Weekly Gear Lockouts Kill Gameplay

[koko-on-da-forumz]

I do wish they'd find another system for raid gear (normal and savage).

I really like the normal raids this time around, they're fantastic. But I did them on Tuesday. And then I have nothing to do for seven days? Why isn't it grindable? Why is that the only thing to get besides a minion? It just feels like a relic from an era when the levelling process mattered in terms of playtime, so there were other things to do.

[Aurora428]

I'm good with weekly lockouts, but they need to be cumulative over the tier so you can catch up after breaks or if your savage prog was slow.

What's even more important is once you own a piece of gear for one job, the same savage/tome piece should be DRASTICALLY (like 75% cheaper) faster to get on another job.

[Aurora428]

Thats why its called END GAME RAIDING not Casual Game Raiding

This has nothing to do with anything. Waiting a week isn't difficulty. Not letting me flex mid-tier from DPS to healer isn't difficulty, it's just annoying.

There are reasons why there are limits placed week by week, but I'd argue the system we have is too restrictive.

[Colt47]

Its just pointless... "try hards" will just craft/buy crafted gear and call it a day, might not return till the next patch. Others will be lazy and only gear their main and MAYBE one more job... ppl who dont actually wanna play wont either way and it might only be a tiny fraction thats actually lured in with this...

It became bigger in shadowbringers with the job changes making a lot of things more accessible. But my feeling is endwalker probably burned out a lot of people because of how harsh the 8-man jump rope was. It's funny because the streamers were having a blast doing it supposedly, albeit I bet if anyone watched all the death footage and had the voice chatter recorded there would be a different picture. A lot of people did not like dying over and over to RNG from connection issues, people having a bad night, etc, on p10s and p12s. P12S was probably the worse of the two but it got off easy because it was the final encounter. p8s was rough due to the bleeds.

[Raven2014]

Not letting me flex mid-tier from DPS to healer isn't difficulty, it's just annoying.

Curious but ... what stop you from flexing mid-tier from DPS to healer? Because I know it's not the gears that stopping you.

[Kalocin]

Realistically speaking, with how many jobs we're at and how many we'll likely be getting... Yeah they need to reconsider gearing methods. At the very least separate weekly stuff by roles, the game encourages you to have all five up with the role quests. It'd be nice if there were other gearing methods like criterion and what not too, make other content more valuable (which they said they wanted to do anyway with the whole 1.5x more rewards for DT). The gearing system is literally 1:1 based off of WotLK's from what 2008? It could use a good review and update.

[Lusarae]

Regarding your question, I must respectfully disagree. The desire is for players to continue running the raid even after obtaining their desired items. If players were given everything on the first day, there would be no incentive to run it again.

Strong disagree. This is why the pets and mounts exist. They could also just create a new type of currency for cosmetic only rewards that you can only get from the current raid tier raids. Like an upgraded version of the moogle tomestone event, but its always active. With an ever increasing pool of items to get again. Like all the stuff that was taken out of the game that they said they'd put back in, like the old pvp series rewards... that would be the first thing I'd put in there.

[ValynS]

I don't disagree with the complaint that the way gearing works is painful for people who like playing multiple jobs, but anyone who claims it is trolling/griefing to play content with a few bits of gear that aren't the bleeding edge maxed out bis is toxic as hell and it's going to be miserable playing with them even when you are fully geared to the absolute best.

[CaedemSanguis]

They gate the savage raid mostly for the 2nd hidden boss fight at the fourth tier. If it were just a gear grind people would drop doing it entirely because the only benefit is getting the dyable slots on raid gear and higher damage numbers, which are rendered completely moot by the next big content patch. But the fact it takes a specific group of people putting in over a hundred hours just to get the clear done optimally makes the content unaccessible to most people.

Also, some numbers so people get an idea of how insane savage really is (because our blessed content creators tend to have a bit of bias in the whole thing and don't seem to want to show people the ugly parts like arguing with your team mates and the time commitments)

A week 1 clear party generally puts in 12 hours a day with some minor breaks, and generally the later tiers require more than one week to clear for these groups. So a top tier raiding group can potentially race and clear in around 84 - 144 hours. FYI, most people aren't in this category and have to divide their times up each week hence why it can take 4+ weeks to clear. However, that isn't all of it. In truth, it takes even more hours for groups that do not dig into the fights every day because they often have to review and reprog older mechanics, since people forget things between last week wednesday and the current wednesday. So lets say an entire night gets wasted on reprogs and someone is doing 3 hour nights for three days in a week. Without counting reclear times, the number of weeks goes from 12-16 weeks to 14-18 weeks since those extra hours of reprog have to come out of something. Now lets say that those days people are raiding on are also representative of the time they have to do reclears. It takes a full night to reclear all the way to the 4th fight and the prior nights are basically getting cut down because of the reclear times. We're looking at anywhere from 19-20 weeks to 21-24 weeks easily. This is why people end up trying to get skips in later tiers because the increased difficulty in the 2nd and 3rd tiers are pretty brutal on groups.

And remember, the longer the time it takes to get through savage the more likely there is going to be drama and in-fighting, let alone having to go find another group in that case of a break-up. This is why it takes many people ages to clear a tier and why the content creator comments that savage is easy is kind of a stupid smoke screen for how much of a pain it really is. By tier 3 any sane person will want to tear their hair out with the amount of stupid stuff they likely had to deal with. The one good thing is at least the first tier is forgiving enough the social issues are not quite as bad.

A first tier take around 20h-25hours to clear

My static for p4s took 22 hours to clear p1s-p4s, week 1

[Rookie1]

I like the weekly limits on things...it gives you the chance to go do something else. If I had to farm the raid gear non-stop until I had all the pieces then I wouldn't have time to farm scrips or something else. I can get my one piece and then go take care of other business