Ok SE its time...Follow

While I would love to see that sort of thing as well, I don't see it happening in the near future. It would require a complete reworking of how jobs, abilities, and gear are balanced, and I can't imagine them doing that mid-expansion.

Wacky additional effects on gear worked in FFXI because of the non-linear raid structure and the gear swapping mechanic. Nothing really had to be balanced well because EVERYTHING was situational, and most bosses had few mechanics and little strategy beyond "throw a bunch of people at it and stun and/or kite the 2hr."

It also works in a game like WoW where you have set bonuses and glyphs and stuff. In that case the entire raid tiers are balanced around it from the start. FFXIV isn't set up that way. It could be, but it isn't right now. Maybe it'll happen a few years down the road. Who knows? I can't imagine it'll happen any time soon though.


Personally I'd rather see them address more of the minor QoL issues before making any more massive balance or system changes. Let me queue with my chocobo out, let me rearrange my gear and inventory while talking to an NPC, give me more blacklist space, or at least let me remove names from it in bulk, let me hide quests in the duty list, etc.

They could very easily do it with the current system. For Drg they could add a piece of gear with the usual stat increases but also add 10 percent added Spirit Surge damage. The only problem would be how quickly new gear replaces the current BiS. If we could change gear mid battle, it would help a bit, but that would probably require more work than I see them putting into something like this.

I think it has more to do with Yoshi being petrified of "confusing the new player/new people to MMORPGs" as he says. Yeah it's "hard to balance" and yeah people love to say:

"but but..in XI you used gear you had at level 45 at 75 and that's not right!"

Yet we went 2 full cycles where BRD's BiS gear didn't even come from actual raids. So...there's really no excuse, especially considering 1.0-1.23 used the same concept and that version had engine problems.

It was like Jay Wilson and Diablo 3. His reasoning for allowing you to interchange abilities/stats on the go was that the player base was too stupid to do math and customize their character. So now everyone runs the same junk rather then building several different builds like in Diablo 2. Sure there were optimal builds in D2, but you would farm for other chars and try several different builds. It also kept the game going constantly. Now, people level to paragon 500-600 in a season and put it down for a few months and wait for a patch. Similar to XIV...

These producers need to stop assuming their population is dumb...and then the official forums come alive and confirm their suspicions.

I also don't see it happening in XIV, at least not with this expansion.

The old XIV could have been more horizontal, but the game was clearly rebuilt with vertical progression in mind, and there isn't really anything left from the old systems or development cycles to accommodate horizontal progression.

Implementing horizontal growth would take a profound rethinking of how new content is designed and implemented into the game. It would also probably require a big shift of job abilities, battle mechanics, etc.

I like the idea of set bonuses, but even then, people would probably only bother getting the best set that increased each job's primary function.

One of the key design concepts of the rebuilt FFXIV was for the game to be easily accessible by new players -- which means creating opportunities for newbies to "catch up" to the pack in terms of gear/levels. A horizontal game that gives players many additional months (or years) to optimize their characters starts to create massive inequities that can't be easily bridged. I think that's the no. 1 reason why this development team won't implement horizontal growth as a big factor in this game.

Sure but that's not a reason not to do this.

You don't add ability-altering stats to things at low levels, you add them to things at high levels. You put them on AF gear, you put them on job-specific gear like the Eso set. Or you put them on a completely separate kind of gear that's job-specific by definition (how about the soul crystal?) like a trinket.

WoW has gear that alters playstyle. They carefully balance trinkets and set bonuses so that they're only increasing performance by a particular amount (I think 5% is the usual quoted number). WoW also allows new or lapsed players to catch up fairly quickly, and somehow the existence of this gear doesn't overwhelm people or cause them to start bleeding from the eyes.

It's just an excuse because balancing this kind of gear is more work and the dev team is ludicrously small for the size of the game they're in charge of. It's seriously time for SE to give Yoshi P some big boy pants and let him put together a big boy dev team.

Agree with op, the game is severely lacking depth atm in many areas, gear and stats/bonus being just one area.

I also agree it would never be something we see in the near future, se moves literally at a snails pace (usually reacting once something no longer needed/ wanted or until people simply get frustrated enough to leave)

I hope to see changes like the op mentioned one day, but tbh I cant see it happening for a very very long time, if at all ;;

Are you kidding? It's insanely easy to get caught up in this game.

Players quickly get 170 gear rained upon them just by playing roulettes, and in the meantime they also start saving up for Eso gear... and in the meantime they can also hop into Alex and start farming that gear, too.

When the casual 24-man raid content comes out, I'm guessing it will be just like CT in that nobody will need top-level gear to farm it... so that will most likely be another way for people with ilevels of 170 or 180 to farm i200 gear.

SE couldn't make this game any easier to get caught up unless they just sent gear to our mog mails.

Member of the dev team are you?

Since neither ST nor WoD followed the model you just talked about, why would you assume Void Ark will? ST and WoD's models showed that SE learned a little more about where to put gear in those kinds of raids.



Getting to 180 nearly effortlessly allows newer players to easily get into a position where they can begin farming the higher-end gear. OBVIOUSLY the top tier gear takes more work than that. The catch up there is that those players aren't stuck farming instances for drops or having to endlessly grind the lower currency before they can even try to start on the higher one.

Yoshida already confirmed while Void Ark will be "new raid exclusive to FFXIV" it's going to be designed like Crystal Tower. WoD is the only oddman out because it actually dropped some BiS pieces for certain jobs despite the ilvl. Poetics were upgradable but unless you couldn't hit the broadside of a barn, the BRD body and feet were BiS, granted you weren't still rocking your overmelded Kirimu set from ages past..which good chance you still were.

VA will be ilvl200 weekly lock since alexander Story is obsolete per progression now, esoterics is upgradable and alex savage is 210 base. If it started at 210 that means there's literally no reason to do savage, let alone alex story. So while ST and WoD dropped era appropriate gear..it was still far from the actual current ilvl since that would create an alternate gearing path...horizontally, if you will, and yoshida doesn't like that.

Alex story is perfectly DFable..but at the same time it's a slow process because it's still weekly locked loot wise when it shouldn't have been once Esoterics came out. I get what he means because of the vertical nature of obsoleting all of your accomplishment.

You will have the gear going into the next raid..but look at HW - After all the T10-13 farming, over melding...it gets beat out on the first real dungeon drop. People hate gear lasting forever..and people hate gear lasting only weeks because when the next best thing comes out..it's just an addition 4-7 stats and some times looks even uglier. I mean they spend MORE time on glamor designs. Think of how it would be if all raid sets actually look the Thav gear in terms of design.

But then people would be pissed off and ask for a Story Mode Savage Alexander/New Raid because only people who actually do content will get that and it will upset them to know that. People say "but alts!"..that's cool..and that's why XI's system was still far superior in itemization. Even 1.x's was better since it came with more than basic stats and even the materia was multi purpose (HP/MP/Def/Store Tp etc combos on one materia.) Even though you can play multiple jobs per character, it's like..they forgot that while designing this vertical game...but if there were more content to sustain it, it would actually be a lot better in the long run. But the fact EVERYTHING progressively as of now is barred behind a weekly lock despite even obsoleting many of it...means they have something better in mind or they're really banking on people sticking around for that carrot.

Look at Bismarck - The ONLY reason it's touched is because it's like Mido from Ocarina of Time, just in your way for absolutely no reason at all. Not even the story bit matters because gear wise, it's obsolete out the gate because Ravana blows it away and doesn't require near as much DPS as Bismarck did (still does but the DPS check is insane in Bismarck.)

When WoD was released (2.5), its corresponding hardcore raid was Final Coil. At the time, Final Coil was still not in the DF and it had a weekly entry limit.

WoD dropped i120 gear, Final Coil dropped i130 (i135 weapon), Poetics gear was i120 upgradable to i130 IF you were doing Final Coil.

In patch 2.55, Final Coil's restrictions were lifted, WoD's weekly loot lockout was lifted, and poetics left side upgrade items were added to the CT trio weekly quest.

Just because Final Coil dropped higher-level gear didn't make WoD's gear obsolete, nor did it make poetics gear irrelevant. For one thing MOST people couldn't do Final Coil either because they didn't have the ability or because they were gated behind the other two coils or because they couldn't commit to a raid team.

WoD gear could also negate LARGE chunks of your poetics grind. Get your WoD body? Maybe you don't need to worry about your poetics body. You just saved 825 poetics that can now go to other things. In this way the CT series of raids was also a catch-up mechanism. The weekly lockout on loot there also facilitated people using it to catch up because others wouldn't roll on gear they didn't absolutely need.

Some WoD gear was BiS even with Final Coil gear in the mix. Some upgraded poetics gear as well. For many people, the Zeta weapon was better than the weapon dropped in T13 if it was properly configured. All of these things existed together at the same time.



That's what I'm expecting, yeah.



Only if you don't need to catch up. If you DO need to catch up, or you want to gear alt jobs, Alex normal gear is great. I'm not a fan of the raid dropping fractions of gear... that's not great, but i190 is absolutely still relevant.



That's an exaggeration. The first dungeon in HW is Dusk Vigil which drops i120 gear, equivalent to un-upgraded poetics gear or WoD gear. I didn't replace my Zeta weapon until Vault. And even then it wasn't a colossal upgrade. Also for green gear to out-stat blue gear, it has to be more than a handful of ilvls above it. You need like 15+ item levels before that happens.



Yeah, the current EX primals are in a weird place. Bismarck especially because his drops are weaker than upgraded law gear which takes about as long to get as it takes to order a pizza. Even Ravana is pretty much ignored now because esoterics weapons are much better and only locked behind a grind. I wouldn't be surprised if we see some mounts or something drop from them later, but for now they're pretty irrelevant.

And yet, they spend their time and effort more on better looking crafted vanity gear or gear from sub rewards. So yeah it matters but it's not something to be ignored because even casual players are starting to get bored based on the recent trend on OF lol. When your high end content is bleh, how will your low end/"mid level" content fare? Normally you trickle down but XIV seems to be a flatline with extreme ends. No one really likes savage because it's the same content as normal for example.

There's not THAT much value in it or they wouldn't obsolete it very quickly :p If you want it for glamor..cool, but it echos what someone said on the FFXI forums:

"Considering a large portion of the playerbase only care for glamors and not even the actual content, if a new MMO with a better vanity system and more shinies come out, it could easily pull away a lot of players."

So..if the sub numbers are as low as I feel they are based on census data since even a tiny portion of all servers combined even touched the 'casual mode' of Alexander...yeah, even the 'hardcore' players matter.