Endgame gearing in FFXIV

[Sfia]

Having played FFXIV continuously since A Realm Reborn, as much as I enjoy playing the game and the complexity increases in harder content, the gearing has become progressively more and more stale.

I want to start on a positive note and say the reliability of obtaining gear over time is a huge success. Regardless of the time frame in which this happens, the core system of guaranteed desired drops is well done. People will have varying opinions about the timeframe in which these should be achieved, but that number is more easily changed than the reward systems that currently exist (tomestones and raid tokens).
I believe it is important to maintain this structure while addressing some of the negatives that exist in the gearing systems going forward.

To name some of the current issues:

1. The rate of gear acquisition from tomestones is too slow considering the game is heavily advertised and enjoyed as a "one character can play all jobs" system.
Playing multiple roles, or even multiple jobs within the same role in some cases (looking at you caster) can result in simply taking far too long to acquire all the gear necessary to perform optimally on them. This makes gearing in patches before an Ultimate especially restrictive.
Even disregarding content which is designed around best-in-slot gear, there is a social expectation to bring the job with the highest gear. This is reinforced by ILVL restrictions on party finder increasing as the tier progresses.
This restrictive gearing timeline results in feeling like after spending a single tomestone on one job, I am locked into that job for the remainder on the progression cycle.
One of the greatest parts of the FFXIV job system is the ability to play all jobs on one character, but with the current gearing system I am limited to one role per patch, depending on what I play.

2. Substats are a problem for balance and creativity.
In the current landscape of FFXIV job design, there is an issue with damage variance from pull to pull. This is largely due to the design of both critical hit and direct hit stats, combined with the high burst damage profiles the game has trended towards.
My major gripe with substats as they currently exist is a lack of impact. There is only one job remaining in the game which has any interaction with the substats (monk).
Part of the appeal of RPG games is the character power growth, and the feel that has on gameplay. As it stands, the only feedback I get that I am more powerful as a black mage is my critical hit xenoglossy hitting for 61k instead of 60k.
Tenacity currently is completely undesired as a stat with the way incoming damage in FFXIV works. Spike damage profiles do not mesh with the low value of tenacity's defensive stats, when cooldowns are so powerful in comparison.
The final major point about substats is the lack of interaction with speed stats. Generally they are hugely undesired outside of low thresholds and then completely avoided. They create anti-synergy with the jobs abilities in many cases, and are sometimes out of the players control.

3. There is a lack of varied methods of acquiring max ILVL gear in the game.
Currently a best in slot character interacts with tomestones and the latest savage raid. Having only two sets of gear means acquiring best in slot is more restrictive than it should be. More available max item level gearsets would result in the ability to gear more jobs simultaneously, while also increasing the speed at which to obtain a total best in slot. A great example of a previous piece of content which added more gear was the Proto-Ultima sidequest in Dun Scaith.

4. This final point is much smaller, and more to do with the current savage release schedule and it's interaction with Criterion release. The Criterion dungeon's savage mode was targeted towards players who had cleared Abyssos savage early in the tier and acquired plenty of loot - unfortunately it released at the start of the 8th week meaning those wanting to go into the content immediately were not yet guaranteed certain items requiring 8 books.

I want to reiterate that the positives to the current gearing system are a huge benefit to existing and prospective players, and this post was made with the hopes that the gearing system can be even more appealing to a wider audience. Thank you for reading.

[azalynn]

[NotACapitalist]

Agree on gearing is slow in this game. It takes 8 weeks to BIS a class and that's assuming the group killed the last tier boss, which most can't in just one week.

[ReiMakoto]

I like your point on speed and i think steps should be taken to allow speed to be built on more jobs. The main way i see this happening without very broad reworks is allowing jobs with combo dots (mnk, drg, pld) to extend their dot like reapers deaths design. This makes is so if you build full speed and arrive at your dot refresh early, its not the end of the world, and after enough sustained uptime you skip an application. This doesnt account for the other kinks of speed stacking like missing the very important 2 min line up (another reason the shift to 2 mins is harmful to the game design) but baby steps.

[Johners]

Going forward I'd like to see Square Enix take a leaf out of WoW's book. For PvE gearing, Mythic+ and Raiding can reach the same peak of the item level curve entirely independently of each other and you can do high level Mythic+ keys without ever needing to raid. Likewise the inverse is true if you like raiding but don't want to do Mythic+. This would require Criterion dungeons to be fleshed out into a system that's ready at the start of each raid tier so you can enter with the crafted/normal mode gear and progress to the same need point.

In general I do think the pace of gearing is far too slow, especially if you want multiple gear sets to be as powerful as possible on multiple jobs while playing a single character. Definitely feels like it's balanced solely to keep you playing longer and subscribing for more months per raid tier... although that's a somewhat expected design decision for a subscription MMO.

[Miyuyu]

I wanna start here with saying that I largely agree with everything you say in your post. But I do want to raise a few points that I think warrant discussion when we talk about the rate of gear acquisition.

When we talk about the "speed" of gear acquisition, I think we need to think about the life-cycle of an ilvl tier. When we say that "getting alt gear is too slow" - who do we mean that it is too slow for. I think we have to be specific about this because realistically when you look at loot acquisition for BiS (for a single job), it's not really THAT slow relative to the content cycle. If we get 6.3 (and potentially the next ultimate) in December or January given a 4 month dev cycle, we likely will not see another raid tier until May at the latest. We got this raid tier on August 22nd, which meant that the gear cycle began on that day (tomestones) and savage loot unlocked the following week.

That comes out to about 9 months for a single ilvl lifespan. 630 ilvl will have been BiS for 9 months by the time we get new ilvl. Somewhere along the way, halfway through that, it will become farmable.

If you have eight to nine months to achieve BiS on multiple jobs, Square obviously is going to say that you have more than enough time to get the gear.

So then that kind of begs the question of: who is it too slow for? And the answer is players like us who want to do the new ultimate on a different job than the one we progged savage on (though by the time that comes out if you've been clearing for a while, you could realistically have two jobs BiS) or re-prog or play with friends on alt jobs after we've already cleared on our main job - or perhaps those of us who end up switching jobs mid-tier for whatever reason.

Changing the speed of gearing may benefit a small group of people far more than it benefits everyone else because the faster you make it, the sooner people will run out of goals to chase and the content lifecycle ends much faster for a lot of people. I suspect how much this impacts people depends on how many people actually play multiple jobs regularly and not just here or there. I'm not sure if that is healthy for the long-term health of the game.

I am also worried that faster gear acquisition will lock people out of PF groups faster. As you mentioned, we already see people setting high ilvls in PF pretty early on for content that doesn't require it, so it's certainly easy to imagine a world where that gets WORSE if gear acquisition is faster.

I DO believe that gearing needs to be improved. I think the tier stays locked for entirely too long. I also think the tomestone cap is a LITTLE too low for a little too long. (eg: if we unlock the tier earlier, we can raise the tomestone cap earlier). I also think there is a lot of waste when it comes to books after a certain point. I've seen some people float the idea of trading down books you don't need anymore and I think that could be a useful feature to play around with.

[Lionlicious]

Thanks for writing this, hopefully the developers get ahold of this feedback!

[Miyuyu]

I also want to add that I think we really lack a good mid-tier set like what we got with Bozja & Eureka. I think variant \ criterion dungeons were a good opportunity to give us something like that and they whiffed it.

[Moebious]

Anything that gives players more means to acquire gear, and more glams, I would highly appreciate.

[JoseiToAoiTori]

Agree with everything. One idea I've had for a while is for savage raids to drop "tokens" that can be consumed to unlock gear on a vendor similar to how you can redeem artifact gear. Consuming a hand token should unlock hand gear for every job for instance. They can expand the system to tomestones too but I also agree that substats in their current form are restrictive at best and multiple builds should be viable. I shouldn't be screwed out of playing DRG well if I have pieces with skill speed on them.