Skills should scale down in lower content NOT be greyed out.

[Makeda]

Newbies would not only not really be able to do anything, they would actively be unwanted by down sync'd players because of how much they would slow the run down. 3 Sprouts in your leveling roulette? May aswell leave right now.
I think you are 100% correct with the lack of actions at low levels. IMO it needs atleast one AoE skill at every dungeon level.

Yes exactly.

I see this as a 'fundamental design problem'. Any solution that works would also require radically redesigning the game.

City of Heroes was one of the first MMOs to do scaling. It did it by scaling up. I could group with somebody and bring them up to my effective level but in so doing they only had their original abilities. The result was that nobody ever wanted to use it unless they were using it to speed level a friend. It was basically 'toxic' to group play.

FFXIV is kind of the next attempt at MMO scaling and did scaling down. This mostly works - but leaves the play a bit boring to higher level players.

ESO is the third attempt and it works, almost perfectly. BUT it only does this because your action bar is so small, you can fill it by a pretty early level - and the hundreds of abilities you can get after that are just 'better or different gameplay options'... but by the first dungeon even a 'noob' has something to bring and is fun to play...
- The ESO solution would NOT WORK HERE... That small action bar works because it's aim-based action combat, which has a lot of other issues (all of which would be hard to explain here as the engine is so radically different).

For what it tries to do, the FFXIV system more or less works. FFXIV is probably the "endgame" of the potential for tab-target MMOs... Action based MMOs are what we see in new games, and they're still in the early stages where none of them yet really have good combat systems for organized group play (BDO may have a great combat engine - but mostly because people use it to 1v1 PvP, not tank Coils or Castle Nathria or something. ESO combat engine probably works the best of the action-MMOs for group content, but that's 'best compared to other options in an action MMO' not best as in an actual great system... And this coming from a big fan of their system...).

So I think gaming is a bit at an impasse on this one.

If we gave low levels a few OGCDs though - we could at least make the scale down funner.

[KyahAlmasy]

I want to say this should only apply to jobs that don't require you to level them through low-level content. Rdm for instance has a lot of skills that rely on other skills to pull off damage, because it wasn't designed as a low-level class, so syncing down guts the class to the point where you're literally just spamming on spell the entire dungeon.

[YukikoKurosawa]

Let's face it - this is never going to get implemented because so many people on here keep using this silly "but it'd be unfair!" argument.

We've already been over this, countless times. This has been asked for the for years, along with the explanation why it shouldnt be done, why it wouldn't work. And yet you never listen. Why do you even care anyway? Are you running older content for fun? No of course you aren't, else you wouldn't want to intentionally trivialize it further with this kind of change. You're annoyed because you do it once a day for your roulettes, once a day you have to deal with briefly losing your skills for 15 minute runs. You want this change solely so you can do your dailies which you do for no other reason than the rewards anyway to make them slightly more entertaining for you, when all you will be doing is making them further trivialized and ruining them for people who actually enjoy doing them, along with ruining the experience for new players who won't be able to experience the dungeons as they were intended to be. Not to mention the ensuing toxicity as people would want to only group with people who are already max level because max level players have all the skills and will give the easiest and quickest runs.

You're the type of player who doesn't actually enjoy the game, doesn't actually care about the game, and just views the game as a timesink, like when someone plays angry birds on their phone while they wait for their laundry just to kill time. But you want that timesink have slightly more convenience so you can tolerate it a little more. If those other games are so great, if those other games have the system's you want already, then I ask you again, why don't you go and play those games instead instead of trying to hamfistedly turn yet another game into the way you want it to be at the expense of those who don't and already enjoy it the way it is? The fact that you don't only reveals your true intentions here. Of course you wont do that because you can't except a game existing that does not cater to you, that does not specifically give you what you want. The world revolves around you in your mind, and every game, no, EVERYTHING, must reflect that. A niche existing only fills you with rage, "How DARE a game not cater to me!" you think to yourself, "I must have it changed specifically to cater to MY interests, screw anyone who disagrees, screw the people already playing and enjoying the game, it MUST cater to ME. ME ME ME. Mother told me I was special, that I am the most important person in world!"

If you want a system so badly, and if games out there, by your own claim, already exist giving you exactly what you want, then go and play those games instead.

[TMW001]

I 100% agree with this nothing more painful unlocking some amazing skills on a class and not being able to use them

[IchiExorz]

I definitely agree that we should keep all of our abilities but be scaled down to the point where we literally can't deal much more damage than a low lvl player.
In one way it means we have to put more effort in doing the same dps but hell i'd rather do that rather than hit 1, 2 for the entirety of the dungeon.

And I simply disagree with the claim that it's "unfair" for low lvl players. I think one of FF XIV's biggest barriers to entry for new players is how slow the combat feels at low lvls.
I think if low lvl players see high lvl players in their dungeon doing all these cool spells, skills & rotations it's going to give them more incentive to keep going because they can see how much more fun the combat becomes later on.

I think the hardest thing about this though is the actual scaling though. They can't just scale down the damage as they already do right now. There's a lot more to take into account.

People making the claim it's going to be unfair are assuming the downscaling will be done badly and high lvl players will destroy everything and new players won't be able to do anything. That's why it's important that the scaling would be done correctly so high lvl players barely do more damage than new players even with their entire kit available. The actual balancing and downscaling of this I have no idea how they'd be able to do though. It would be really hard to do properly.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Newbies would not only not really be able to do anything, they would actively be unwanted by down sync'd players because of how much they would slow the run down. 3 Sprouts in your leveling roulette? May aswell leave right now.

Or it could turn into something similar to the old MSR: ”A newbie? Run will be 1/4 slower. Let’s vote a dismiss.”

Do not underestimate the length which people willing to go just to skip… the minor inconvenience.

[Powercow]

I think the hardest thing about this though is the actual scaling though. They can't just scale down the damage as they already do right now. There's a lot more to take into account.

How do you scale down Hallowed Ground? Have it only be 20% for 10 seconds? Or let it be invincibility, but have it be only 2 seconds? What about Benediction? A full HP restore -- except when it isn't, apparently.

And yeah that's not going to confuse the hell out of newbies: "Ah yes, Hallowed Ground makes you completely invincible for 10 seconds... unless you're doing Haukke Manor, in which case it's 5.2 seconds, but it's 6.8 in Stone Vigil, in Aurum Vale it's 9 but man if you do Sastasha it's only 1.4."

[kejakalope]

Or it could turn into something similar to the old MSR: ”A newbie? Run will be 1/4 slower. Let’s vote a dismiss.”

Do not underestimate the length which people willing to go just to skip… the minor inconvenience.

Yep. We've got that other thread going where people are out in God's good clean daylight full-voiced defending their ruining of the Alliance roulette for everyone by queueing naked and guaranteeing 23 other people have to snooze through Labyrinth of the Ancients so they don't have to actually play the game or spend any time or effort leveling a job.

[Xtro99]

I definitely agree that we should keep all of our abilities but be scaled down to the point where we literally can't deal much more damage than a low lvl player.
In one way it means we have to put more effort in doing the same dps but hell i'd rather do that rather than hit 1, 2 for the entirety of the dungeon.

And I simply disagree with the claim that it's "unfair" for low lvl players. I think one of FF XIV's biggest barriers to entry for new players is how slow the combat feels at low lvls.
I think if low lvl players see high lvl players in their dungeon doing all these cool spells, skills & rotations it's going to give them more incentive to keep going because they can see how much more fun the combat becomes later on.

I think the hardest thing about this though is the actual scaling though. They can't just scale down the damage as they already do right now. There's a lot more to take into account.

People making the claim it's going to be unfair are assuming the downscaling will be done badly and high lvl players will destroy everything and new players won't be able to do anything. That's why it's important that the scaling would be done correctly so high lvl players barely do more damage than new players even with their entire kit available. The actual balancing and downscaling of this I have no idea how they'd be able to do though. It would be really hard to do properly.

There's much more to take into account, considering we'd have like 20 more abilities that add up to DMG/Healing throughput and mitigation and let's not even delve into group buffs, availability of AoE abilities, sustainability abilities, trait modifiers and mobility. Even If you slap the 90 Character with an across the board 98% damage reduction to put it on par with a lv16, the 90 would still be leagues better than the 16 with his very basic toolset, unless, they buff or tweak mob dmg and HP pool or considerably boost the lv16's raw dmg and healing.

Idk how would that work, but it sure as heck would take much more work than the devs are apparently willing to invest into something that already has very little engagement.

[oakguy5000]

oh man this would be so great! I love doing duty finder. but playing scholar without any shields is really lame sometimes.