Final Fantasy XIV's Trinity System is Broken

[KisaiTenshi]

Impossible because the game runs on hand outs. rewards for everything rewards for nothing. and it throws out so many rewards it destroys every other aspect of the game to.

deep dungeons are a perfect example here. they try to encourage exploring by throwing in those sacks to be found in random rooms. yet they give players so many sacks and rewards that all that happens is the market boards get flooded with stuff and crashes the value of rewards so heavily that players completely ignore them and literally just activate the portal and go go go.. also destroys the economy for craters and gatherers, because suddenly something can cost 100k to make but be worth a whopping 1or2k on the markets.

the same thing happnens in dungeons even at the highest end. where a treasure chest is literally right there in the corner of that room but gets ignored because its contents aren't worth taking 3 or 4 seconds to run over and open..

Retainer ventures and stuff aswell when they add new stuff to the Retainer pool it destroys the economy omy because suddenly things that take a fair bit of time and effort to craft nose dive to literally a couple of hundred gils because there's thousands of retainers flooding the game with them.

...

and i know yoshi has said that he regrets dumbing the game down so much and wants to change directions but honestly i think its too late. this lazy mode gameplay has been so ingrained that anything that deviates will get so much backlash.. all you have to do is look at any instance where there even the smallest hint of an increase in difficulty to see it.

If there are no rewards, people won't run them, but if the rewards are random, and frequently garbage (I'm sorry but gacha-style rewards are garbage) then people are just going to run them for the experience to level and then never touch them. This game already "Bloats" your inventory with the raid drops as it is. You would think that the game would just have a separate "raid token currency" like it does with the beast tribes, so players don't end up with all this junk when they're dropped into a roulette.

Fixing the game economy is an entirely other discussion. I'd make the argument that the way to fix that is to just make the marketboard, retainers and housing work at the data-center level rather than the way it works now which would require visiting every server on every data center to find the best price. But it would also require crafters to actually "craft", to supply NPC vendors with the items they sell to players. Not this "collectible" system which exists to level the crafter but does nothing for the game economy. Imagine for a moment that only crafted HQ gear was available, and tomes/tokens gear was level 1 glamor gear only. it would unfortunately only reward people for buying the maximum retainers, so maybe it's best left as it is.

That said, let's go back to the trinity conversation. My point in the last post was that perhaps there could be dungeons that the goal isn't "clearing it" but exploring it, thus you can only open certain doors or paths with certain jobs. You could only clear certain enemies or bosses with a certain job in the party. If you wanted to solo it, you would need to re-visit it with every job once to clear every path and get every reward. And if you wanted the rewards again you could NG+ it, but you have to get all the rewards from it before you can reset it.

Take for example how Totorank originally was:


Versus now:

[Shikiseki]

IMO - even if you abolish the trinity system and turn all kits into dps + unique skills to a job, that doesn't change the fact that they failed to design healers (and tanks to a certain degree) engaging and unique enough within their own role - like imagine every caster having the exact same core rotation or design, ppl would rage!
And even higher incoming damage won't really solve anything as you'll be shifting your glares into just cure spam...

I'd personally get rid of the trinity at this point and distribute tank/healing/support skills evenly across jobs that would suit them thematically while having all jobs build as dps at it's core design philosophy.
While this would work in premade runs, matchmaking via dutyfinder very difficult.

[Dzian]

That said, let's go back to the trinity conversation. My point in the last post was that perhaps there could be dungeons that the goal isn't "clearing it" but exploring it, thus you can only open certain doors or paths with certain jobs. You could only clear certain enemies or bosses with a certain job in the party. If you wanted to solo it, you would need to re-visit it with every job once to clear every path and get every reward.

The thing is it's very much a case 9f not seeing the forest because too busy looking at a tree.. it's all about the bigger picture..

The start of your post you said if there are no rewards people won't run the content. True. But it all ties in together with the economy and other stuff those rewards have to seen as valuable to be deemed as worth it or be an incentive.. and this is where deep dungeons provided the perfect example. In the first days the value of rewards from those sacks is very much worthwhile and everyone would run to every corner of every room. To explore and find them. But after the initial days when the markets are flooded with all the rewards they'll value plummets and so does the incentive to explore those rooms. The rewards for doing so are deemed not worth it.

How are you going to incentivise players to run and explore that content without valuable rewards..

Rarity is valuable. That's why when there's a shiny new mount you often see people showing it off because it's rare and perceived as valuable.. but then they inevitably add unsliced and let everyone have it effortlessly and you'll almost never see anyone use that mount ever again because everyone has it its perceived as common and worthless..

Rng is no bad thing as long as you can mitigate extreme bad fortune. Somehow. Ex primal for example have rng rewards but also mitigate bad fortune by providing a token you can save up and trade in. The biggest issue there is players grind the hell out of it because often it's basically the only thing to do that patch.

Everything is connected then trinity system the economy the reward structure not just items but gameplay. The jobs you can't really stand out to much for playing well becausendevs are so afraid to punish players who don't. Which is why something like landing a positional has no weight or Impact. Because can't punish a player for missing it. And by extention can't reward a player for hitting it.

[KisaiTenshi]

Everything is connected then trinity system the economy the reward structure not just items but gameplay. The jobs you can't really stand out to much for playing well becausendevs are so afraid to punish players who don't. Which is why something like landing a positional has no weight or Impact. Because can't punish a player for missing it. And by extention can't reward a player for hitting it.

People who played 1.0 (or even other games with other kinds of dungeon design) have experienced more interesting things to do. But just about every MMORPG out there focuses on DPS. Even the gacha games do this. You can have a healer and a tank in the party, but all that happens is the opponents kills the healer first, the tank can only grab one of the incoming hits.

All-DPS content is exceptionally boring because that means the dungeon only needs to be designed for boss burn, everyone makes a bee line to the boss room, and then uses whatever nuke they brought into the dungeon. Basically it replaces strategy and choreography with brute force.

Moggle Mog, and the post-HW story with the Warriors of Darkness are the only fights in the game that insist on you fighting the opponents in a specific order or you fail the fight. That said nearly dungeon and trial in the game is a single boss, and a few trash mobs that sometimes appear in the boss room. That part of combat design probably needs a revamp, boss+2 adds that can't stand next to each other, and the adds explicitly ignore the tank, thus giving the DPS something they have to actually focus on, and the healer to use their single-target heals.