Could Merit Points/Job Points or another sort of character progression work for FF14?

[BigCheez]

I put on my tinfoil hat and came up with a theory: an expansion-specific leveling system akin to field ops(elemental/mettle/knowledge), with each job having something similar to a phantom job to provide skill progression. It allows Yoshida to have technically been telling the truth without them actually changing the formula.

You're describing WoW's borrowed power systems. They stopped doing them after Shadowlands and that was universally celebrated. Hopefully they don't go down this path because it's awful.

[CaptainLagbeard]

I’m not really sure where levels could be removed from arr without making it feel a progressionless slog as with the 2.x patches. There’s already been some restructuring and I’d rather not see a third pass at it if it can possibly be avoided. It might be easier to convert the patches to 5 levels each and assume a level up after each dungeon. Holminster is when you reach 71, don mheg 72, qitana 73, malikah 74, big pulls 75*. Even then I think so much stuff with no perceived gain in power would be difficult to swallow for a lot of people. “Number go up” isn’t the most compelling motivation, but the infrequent reward for doing cutscenes/instances does serve as some feedback rather than fighting fog. It’s probably why there’s such a fanfare whenever you level or gain a merit point in xi; never mind that you need three quarters of a million exp, you’ve got 10k here’s some trumpets, now kill some more.

*actually these would be 61-65 but it seemed clearer when explaining to compress purely within that expansion’s usual range.

There's levels on every Class/Job in ARR where you don't actually get anything other than stats going up. You don't get any new skills or unlock new content. Those are the kind of levels I think they could take out and just spread out the XP and stat gains over so you end up at the same point as you would be at 50.

[Musashidon]

There would still be room for level ups, if they went ahead and squished levels down in ARR... ARR doesn't really need 50 levels these days...

But I do kind of wonder what they have in mind for future character growth.

i have never liked the idea of squishing ARR into lower lvls cause what do you mean i will be fight bahamut prime at lvl 20?! for a lvl squish just putting everything post ARR into lvl 50 is the easier solution and the newest expansion goes from 51-60.

[Nadda]

Thinking back on Yoshi-P saying that he was considering another method of character progression past level 100 because it was a milestone of sorts, it makes me wonder if the way that jobs are designed and the way combat balance is handled, if the game could even handle some form of progression besides leveling up. I know 8.0 is the supposed "job identity" patch, but what do you guys think? You think we'll just get to level 110, or do you think there could be some way they could squeeze in another form of character progression, even with this game strict adherence to balance?

I'm thinking we're going the sub classing route in 8.0 I think it'll be interesting.