Thread: Coming In Version 3.0?

Originally Posted by bobbygunz

I was talking about the recent changes in design philosophy since Yoshi took over. You do realise I said Yoshi "looked to WoW" for inspiration, I never said FFXIV is exactly like WoW in every single way.

Pronouns don't mean much without being provided with context. If "they" means Yoshi in your post, as opposed to the game's original dev team, then that's news to me. To be honest, I actually assumed that you were referring to both because the game is still keeping a lot of the original team's work despite Yoshi's many additions. In the end, FFXIV has been a team effort between the two. Slapping "2.0" onto it doesn't change that fact.

That's beside the point though.

Originally Posted by bobbygunz

if it was up to Yoshi, I bet crafting would be an afterthought in FFXIV as much as it was in WoW too. I mean, crafters have already been heavily marginalised after the whole instance raid era of FFXIV's lifetime. In reality, the change to crafting is evidence that it is like WoW.

Which is exactly why crafting is in the process of being revamped with so many new and difficult synths being added to the game lately. It had been stated that U/U gear was only supposed to be as good as double-melded crafted gear. The fact that crafting has since been marginalized was a completely unintended and unexpected consequence, and they're obviously unhappy about it. Either that, or they had the implementation of high-difficulty synths in mind while developing the new U/U gear and they just couldn't get it all out of the gate at the same time. Either case can be evidenced by the fact that they're now making visible efforts to bring crafting back up to par with everything else with the release of more powerful recipes. Seeing as the latest batch of recipes is all class-specific, not to mention only for DoM/DoW, I have serious doubts that they're anywhere near done, and I will not be at all surprised when we see more recipes being added to give crafting an even bigger push in 1.23.

Originally Posted by bobbygunz

Besides, there definitely is a linear gating and vertical scaling type situation happening with FFXIV at the moment anyway with the Primal fights getting increasingly difficult (well, or so S.E. wishes).

I'll try to ignore that you've argued against your own point in your parenthesis.

There's a lot going on to explain the variations in difficulty here. The game has undergone MASSIVE changes since Ifrit was released, and even since Moogles were released. Player abilities are no longer balanced the same way as they were back then, nor is player power calculated the same way as it was when those fights were first released. Go ahead and throw into the equation that seven new jobs were released since Ifrit was released as well. Now consider how despite all of this, the fights have not been re-tuned in order to adapt to all of these enormous changes. This is what has resulted in them becoming easier over time. Ifrit and Moogles didn't get easier because we earned more power over the past six months; we've just been re-tuned while the game's enemies haven't. Take a look at how much easier leveling has become as an example. Even before reaching max level, we're consistently much more powerful than we used to be.

As for Garuda being INTENDED to be more difficult than the somewhat easy fights that the other two Primals have become, this is easily explained by SE's encounter designer trying out some new formulas before 2.0 is launched. Since the formula that was used in the development of Ifrit and Moogles has been made outdated by all of the game's balance changes since their launch, the encounter designer is now in a position where they must develop a new, more difficult formula for tuning future fights, in order to restore the level of difficulty that is intended for this game. Garuda was just a guinea pig for this. Note, however, that even though Garuda was expected by the encounter designer to be more difficult, she was still killed much, much faster than Ifrit was on release. While they're still trying to figure out how to give us that challenge back after all of the recent changes that the game's undergone, they haven't quite nailed it yet, so expect a more difficult encounter in 1.23.

This attempt to restore the game's difficulty is far from gating content though. Gated content results through better rewards being given to players during progression, not through fights simply being made harder. Garuda does not require you to have weapons from Ifrit or Moogles in order to have a chance at success, and go ahead and try to convince me that you'll suddenly be equipped to take on new, significantly more difficult content in the next patch simply by upgrading from Ifrit weapons to Garuda weapons. The weapons from Primals are all intended to be side-grades, only serving to prove the point that this game is not being designed to be linear, tiered, or gated.

Also, not to say that Garuda is as challenging as SE was aiming for, but some fights can be intended to serve a greater challenge than others purely for the sake of offering skilled players a fun challenge to take down. As long as rewards aren't increasing in value from these fights, all it means is the fight is more challenging than others. It doesn't have to mean anything more than that.