Gearing up is bad

[Thoosa]

My issue with raising the tome cap is it pushes a requirement to meet or you fall behind. Tome gear is a catch-up mechanic, not a primary means of gearing a character.

If people want to gear up as fast as possible (and let’s face it, any speed other than “right now” is going to be too slow for some,) then crafted gear really is the best starting point for the game as a whole, followed by extreme and savage drops to start filling things out.

Heck, past the first few weeks the crafted gear crashes in price so even that has its own built-in catchup mechanic.

Yup, I can see that.

They could in theory make the cap slightly bigger and separate for alt jobs? So you can’t massively go ahead on your main job but at the same time you could get the cap separately on alt jobs?

[DrWho2010]

even tho they say and allow you to play every job on one character they only really want you to play one job and gear up the one job "easier". everything else should from the devs to you be a pain in the butt to gear out as well to the same extent as your primary.

[Saraide]

not going into the whole savage aspect here, but on tome gear my point (and which people often ignore) is that the cap exists so that you do gear up over a certain timeframe and that is intentional. of course they could change it, but it is very much an intentional design decision and many people tend to ignore that and act like "just let us get grind as much as we want, theres no downside to that" which just isn't true.

first and foremost letting you gear up faster for example has an effect on how fast gear makes raids easier, it's also leads to crafted gear devaluing sooner. furthermore the amount of tomestones one can get also keeps you from burning yourself out while farming them. say they raise the cap to 900 a week, for me that would just suck because now i would feel pressured to get this very same 900 tomestones every week and no amount of "than just don't get the cap every week, not like you absolutely need them" would change that feeling. I don't claim this to be an absolute that totally has to be respected by the developers, this feeling is however every bit as valid as anyones "but i want to gear up faster".

Yea I'm not for just increasing the cap, I'd rather have that solved by reducing the cost of tome gear. Right now there is a pretty significant difference between some jobs in how long getting BiS gear takes. For example it's going to take me 7 weeks of tome cap to get all my tome stuff, meanwhile our dragoon is done already after 3 weeks because both savage pants and chest are better for him. If you try to get gear on multiple roles, that's gonna take ages then. And it's clear they know what sub stats are desirable and which ones arent. So they are not getting the balance down between how long savage gear takes and how long tome gear takes. That's the heart of the issue.

It's intended that a savage gear gets easier over a few weeks thanks to gearing up but trying to raid on multiple jobs falls out of that despite switching between jobs on a single character being encouraged by design in the rest of the game. One idea that came to my mind was to give you discounts for the tome gear on other jobs when you buy a piece of tome gear for one job.

[Akiudo]

Yea I'm not for just increasing the cap, I'd rather have that solved by reducing the cost of tome gear. Right now there is a pretty significant difference between some jobs in how long getting BiS gear takes. For example it's going to take me 7 weeks of tome cap to get all my tome stuff, meanwhile our dragoon is done already after 3 weeks because both savage pants and chest are better for him. If you try to get gear on multiple roles, that's gonna take ages then. And it's clear they know what sub stats are desirable and which ones arent. So they are not getting the balance down between how long savage gear takes and how long tome gear takes. That's the heart of the issue.

It's intended that a savage gear gets easier over a few weeks thanks to gearing up but trying to raid on multiple jobs falls out of that despite switching between jobs on a single character being encouraged by design in the rest of the game. One idea that came to my mind was to give you discounts for the tome gear on other jobs when you buy a piece of tome gear for one job.

well reducing the cost (instead of raising the cap) would still leave us at "gearing up gets faster", which yes, one can want that but people need to at least start to see the underlying implications behind such a change instead of just going "raise the cap, it sucks" as many do (not saying you do that, but that's often the tone the most upvoted "suggestions" in these threads take).

mind you i'm totally with you on the point of balancing out tome/savage gear, i would vastly prefer it if that was more uniform between classes how many tomes you spend on average. no, it doesn't need to be a perfect 1/1 but at least close to parity would be nice. while at that make at least chest/leg purchasable with 4 tomes each, really no reason to keep people from just buying the chest after clearing the final fight for 4 weeks, and maybe at 4 tomes there would at least be some value to buying the legs over an upgrade item.

discounts for second jobs may actually be a worthwhile suggestion i'll give you that, most people that really want to equip a second class most likely will do the same for a third or even fourth one so i don't see it diminishing the general "encouragement to farm tomes" all that much, but would make gearing up less of a hassle.

[van_arn]

I do like the idea of the “armory bonus but for tomestones,” but I’m not sure how I’d like to see it implemented. I don’t think I’ve ever seen adjustable prices in the game; maybe a partial refund based on how many tome items you own of a given slot?

[Akiudo]

I do like the idea of the “armory bonus but for tomestones,” but I’m not sure how I’d like to see it implemented. I don’t think I’ve ever seen adjustable prices in the game; maybe a partial refund based on how many tome items you own of a given slot?

maybe just turn it into "half price once you own a same slot item of the same or higher itemlevel" ?

not that i think they'd ever do that, but that would actually be one way to solve it. and yes this would mean that getting raid gear also would make tome gear cheaper, but realistically in a random group its every man for themselves anyways, randoms aren't gonna pass on loot just because its not BiS for their main or whatever so it wouldn't change anything there. in a static setting on the other hand it would 9/10 times still change nothing (you wouldn't give gear to someone just to cut down his tome prices if someone else actually needed the gear), if however you reached the point where literally no one really needs the gear piece in question anymore than this would actually add some additional value to loot that otherwise often feels mostly worthless to people.

[smol_cofe]

they should add gear augments to tome vendors. 200/300 for accessories fluid, 400 for armor twine and 500 for weapon coating. there are lots of tweener kind of weeks with raiding where you can have like 200-400 left over weekly tomes but the week before, that week itself, and the next week you just continue to roll low on upgrades. this could help gear progging a bit without excessively boosting every character to ilvl cap.

[Hatfright]

they should add gear augments to tome vendors. 200/300 for accessories fluid, 400 for armor twine and 500 for weapon coating.

They already add that for alliance raids coins as another catch up thingy, they probably won't sell it for tomes ever.

[smol_cofe]

that's true but the first alliance raid isn't even nearly here yet(like 3 weeks away?) and this tier is already a week shy of 2 months old.