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

[fulminating]

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.

[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.