Can we have an actual horizontal progression?

[Patxi]

Hi,
Firstly, sorry if that is not the correct place for such feedback/discussion.
First time I am posting despite having played the game for more than 2 years now.

What I mean by horizontal progression is being able to gear up jobs at the same time.
Not reducing the amount of time it takes to gear up one specific job.

I personally play FFXIV for the job system, being able to switch from tank to healer, from healer to DPS etc.. just feels great to me. And I love raiding as well, but these two aspects are not entertwined, like, at all.

Looking at it like this, a character can have up to 19 jobs at max level.
And yet all endgame content rewards are done on a per character basis.... Why?

Why, if I want to gear up two jobs at the same time, would it make more sense to create 2 characters with different jobs rather than having rewards being separated based on the job you queue in as?

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Some simple rules could be introduced when it comes to books and coffers to change the system for the better, for example:

Considering that we have 6 different job sets

- 1 book per floor per job type / week
- 1 coffer per floor per job type / week
- if you re-clear with a job type you didn’t clear with the current week, no penalty.
- characters can open a coffer only if they didn’t open any other coffer with the same job the same week.
- ex: Receive earrings coffer and necklace coffer, open earrings coffer with SAM, can’t open necklace coffer with SAM until next reset.
- Reasoning: prevents extremely fast progression for a single job

- Increase tome of astronomy gains to 3k per week.
- only one item of each type can be exchanged per week
- ex: Buy radiant slaying ring, can’t buy anymore slaying item until next reset.

- remove upgrade materials from loot table
- add a personal upgrade coffer instead on first clears ( character ) for current week
- Reasoning: Allows players a reliable upgrade mat gain per week

### RESULTS 

- Could get up to 1 book item, 1 exchange item and 1 coffer per week per job
- Progression is capped / regulated instead of being RNG basec
- 1 upgrade mat per week
- catch up patch would actually be catch up patch, not subjobs gearing patch
- Missing out weeks would not feel as terrible
- so 4 to 7 weeks still to gear up a single job however:
- Better insurance in case of terrible luck
- Allows for horizontal progression across sidejobs
- Prevents players to penalize their other groups if they want to practice another job instead.

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Obviously this solution proposed here is not perfect and might require some tuning but I can only see benefits when it comes to horizontal progression.


PS: Like I said, my intent is not to reduce the amount of time it takes to gear up one job. My intent is to reduce the amount of time it takes to gear up multiple jobs simultaneously.

[Kabooa]

IMO, I'd argue that if you simply made accessories universal, that goes a long way to not making it trivial while also allowing you to gear up more, but not all, jobs within current content.

While you can make the argument you could do this for armor too, so long as the armor class was the same, I would look more at Savage Books and how they can be better handled. What we have is serviceable, some would even argue good in comparison to other systems, but it can be better.

So for example:

Accessories come with "Power" instead of the Main Stat. Power is simply universal main stat, added directly to your Power scores for the role you're in. Similar to how they do the expansion pre-order earrings.

We (finally) condense Skill/Spellspeed into just Haste, so now instead of having to buy 6 sets of earrings, you perhaps maybe have to only buy 2. (This is books / tomes in your pocket.)

Combine this with revamping how books drop.

Instead of having Volumes 1-4, you instead just have one singular item - We'll call it a Compendium.

You get 1 Compendium for floor 1/ 2, 2 compendiums for floor 3, and 4 for 4.

The compendium is good for any item in Savage, however, you cannot buy from a floor you haven't cleared from.

To put this into perspective - Every full clear of Savage gives you 8 Compendiums - You can buy a weapon, a chest, legs, gloves/helm/boots and change, or 2 accessories / upgrade tokens in addition to any drops you get. This also has the side effect of keeping previous floors valuable for those who do not prog at week 1 rates, instead of hitting that point where everything on the floor is a waste.

This is all, mostly, unaffecting the economy of tomestones, or demanding players rerun content if they really don't want to. The freeing up of tomestones usually devoted to accessories should provide much more free tomestones for players to pick up the preferred armor pieces.

[Patxi]

I would agree with the idea that revamping the gear system altogether into universal stats would be a way to handle it and might be simpler to maintain in the long run,
it would be however something quite massive to implement as of now imo, impacting everything from catch up patches to stats, time to get geared up per job, materia, gear to even simple thing like food and recipes, and thinks like glam options ( if you reduce the amount of sets, you reduce the amount of glam ) etc

My approach when making this thread was more about "how to implement it in the easiest way within the current system" rather than reworking the whole thing

The compendium, while being attractive in concept ( and inventory space ), I think diminishes a bit the value of higher level floors and the gear as well. Just a single clear would allow free exchange for the whole floor loot table, so people could maybe clear last floor only once and get all of the items via only farming the first floor for the remaining of the patches for example which diminishes for some the value of those items.

[Tracewood]

As much as I would LOVE this, I was shot down many times on this forum in the past.

Though with the changes to PVP, they should reconsider. Perhaps in the next season for 6.2 they could introduce PVP bounties. They would reward you with current patch Savage tier gear.

For those of us who don't have the time for Savage, this will give time restricted players something to work on off and on like the relic weapons without having to wait three patches in. However hardcore XIV that raid AND PVP will get to double dip.

Five bounties per week, All five drop a guaranteed token you save/trade for an acc/armor coffer for your job (4 for acc, 6-8 for armor, 10 for weapon). Four bounties have a random chance for a tome upgrade item/accessory/armor. The last bounty is the weapon upgrade which will have the most conditions for completion.

Four bounties have TWO conditions, with the fifth and final bounty have FOUR.

The conditions I could think of:

Defeat 10 Tanks
Defeat 10 DPS
Defeat 10 Healers
Defeat 5 combatants without getting KOed.
Defeat 20 combatants
Defeat 100 combatants (this would be on weapon bounty)
Win 3 matches in a row
Win 10 matches
Win 30 matches (weapon bounty only)
Get 10 assists
Get 50 assists
Get 100 assists (weapon bounty only)
Complete daily Frontline in Duty Finder
Win 5 matches in (current weekly PVP activity - weapon bounty only)
Rank up in Crystal series 5 times

People might argue that this can ruin normal raid and crafted armor, possibly 24 man but perhaps if they pace PVP gearing in the middle of the current raid patch it might even things out a little bit. Also I think people will still do 24 man since there will be players who don't do raiding OR PVP, but maybe the 24 man could use a little more incentive aside from tome tokens and glamour. They could raise the item level of 24 man gear to the current of the raid patch, make it a little more challenging.

[Super_Smiley]

I personally would love to gear up more than one job.

Savage Floor 1
You can get accessories/upgrades.
Only need 2 books to trade in for accessories/accessory upgrades.

Savage Floor 2
You can get 3 random pieces of Head/Arms/Feet gear.
Only need 2 books for gear.

Savage Floor 3
You can get Body/Legs/Tome Weapon & Tome Gear upgrades.
Only need 3 books for gear and upgrades.

Savage Floor 4
You can get Savage Weapon/Mount
Only need 4 books for Weapon/Mount
Only need 1 book trade in for accessories/accessory upgrades and head/arms/feet gear.

Tome requirements for gear lowered or tome cap increased.

These changes will also make players who don't have a static/friends a much better experience in Party Finder.

[Garnix]

Here is my hot take: make loot universal instead of being role based.
What is the point having different gear for each role?
For example: Why do we have Panthean Cuirass of Fending, Panthean Corselet of Maiming, Panthean Corselet of Striking, Panthean Mail of Scouting, Panthean Mail of Aiming, Panthean Robe of Casting and Panthean Robe of Healing?
Just for us to have a reason to grind?...I don't think we should waste our time this way.
Can't we have "Panthean Body", with stats, melds, and appearance changing depending on your current job?

This would also drastically improve the major issue of the storage room available in the glam dresser.

[Ransu]

I would agree with the idea that revamping the gear system altogether into universal stats would be a way to handle it and might be simpler to maintain in the long run,
it would be however something quite massive to implement as of now imo, impacting everything from catch up patches to stats, time to get geared up per job, materia, gear to even simple thing like food and recipes, and thinks like glam options ( if you reduce the amount of sets, you reduce the amount of glam ) etc

My approach when making this thread was more about "how to implement it in the easiest way within the current system" rather than reworking the whole thing

The compendium, while being attractive in concept ( and inventory space ), I think diminishes a bit the value of higher level floors and the gear as well. Just a single clear would allow free exchange for the whole floor loot table, so people could maybe clear last floor only once and get all of the items via only farming the first floor for the remaining of the patches for example which diminishes for some the value of those items.

swtor did this with mastery and it made gearing boring...

[Seraphor]

IMO, I'd argue that if you simply made accessories universal, that goes a long way to not making it trivial while also allowing you to gear up more, but not all, jobs within current content.

While you can make the argument you could do this for armor too, so long as the armor class was the same, I would look more at Savage Books and how they can be better handled. What we have is serviceable, some would even argue good in comparison to other systems, but it can be better.

So for example:

Accessories come with "Power" instead of the Main Stat. Power is simply universal main stat, added directly to your Power scores for the role you're in. Similar to how they do the expansion pre-order earrings.

We (finally) condense Skill/Spellspeed into just Haste, so now instead of having to buy 6 sets of earrings, you perhaps maybe have to only buy 2. (This is books / tomes in your pocket.)

This could be made much more simple without having to change all too much with how gear works.

Have all accessories have just the four main stats; Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence and Mind, equal amounts of each.
No substats. Either distribute the substats to left-side gear, or probably much simpler, give accessories more materia slots by default. (the latter would devalue pentamelding though, but if the next tier was built around this it wouldn't be an issue)
You can then get accessories that work for all classes, and fill them with Crit/Det materia to make them versatile, or if you want to specialise you can go with DHit/Speed. (please don't call it Haste)

[AprilHanabira]

by the time u get bis with ur bad roll, the catch-up raids come out, and the loot restriction is lifted

[Droxybrobotnik]

Horizontal progression means progression over time towards a goal. It doesn't stop being that just because it doesn't let you gear up everything in one journey, and a lot of the classes already share everything but weapons, like all healers and tanks. And if they shortened the process people would run out of things to do faster and you'd get more content draught complaints.