An end to the gear treadmill

[ForsakenRoe]

Couldn't post before cos daily post limit, but I'd agree on the crafted upgrade, but I'd say having 5 guaranteed slots is enough of a boost, no need for extra ILVL too. 5 slots means 5 grade X materia instead of the mix of X/IX we have now, and on every gear piece that'd add up quick. If we look back at ARR crafts that had an equipment as the ingredient, something like that could work. Craft a 'upgrade token' (expert craft), and then do a recipe that uses 'upgrade token' and 'piece of crafted gear' as the ingredients, and is another expert craft, that way if you botch it, you risk losing the gear piece

'Unlock this slot' purchases with tomestones would be interesting, and doubly so if it applied to buying raid gear with books, as it'd allow SE to have a pseudo-item-reclaim system in place which would help alleviate glamour dresser issues (for example, people holding onto Eden gear cos it's a bit of a pain to re-obtain, would be able to throw it out and just reclaim it from the vendor whenever they like)

As for Piety, I've said in other places I'd just merge DET's effect into PIE and TEN, delete DET for being bland and boring, lock DHit to DPS role only, and then separate Crit into it's two component parts so it doesn't have such a chokehold on our gearing. Then we'd potentially be able to see actual gearing choice for once, like as an example, healers could go for Crit Rate and Crit Strength for a 'higher peaks, lower troughs' build, taking advantage of doing big damage in buff windows, or they could go for a more sustained damage profile via Spellspeed and Piety. It seems weird to me that SE's got this problem with damage variance thanks to Crit, and just... leaves Crit to double dip on scaling, making it the best stat on basically every class, every expansion...?

[Koros]

Couldn't post before cos daily post limit, but I'd agree on the crafted upgrade, but I'd say having 5 guaranteed slots is enough of a boost, no need for extra ILVL too. 5 slots means 5 grade X materia instead of the mix of X/IX we have now, and on every gear piece that'd add up quick. If we look back at ARR crafts that had an equipment as the ingredient, something like that could work. Craft a 'upgrade token' (expert craft), and then do a recipe that uses 'upgrade token' and 'piece of crafted gear' as the ingredients, and is another expert craft, that way if you botch it, you risk losing the gear piece

'Unlock this slot' purchases with tomestones would be interesting, and doubly so if it applied to buying raid gear with books, as it'd allow SE to have a pseudo-item-reclaim system in place which would help alleviate glamour dresser issues (for example, people holding onto Eden gear cos it's a bit of a pain to re-obtain, would be able to throw it out and just reclaim it from the vendor whenever they like)

As for Piety, I've said in other places I'd just merge DET's effect into PIE and TEN, delete DET for being bland and boring, lock DHit to DPS role only, and then separate Crit into it's two component parts so it doesn't have such a chokehold on our gearing. Then we'd potentially be able to see actual gearing choice for once, like as an example, healers could go for Crit Rate and Crit Strength for a 'higher peaks, lower troughs' build, taking advantage of doing big damage in buff windows, or they could go for a more sustained damage profile via Spellspeed and Piety. It seems weird to me that SE's got this problem with damage variance thanks to Crit, and just... leaves Crit to double dip on scaling, making it the best stat on basically every class, every expansion...?

Yeah the augmented crafter gear that drops from khloe can easily be turned into expert/challenge recipes.

Personally though I want to see utility become important again in this game so I would like piety and tenacity to remain relevant in their current state. But that might be a pipe dream since it would require fundamentally rethinking encounter design.

[ThaCa]

A lot of interesting ideas by OP.

I would love to see at very least some expansion to the overall gearing, like use previous Savage bis as starting point for new tier and the base crafted set hitting the same ilvl and then expand the middling ilvls with secondary craft set (harder materials etc. maybe expert recipes), potentially gear from criterions, PvP, eventually upgradeable Alliance pieces (whether by crafts or savage drops) and so on.

But revising the materias into something meaningful and potentially adding another consumable or two would be great.

[Jeeqbit]

Main Stats

A careful balance is needed here: players should be expected to reach 90-95% of the maximum power boost from this system, equating to around a 2-3% DPS increase and 5% HP increase by casually engaging in a wide variety of content, with the last 5-10% of the boost coming from midcore grinds (something that takes around 20 hours of grinding altogether at most).

It works in Delubrum Reginae at least. We can grind skirmishes to increase our main stats and it wasn't a significant issue that some players could be more powerful than others. It just made up for the players that weren't playing well (y'know, essences and deaths). The bozja system even proves SE is capable of making this, they just always choose to contain it to those areas.

Even with the current system, it's not a significant issue that some players can do more damage than others due to savage gear or just not being lazy with gear.

So it should not actually be a problem to have systems that can increase DPS by 2-3%, health by 5% and so on.

The only reasons I can think that they keep it the current way is to keep it extremely simple and also the argument that people just choose what is on the balance etc.

I suppose they also need to be really careful not to go too far with it like Blizzard did that synthesized the WoW refugee crisis in their, what was it called... Bfa expansion. The progression system there resulted in a lot of people coming to this game for years. The worst part was apparently RNG, and I didn't like the RNG in Eureka Pyros stats either, because it wastes my time if I did all that work for worthless stats.

I just want to work toward goals that aren't wasting my time like the Cluster farms in Bozja which I could mathematically calculate how long it would take, and schedule the day I would do it and how I would split it up around life events (such as eating), or the stat buff stacks in bozja where I could do the same thing.

[Koros]

A lot of interesting ideas by OP.

I would love to see at very least some expansion to the overall gearing, like use previous Savage bis as starting point for new tier and the base crafted set hitting the same ilvl and then expand the middling ilvls with secondary craft set (harder materials etc. maybe expert recipes), potentially gear from criterions, PvP, eventually upgradeable Alliance pieces (whether by crafts or savage drops) and so on.

But revising the materias into something meaningful and potentially adding another consumable or two would be great.

I have a feeling the developers are reluctant to add more gear sets at the in-between ilvls, but I honestly think most raiders wouldn't mind so it might be a JP thing.

It works in Delubrum Reginae at least. We can grind skirmishes to increase our main stats and it wasn't a significant issue that some players could be more powerful than others. It just made up for the players that weren't playing well (y'know, essences and deaths). The bozja system even proves SE is capable of making this, they just always choose to contain it to those areas.

Even with the current system, it's not a significant issue that some players can do more damage than others due to savage gear or just not being lazy with gear.

So it should not actually be a problem to have systems that can increase DPS by 2-3%, health by 5% and so on.

The only reasons I can think that they keep it the current way is to keep it extremely simple and also the argument that people just choose what is on the balance etc.

I suppose they also need to be really careful not to go too far with it like Blizzard did that synthesized the WoW refugee crisis in their, what was it called... Bfa expansion. The progression system there resulted in a lot of people coming to this game for years. The worst part was apparently RNG, and I didn't like the RNG in Eureka Pyros stats either, because it wastes my time if I did all that work for worthless stats.

I just want to work toward goals that aren't wasting my time like the Cluster farms in Bozja which I could mathematically calculate how long it would take, and schedule the day I would do it and how I would split it up around life events (such as eating), or the stat buff stacks in bozja where I could do the same thing.

Good point on Delubrum. I don't think it's that bad an idea for normal content. For Savage perhaps they can just disable those increases

[Jeeqbit]

Overall I wouldn't mind it working like this.

As it is now, I just try to cling to what little scraps we have in this area. I get new gear when it's available. I meld materia asap. I buy the latest food and use it everywhere, including dungeons (unlike 99% of players). I got things such as the stat increases in Bozja knowing it is ultimately pointless because it won't be used anywhere else (although it would become obsolete after a new expansion or earlier anyway). But I feel that gear just progresses really fast in some cases that it doesn't give you much time to appreciate what work you put into your previous gear.

I set goals for myself such as mounts, to give me a reason to do a variety of content and make up for the lack of sensible achievements (such as the ones involving 10,000, 100,000 or a million of certain activities).

But all of this is self-created content and goals unlike your suggestions (although some others do these things too to create goals for themselves as well).

At some point I think developers need to ignore that there will be a meta.

I agree because some people won't choose the meta anyway. It's like how when we had stance dancing some people would choose to play defensively 100% of the time and do less damage and they must have been able to read this stance reduces their damage. Or some people do actually stack Tenacity still.

We currently have different BiS sets for most jobs that people can choose based on their preferences for comfort, speed, and need to play multiple jobs. People will math out the degree of personalization, but if it's well-balanced then there will still be a choice players can make that will be competitive with the absolute best pick.

I'm glad that it's gone this way where personalization is promoted a lot now, such as comfortable skill speeds. I feel that a lot of people still seek out what is "best" no matter what, to the point of searching for a post they can trust that tells them what is BiS, ignoring all the "depends" stuff. But for as many players that do that, there are going to be plenty that just do whatever they want.

In Bozja there are absolute best picks but most casual players would bring something like Regen or Shell even if it's mathematically actually extremely terrible because they like healing themselves or having the feeling of applying buffs on their party members

This is another example like how people used to use tank stance that reduced outgoing damage. Also like how healers could spam their attack and only use off-globals, but you will see some of them casting cure and adlo constantly on WHM and SCH, and if you talk to them about it some of them are aware of what they are doing and just like playing that way.

[CStrife912]

See Koros… if you made posts like this mostly then people wouldn’t be going after you and your alts…. But because you have conditioned the community in a sort of boy who cried wolf situation we look at these posts and are like ‘are you being genuine here’ for how many times you bait and troll.

But to the actual topic I do like a lot of the ideas present here especially in materia and the collectible tiers with shanty etc nice idea there. However like others pointed out the numbers are off but for an example it’s a good idea. I also think deep dungeon should be less floors and more complicated floors. Heck could even take into account more of FF12s danger spots which do random status effects etc and you could use lost actions to have them briefly appear.

[Koros]

Overall I wouldn't mind it working like this.

I think there is a cultural shift where people are OK playing slightly suboptimally now. Back in Stormblood people stuck to the meta much more closely even if the meta was actually fairly balanced (unlike HW). But FFLogs switching to rdps changed the community perception a great deal.

Honestly only week 1 raiders need to care about the meta. The thing about Bozja is that it actually encouraged off-meta picks because of the content design. Tenacity can be valuable if you're a tank who needs to soak hits from a lot of mobs. Healing non-stop can be valuable if you're in a party with no healer. I feel like only in DRS and BA were actual meta picks enforced, but even then there's build diversity where a tank could have multiple viable builds depending on their role in the raid, which promotes replayability.

Genuinely, DRS and BA are much better raid content for raiders than Savage raids these days IMHO.

[User202503201232]

Bumping this epic thread

[Aneshda]

All we need is exactly one gear set per expansion, which we players can level up and customize over the course of the expansion. For example, with rare materials that can be collected, fished, found in treasure maps, dungeons, trials, raids, world bosses, and so on. With this material, you can then improve the armor or even change details of its appearance. Additionally, the armor should be fully dyeable from a certain level onwards. SE doesn't put any effort into creative new armor sets anymore anyway; 90% of the sets are copies, just in a different color with a different name. That way, SE would have more time to focus on other things. Jewelry + weapons & shields should be available as usual.