Loot suggestion: Turn the random job-specific weapon into an additional weapon coffer

[Deo14]

Strange take.

If you consider an extra randomized weapon a "cheap trick", what is your preferred vision for Savage loot distribution and gearing process?

I don't do savage, so keep in mind that my opinion/idea weights fraction of the someone who actually does that. My only experience is doing p1s and p2s for few weeks in PF, and I tried p3s few times for lols.


Realistically:

Remove shared loot, need/greed/pass was outdated on release, just do what every modern game does and make personalized loot, it doesn't even need to be buffed, instead of book for everyone and 4 items in chest, everyone could get 1 book and 50% chance to get item and so on.

You can refine it further by removing RNG and give guaranteed item every 2nd clear, or just buff it (there are 19 jobs and 7 gearsets anyway) and give 1 book and 1 item for everyone. There's problem that it might be item you don't need, but hey, PF already works this way, you just need on everything and hope you get anything at all, this would only even up the gap between statics and PF.

Or if you want to make it super clean and fair, keep only books and scale them up (10x more books per clear, but gear also costs 10x more), so if you clear with 8/8 people, you get 10 + 10 books, but if 1-4 people already cleared that week, you get 10 + 5 books. Then you just buy upgrade tokens/gear for books and you're done. Would it feel lame and sterile if you cleared and there was no chest? Probably, but relics are already reduced to speaking to NPC and giving it 1500 tomes, so I think this ship has already sailed.


Ideal scenario, which would make me give savage a second chance:

Stop savage from being primary way to get gear, it makes no sense to gear up, just so you can clear exact same content, but easier next week. That gear can be used for ultimates of course, but someone doing savage doesn't necessary mean they'll go for ultimates, and there are 3 tiers and only 2 ultimates anyways.

Keep gear as loot in savage just as secondary way of gearing. Make better ways to gear up, you have EXs which give only pretty much a catch up weapons and ~1% chance for mount, you have V&C which have no meaningful rewards, you have 2 types of tomes, you have crafters and gatherers which only have something interesting to do in the first week of tier, maps which are only used to farm material for glam, you have Hunts, FATEs, whatever. There's plethora of ways to make BiS gearing not only available for more people, but to make it much more diverse and interesting. My idea is that you should gear up before you start doing one of the hardest content in the game, not while you're doing it. This might also mean that tier would need to be released with much bigger offset than 1 week, but is it really a problem? We already get content like EO, V&C on .X5, would it be such a big deal if release of savage and this content was swapped, so everyone has time to gear themselves up?

Put some rewards in savage which are actually meaningful and won't be worthless in 8 months. I suggest getting inspired by GW2's raid rewards (only rewards, don't get inspired by their raid design). You should make gil by raiding, not losing it on pots and food. Raids should drop unique stuff and material, just like maps do, which are fully marketable and raiders can sell them to make profit, people who don't do savage will just buy it. This can be anything, furniture, material for glam, regular glam, whatever, you can expand it however you want, there are endless possibilities, you can make more long term progression, like legendary armor in GW2 (even though I can bet that FFXIV players will have mental breakdown if you make something unique to raids, but you can still just make it marketable).

That's about it, those are just quick, not very thought out suggestions. Problem with gearing and savage is that it is very vertical and players just run on endless treadmill. There's nothing meaningful in savage loot, even if you wanted whole dyeable savage gear set for glam purposes, then you just wait for .18/.38/.58 patch, because why would you waste your opportunity by getting non-BiS pieces of gear.

Well actually the RNG is removed when you take away the RNG weapon drop.

Also where is the cheap trick anyway?

Giving a second, fixed weapon drop will just shorten the lifespan of the content. And I can ask you the same question. If you just want the weapon as fast as possible so you don't have to do the content again - is it even worth doing in the first place? Is it even fun? Seems you would rather spend your time doing other things instead.

There will always be RNG with shared loot system. And exactly, is it worth doing this in the first place? It's not, which is why I don't do savage. Put something meaningful as a reward and I'll give savage a second try.