Why wasn't the game designed like this?

[Gilthas]

Honestly, I'm also disappointed with how crafting is being handled in FFXIV.


Of course I'm not saying that dungeons and quests can't give gear. Low level gear being currently worthless has a lot more to do with the rapid leveling than easily accessible gear. HQ gear is often times better than dungeon/aetherial gear of comparable level, but why bother investing in HQ stuff when in a couple of hours you're already high enough in level to equip the next set?. But some BiS items should involve crafting so crafting has some relevance.

At the very least dungeon gear should be meldable. The decision to not allow them to be melded is just the final nail in the crafters coffin. That's why I just level them to gear myself for fun, because unless a lot of things change, both DoH and DoL are pretty meaningless.

[Yoko_Kurama]

but why bother investing in HQ stuff when in a couple of hours you're already high enough in level to equip the next set?.

That is something i've wanted to touch on for a while, I think that you have 2 possible paths to solve this based on my experiences with other mmos. You could either make each level require insane amounts of exp via grinding hundreds of mobs per level (which many people wouldn't want to do) or, you create check point incentives at various levels, for example one of the old mmos i played had 3 distinct pvp areas, one was at level 15, once you got to level 16 you could no longer go to that level 15 pvp area, the next was level 30, finally was the max level pvp area. These 3 areas caused people to purposely go out of their way to get the best possible gears for the level they wanted to hang out and pvp at for a few days/weeks. Some people in that game never even went to max level because they had more fun at level 30 or they'd make a max level character specifically to farm for money to afford lower level pvp gears etc..

But this is not a pvp game, it's a story driven game, and with that method in mind the only way to make crafting viable at lower levels is to create a system that somehow causes players to be at lower levels a lot longer than they are.