Doing something a little bit different in this video! We sit down and have a chat with Chris from @sharlayanforum about the gearing systems in FFXIV. This was just a casual conversation without much planning but it was a fun talk!
Note: This was recorded a day or two before the recent Live Letter and announcement of the Chaotic Alliance Raids. We talked a bit about predictions for the savage alliance raids, but the conversation still holds up with the recent announcements.
Be sure to check out @sharlayanforum! We did another video over on his channel talking about Dawntrail’s job design. If it’s not posted yet, it will be soon!
Come hang out on Twitch! https://twitch.tv/99_vit
Join the Discord! https://discord.gg/exnYvQuTVv
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Yooooo two of my favorite ffxiv youtubers????
So yeah I did Ex1 and Ex2 because I thought I needed it for Savage, turned out to be a waste of time and obsolete in like 2 weeks / not needed for Savage. I'm also unable to gear my other fav jobs. Gearing in FFXIV is super throttled and unfun, looking at many many weeks to get BiS because I learned 1 fight per week (my leisure time having a full time job). Still don't have raid weapon and upgrades…. and it's October 4th. Probably will just play another game haha other than Tuesdays. I don't understand why it would take me half a year to have multiple sets of gear lol…. mega unfun system.
It feels pretty rough even in a static if you have a lot of people who potentially want to try new things, or get burned out on their “new” job by the third fight, but their old faithful’s ungeared and has a slot filled by someone who only has that job geared.
At the start of the vid, but I just wanted to say I gave up playing savage because it felt so unrewarding. Gearing feels like a chore instead of a reward.
Kinda wish that if you didn't win a coffer or just passed without winning a piece of gear you got a bonus book.
Would still take a long time to get all the upgrades if you are just the unluckiest person on the planet, but it's not two months of a slog to get BIS.
The gear is terrible. Have you seen the new crafter gear? I dont usually do glamours but i had to put one on the ugly thunderyards junk
tbh i don't really get the griefing thing. Not to diminish the effort it takes to learn the fights but the tier's easy enough both mechanically and dps wise. I feel like if we're wiping to enrages then something else going terribly wrong or someones not pulling their weight so it's not my problem. Maybe it was different in previous tiers but i don't get that feeling personally :3
There is no loot incentive. You can get full bis tombstone gear very fast and then immediately nothing from dungeons or trials becomes an upgrade. Never seen a worse loot system in an MMO
Thanks for sitting down with me to discuss some stuff! Of course the Chaotic announcement comes literally days after we record this. Why Yoshi-P, why!?
ps, That guy on the right is handsome af.
I was foolishly brave and set myself the goal of acquiring full BiS on all jobs during Anabaseios as part of my DT prep. If the relic wasn't BiS that would not have been possible, but I also included 90 BiS for viper and pictomancer. It was only worth it in the end on one job, and that was Dark Knight, because of what they did with the DT dungeons, and it might make a difference on doing the FATEs for xp as a dps if you are soloing the FATEs. Definitely not something I'm doing again for the next expansion launch unless they drastically improve gearing past your main job.
It took me
around 15 clears of p9s
a minimum of 60 clears of p10s
around 20 clears of p11s
And fortunately just 10 clears of p12s.
I only won a total of 7 coffers, 2 from p9s, 4 from p11s and 1 from p12s. Not a single coffer won from p10s. 60+ clears of a single raid to fully gear all jobs with rng protection being the only way of getting gear is ridiculous. And that includes the alliance raid coins which I farmed weekly for the extra juice, but that didn't drop until like week 30, which is too long to go without adding extra rng protection.
Square Enix clearly thinks the raid tiers last way longer than they actually do. The gearing system does not fit their "able to play all jobs on a single character" approach to character flexibility at all. And it's completely fixable.
100% on unlocking the raid tier BEFORE the ultimate needing to happen. The raid tier is dead by week 16, and realistically it starts dying week 8 for those that are fortunate with rng.
I think the books and augment juice should be there as guaranteed extra and that there should just be a coffer for each player in the party for the first 3 fights, and that the 4th fight should be increased to 2 coffers and 2 random weapons, and that the random weapon is incapable of being for a job that wasn't used for the clear. So say your party doesn't have a whm in the party, then it shouldn't be possible to see a random whm cane. This would improve the gearing without reducing the book costs and it would be far more fair and rewarding for the amount of effort and time investment it sometimes takes. cough p10s cough
You should be able to gear 2 jobs in 2 months and then be able to focus on other stuff.
The fight difficulty also comes into play. Savage used to be midcore content, and the gold standard for what that looks like is Stormblood savage raids. They started upping the difficulty tier after tier with Shadowbringers, and they surpassed ultimate phases with p8s and p10s. Why even have ultimates and say it's for the "hardcore gamers" if they are going to do that with savage? No, I hope they don't up the difficulty next raid tier, because I will probably completely stop doing savage if they do. If the hardcore players are bored, they can take what the devs love to say to heart and "go play other games" while waiting for the ultimate. This raid tier is very close to going back to that standard that the Stormblood savage raids created. I think there are some things in m2s and m4s that keep it from fully being midcore, but it's definitely far better than any from the last 2 expansions. My static is also close to clearing m4s. I would love to have time for other things, but I can't when it takes 3-5 weeks just to prog one of the fights with a decent static. The difficulty needs to come back down to Stormblood for savage raids and stay there. The only players it would piss off is the super elites that are always complaining about the game being boring no matter what the devs do.
100% on the tome cap being way too small. I could maybe understand the first 3-4 weeks being 450/week, but after that, it's just obnoxious in terms of the gatekeeping of gear.
I would actually love to see them copy WoW's loot system for raid, or at least the iteration of it that existed during Mists of Pandaria. I haven't played since then so I can't say whether it's still like that. Having a 60% chance for a gear piece, 40% chance for gold and 0% chance of nothing, with a stackable currency item that allowed you a choice to spend one for a reroll once per raid boss or just accept what you got, and it being player-locked (each player got this same roll upon killing the boss). This was such a goated system and one of the main highlights of MoP. Each raid had enough bosses that you were pretty much guaranteed 2-3 upgrades for your gear, and so each week felt like you were progressing your character. The thunderforging was really only for the most elite of players, and I have to agree that part of it was bad, but the normal raid loot was awesome, and the normal raids were the midcore content, which is what savage is supposed to be imo. I think the most hated thing about WoW's loot system back then was the chance for mount drops, which is probably still abysmally low.
I love the melding materia to the job stone idea. That would be so good. And yes to gear sets.
The complaints about dark knight are warranted because dark knight has been in this state where both NA and EU have a healer vendetta against dark knight mains among the hypercasuals who expect it to always be a hard carry from the tank in dungeons and that's not what they get if the tank is a dark knight, regardless of the level of content. It's a very staggering problem that dark knight is still exempt from the able to solo dungeons club when dungeons are not what the jobs are designed around and dungeons are designed to be carryable as the other 3 tanks. Dark knight needs to be able to at least not instantly die the moment the healer drops the ball. They should be able to live 25-30s on their own during a wall to wall pull, which is just not possible in it's current iteration, and it's worse for dark knight the lower you get synced down in level due to having even fewer tank cooldowns. Square Enix has got to address this eventually because they've already started losing subs over the current direction they've continued going with dark knight in Dawntrail. I know several players that dropped their sub upon reading the 7.0 patch notes and finding out that Shadowed Vigil is only available in DT content because they were hoping for some self sustain between levels 40 and 90 where it's desperately needed on the job. How do we fix that?
Dark Mind getting the Addle treatment
TBN being untied from damage and upgraded to the equivalent of just Holy Shelltron in terms of it's value.
Oblation also applying a regen on top of the 10% mit so that it's not just a worse Reprisal.
honestly they should make it so once you clear the raid tier your current tome gear cap doubles till the next savage tier having to wait 2 weeks to get a tome piece that you still have to upgrade feels bad
They should just change that every person can only get one loot per fight per week, it sucks doing a fight on pf and one person gets 3 coffers. I've been lucky with loot and have got 2 thing in m1s and m2s, and that feels unfair. One person can get really lucky and get everything
It's such a daunting task to gear up in this game it makes me not even want to play. And that's a problem. Even if they cut the requirements in half, it would still be challenging.
Gearing sucks especially when you have so many jobs on 1 character and you need 8 books for 1 weapon (tho x.55 relic is a god send) but they need to put some bis gear in Criterion normal and now in this Chaotic Alliance, it takes too long to gear 1 role/job especially in an raid cycle with an Ultimate, coz your like ok in Bis in warrior but damn this group has 1 oh i don't have the weapon yet for Gunbreaker or just i wanna try that job coz it does more damage. Then materia needs adjusting where you have materia loadouts similar to glamour loadouts
good video, cheers lads
I love how your toons are hanging out in game
Hypotheticly, if they removed gear entirely (besides the glam) the game doesnt even change. They could on expansion release put every max level char to ilvl 700 (just as an example number) and tune every raid around that. Savage is clearable week 1 with crafted gear anyway and ultimates are designed around a certain ilvl. So that means the entire gear progression is completly cosmetic unless your group cant deal with week 1 damage checks.
That means the whole game's "gear progression" is nothing more than an 8 week player retention mechanic…. gear feels like the replacement of nerf waves to bosses that WoW does instead of an actual progression system.
I hate that all the gear in this gane is the same. Just bigger number so boring. Worst gear of any mmo
Unfortunately I don't see gearing up changing any time soon, if ever. It's been nearly the same since Heavensward savage releases with minor changes here and there, but ultimately how I geared then is the same as now. Don't say you don't like it to the XIV community though, you will be attacked for having an opinion
Im bis on one job.
I was asked if i could flex jobs for FRU and i just blankly said no, because im not gearing an alt job in time.
The raid tier should be unlocked after the first 8 weeks, nobody fucking cares past that point. I dont even want to log in and play the game outaode of raid nights because there is literally nothing to do.
I think XIV loot progression is okay at best, not great, not terrible, but only if you play in a static group with loot planning. My group in 10 clears were able to put everyone's main job on BiS, and almost everyone's alts as well.
Now if you raid on PF, it's a completely different story. It's very, very bad. They need to change the cost of gear/weapons/twine/shine as soon as possible. Eight books for a weapon, four for a twine, three for a shine, and so on, is just too much. Not to mention how expensive tome chests/legs are. It should be half of that, even less. In a game that incentivizes the player to try various jobs, gearing should be more flexible.
Assuming SE sticks to the 19 week schedule between major patches, they really should be loosening the savage drops by X.5. I get that they're trying to maximize the time per raid, but assuming you wanna gear up more than one job, it's terrible. I gear up one job to BiS and stop because I'm not doing the grind for more than one job.
Personally the game feels really time gated. Once you have cleared all of the savage fights in a tier, it is not too hard to finish ALL your reclears for the week in just 1 day, whether that be in Party Finder or Static.
Capping on tomestones also really takes a short amount of time.
I also feel demotivated to even do an entire tier if there is no Ultimate to come at the end of it. Doing reclears every week just for the gear to not be used for anything also feels worthlesss, unless you're somebody that goes for logs on FF logs, or even (maybe) criterion dungeon.
bigger ilvl is all you need. the game was made for all people skill levels. the "hard" content is just a longer script with more things to do in boss fights.
Just wanna say there was some contradictory opinions here. On one hand gearing is to slow they need to speed it up and on the other gear is boring they should add RNG drops that could be way better than the guaranteed stuff, coming from wow it sucked doing a fight for months and never seeing the drop you need and then to add that level of RNG to gearing in this game on top of random tertiary stats idk it sounds like yall want wow circa wod up to BFA. The reason i play this game over wow is that its not wasting my time as bad, i know when ill get bis and then im done not praying to RNGesus to hopefully get the gear i need or my class just sucks. I don't even disagree that the gearing is to slow because it is they should unlock the tier sooner we should be getting alternate ways of getting upgrade mats sooner increase the cap on weekly tomes etc but really the biggest issue the game has is that there isn't enough content nobody would be fixated on gear if there was literally anything else to do in this game besides gear up to do ultimate. Just sounds like yall need a break from the game which is good i played the new expansion wow dropped recently for a month and it just reminded why i play XIV over wow, when i clear content im actually getting something even if that something is the bare minimum like 1 book that to me is better than going in praying the piece of loot i want drops just for it not to drop and making me feel like i wasted hours of my life.
I never done savage content in FF14, but it sounds like they should only drop coffers moving forward. And they should let you do a one time exchange with all armors, weapon and accessory. That way gear earned/won is never wasted. And with gear, have a set effect that's like taking a food buff, give 2%/3%/4% pending on your class (determination, vitality, critical hit, etc..)
Can someone tell me why the FFXIV community keeps lying about gear? People always keep saying the same 2 things and usually both at the same time, "BiS doesn't matter" and "SE and Yoshi-P need to give us our BiS gear FASTER". These are two mutually exclusive statements about gear in FFXIV. So, either "BiS doesn'tmatter" and it doesn't matter how long it takes to get to BiS OR BiS does matter and "SE and Yoshi-P need to give us our BiS gear FASTER". Which is it?
The only gear that's interesting in this game is stuff like going to Pagos to get Cassie Earring.
I also think the discussion around materia is emblematic of XIV walking away from being an rpg and becoming an action game over the years. Which is not inherently bad, but it has gotten away from what I like about the gameplay that Final Fantasy games tend to have. It's not very surprising to me that the portion of XIV devs that went on to make XVI made it an action game instead of an rpg, meanwhile Remake and Rebirth still have rpg aspects to them like elemental affinity and contextual buffs and debuffs.
Not only are there so many jobs, but the jobs themselves are very simple, meaning that it can be very easy to get bored if you aren't an altoholic. There isn't a very high skill gap on any given job, meaning that the incentive to keep practicing the same job on the same fight for countless runs is pretty irrelevant. If Square is going to trivialize or delegitimize job mastery, they need to make it easier to gear alt roles to keep the content fresh.
For a game where one of the biggest draws is playing all jobs on one character, they sure make getting gear for more than one job, let alone all jobs, excrutiating