Endgame gearing in FFXIV

[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

[Shurrikhan]

I don't think the devs are going to change their formula and only put out very easy and very hard content with no middle ground.

Instead of Easy > Hard > Extreme > Savage > Unreal > Ultimate

First, it's hard to tell from your wording whether you are implying that I'm asking for a change to only two difficulties or that you're saying the devs already have only two difficulties.

Regardless, difficulty tiers in themselves only indirectly have anything to do with the kind of content variety I'm talking about. For burst damage to differentiate itself from simple rDPS over the total fight length (to which both contribute at a decently predictable value for a fight of given features and parameters), you need fights that aren't just constant uptime against a single threshold-less unit, etc. That doesn't necessarily have to be "very hard" (though it does at least have to be enough that sustain alone can't nicely handle whatever's being added), it just has to be more varied in its threats and the timing thereof. The same goes for utility.

The obfuscation argument has merit I think because the secondary stats just amount to a obfuscating number when it should just give you a percentage that tells you what you need to know.

I'm all for more transparent secondary stat effects and having tooltips be readable in whatever way is most intuitive to us, but that too is outside what we were just discussing... Was this intended only as a tangent?

Tying such back to the previous point of discussion, you could write a given tier set effect as "X% more damage from Y," "X additional potency for Y," "X more damage for Y," or whatever else, and any of those ways of describing the effect would still require that someone know/understand the skill's frequency, its (CD/raid buff/rotational buff) interactions, and its stat scaling. Until there's an actual trade off in terms of how the given piece handles content --and even then lasting until any short-term advantages become redundant-- adding skill-specific or conditional effects, etc., is just adding hoops to an inevitable mathematical conclusion.

That's not to say that all complication there is necessarily convolution, but there are...

• diminishing returns to increased complexity, especially if systems end up shading out each other,
• differences in the disruptive/convoluting costs of additional complexity based on where and how they're added, and
• the value to be had from an additional layer of complexity depends on how much real, palpable, and ideally satisfying choice can be generated from it.

The latter two parts are the most significant when discussing tier sets.

Tier sets' effects (+%damage to this, -%CD to that) disrupt a job's internal balance, meaning that if there is only really a single form of combat (perfect uptime, 2-minute-based, single-target, etc.) and its profile was already next to perfect, it can only be worsened by that shift in weight among its skills. For it to be a change without being a detrimental one means that there must, too, be available variety of content into which it may go (that would make the shift, even if worse on average, feel better there).

But the worse part is that a tier set is both time-limited and singular. If those changes to internal balance are significant enough to actually make adjustments to play, then that playstyle shift is forced on anyone who wants to gear through that avenue of gear acquisition (be that Savage, for instance, or weekly-currency gear, as what becomes your "tier set" for the given tier). Just to continue playing how they preferred to before, they must gear instead through the opposite means, and to play in that newly permitted way, they must likewise stick to that one particular gearing path. If the tier set has any actual impact, you essentially force new ways to play the job each tier and/or you remove half of a player's gearing opportunities.

That's why I can't agree with the idea of adding tier sets. Had you just wanted gear effects, I'd still have reminded you that, until there's a larger variety in how core combat content plays out, they'd likely be inefficient additions to customization that add more convolution than customization, but I'd agree with the mission on the whole. I just can't get behind tier sets, in particular. They seem an inherently bad idea.

[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.

[Amarande]

Stop pugging? Seriously, the answer is that simple. They are not just going to give away a guaranteed piece just because you cleared. You already get a book and if you want less rng then join a static where people work together and pass on stuff they don't need. I guarantee most of you spend more time pugging than you would playing on a "schedule" with your average static.

Yeah, try that when you're an old school nerd and for RL reasons work a full time 2nd shift job.

There used to be a ton of late night activity in XIV when I returned and rerolled in late 4.0, but all of a sudden sometime around late 4.1-early 4.2 it seemed like most of the night owls precipitously vanished and never came back and the game became all about conforming to prime time. I'm not sure what happened in early 2018 to cause that, but something apparently did. WFH and stay-at-home orders during Covid certainly made it worse too, because it basically mandated by fiat that everyone but us essential workers conform to the standard 9-5, but the trend had started long before that. Housing rollouts (4.1 and 4.2 both had one) that forced people to learn to be up supremely early to have a decent chance at all maybe? I don't know. There's the early bird wrinkle for tribal quest rollouts but that's generally considered casual enough content not to matter ...

In any case, true (ie., midnight-oil hours, as these days, starting as early as 9:30pm is considered "late night" by MMO culture now; again, I'm not sure what changed, when I was growing up "late" basically didn't start till at least when the post-primetime news came on TV ...) late night statics are rare, even before considering playstyle, temperament, and whether there's room for your role.

There's off-region play, but that involves bad ping to JP/OCE, and EU is if anything even more hardcore than NA from all I've heard.

There's also the fact that statics almost entirely seem to be a "get into one at the very beginning of the even patch" dealie, especially if you have that weird schedule to limit your choices. Trendiness has apparently also intensified (see that 1/3 of the playerbase statistic from earlier in the thread). I don't even know what sprouts, returners, general misfits, and those playing at a more relaxed pace for stress reasons are supposed to do when they hit endgame now given the pace that PF has started to acquire.

I'm thinking of moving to Crystal literally because of its casual misfits rep, honestly But seriously, something that this game desperately needs is a static culture that's accommodating to more types of player, like how WoW basically seemed to have an endgame guild for almost anyone unless you were literal cyanide (heck, there probably were guilds just for toxic people, too lol), or a lot of folks are going to continue to be stuck with PF, with the issues consistently mentioned.

[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.

[Ransu]

Yeah, try that when you're an old school nerd and for RL reasons work a full time 2nd shift job.

There used to be a ton of late night activity in XIV when I returned and rerolled in late 4.0, but all of a sudden sometime around late 4.1-early 4.2 it seemed like most of the night owls precipitously vanished and never came back and the game became all about conforming to prime time. I'm not sure what happened in early 2018 to cause that, but something apparently did. WFH and stay-at-home orders during Covid certainly made it worse too, because it basically mandated by fiat that everyone but us essential workers conform to the standard 9-5, but the trend had started long before that. Housing rollouts (4.1 and 4.2 both had one) that forced people to learn to be up supremely early to have a decent chance at all maybe? I don't know. There's the early bird wrinkle for tribal quest rollouts but that's generally considered casual enough content not to matter ...

In any case, true (ie., midnight-oil hours, as these days, starting as early as 9:30pm is considered "late night" by MMO culture now; again, I'm not sure what changed, when I was growing up "late" basically didn't start till at least when the post-primetime news came on TV ...) late night statics are rare, even before considering playstyle, temperament, and whether there's room for your role.

There's off-region play, but that involves bad ping to JP/OCE, and EU is if anything even more hardcore than NA from all I've heard.

There's also the fact that statics almost entirely seem to be a "get into one at the very beginning of the even patch" dealie, especially if you have that weird schedule to limit your choices. Trendiness has apparently also intensified (see that 1/3 of the playerbase statistic from earlier in the thread). I don't even know what sprouts, returners, general misfits, and those playing at a more relaxed pace for stress reasons are supposed to do when they hit endgame now given the pace that PF has started to acquire.

I'm thinking of moving to Crystal literally because of its casual misfits rep, honestly But seriously, something that this game desperately needs is a static culture that's accommodating to more types of player, like how WoW basically seemed to have an endgame guild for almost anyone unless you were literal cyanide (heck, there probably were guilds just for toxic people, too lol), or a lot of folks are going to continue to be stuck with PF, with the issues consistently mentioned.

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.

[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.

[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 ...

[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.