Criterion normal should drop Savage-equivalent gear.

[Colt47]

A lot of these gearing discussions IMO are a result of the choice to trim nearly every RPG aspect out of the game. As a result they've been stuck with this issue because they removed just about every possible opportunity for horizontal progression which what kept FFXI going for numerous years because there were so many different types of options available on gear.

I'm not asking them to strip it. If everyone can get max iLvL at the same patch via some method then it works out better than shoehorning everyone into savage.

[RitsukoSonoda]

I'm not asking them to strip it. If everyone can get max iLvL at the same patch via some method then it works out better than shoehorning everyone into savage.

No, What i'm saying is the reason they're essentially shoehorning people into savage is because of all the trimming they did already. The only character progression they have is job level to access skills, and item level to inflate stat numbers. FFXI offered gear with various types of options outside of just a base/sub stat boost which allowed them to continually add new endgame content without increasing the level cap or powercreeping the challenge out of old content due to stat bloat and still have players actively doing it for the rewards.

[Colt47]

No, What i'm saying is the reason they're essentially shoehorning people into savage is because of all the trimming they did already. The only character progression they have is job level to access skills, and item level to inflate stat numbers. FFXI offered gear with various types of options outside of just a base/sub stat boost which allowed them to continually add new endgame content without increasing the level cap or powercreeping the challenge out of old content due to stat bloat and still have players actively doing it for the rewards.

Ah okay. Yeah I misread what you were trying to say there. I'm not even sure I'd call it trimming as much as what they have always been doing to begin with. Even in shadowbringers people couldn't get gear on the level of savage until the very final patch, but thankfully because the stat system was completely broken back then, the savage was doable even on 6 hours a night thanks to huge mana pools, really high HP, and other factors. When they did the stat adjustment they universally nerfed players quite heavily for the sake of streamlining and making balancing easier. In the process, it showed that they have a much more difficult time managing the difficulty then they let on. It seems like ages ago but p3s was a rather big show stopper for a lot of people due to the birds and color of arena, the entirety of the second tier was not properly scaled so it came down to RNG to clear it with the crafted gear. Even post nerf it was still harder to meet dps checks than even the current tier. And this current tier has so many party KO tactics that server related issues can prevent a group from clearing p12s p1. Limit cut is just really fickle depending on the pattern and where people are standing.