Please no more levels.

[AmorfaVex]

And that illusion goes right out the window when we kill a god one moment and get murdered by a crab the other.



The issue with DT isn't levels or absence of levels, it's the lack of combat interruptions and plenty more. There were multiple places where a personal instance would have been fitting, but we didn't get them.



It's not about the difficulty of leveling, but how the pattern they keep slapping on more and more levels only serve to be a self destructive feature to the game as a whole the longer it goes on.

1) you're mixing story with progression. SE shouldnt have pulled the worst threat in a universe card out if it wasnt. Unfortunately, you cant retcon the story now. Or can you?

2) remove leveling from DT and see what fans would say. Sure, there are people that view it as a social club and focus on glams and roleplay. But the meat and bones of this fanbase are gamers that enjoy RPG/MMO style play. When someone caps a job at 100 what do they do? Most move on and level the next job. When there are no more jobs to level, they play another game.

3) There are games that dont have leveling. Maybe the sims would be more your speed? Not trying to be a jerk here, but this is the nature of a CRPG.

[Rhysati]

I agree with this. But look where we are now, with people complaining jobs did not change enough in DT.

This is because the current job design sucks. People wanted them to fix the issue that constant homogenization and pruning has caused. Instead they just did more pruning and gave people a new ability they don't need. Almost ever class is the same as it was the entire last expansion.

[koko-on-da-forumz]

There has been no sense of progression in this game for a long, long time.

In the streamlined state, nothing matters except your minimum item level requirement (treadmill) and doing your little dance correctly. Our jobs have mostly been the same for the past five or six years, and there's really nowhere for them to go. When the entire game is "press ALL of your buttons in burst and then just 1-2-3", there's really nowhere else you can grow.

Levelling has always been, and still is, a joke in this game. It's easy, it's fast, you learn nothing doing it. On your first job in Dawntrail, you literally (l i t e r a l l y) just watch a movie to level fully. It's there as a relic from the RPGs that FFXIV claims to share a bed with.

Either make levelling a major part of the game or remove it. It's vestigial at this point.

[AmorfaVex]

actually.. no, levels have not always been a thing. used to be skill grinding. I am likely wrong, but levels were a thing mainstreamed by WoW to increase the rush by the whole level effect and sound. 100 levels isnt really that much either, Anarchy Online the level cap was 220, years ago.

power creep is what you are finding a problem with I think. regardless.. things from the games past will always become trivialized. would you prefer they take the Destiny route and whole parts of the game are "vaulted"? while there is no good answer for the issue, you have proposed no alternative, no real fix except.. "no more levels". even if they did away with that, a new expansion, because people scream for it, would likely include new jobs, and new content. those two things will cause exactly the same issue you are complaining about here. new content will trivialize old content, new regular mobs will appear to be gods compared to old npcs and the devs would have to put in extra effort to fixing old content.

see? even without levels the issue would remain.

Just to elaborate on your first paragraph. Leveling has been around since the dawn of CRPG/MMOs. There have been some variants that focus more on skill building, such as Ultima Online (I believe the first graphical MMO, I happened to beta test and play a bit.)

But these games all grew from Dungeons and Dragons, in which leveling was an integral part of the game.

If you reach back to the days before UO, you are looking at the MUDs (Multi User Dungeons), which were text based games where you did level (Gemstone III comes to mind as an example, but it was far from the first MUD.) (Excellent game btw, for people who dont mind reading instead of graphics.)

But leveing is a core part of this genre and the Final Fantasy franchise itself.

[Selvokaz]

capping levels at 100 is fine, but staggering skill evolution is not, fights are going to get harder and more challenging that's the nature of video games in general, so skills have to be raised and developed over time, and I don't think that has anything to do with leveling that can be a simple matter of devs seeing what works and what doesn't and altering that that doesn't, in game wise we could go back to job quest where the point of it is to gain a deeper understanding of the job and obtain a new ability either self taught or learned from a master or legendary member of the job.

As far as making old content trivialized I have to disagree, the level caps on instances prevents that from happening as well as equipment caps, even at lv 90s being brought back to some level 50 content can make things challenging as you have less of your kit to use or unevolved abilities that don't offer the comfortable bonuses you were once used to. Was in Vigil Hard the other day as a healer and I swear the tank needed me to babysit him through the whole thing, I almost never got a chance to dps cause I had to keep my eyes on the party HP because they were getting spanked so hard, I wanted to say they were under armed but I took a look at the tanks equipment and it was indeed level 50 gear so he wasn't underprepared, and was a warrior. It was quite eye-opening.

I do like the idea of level capping us at lv 100, and just designing newer expansions to evolve our current skills into newer stronger ones, majorly reworking jobs that haven't been performing within the original design of the job. creating new jobs that start at lv 1 and just give us something to work toward which would have us revisiting older content or doing deep dungeons longer who knows.

My addition would be an ascension Tier, where all jobs that are lv 100 ascend returning to what could be described as level 1 but isn't. For content level 100+ a new job will ascend and begin leveling a new in a sub-tier called the ascended, where you will gain faux levels to a certain cap that will grant the evolved skills I mentioned before as you progress, your hp and mp and all that stuff stays the same prior to the new content but what skills you have change. This keeps you looking forward to new content, gives the devs time to develop each job toward this new far-flung goal of evolution, Maybe Paladin changes to Holy Knight with certain job actions becoming more flashier, Dark Knight could become Dark Lord, so on and so forth.

[Gortys]

Even if the level doesn't "trivialize" the content, the player base will when they are tired of that content. Even in GW2 where there is a horizontal system there are empty zones and content nobody seems to be interested in. Horizontal leveling doesn't fix this aspect of how MMO players feel about certain content.

[koko-on-da-forumz]

Even in GW2 where there is a horizontal system there are empty zones and content nobody seems to be interested in. Horizontal leveling doesn't fix this aspect of how MMO players feel about certain content.

This is just not true? I have friends who tell me "Oh, you'll never be able to run PoF metas, no one runs those anymore". Girl, people run them many times every day.

"No one runs dungeons anymore", LFG fills within five minutes.

There's a bias that if you don't do something anymore, you assume no one does. I have never once had an issue running any content in GW2, doubly so after engaging myself in my guilds and social circles.

[Gortys]

This is just not true? I have friends who tell me "Oh, you'll never be able to run PoF metas, no one runs those anymore". Girl, people run them many times every day.

"No one runs dungeons anymore", LFG fills within five minutes.

There's a bias that if you don't do something anymore, you assume no one does. I have never once had an issue running any content in GW2, doubly so after engaging myself in my guilds and social circles.

It's almost like experiences in MMO's are subjective? And everyone may have a different experience based on where or even the time of day they play? Hmmm....
Also, you are naming very specific content.

So there's also a bias in games where people assume if they were able to find help with some old content, then everyone must be able to. This just isn't the case. But there is some content in GW2 that people seem to love to run over and over. I never stated that people in GW2 don't like to do any old content at all - that's how you took it.

[Kes13a]

Just to elaborate on your first paragraph. Leveling has been around since the dawn of CRPG/MMOs. There have been some variants that focus more on skill building, such as Ultima Online (I believe the first graphical MMO, I happened to beta test and play a bit.)

But these games all grew from Dungeons and Dragons, in which leveling was an integral part of the game.

If you reach back to the days before UO, you are looking at the MUDs (Multi User Dungeons), which were text based games where you did level (Gemstone III comes to mind as an example, but it was far from the first MUD.) (Excellent game btw, for people who dont mind reading instead of graphics.)

But leveing is a core part of this genre and the Final Fantasy franchise itself.

far enough, the first mmos I played did not use 'leveling' and I was not aware of it until WoW released.

[AmorfaVex]

far enough, the first mmos I played did not use 'leveling' and I was not aware of it until WoW released.

Alternate leveling has been used in other games as well, in conjunction with standard leveling.

EQ implemented the Alternate Advancement system to avoid the issue of level bloat. In the AA system you accumulated XP after reaching the level cap and you could distribute points to make small adjustments to your character (Very similar to the Diablo 3 system, if you've played that, with paragon points, only much more complicated.)

The AA system, as it applied in EQ, encouraged people to keep playing, even for marginal gains (that did in fact add up after a while) some even rewarded unique mounts. It kept people invested in the game and the development of their character.

Quick Edit: Thinking back on it now, EQ also had a skill leveling system tied into the standard leveling as well. If you used a sword and nothing else for 10 levels, you'd only level your one-hand slash skill (or 2hs as the case may be) and if you found a mace you really wanted to use, you needed to level that up as well or it wouldnt be as effective as a 1hs. These skills were capped per level, so every level you might be able to train another 5 points in the skill. It applied to everything from offensive weapon use, parrying, riposte, swim speed, you name it.

I just dont think today's player base could handle that kind of complexity though, and it seems the devs would agree. They keep it simple, easy, and it all seems pointless.

If done correctly, the player shouldnt feel that way. They should feel that leveling means something. Devs just need to do a better job of implementing that.