Improvements to battlecraft levequesting

[ReynTime]

Originally I had written this huge crazy list of desired changes to battlecraft guildleves, but since any suggestion would be ignored, it was pointless.
Instead here's a way more simplified version.

Keep in mind I don't seriously think the devs will consider any of this. Let alone anyone directing this topic to them. I guess in the end it's more for fun than anything.


Guildleves are a legacy from as far back as 1.0. They're no longer the "main" or optimal way to level up. However, they have their use and potential.
FATE spawning can be unpredictable, and sometimes you have bad luck and some BLU or big party (depending on the area 3 characters are enough to ruin your gains) are already doing a train in it.
Levequests let you get that "in-wait-for-queue/something else" experience and gil at your own leisure with targets and objectives that are reserved to you and your party. Furthermore you get some OK extra exp bonus for clearing the weekly challenge log levequest objectives.
In addition to that, this may be just me and a minority, but sometimes I get tired of farming certain dungeons, and prefer to do leves at least for a bit. This is specially true to me when leveling alt characters.

Lastly, levequests play an important step in the relics for ARR and HW. Those two have enough tiring and time-gated steps as is, this would really help speed up the steps tied to levequesting.

I am and will always be against scrapping content or letting it rot. I always defend the idea of improving it instead. Consider that my answer to forthcoming comments such as "no one cares about leves" "just remove them" "they're pointless, waste of effort to change" etc.
Doesn't have to be the way I'm suggesting, but I do think they need to be changed or improved.


THE PROBLEMS:

• You have a cap of 100 allowances. Which is fine. But they're shared across all 3 leve types.
• It's objectively more valuable to use allowances for your gathering or crafting levequests. If you're leveling either of those last two using leves? You're gonna run out of allowances very quickly.
  
• The rate at which you regain allowance hasn't changed from how it was since before 2.0. It takes nearly a whole month to go from close to 0 to 100. I understand this limits the gil generated from leves like the coffee biscuit one however.
  
• If you're just doing leves while waiting for your queue as a dps, if you can't finish the leve within 40 seconds of the pop-up you just lost an allowance for nothing. That's a severe punishment for something that is so limited and not proportionally rewarding when you complete.
  
• Difficulty adjustments barely make any difference if you're not doing a leve that is by default more than 5 levels above yours. They don't get much harder at all otherwise. And even if you aim higher, you're only gonna have a rough time because of the level gap penalty system. So the dificulty doesn't even properly encourage partying as either you're gonna get carried by someone closer to the appropriate level or everyone will be just as blind and frail.

The above problems contribute with discouraging battlecraft leves from being done at all once you've completed the one leve that unlocks the region.


POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS:

1. Make it so re-trying leves does not cost allowances. At the very least for battlecraft leves specifically. That way you don't have to fear wasting allowances because your queue pop happened.
   
2. Make changes to the allowance system. It could be ONE of the following:
   2.a Battlecraft leves not requiring allowances (not my favorite solution)
   2.b Battlecraft leves having a separate allowance type
   2.c Allowance regeneration being faster than it currently is
   
   Any of those could contribute with not encouraging to pass on spending on battlecraft as much.
   
   
   The next two suggestions focus on encouraging party play without taking 'solo' away as an option.
   
3. Add or change the difficulty system.
   In addition to the current level adjustment adding an option based on preferred party size. Something like "Solo, Band, Light Party" or such. This would scale up monster stats, and possibly the number of enemies that must be slayed, spawn or things to collect, and the reward would compensate the difficulty increase. This also means if you're confident you can aim for higher than 'solo' without help.
   
   This would do two things. Offer a little bit of optional challenge for any player who wants it, and encourage leve sharing, which is technically already a thing but no one does it.
   
4. An alternative to number 3 , just reintroduce Faction Leves. Those would feature more challenging enemies and be designed not to be easy to solo. And they would have their own type of allowance (Faction Points). Originally you'd get FP by doing levequests. However this new iteration could be just something you unlock then get a handful FPs per week or something. They could have their own little story too, for each faction, almost like beast tribes but not really focused on beasts, sort of like how they were originally.
   They'd have to be significantly more rewarding than normal leves, possibly with chance to give glamour mats(?) in addition to leveling gear, seals, poetics, exp and gil. It would be something else to do in the overworld, and with up to 7 other players no less.
   The fights would have to be more engaging and the "gimmicky" ones would have to be less trivial. The "slay unique monster" variants probably featuring elite mark tier difficulty. Only because it's a leve you don't get to cheese it with 3+ full parties helping.
   
   
5. Please fix Ishgardian levequests. They completely botch the "return to nearest levemete" feature for literally no sensible reason. They feel more like an inconvenience than anything. Every map should have a levemete somewhere. I know there is a lore reason, but lore didn't stop AST from going against it for game design purposes among other changes XIV underwent.
   
6. Please add battlecraft leves beyond lv58. They don't even need to be super creative.
   
7. Make the leveplate names clear. It won't surprise me if you read this and think "what the hell is he talking about", but every leve has a plate associated with them, and the painting isn't there just to look cool. They define what to expect from the leve objectives.
   For some reason, the lack of clarity about the plates hasn't changed in the slighest since 1.0. It would go a long way to just include the name right there in the description. "Diligence", "Tenacity", "Wisdom", etc.
   
8. Not really important but just a cool thing. Leves used to have unique themes instead of the generic one that plays everywhere. The three battle leve BGMs provided by Uematsu are still yet to be used anywhere. They're not even around in form of orchestrion rolls. Would be nice if battle leves went back to having unique themes per nation, and among those we got back Desert Moon Defied, Bathed in Woodsin and In the Shadow of the Colussus. DMD and iSotC are so good too.

If you read all this, thanks!
It's OK if you disagree with the suggestions. Just don't be toxic or condescending about it.

[Vyrerus]

I actually really like the sound of these. I like Levequests, especially for leveling with the weekly bonus on a higher level job. For all of Stormblood and SHB while leveling anything that had queue times(DPS, tanks in some cases), I would go do really low level levequests in the snap of a finger just to get the weekly challenge.

I've also always liked that the levequests up into the level 45 range ones dropped chests that dropped aetherial weapons of that level range. Was a nice way to get HQ gear without having to go into crafting or spend gil or seals.

I'd really like if they brought them back up to speed for battle leves.

I'd also be game for them adding the Ishgardian grand leves or whatever, that spend more allowances at once for a bulk reward. Add those to past and future leves of both types!

[ItMe]

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS:

Make it so re-trying leves does not cost allowances. At the very least for battlecraft leves specifically. That way you don't have to fear wasting allowances because your queue pop happened.

Holy shit...
This would make it SO much easier to farm Amber Encased Velkin.

[Luin]

Battlecraft leves are an abandoned feature. They give bad XP, gil, are inconvenient, boring, timegated, and the leves themselves are better used on DoL/DoH.

Ultimately the only way to fix leves would be to buff the XP/resources so much that they become a dominant method (even if combat jobs could take leves for free). This is bad because leves themselves are not engaging, and because it's more beneficial for these players to be in dungeons filling queues with other players.

[Vyrerus]

Battlecraft leves are an abandoned feature. They give bad XP, gil, are inconvenient, boring, timegated, and the leves themselves are better used on DoL/DoH.

Ultimately the only way to fix leves would be to buff the XP/resources so much that they become a dominant method (even if combat jobs could take leves for free). This is bad because leves themselves are not engaging, and because it's more beneficial for these players to be in dungeons filling queues with other players.

All a levequest has to do is be comparable in EXP to current Fates(though preferably higher since they are timegated, but then also consider the gil/item rewards), and then they are more or less the same, though they are all soloable by everything, regardless of players in zone.

They would only need to be buffed up to the current Fate level of exp for their associated zone, and preferably, have levemetes make a return per zone.

They wouldn't have much impact on dungeon queues, because players could do them while in queue if that was their preference over fates or crafting. Not everyone likes the same thing, and battlecraft leves only fell to the way side by dev decision, not player. There's tons of people who don't touch dungeons at all for leveling, so this would be another method for those players.

Particularly, if they kept letting them give aetherial gear on par with the gear at level, they'd also serve as a way to keep up current on gear. while you level.

It was a good, simple system. They just let it die, cause not many people care about having it around.

[ItMe]

Battlecraft leves are an abandoned feature.

Are they?
Didn't they just get an update so you can initiate/abandon them while mounted?
They're still getting QoL improvements.