Endgame gearing in FFXIV

[Amarande]

What does being an "old school nerd" have to do with anything? That's a weird thing to say.

Not all statics start on Tuesdays and I see plenty of recruitment posts of statics doing late night runs. Have you ever considered joining the recruitment discord? If you're only looking at the forums or PF you're not looking very hard.

I guess part of it is that I got accustomed to a very different culture overall when it came to online chat and gaming (which seems to have undergone a massive sea change that might have entirely happened in 2016, it's hard to tell because before that it still felt like oldschool was alive and well and then I spent most of 2016 struggling IRL, not getting back on my feet enough to MMO until spring of the next year). Also being socially awkward and neurodivergent doesn't seem to do me any favors these days too, while it was common enough among the old guard Xennial generation online to be much more easily accepted, nowadays gaming seems to be a regular person's activity to the point that us "spoony" types are just as awkward online as IRL

I recall joining a recruitment Discord at some point in Stormblood and not really being able to find much of anything suitable in it; I usually try to get the lay of the static land by browsing the ffxiv recruitment subreddit lately. When I mean late night, I mean the real late night (like, after 11:30PM-midnight late, and I'm also Central US time which seems not to help much either). Like I said, there seemed to be a lot more night owls, and then something happened in 2018 that suddenly made everyone need to go to bed early and I'm not even sure what.

Also Discord in general has always felt particularly awkward to me compared to previous gamer hangout venues. Servers almost invariably seem to come in only two types, the huge public ones that tend to be extremely heavily moderated (and thus particularly anxiety inducing for someone like me, and sadly I more than a few times lost my cool as a result) and tiny private ones that you have to be told about to even know they exist (and which are usually so tiny that they are largely ineffective for actual grouping, even though they are usually good places to chill socially). I feel we used to have more choice in general, but this seems to have dried up and been absorbed into the huge centralized servers (when World Visit came out the effect was especially devastating, with server cultures being lost in the merge to DC level organization instead), so now it's like you have one acceptable player mindset per Data Center that you either are forced to conform to or you're practically pushed out of content altogether ...

[Elizasylen]

I second the notion of removing piety and tenacity from gears.

[Ransu]

Gear has never been interesting in any MMO. Its always just a mathematical conclusion to what will give the best output thus being BiS. Everything else is just a false choice.

[Ivtrix]

Gear has never been interesting in any MMO. Its always just a mathematical conclusion to what will give the best output thus being BiS. Everything else is just a false choice.

gear sets in wow that altered your playstyle were enjoyable

but that is a bonus effect of the gear, not the gear itself

[Elizasylen]

Gear has never been interesting in any MMO. Its always just a mathematical conclusion to what will give the best output thus being BiS. Everything else is just a false choice.

There may be benefit to set crit/dh to have higher theoretical ceiling with increased variance and but buff DET/SkS/SpS to where it's above the mean average of Crit and DH so in theory you can have more output with Crit/DH if you're lucky but you can be unlucky with crits/dh. While SkS and DET can provide very consistent output that is just above the Crit/DH average. At least that's a decision that can be meaningfully made.

Alternatively just expect we're going to Crit/DH everything and just run with it. It's already been like this for 10 years. Just delete Tenacity already. Whatever meaningful SkS/SpS adjustment or even piety if people are into it. They can meld for it. Just Crit DH and DET on everything.

[BluexBird]

It's in their best interest to delay the rate at which players acquire the best gear possible, so that they can have more time to come out with new content.

If everyone could completely Savage and gear up all their jobs in just a month, then they'd be hard-pressed to release new Savage content faster, because those players would end up "bored" and possibly unsubscribe.

By making it so that raiders have to spend almost half a year gearing up a couple of their main characters, the company can enjoy the benefits of having their playerbase subscribed to the game. And that way, they don't have to rush out with the next content, giving them more time to work on other games, for example.

As for job flexibility and creativity... I'm sorry to say, but this is FFXIV. Your Warrior is and will play exactly the same as every other Warrior. This isn't Guild Wars 2, where you can choose your skills, weapons, and play around with masteries to completely turn your playstyle around. This isn't World of Warcraft, where the mage class can actually have 3 different playstyles (Fire, Ice, Arcane). No, this is Final Fantasy XIV. This is the game you chose to play.

Now pipe down and go hang out in Limsa until the next raid reset, so you can have A CHANCE to win a new piece of gear.

[ForteNightshade]

It's in their best interest to delay the rate at which players acquire the best gear possible, so that they can have more time to come out with new content.

If everyone could completely Savage and gear up all their jobs in just a month, then they'd be hard-pressed to release new Savage content faster, because those players would end up "bored" and possibly unsubscribe.

By making it so that raiders have to spend almost half a year gearing up a couple of their main characters, the company can enjoy the benefits of having their playerbase subscribed to the game. And that way, they don't have to rush out with the next content, giving them more time to work on other games, for example.

Except this hasn't been working. PF slowly dies off as the months drag on. Which is fine for those of us who cleared prior and are gearing maybe our second or even third job. It's still frustrating but at least we're done. For the others still progging or even attempting to get in the tier, they have a substantially smaller pool to work with. A lot of people simply lose interest playing when after two months they've barely gotten anything for one job much less two.

Speaking as someone who simply likes doing Savage PF. I'm not going to play a i610 job in week 10. So I'll either stick to the few jobs I've managed to get a lot of gear for or simply play a different game entirely. The fact Sfia has garnered 400 likes should highlight just how immensely unpopular the current gear progression is.

[Amh_Wilzuun]

Simple solution for alt: Once you get the tome piece/raid book piece once the price for that specific piece will be reduced.

[Fendred]

I've posted this elsewhere, but my suggestion would just be to change it into a purely currency based system. Either each fight rewards a fixed amount of special tomestones appropriate for the boss's position in the raid tier, or do that and have one chest. The chest when popped gives 4 random people a bonus tomestone. The objective of the system being to give people the most special tomestones from the clear and the chest being a very minor bonus.

I also like Amh's idea of making future purchases less expensive if someone has already gotten a piece for that slot.

[Colt47]

I'm going to add that trying to speed up your gearing rate by doing Savage is a pretty sour experience. After doing it for multiple tiers I can say that it is nothing but a frustrating, unfulfilling nightmare where people seem to always get at each others throats due to differences in how much time people have to learn the content, and no matter where I go to try and get the tier going, people constantly believe they are falling behind on clearing content if they don't have it down by week 4-6. Do they understand how many hours you need to grasp some of these mechanics properly and execute them?

Then you got people who get ahead of whatever static group they are in complaining about people not knowing a mechanic at all or what it does after watching a video on high concept, or trying to understand natural alignment from a vid that strictly shows a bunch of positions with people running between them, without any narration on what the effects going off are doing except in plain text.

Also going to add that the reason end game gearing is slow is because of savage. If people geared faster with savage than they'd have a higher gear score more quickly going into it, which means the bosses have to be adjusted to compensate for it, or at least that is how it would work out since they intend to have people get stuck for the most part until their gear improves. Those that clear savage quickly are outliers.