I’m done being silent! FFXIV’s Gearing system is Garbage!
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Been a fan ever since I found your controller guides/macros, and love the content. A quick trip to any critical subreddit or the forum post will instantly spotlight the FFXIV Defense Force you're talking about. I love the fact that you're speaking your mind and bringing fact to the surface. I'd bet 99.9% of us are here because we love FFXIV, but to be a zealot and rally against constructive community feedback because the game is "perfect" is just wrong.
"The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it."
-George Bernard Shaw
Honestly I like how gearing works in ffxiv. I dont want all my time in game to be bis chasing. There are too many other things I like doing in ffxiv. That said gearing up multiple jobs takes a lot of time but that’s just because of time gating. Like I don’t have to spend 4+ hours a day everyday just on getting gear. It takes very little time to cap tomes every week and that leaves me plenty of time to do my filthy casual activities I actually play the game for.
I think the entire endgame gear system needs to be redone. Honestly, I'd rather see a Star Wars the Old Republic system where the gear piece is just a robe, hat, pair of boots, whatever and it has slots. The real gear drops are inserts that you slot into the gear to add stats allowing you to keep a cosmetic look for as long as you want while getting more control over the stats on your stuff.
I think a lot of the problem comes down to stats being largely inconsequential. You either weight one thing completely or two things heavily (crit, direct hit, determination) and that's it. If you ended up with one materia slot that you weren't sure what to do with it so you put in skill speed, you would see no tangible benefit from that stat because the stat weights are totally garbage. There is one "meta" and that's it.
Nice video! I think the issue is a bit of an incentive problem too – say you want to do savage, you will need at a minimum, latest crafted gear, which you can buy or craft. That will allow you to beat the dps check of the fight. After this, you can make your life easier in savage by clearing the fight faster and getting a higher personal dps by using a mixture of tome and savage gear.
If you wanna do ultimate you absolutely need BIS from savage and tomes.
But! If you don’t want to do savage, you can stick with crafted gear the whole expansion and there’s no reason to even bother doing roulettes to get tomes to get tome gear.
It’s nice having a game with no required content, but at some point you need some kinda loop to keep people logging in and when you have loops, gear becomes more relevant I think, because then they can offer more content for the reason of giving you rewards which could be interesting gear with more unique stats, resulting in fun and something to work to.
Whale hello there!
First: I share your feelings about the FFXIV defense forces. They're annoying and completely counter to the wholesome Welcome Wagon I'd love for this game to have
Second: I suspect the blandness of the gearing system is intentional for balance purposes and the devs realize the blandness of it is the trade off for having a system that's dramatically easier to balance. As someone who has played WoW since 2004, I personally appreciate how simple the gearing system is versus the convoluted ways in which World of Warcraft handles its gearing (the upcoming expansion is actually looking like its going to go to a more bland, easier-to-understand-easier-to-balance system but this is Blizzard and they love stepping on rakes so we'll see)
So I understand the sentiment, but I'm OK with FFXIVs system as its orders of magnitude more preferable (FOR ME) to the constant juggling act that Devs in others games have to spend what feels like all of their time on.
I guess my take away from this video is I'm not really sure who you're angry at here. After watching the video, I feel like you're angrier at the 'FFXIV DF' and their inability to take criticism than you are at whatever perceived flaws there are in the way FF does gear.
Edit: After some thinking, I have a potentially spicy response to your feelings of item blandness which is simply that: You think you do, but you really don't
See, I've played WoW during the Legion, BfA, and the beginning of Shadowlands. In all three of these expansions, they added systems that would allow you personalize and tailor your character based on how you spent your Artifact power points on your artifact weapon or the few legendary items you could get (Legion), what abilities you could use on the pieces of Azerite gear for what best suited you (BfA) or what conduits you sloted for which soulbind you had for your covenants and what legendary items you coulds make (Shadowlands)
And in every*. *single*. *expansion what did the players writ-large do? They did everything they could to find which combination gave the most damage, the most whatever they needed to raid, and they all lined up and picked that specific combination*. The devs for WoW spent *literally the entire expansion for all three expansions trying to balance this, and at the end of each expansion just gave up and said, "Go nuts"
All that personalization burned on the Altar of Viability.
These players whinged and complained to the devs about how "needlessly complex" all of these systems were, not realizing how schizophrenic a lot of players are when it comes to gearing in these games. What these players seem to want is for a wide variety of different kinds of items that are also simultaneously all equally applicable in all situations, which is (from what I've seen from WoW anyway, I can't speak to the Agony system in GW2) mathematically impossible OR would require SO MUCH dev time and money as to be financially infeasible given the life cycle of content in an MMORPG OR!!!!
OR!!!!
WOULD WIND UP WITH EXACTLY WHAT WE HAVE RIGHT NOW, A HOMOGENIZED SYSTEM!
MMO players exhaust me
So I haven't played other MMO's as much. How do they do it there? You get to choose which stats you want? I agree that gearing is bland, but it's also easy for a casual like me.
I did like the Bozja gearing and potions. Would love to see it in other content. On the other hand I'm worried as a casual player that if all Bozja-like content got separate gearing, I won't have any time to do all the content.
Also if Main content got more gear options I think I'd pick the wrong stats/ build 😅.
Thank you for making this video. I have a ton of valid criticism of FFXIV but I dont post it anywhere because I know its only going to get hate comments and down voted into oblivion.
Yup def agree with this.
My biggest complaint is that we have 20 different jobs and you have to grind a fight for essentially 8 weeks or more to get BiS for ONE job. How on Earth are you supposed to gear other alt jobs that you might want to play? By the time you get there the tier is almost dead and nobody is farming the fight anymore.
Last time I log on it was still 580 ilvl on the Market in game. I'm not worried.
As long as the gear I use helps me clear content I'm happy. I don't need fancy bonuses or additive effects on gear for me to be happy. And some ppl need to touch grass instead of getting defensive over someones opinion.
What the game, any game, needs is fans. Fans care about the quality of the content and experience. They want the game to get better and grow. Corporate Defense Force ™ are simps. Simps are useless.
Discussion and critiscism is always important. However critiscism needs to be more than just "this is bad, we need to change it" and that's what most of it ends up being. But sometimes there are some good stuff that appears.
As for your idea of perks or systems tied to the gear, I have mixed feelings about it.
For the bad:
-doesn't matter if you have 20 options to choose from if everybody will pick option C because someone did the math and is the most optimal.
For the good:
-with the above bad point in mind, I think it could work well for self contains systems, like Bozja, deep dungeons, possibly variant dungeons (variant actions are a step in that direction I guess). But keep in mind that even in Bozja, people get mad at others for not picking the "right" actions when going for the special dungeons instances.
There is a very fine line of balancing with this kind of thing and people will tend to optimize the hell out of everything sadly. Which is why I think it might work better on content you do solo or with small group of friends (or solo player games, by all means, give me all the options/choices in those solo games).
Hope to see more on this kind of discussion from you in the future 🙂
I absolutely agree with everything you said in this video. It's a shame there's a vocal minority that attacks you just for having a different opinion. They act like criticism comes from malice but in reality more often than not the ones criticizing the game love the game so much that they're willing to point out it's flaws in an effort to see the game improve and keep it around for many more years. I have played FFXI on and off going on 16 years now, and I have tried numerous times to give FFXIV an honest chance, but every time I do I'm reminded how much better FFXI is in terms of progressing your character. FFXI has many flaws as well, but what it does best is character progression. In XIV progression is an illusion. Every expansion they remove abilities from jobs just to replace them (or merge them) with something else, so when you level up you're essentially just gaining back what you already had from the previous expansion. Gear progression is also an illusion. At the very least, they could implement complex and rewarding rotations for the jobs so that there's difficulty outside of dodge the orange circle on the floor, but they even took that away. Like it or not, stance dancing on tanks made combat more engaging than it is now. Knowing when to turn clerics stance on or off made healers more engaging. Jobs being able to provide a particular weakness (slashing, blunt, piercing) made you feel like you were providing something useful to your party. And let's not forget about mage's ballad being removed and AST cards being so dumbed down they may as well not exist. All in the name of balance. it's OK for jobs to not be perfectly balanced. The issue lies in lack of content variety that demands the strengths of certain jobs to make them feel different and useful. But all of this is just my opinion. Don't stop voicing yours either man.
On toxic people: I see this a lot. Whenever I note that classes with more than 30 buttons or so are a pain in the butt on controller. A quick Right Bumper tap can swap to a second bar set, and with Limit Break, Sprint, and Potion (Mount when not in raids), that leaves 29 buttons.
But people insist to high heaven that the "press and hold", "tap" and so on are god-mode and anyone who doesn't use them is a scrub.
I just play WHM, SGE, SCH without Dissipation on my bar (to be fair, I just hate that skill), WAR, and SMN and ignore the haters.
And note I don't at all MIND that Jobs like PLD exist with their 40 buttons or whatever. I just don't play those because it's a PITA on controller and I just prefer playing my way instead.
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It's one thing to say when people are being overly negative and try to keep a positive overall environment, it's quite another to be a toxic asshat "white knight" that just makes things worse for everyone.
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To the gear topic:
I'm mixed on it. I really DO like FFXIV's gearing system in the sense that it works really really well for catch-up and alt-friendly stuff. When you have something like old WoW (or current WoW), it can be EXTREMELY alt-unfriendly, or even unfriendly for gearing for a second spec. There were so many places they could have gone with it, like having horizontal progression or even gear with specializations (like gear with boosted stats in 5 man content for people that only run dungeons and don't raid), instead, they made everything for raiders and only raiders, and really played up that elitism business.
…I proposed the idea of new Dungeon Sets that were designed for that purpose back when I was still playing in Mists/Warlords and was attacked on the forums for just being a bad who wanted free gear or some stupidity like that.
FFXIV has LARGELY avoided this, since even high end raid gear is equal or just SLIGHTLY better than next tier's gear when the next major patch comes out. This does a good job of tamping down on the elitism and granting players an equal footing. It also helps a ton with alts and catch-up for players that take a break or want to swap mains or dual/tri-main.
The gearing could be more interesting, as there are things like Bozja and Eureka gear which have grinds attached, dungeon gear could have something like increased stats in non-raid environments, etc etc. There are plenty of ways to make gearing more interesting.
I'm not really sure what the BEST solution is, as I really do like that the current system has a lot of benefits (again, alt/second/third Job friendly and catch-up friendly ARE NOT AT ALL minor things), and I love Bozja/Eureka (and am miffed we won't be getting one this patch…) Relic GEAR as an alternative (at least when it's approachable – 999 coins was BS and everyone knew it, as was Savage only drops to upgrade Judge gear, and then the last gear set completely unrelated to the first two) could be an option.
Hell, before they took it away, elemental resistance could have been another potential avenue.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but I do agree that the current model is rather raider-centric, with a dash of hardcore-crafter focus, and rather bland overall.
It has some important GOOD SIDES that should be kept, but it would be interesting to see if they could spice things up as you point out with new dungeon types and stuff.
First yeah gearing is very boring and vanilla in FFXIV. But my experience with other games is your only given the illusion of choice. They could add perks to the side content. But then you run into a decision as a developer. Would they take the time to perfectly balance all the options so that one doesn't become meta over the others. Or do they just throw a bunch of unbalanced options out there leading to a meta build being created and then your only being given the illusion of choice. Lol I mean it's actually a management technique is use with staff. Most people don't care that I'm offering them a turd burger or a crap sandwich as long as they feel they are being empowered to choose between them.
My complaint with FFXIV gear is the changes between tier are so minuscule, you barely notice a difference until you get the whole set. I would like a bit more of a bump, so each upgrade felt meaningful. This is particularly true with Materia, you need lots of it to really feel the changes.
Oh! Brian is upset. 😳 It’s ok. Not ok that’s he’s upset, but that he’s letting his frustration out. It’s much healthier then keeping it bottled up! It can’t be helped sometimes. He’s only human. When you care about something enough, this will happen. I played FFXIV at a time when we didn’t have any help for choosing the right gear except, reading numbers and experimenting. Now you just click an icon and boom, ‘better’ gear auto equipped. But as so many of us have noticed, it’s not always better, it’s just bigger numbers. Personally I think the in-game option to give feedback is a BRILLIANT idea. And remember folks, no game is perfect and it’s ok to say it. Stay safe. ❤️
Here's just a simple question:
What if there was Relic ARMOR/GEAR alongside Relic Weapons, which matched the current iLevel (instead of being a bit behind) of Augmented Tomestone gear, had the 5 meld slots that Relics tend to, and at the high end, let you adjust their stats the way Relic Weapons do, along with being the best for some kind of content (exploration content like Eureka/Bozja, or I guess with us NOT GETTING ANY this expansion, Criterion dungeons)?
Basically, a parallel progression path that isn't BETTER than Savage raid gear, but is roughly comparable to it, can be used in raids for people that really want to, and can be advantageous in the non-raid content.
I'm sure the complains of "OH NO!!! Raiders will have to grind a second set of gear if one piece is BIS!!!" will come out of the woodwork, but I've always had one response to that, no matter the game:
So what?
If that's the way they WANT TO PLAY, then they can do it. Choices are good things, not bad things. And yes, it is a choice. Since the gear will be approximately equal, no one will HAVE to do it, and it won't be required for clears, so any raid leader demanding it will be a moron and the raid team can kick him/her to the curb and find another if they don't like it.
People who hardcore min-max are going to hardcore min-max regardless of what that means. They're going to have every Job to max level, they're going to constantly be swapping melds and eating through Materia like it was Thanksgiving dinner topped with Halloween candy. If they want to do that, let 'em. Games shouldn't be limiting the 99% of the player base because of the CHANCE that the 1% – who burn themselves out anyway if content is hard/grindy and, if it isn't, get bored and unsub – are going to maybe burn themselves out.
There's zero reason not to have AT LEAST ONE parallel gearing path at this point.
Hell, every new dungeon comes out with gear that we all just sell/disenchant for mats because literally no one needs it unless you're gearing that 13th 90 you just leveled to run role quests on and never touch otherwise that shares no gear with any of your other Jobs. (Ninja. Basically Ninja. :p And it can at least share accessories with Ranged!)
Perks in gear is a bit risky and ends up being a hassle for devs to balance as most games with perks or gear set bonuses ends up impacting other aspects of the game that they may have overlooked. Division 2 as an example and it’s “perks” cause more issue that end up taking away dev time to fix then making new content.
The current gear grind doesn’t bother me in FFXIV as it means the other content can expand and grow and not get pushed back because a specific set does 1 million damage.
As my professor once said. If you want to rant, that is fine, but if you don’t bring a solid idea to the table all your blowing is hot air.
Having read a few comments, I completely misunderstood what you were saying! I love FFXIV, really I do, but that doesn't make me blind to its flaws. The gearing system itself is linear, which I think makes it accessible to all the players rather than just this group or that group. However, grindy grinds and pentamelding just to make special recipes or gather that collectable? That makes my teeth itch and eyes roll. There are parts of the gearing system that does need to be looked at. Especially the design of some of this gear, because so much of it is hideous!
I totally agree! This is def one aspect of the game that if changed would motivate me to log in more regularly!
As an ex WOW player I love the gear system but I don’t engage with the high end stuff.
Go Brian!
I do love the simplicity of the tome system, but I agree with you on a lot of points. I just push my iLvL up. I like the ease of this at times, but most of the time it means I don’t think about what I use.
Wish I could like this video more than once.
Explaing how you feel is better than being a rant but being a critique is fine without extremes, I guess. FF14 is awful. World of Warcraft is not better. There are many as possibly 500 Mmorpgs or less. I know for sure there is a 100 or less.
I've never laughed so hard listening to someone whine so much and throw their toys out of the pram.
I'm all up for this villain arc too, as long as you are not going out of your way to bother anyone I am all Pro constructive criticism. Otherwise how can things improve? I do think that the idea of having niche gear with specific perks for different content would be a great idea
YES! I a love FFXIV and have been playing since ARR yet I agree with everything you say here. The community really is eager to silence criticism no matter how legitimate it is.
And this criticism is absolutely legitimate. Mundane is really the best way to describe the gear in XIV. I should be excited about getting a new piece of gear yet in XIV I haven't been excited for any piece of gear since I got my first job gear in ARR. That's really terrible.
I think having gear that affects specific content is the way forward. It's sort of how HoH/PoTD have their own gearing systems (although they aren't complex at all) that are independent from the regular item levels and substats.
Bozja/Zadnor gear is a really good example of what I'm talking about. Having gear you earn/upgrade from doing specific content that provides you with additional effects that only work within that content is a good compromise since it won't affect the balance of the rest of the game's content.
Criterion dungeons seem like the perfect place to introduce something like that in Endwalker.
what dislike button. []~(￣▽￣)~*
Love this side of Brian!
Speak your mind Brian! Better to be honest especially when it is about something you are passionate about.
I agree so much. Gearing in XIV is just about inflating your numbers. Now there is less choice with Materia as well.
It is great they made the game more accessible, but the gear is so simplified now.
Perks or subclasses … some sort of option on how to optimize "your" character. Make him/ her perform how you see fit.
This will make balancing harder but there has to be growth on the system they have now.
I gave a like to this.
Things I learned from this video:
– Everyone is out to get you
– You think gear suck
– You want to play aRPG, but in FF14
There is no substance to the video and you still spend over 8min talking about it. That's really impressive.
i think that gearing should be fairly simple….if u wanna do X content u gotta have X gear when it comes to high-end raiding content of course….(pvp should stay as it is-gear should never play a role in pvp)….gearing should not be a game mechanic…once u start complicating gearing system u will just hit the same wall WOW did….its not good for the game
Heck yeah Brian!!!
as a cs major/student who plans on dominating the mmo scene in the coming years, these kinds of videos are always fun to watch but i think i missed the point
This is one of the better tales you’ve had towards the game in my opinion. I think most people who have played the game for a while or do challenging content in the game regularly agree with how boring gearing in this game really is. It just doesn’t leave much to the player in terms of individualism or creativity in specs. Gearing in this game is what keeps the jobs linear and honestly a lot of us are just tired of it.