game. I'm just asking for it to be reworked so that it rewards endgame players more than it punishes them.

The sync system is in place solely to benefit the low level players - how it feels to an endgame player is irrelevant. The rewards you get from doing these sync'd roulettes are the part thats there for the high level players - and this is where low level peoples opinions are irrelevant.

[Intellion]

The result is basically that, in low level duties, you're required to play your job much closer to perfectly, just to match up with a mediocre low level player. And a mediocre high level player will quickly find themselves to be dragging the group down.

Now this may not relate to the current discussion at hand, but am I the only one who actually likes that "consequence?"
After all, I've noticed that this very community also likes complaining that "most endgame players suck at their jobs."

Personally, I would actually love a system like that: Endgame players retain access to their whole kits even after level-sync, but due to various nerfs across the board for balancing reasons, said endgame players are also required to play their jobs well in synced content, or else get outperformed by even a mediocre low-level player. That way, the endgame player is actually forced to learn how to play their jobs properly to avoid dragging the group down (I mean, a certain level of competence should be expected from endgame players), while low-level players are given leeway in that they can still perform on even grounds with endgame players even if they're still struggling/learning on their jobs.


Also, such a trade-off might also significantly cut down the boredom for endgame players on low-level content since they are now forced to play optimally with their whole kits at all times, but that's just me.

[Vortuna]

Level sync is why I prefer using BLU on FATEs, that's just about how I deal with level sync shenanigans.