Endgame gearing in FFXIV

[EnigmaticDodo]

Using poetic/token to buy role token thats weekly capped. yes.
Poetic uncapped.

[Elizasylen]

I get that left side can be left separate because of glam and individual class identity. But why can we have universal right sides.

Hell every expansion we even get an universal earring. So just unify all of the right sides across all the jobs.
You know what that also free up all the armory inventory for the left side.

[Illmaeran]

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.

I agree, a slot token would be a good solution to this issue. The OP's point about gearing up multiple jobs per tier being essentially unachievable is valid and goes against the One Character, All Jobs paradigm. Having a single token give all sub-sets of gear for that slot at once seems a bit too fast at 9 weeks to get all slots filled, 10 if you can have two of the same ring (I don't raid so don't know). Perhaps letting a player get 3 generic tokens per lockout to redeem however they want would work well. That would let people get a full set of gear every three weeks for a total of 21 weeks, or just over five months, to fill out all slots for all roles (Fending, Maiming, Aiming, etc). It may be less, I can't remember how much overlap jewelry has. A scheme like this would allow people to gear up secondary jobs relatively quickly to give their group some flexibility in composition while also keeping the upgrade drip-feed going at a rate that's still exciting enough to encourage long-term farm groups.

Then we have to look at what an RPG is, and who plays it. This actually affects casual players more than raiders, because those who are casual(In this context, I refer to players not doing savage raids.) have it even worse: Tomestones. These take forever to get, 450 per week, and god forbid if the game we played were to have one of its main qualities about playing multiple jobs on one character it would be a huge slog to actually get gear on most jobs in a timely manner. Savage players aren't AS concerned about this because they DO have savage gear (bis isn't 100% necessary for ultimate, it just stacks all cards in your favor so running non-optimal pieces is still valid just not sought after or desired).

Now, one can make the argument:
"But Mia, they casuals don't need that higher item level gear. The content they do doesn't require it!" and while in essence, it would be true, who plays an RPG and wishes to live in a stalemate for for 7 months with gear? RPG's and especially games with items with increasingly higher stats, everyone aims to get stronger and stronger.

I agree wholeheartedly with this. I don't raid, so tomestones are the only reliable means of improving my gear. Sadly, the low rate of acquisition and knowing that come X.5 I'll be able to get the BIS tomestone gear is very demotivating. Why should I bother grinding all those time-gated tomestones when I'll be grinding them out come X.5? I understand the philosophy of wanting to spread out top-tier tomestones over time, but Poetics and the mid-tier tomestone should have their rate of acquisition increased and caps removed. There are seven gear sets each so the left side alone is 35 pieces to gear all types, not to mention the right side stuff. I'm the kind of player that wants to have a max level job for each role and have them all well geared even if I never play them except to level during the next expansion.

I haven't bothered this time around since the top-tier non-raid tomestone gear's an ever moving target and takes so long to accomplish. The irony of the situation is even though I'm "only doing roulette/DF" content and don't need top-tier gear, the difficulty in getting full sets as tiers increase has caused me to stop doing content when it's the tomestones themselves that are the reason to do the content to get ever better gear. In general I could care less about the glamours, I just want to progress my character's gear at a rate that will let me complete each set before the next tier comes out rather than just sit back, not engage in content, and wait for the time to do the big push to prepare for the next expansion.

I enjoy the game a lot and generally find something to do on a daily basis, but I'm not as engaged with the game now as I am when there's a meaningful goal or means of improving my character at a sustainable rate. I'd gladly do my roulettes every day if I felt it would have a meaningful impact on my character's progression, even if it only means gearing out various jobs and/or my retainers with gear. As it stands now, grinding PvP to get the rank 25 reward each series is about the most significant thing for me and that's only because they're time-limited items. Other than that, the majority of my play time is doing little, non-progression, things and sitting in venues chatting with friends.

[Rolder50]

I agree, a slot token would be a good solution to this issue. The OP's point about gearing up multiple jobs per tier being essentially unachievable is valid and goes against the One Character, All Jobs paradigm. Having a single token give all sub-sets of gear for that slot at once seems a bit too fast at 9 weeks to get all slots filled, 10 if you can have two of the same ring (I don't raid so don't know). Perhaps letting a player get 3 generic tokens per lockout to redeem however they want would work well. That would let people get a full set of gear every three weeks for a total of 21 weeks, or just over five months, to fill out all slots for all roles (Fending, Maiming, Aiming, etc). It may be less, I can't remember how much overlap jewelry has. A scheme like this would allow people to gear up secondary jobs relatively quickly to give their group some flexibility in composition while also keeping the upgrade drip-feed going at a rate that's still exciting enough to encourage long-term farm groups.

Perhaps you could have the bosses drop the tokens as suggested but only have the token vendor give 620 gear (or similar depending on tier)? Then have the raid bosses drop the upgrade item, or the 24 man on off patch like normal. That way you can get full 620 gear for alts easy, but getting them up to 630 would still take a little bit of farming. Of course, if I were to do this, I would slightly increase the drop rates on the upgrade items, add em to a couple more bosses like have one of each drop off the last floor or whatnot.

[ReynTime]

10 pages in this was probably already suggested:

Don't increase tome caps. That would add more time required to gear up, which wouldn't make alt gearing that much better. Rather than increase the cap they should decrease the prices... The grind is the same as it is, but you would take half (?) the time to gear up your first choice of role before being able to work on a secondary.

[Deveryn]

10 pages in this was probably already suggested:

Don't increase tome caps. That would add more time required to gear up, which wouldn't make alt gearing that much better. Rather than increase the cap they should decrease the prices... The grind is the same as it is, but you would take half (?) the time to gear up your first choice of role before being able to work on a secondary.

They're not going to decrease prices either. They might consider providing a reward for putting in the work to gear up completely, which is what I'm proposing elsewhere.

[Absimiliard]

how smug to not notice he edited it after I posted, but please continue.

I did notice. His edit was obvious BS.

If your reaction was one of dis pleasure, which it seems to have been, then you appear to be misjudging who, exactly, my post made an insinuation about.

[Blood_Blossoms]

Agree it's to slow in some way but can also be too fast. for me it lacks ways of getting gear just very stale for me at this point I kind of want more content with more ways to get same gear within sort same time frame.

[Anemoshi]

Gearing alone is truly such an investment of both time and effort. People who have that time and energy might not see the problem with that. Tomestone capping alone takes a long time.

Now, I'm a casual player, but I play consistently because I'm a completionist, I'm always grinding away at multiple features of the game. I don't have a true need to get BiS gear, and I'm usually more interested in getting gear for the purpose of glamour or just the satisfaction of having a high item level.

That being said, the sheer amount of grinding that goes into getting tomestone gear is legitimately a lot. I often end up waiting until the next round of tomestone gear is cycled in and the old tomestones become easier to obtain in larger amounts, and then there's no weekly cap at all.

I think that duties should award a bit more tomestones. At the very least, reaching the weekly cap should be a bit quicker if it's still necessary for some reason for tomestone gear to take a longer amount of time to obtain every piece.

[Sarnix]

good take ♥