Gearing in FFXIV Is Broken 

I didn't find a way to mention bait bag in this video...sorry

A high tomestone cost 'unlock merchant' or 'unlock category' with an NPC, a one-time payment, and then the gear is exponentially cheaper- perhaps even cheaper the more roles you have geared, may solve the tomestone bottleneck.

As party finder raider, getting flexibility is massive. Having a pocket warrior or summoner you can pull out when there's no spot for your main is such a convenience late in the tier.

I 100% agree the savage tier loot restrictions should be lifted on the odd numbered major patch.

I think the key part I like about the way you have it proposed is that the progression seems to make sense, when something new comes out there's a good reason to do it as it actually stands a chance of improving your gear (even if you're just swapping some det for some crit) and not just for the fashion or suboptimally gearing an alt. It also means after the first few weeks of optional content's release you'll have people coming back to keep it active. I think that having more than two top ilvl options for gear would be enough to make the gear min-maxing a little more interesting even with nothing else added.

1. Tomes: They already fixed this a bit for the casual base. Reducing the cost of Weapons is HUGE. However, your "additional option" (3:46) making tomes role based would also have weird side effects and such for different playstyles. The casual players who run different roles at random. I know people who do roulettes on a die roll. You force people to play only their main for roulettes when often I don't even touch DRG for a day's roulettes when I'm doing them. I'll be on SGE, or WAR often, especially if I'm not going solo. And making it a spending limit would also be a bit weird, given some pieces cost below 400, 500, or the pieces over 800. You would need to rebuild tomes from the ground up. 2. Casual content actually has better access to upgrade tokens than someone who only raids. Sure, one per week from Alliance, but Hunt Trains kinda destroy every other grinding option. 2000/3000 Nuts for an upgrade token, while you gain tons of multiple tomes. Hit S ranks or even have SSs proc? Sure it'll give us A reason to spend our capped tomes once we have every BiS Tome piece as a Savage player, but like... yeah hunts. From your points on Criterion and beyond I can't really disagree too much. Especially relics. I've said for years "Relic is for Glamour and NOTHING but." They're always so behind until x.55 they're not really useful. You're either so casual the weapon means nothing, or already too "hardcore" in doing the super difficult task of buying Tome Weapons that its not worth it. I like having a relic grind, but I'm never gonna pretend it's more than glam.

I really like a lot of the suggestions made here, the gearing process is by and large one of my biggest personal issues with the game. More variety in how you're able to gear, and more options to get gear that's actually practical and useful would be so so nice.

The further you get into a patch cycle, the more gear options there should be, and the less restrictive it should be to obtain it. When I first got caught up in Shadowbringers, I got gear from Bozja to to get my foot in the door in high end content. It was good enough, and I could farm for it at my own pace, without worrying about getting the most I can per week or whatever. Maybe its not BiS, maybe hardcore raiders will have no reason to ever use it, but I think its good to have something between the minimum item level for that savage tier and best in slot. It can be used as catch up for people coming into the tier late, or alt jobs for people that want to play other jobs in savage. This can co-exist for faster BiS gearing too. For me, I don't really care about getting BiS on every job. Its just far too much work. Even if it was easier, I probably wouldn't bother. But gear that's good enough for everything but ultimate and isn't restricted? Yeah I'd go for that. I know I would, because I did that in shadowbringers. Endwalker could have offered gear like this through variant dungeons. Maybe you could even then augment that gear via criterion normal and have it be equivalent to savage gear. Then maybe variant/criterion could be its own parallel upgrade path rather than just being something that content hungry raiders do in-between tiers once and then never again. Also have dungeons just drop personalized gear so we stop getting people in the level 87 dungeon that are still in cryptlurker shit

I find the role specific tomestone cap to be a really nice idea tbh. Like if you want you can progress all roles at the same speed with that (aside from weapons, but that's where relics would come in).

I think it'd be interesting if the gear upgrade items could be purchased using Bicolor Gemstones or a new untradable voucher purchased with them. Would give people more reason to do FATEs and populate the overworld areas as well.

The metaphor in the intro had me rolling on the floor. Great video!

idk i kinda just agree tbh, banger vid. The idea of role-based tome caps is certainly interesting that I hadn't thought of before but also can't really see them implementing given SE's usual excuses about what is or isn't in the realm of possibility (packet data, server side info/storage etc). I still think a 900 weekly cap would be sensible at this point but given the change in their approach to Savage release, I would also have them revert the Tome weapon cost to 1k tomes. Something else I've realised becoming increasingly important as well is just having more ways to acquire Tome gear upgrade materials or make it cost less books, even if they were to implement the suggested change of allowing all books to be traded in for lower floor books.

good vid with suggestions that sound nice ^^ (Unortunately I have no idea how current gearing feels, since still sprout)

I think it would help if there was a system similar to augmented crafted gear for tome gear. You could trade a piece of gear plus some token or bi-colored gemstones for that same piece of gear for another role. Your friends need a tank for their raid? Swap your caster gear and some gemstones for fending gear and help them out. Too many bleeds to heal? Swap your healer gear for some DPS gear and let someone else deal with it. It isn't perfect, more of a band-aid than a real solution, but it would at least allow players to play more roles

Great video!!

That intro fucking sent me, hahaha, thank you for that Rinon

I love your timeline you suggested! Much more up to date and not so sliggish anymore The one thing I kinda miss is that I would like to have a second gear set that Criterion provides. Maybe make it a carbon copy of the savage raid set stat wise. Why I would like this is simply for all the people that try to gear up through pf and lose out to rolls over and over again. Having then another sort pf battle content on par on Savage that provides the same gear but with a currency system instead of a loot roll system, I think, would be very healthy for the game

Regarding the tome cap, I think they should just raise the cap earlier in the patch cycle. If each savage tier is relevant for 8 months, raise the cap at least halfway through. Perhaps not ideal but it's the simplest solution I can think of

Changing caps around would be nice QoL for trying alt roles, but you get the same impact by having an alt character. This may ultimately be healthier for the crafter economy - even though nobody wants to level an alt. Having enough friction to deter people from Flavor of the Month/Week swapping is necessary, and the time restrictions work well for that. Also, isn't BIS for ultimates not even from Savage gear?

In terms of the tome gear, I think a simpler solution (from the devs side anyways) would be to gradually raise the weekly cap during the patch cycle. For example, 7.2 launches, a new set of tomes is introduced and capped at 450 per week as usual. Then at 7.25, raise it to 600 per week, 7.28 raise it to 750 per week, then at the start of the 7.3 "catch up" patch it's set to 900 where it can stay until 7.4 introduces a new tome, then the cycle repeats. This way you can gradually increase the speed at which you can gear alt jobs while still keeping the initial gearing cycle for your main about the same.

Maybe relic in the odd number .x5 patches makes more sense, otherwise there's 'no point' to getting the savage weapon if you're doing ultimate, you'd just get the relic. Obviously you'd get it to make clearing savage easier in the meantime but it's nice that gear lasts an entire patch later imo. Unless that's what you meant and I misunderstood, but it seemed like you meant for relics to match savage on the odd patches, meaning right when ulti comes out

I think simply raising the tomestone cap from 450 to 750 would be the best solution on tomestones. It's still going to take 2 weeks to get chest or pants, but will be enough to let you get a head, gloves or boots week 1. I would also like to move the accessory juice to the first turn of each tier. It makes no sense that the accessory juice does not drop with the raid accessories. The way it is now, the 2nd turn of the tier is actually capable of making it take a total of 24+ weeks to gear 1 job because of having the accessory juice in there. I would also move the left side juice to the 2nd turn, and still have the weapon juice in the 3rd turn. Alternatively, you could just have the juice be guaranteed to everyone with the book for clearing instead of forcing us to roll on an upgrade resource. The way it is now, Square Enix clearly does not value the time of their customers. Everything else I can get behind.

100% agree with these recommendations! 👍

I've also long held the relic starts too late. This really hurts player retention in the earlier patches as anyone who's not raiding has little reason to show up.

This is a valid well thought out take. Agree 💯

I definitely agree with all of your points! For the role lockout we could do this: capped tomestones are used to purchase tokens (like the weapon tokens). Gear takes 1 or 2 tokens. These tokens are tied to roles and are what get locked out faster. With this we can simply unlock the tomestones altogether and even add a new way to spend them now that they’re uncapped. Item level between tiers needs addressing. The new gear each patch should be equivalent to, or even outpaced by the old BiS. That way grinding the older savage is a viable way to get raid-ready gear and keeps older tiers alive past for glam or completionist’s sake. Bozja also had a large variety of gear, though I imagine those would be the equivalent for relic gear in your scenario, or it could be a separate gear track entirely! I’ll steal someone else’s suggestion and say that bicolor gemstones should be able to contribute! Either let them purchase upgrade pieces, or perhaps even right side gear?! And allow hunt currency to purchase upgrades sooner, like on the odd patches.

I mean, apparently square's open to 900 tomestone cap since they changed it to that for Comedy on last subpatch to speed up gearing for endgame Endwalker

I would say that they should make it so you can only win one piece of loot each week one each floor in savage like in normal and make 8 pieces drop so you do get to walk away with 1 piece from each floor a week. Also make it so you dont have to clear p1, p2, p3 each week just because you are p4 progging and dont need gear from the other each week. makes it so people arent needing to reclear needlessly or need a taxi

Just spit-balling ideas ofc, and your ideas are prime, as well. I find myself bored during the catch-up patches since I tend to get my ulti class geared out by the time the ultimate is here, and doing my weekly savage reclear right at the start of the week means they're done on day one, I've capped my weekly tomes by day 3, and then I'm only logging in to hang out with friends or participate in raid. I wanna enjoy criterion dungeons and the weekly alliance raid, but the rewards just aren't worth it when I'm thinking about how I'll have enough savage books next week anyways.

Reasonable gearing takes? In MY FFXIV?! The sheer temerity, to the gaol with you!

Agreed with all of this. Many good ideas I would love to see implemented. I hope you'll make a video on the subject of sub-stats in the future. Here is what I would like them to do with sub stats: make them all matter so that we can see different options for builds. Right now there are only a very few jobs that have actual options that matter, mainly Black Mage which you can choose to build as a fast caster or crit caster and it changes the gameplay significantly. Gunbreaker too although not as much. But I would love to see more jobs have that kind of option. Also, please Square-Enix, do something to tenacity and piety to make them useful as sub stats you can pick for a specific build. I always end up throwing away the tenacity/piety materia that extract from my gear. They are completely useless.

Put Rinon in charge of gearing at SE, holy.

The only point i would change is the relic weapon veing best in slot so early. I think for the purposes of high-end raiding, the best-in-slot gear for ultimate shouldnt change until the dungeon gear catches up. For the very hardcore raiders, it doesnt matter if you set that time limit to half a patch, but for a big portion of ultimaye raiders, i think they would still appreticate the title of "on patch" or "on tier" clears. The damage and stat changes are miniscule but lets not fan the flames in this regard.

For upgrade items, I've had largely the same thoughts, but I dunno how I feel about making relics both BiS before expac-end and also releasing so soon after an ultimate. A decent amount of people like the personal achievement of clearing something un-nerfed / before gear obsoletes some of the difficulty (saw some of that in p8s when it got nerfed after a few weeks), and a decent amount of slower-prog groups don't clear an ult in a month or two, at which point having the relic would become expected + make the remaining checks a bit easier. Role-based purchases is a decent idea, but I feel like it might be kind of a coding nightmare for SE to track multiple uses of a single resource. The way I always imagined would be something that checks your inventory, and just reduces tome prices for items which you have a matching ilvl/slot for already, so after you buy your main's earrings, you can buy half-price alt earrings or something.

Final Fantasy XI has a piece of content called Ambuscade that gives unique currency you can use to buy unique equipment. The currency is infinitely grindable, but the items you can buy with it are finite; restocking every week. It's basically tomestones reversed, and I wish XIV worked the same way.

Tomestones could be handled like shadowflame sparks in WoW. The game remembers the current cap and if you aren't caught up you can get up to the cap. Just have the tome cap change each week to the current total and show how many you've already collected.

i actually like the 450/w cap... it seems well balanced except at the every end of the expansion's patch cycle where it would get in the way of the small amount of players that have actually lvled everything to max. but once the new expansion starts, they could theoretically just grab crafted or dungeon gear for those jobs. so it's not as much of an issue as one might think. i do like the idea of allowing for upgraded to the alliance raid gear. if at the cost of it being dyable till you do augment it.

I like how deep dungeon aetherpool works. You essentially “gear” once and all your jobs are done. Play whatever you want. I doubt they would change the system like that though. I guess all I can hope for is they unlock savage and tomes before ulti release

Make it work like the Save the Queen relics where the first one is hard and subsequent ones are easier. For the raid weapons, your first weapon costs a total of 4 swords and each additional weapon costs one sword. Same for pretty much every gear slot. The first of the gear slot costs a lot as you are teching up to that level, but then getting additional roles to that level is easy. The only issue is people who WANT a long grind, in which case it makes sense to have a long relic weapon grind for marginal gains over easier options, mostly centered in stat flexibility.

I think these ideas are great, the only exception is if savage unlocked on .1 (which is great) I feel like alliance should just drop full ilvl since it has a weekly cap anyway, no need to upgrade it.

My biggest gripe is how sparse accessories are at the start of a tier, because they go from incredibly annoying to get, to easy to get as soon as you can get them through alliance raids and hunts. The steps they took with raid gear as a whole are great this expansion, guaranteeing one of each piece and reducing the costs etc, but gear augments are just so annuals to get early, there’s so many easy solutions too: 1: simply add more, maybe an accessory in 1 and 2 and a left side gear in 3 and 4 2: make them cost less books to redeem 3: make them obtainable casually earlier but at a slower rate 4: allow any book to be used as a wild card for a previous turn, like how 12 books can become 9-11 ones now, but make it so 11 can become 9-10 and so on

i wish crafted gear was just catch up and your bis would carry over into the next tier, maybe even with a slight advantage over crafted. I get that we're getting bis for ultimate but it feels so shit to throw it away afterwards

They should also add in a system to convert fully upgraded zodiac relics to fishing poles that can catch one unique fish just to mess with the fishers.

The stupidiest thing they need to change is how upgrade materials are obtained through alliance raids. needing three tokens at the end of an expansion is way too time consuming. Just make it one clear per week for the newest installment.

I would personally like to see an implementation of a weekly guaranteed savage piece of gear, and guaranteed upgrade item, for clearing each week. Same way they do normal raid and alliance, where you roll on what you want, but once you get an item, you're locked for gear for the week However, I want this alongside a change so your completion status for the week doesn't affect others loot. None of this 1 chest, half chest, no chest stuff. I think this would allow for a much more robust raiding scene. You can keep raiding, even if you got your weekly gear. You might need to clear multiple times, just to get the gear you want. Overall, I think it would add life to savage, and help the scene overall

I agree with some of the frustration. I wish there was a more reasonable way to gear alt jobs. For me, I main tank jobs and so those usually get geared up first. But what if my FC needs a healer or a DPS for EX or raids? Well, then I'm weeks behind on my grind unless I have piles of gil sitting around to purchase "good, but not great" gear for the different job roles. A full set of Diadochos is still over a million gil on my server, and that's not including the time needed to augment it if you're at that point in the patch lifecycle. I like the idea of alternate methods of gearing up. Tomestones are fine, but adding in criterion dungeons, field operations, and alliance raids might help. Alliance raids seem to also fall into the "good not great" gear along with crafted, which is even more frustrating considering you are typically locked to one drop per week for the first few months after the raid releases. Alliance Raid gear should be equal to tome gear. For example, gear from Agalia would be equal to augemented Radiant, Euphrosyne would be equal to augmented Lunar Envoy, and Thaleia would be equal to augmented Credendum.

the real downside to increasing tome cap / splitting tome cap between jobs is that it will take also more time in a day to be done with your dailies. It already takes an hour or two to be done, imagine having to run all those roulettes again for other jobs. Some people simply cannot afford this time, which in return will make them upset because they cant use this feature at all

Think the only thing being pitched here that I'm not entirely crazy about is the role-specific tome cap for, say, up to 2 roles...but it reminds me of something that would sorta fix that. At some point in WoW's history, you could specify what loot you wanted to receive whenever you ran content. Ex. I could specify I wanted enhance gear for my shaman (melee dps), but run said content as resto (healer). So being able to set a role cap for say, scouting dps, but then run content as a tank and have those tomes count towards scouting gear...I could get behind that. It's kinda silly how it's so much easier to gear up for older ultimates simply due to how stingy loot acquisition can be in this game.

I would like to add one Thing. This Expansion Savage released one week after the respective Patch has gone life. But before you go into Savage you have to farm another 450 Tomes and up to 4 more Gear Tokens from Normal Raids. I would like to have a combined 900-Tome-Cap for the first 2 Weeks as well as the ability to get 2 Gear-Tokens per Normal Raid in these 2 Weeks. After that it can go back to 450 per week and 1 Gear Token per week per normal raid.

I think they should remove the tomestone cap entirely, but only allow a single gear purchase per role per week. And to prevent burnout from obligatory tomestone farming of a max level dungeon, they should limit tomestome rewards to once per day per duty, like how roulettes award tomestones only once a day. Odd number patch content should also reward gear on par with the previous raid tier. In 6.3 you should be able to get 6.2 tomestone gear upgrade items from Criterion dungeons. Relic weapons can stay in x.x5 patches, but should be the same ilvl or 5 ilvls higher than the previous savage tier. This would mean that 6.35 relics weapons are equal to 6.2 raid weapons OR potentially on par with 6.4 crafted weapons. This would not destroy the crafted weapon economy because many players will still pay for the convenience of not farming a relic weapon, especially for alts. Edit: The one per role per week restriction on tomestone gear could lead to NIN being a preferred raiding choice because they share accessories with ranged. This of course would need to be addressed if they ever went that route.

GOATED thumbnail lol

I just want to be able to tweak my stats like bozja relics on all my pieces :x

I like. it would definitely be an imporvement. I would need to watch the other content creator's videos to compare and take what would be the best of them.

Agree with all the ideas, they would make gearing a lot better. I kind of wish savage criterion would differentiate itself a bit more from “normal” mode, like new mechanics or the missing secret boss though. Though I suppose thats not really related to gear.

0:09 chose the some of the hottest pics of them. Dapper suit Xeno smile, Sworn Gains Happy and Arthuars with his mouth closed

I agree these are positive changes in general, but I do feel they still err towards the issue of "clear Hard content to get access to gear good enough to do that Hard content" I absolutely understand gating BiS to clearing difficult content, but, considering that only a small fraction of the playerbase actually clears savage fights on patch, and only an even smaller fraction actually goes into ultimates on patch, I feel like the system revolves too heavily around those players, specially considering the many, many more players that enjoy extremes but struggle with them and could use better gear even if that required grinding for it in some other way. All the more so when you can get "basically BiS" eventually by grinding captomes, grinding alliance coins, and of course grinding relic. In fact I quite liked how the relic was a BiS option that instead of beating one very hard fight, required one very long grind. Basically, I wish we had more options to upgrade(specially, earlier) crafted gear through paths of alternative difficulties. Like, as a quick and dirty example, if we got something similar to deep dungeons and could use aetherpool grips to upgrade crafted gear into quasi-BiS gear before the catch-up patch, or something like the atma farm for the same purpose. Give players with more of a taste for the traditional MMO grind than for Hard fights something to work towards.

I have had so many thoughts and ideas and gripes with the gearing process for additional jobs in the game forever. I agree with a lot of the suggestions made in this video. There are a few things I would like to add. Relic system I 100% agree with so not bringing it up again. I want to have relics accompany us all expansion and after completing one, to be able to breeze through the rest if I want to. Including with armour. And while we're at it give us relic accessories we can upgrade those with each major patch. The tome system has been disappointing the whole time it has existed. I believe that after we complete a set of left side or right side gear, all costs for the corresponding side of gear should be reduced for following jobs. This idea ties in with "what do you have in your inventory/on your person in the game", so you'd want to hold onto at least one complete set while spending on further pieces of gear. Alliance raid gear should never have been glamour only. I believe as "catch up gear" it should be made a little more available as well. It doesn't need to have best in slot stats, not even close. I want alliance raid gear to be available not only through the drops in the raid itself, but to also be available through a merchant tied to the raid. Let us purchase the raid gear through a token vendor using the coin or whatever the raid drops we currently exchange for a tome gear augment. We're putting it to a capped piece of gear after all. I believe no gear earned in late game content should be inherently irrelevant. Normal raids have decent gear for starting out a patch, however I believe it would be excellent if we were to get a weekly drop until the weekly limits on the normal raids are dropped (and maybe the limit on said gear should be dropped from the outset), and getting say 1 weekly drop should allow us to augment a normal accessory raid piece of gear to be unaugmented tome ilvl, 4 each for body and legs, and 2 each for head, hands and feet. These augmented normal raid equipment maybe still don't have the dye properties, but at least it allows for a higher ilvl a little faster, and maybe for people who still have bad luck getting their gear token from a fight each week despite the QoL update during Shadowbringers to the raid drops. The lack of dye would mean still incentivizing a certain type of player to do the savage fights outside of gearing for ultimates/mounts from the final fights of the tier. I also believe we should have endgame gear come from content through the rest of the game, through content long forgotten...besides tomestones from roulettes. I have long held the belief that leve quests and fates could have much greater potential. Imagine being able to use leve allowances to outright spawn achievement fates, and you invite people along before you spawn it so you know you'll get the completion. Imagine completing fates awards leve allowances. Imagine...using a certain amount of leve allowances allows spawning a boss which is maybe up to 24 person scaled in difficulty, or savage scaled in difficulty, and drops a guaranteed coffer of gear for each participant. I would sincerely love for them to give some attention to that system which had once been a big hope for me that we could eventually pick and choose and scale certain types of endgame fights. It's not even battle content passed heavensward now as far as leves go. Tying fates and leves together allowing the spamming of leves depending on how much you fate farm, as well as genuinely prog-able bosses in the overworld for passersby and newbies to watch in on has been an mmo dream of mine for ffxiv. It would make the world more interesting for people who are just out exploring, they get to see a big boss being fought by people. And, leve targets can't be hit by people in the viscinity, as well the passersby can't be hit by leve targets, so it would basically be uninteractable, however it would be content that they could witness and be inspired to do such a thing when they reach high enough level, or if they're passed a certain level cap, they could do one for a previous expansion. Perhaps the rewarded gear is unique to itself entirely. Perhaps it's like augmented tome gear and has a limit to how many coffers you can get a week until a certain point in a patch cycle. I have also always wanted an extension to grand company content outside of the repetition we've had for it for years now. I wish we had more grand company quests. Daily quests, weekly quests, quests which send us out to quell a primal in the open world. We take up the quest, we get to fight a solo version of the primal in their respective zone. The quest should scale to our level, and depending on whether daily or weekly. I have wanted this for a long time however, so in retrospect, imagine it being something akin to tribe shenanigans, with the addition of giving us a big bad weekly boss. I haven't yet tied this into endgame gear, so I'll get to it after the next point in this. The reputation quests for the grand company through daily and weekly objectives, would allow us to increase our rank further. After a certain point, we'd be "rank capped" until the next expansion. The gear would be earned through the use of weekly quest tokens once the rank cap has been reached. This incentivizes keeping up with the grand company ranking, and if it also requires the use of seals, then there's another use for those seals outside of the already abundant uses they have. I have always wanted more grand company gear, more flavours to the gear, and making it endgame would be incredible. Add to that the grand company potions which can be used to increase the ability of grand company gear for a period of time, and it could be used for endgame content daily. Again, doesn't need to be best in slot, and maybe on top of that maybe we can't even meld it so it's just mediocre as far as endgame gear. It's passable and fine but not ever going to be a best in slot piece of gear. Options in the game have been wonderful outside of endgame gearing for a long time, and adding options in the ways we can suggest to the devs is genuinely something I have been thinking about since back during realm reborn. My opinions on the matter have evolved, and I've enjoyed the bits of quality of life the endgame gearing has faced over the years. I do think relic gear should be indisputable best in slot every time, and that the first job doing the new relic quest should have it ROUGH or grindy, but then following jobs should have it significantly easier considering how many jobs we have available over the years of the game thriving. Perhaps tying the different contents I suggested updating into the relic would make the relics even livelier. As long as they don't bring back Zodiak books and needing to complete a specific fate or a specific leve. Savage should still be worth obtaining, so savage gear being available before being able to complete the new step of the relic should stay, for those who complete savage in a remarkable speed. Another piece of content unrelated to gearing I would love to have updated, is guildhests. With the addition of different mechanics both for individuals and for parties over the years, guildhests could be an incredible method of teaching how to perform a mechanic. Currently, we can essentially skip all the mechanics in the guildhests. Making the guildhests about learning the mechanics rather than *just* hitting a target or multiple targets, would be incredible for teaching players how to get through a certain stage of a fight. Imagine getting stuck in a new fight on a mechanic, and that mechanic is in a new guildhest, and being able to practice that mechanic with your static or party or even random people through the guildhest until completion. Another way of making endgame content more approachable to anyone. Apologies for going on so long with this, but I hope there's some agreement or shared sentiment for this. I have loved this game since the earliest testing periods pre 1.0, and it's only gotten better over the years. I can and always have been critical of things despite this love for the game, because of how much potential I see in it. Content I enjoy or see potential in dying out, makes me genuinely hope one day they'll consider approaching the content again.

Remove normal raid gear from normal raids, replace it with tome gear and keep the same loot system for it. Use the tomestone currency only for upgrading it

I think there should be more choice regarding the substat. Trying to reduce tenacity/piety is annoying already, but having too much skill/spell speed can be infuriating.

Legit just do what blizzard did with their weekly locked currency. Make the cap higher as each week goes by, 450 first week, 900 second week etc etc. That way when it comes to gearing alt jobs you can just farm as much as you need in one go (if you're that crazy)

This video needed to be made in 2.0, not 11 years later.

I would rather see gear from old raids be relevant for the next tier in some way. Even if its just consumed to upgrade the relic armor to reduce or replace a grind to upgrade it, and that relic gear is unquestionably best for week 1 of the new tier. Cuz having gear you spent weeks getting, completely replaced and outclassed by stuff you can buy off the MB just kinda feels bad lol

i am devastated that you think googly eyes percentage won't be a thing in the future

As someone who has mostly played story content so far this may as well be in a foreign language to me lol.

I really hesitate to push relics as an optimal or even viable early/mid-patch gearing option, especially after what we've seen in Endwalker. For some players, mid-level content and relic grinds like Zetas, Eureka and Bozja are what keep them going through patch cycles much more so than high-end raiding, and the relics at the end being best in slot isn't specifically a reward so much as the relics being cool shiny capstones for having done the content. Endwalker sacrificed that entirely, in favor of a way to placate players who had previously never engaged with relics at all and who in most cases weren't running content where they'd need bis anyway. Effectively removing the relic grind as a piece of content in its own right left a nontrivial portion of the playerbase without a tangible focus to work away at throughout the expansion and (anecdotally, among many players I know) left many feeling a little lost and even unsubscribing where before they'd played actively even into late odd patches. I don't think this is *purely* due to the relic changes, of course, so much as the overall lack of good side content 6.0 gave us - but the lack of a relic is a large part of that issue. The Endwalker relic design was specifically a result of player complaints over relics feeling like an excessive or unfair grind for a "necessary" best-in-slot piece, despite relics not being relevant until the absolute end of the expansion, long past the extra substats being any kind of meaningful upgrade. With what Yoship recently said in an interview about wanting to go back to a more grindy, ARR-inspired style of relic, and 7.0 giving us another foray, I'd hate to see those relics become a necessity that every raider feels the need to push for in order to stay competitive or parse well because those complaints would just come back tenfold and finish the job of burying what is in my opinion a really valuable component of the game. I largely agree with every other point you make, and before 6.0 I'd have agreed on this point too, but we've seen how willing they are to streamline anything and everything at the blatant cost of a fun game. If relics become a necessary upgrade path throughout the expansion, I fear they will ultimately and inevitably cease to be content for the people who have enjoyed them throughout the game's existence, and just become another streamlined tome outlet for raiders. Midcore players need things to do too :(

It's really odd how long Square waits to provide alternative methods of gearing than Savage. And like you said, they unlock each Savage tier so late that it basically doesn't matter. I think my biggest hope for DT gearing is that they'll speed up the timeline a bit, so it's not just 'Savage drops' into months of nothing, despite dedicated players already having their BiS. Once the Ult is out for that cycle, just let people gear, who cares at that point. You're just needlessly gatekeeping people who came in late but want to try the Ult.

I approve of these changes, SE please make this happen in 7.x

I fully agree with most of these, especially on the even patch, I hate hate hate getting upgrade materials and it was the one problem they did NOTHING to fix with the anabaseios restructuring. A static of 8 on average shpuld need at least 40 upgrade materials to get Bis, how many do you get per week before spending books? 2. This is unacceptable as it basically forces spending books on tome augments and not on alt job gear or to patch any holes you need otherwise, especially for bad luck protection if you pf.

the role lock for weekly cap could also potentially remove the possibility of you accidentally buying a piece of gear for wrong role (ex. caster/healer) for stupid people like me who have done that :D

I find it impossible to think CBU3 hasn’t heard us on this. It’s too loud a topic. I don’t know what if anything they’re gonna try to change but there’s no way they don’t know gearing is seen as too slow.

I don't like the idea of the Relic overtaking the Savage weapon in in the odd .5 patch, because it kinda fucks with the Ultimate. For one, the Ultimate would lose its original difficulty much sooner since the relic will make dps checks easier. Usually the difficulty of the fight stays the same for the entire odd patch, but this would already "nerf" it in half that time. However, the bigger problem would be that the Relic being BiS for ultimates means that you would also be expected to have the relic when progging the fight while it is current. Now with the manderville relics that wouldn't be as bad, but assuming future relics actually require a grind to get, this would be awful for anyone not interested in that sort of content that just wants to raid. Just imagine having to grind through something like Eureka when it was current for your ultimate BiS. I think the relic should only get upgraded to five item levels below the raid weapon. This would make it useless for raiders, but that's honestly fine, the relic is casual content and its main target audience isn't raiders (it's main purpose is glam anyways). And raiders would still have some incentive of getting it since it would be BiS for ultimates of the previous expansion.

A bit of a late reply to this video but, assuming we stay with the current tome cap, I feel that, next to all the gearing speed suggestions you offered clearing the entire savage lockout should also give you the 450 tome cap, or at least close to it. It's the highest 'average' content in the game, it should give the additional reward of not having to 'grind' expert roulettes for tome cap. I personally just don't like having to log into the game and do a forced dungeon x times per week, I'd rather spend my limited time on the actual content I enjoy. The current amount of tomes offered through Savage is just not enough. The only possible problem I'd see is that there won't be enough "competent" players queueing for experts anymore resulting in either more wipes or longer queue times. Queue times could be alleviated by adding additional rewards for running experts like idk, more gil after hitting cap, a chance of personal drop minions/mounts, bicolor gemstones, sky is the limit really. In case a skill issue would pop up i'd say SE should start pulling ideas from your teaching video and actually train the more casual playerbase to be able to run fairly straightforward content competently. As much as it annoys me that some people don't seem to care about improving, they aren't being handed specific training tools to actually do so besides slamming their head against the content they might struggle with. It's on SE the design the tools and hand the tools to use it, afterwards it's on us as a community to guide the people towards it. Anyway, I hope one of their system changes for Dawntrail will be faster and more accessible gearing, especially for alt jobs. Savage unlock on Ultimate patch would be amazing as well, giving people the opportunity to quickly change roles or jobs depending on the static's or fight's needs.

Gear fix for xiv is simple... All gear should upgrade to savage through various means, so by the end of a tier, you have 3 variations of each item slot. Take glove slot for example. Right now, tanks have crit+tenacity as their bis from savage. But the 650 gloves from alliance raid has crit+det. Now in patch 6.4 you can get 640 crafted gear, 650 tome gear and 660 from raid. In patch 6.5 you can upgrade crafted to 650, and gain access to alliance raid 650 gear and 660 tome upgrades. In 6.55 you should be able to upgrade crafted and alliance to 660. Alliance raid should also have extra accessories added to the vendor list for coins. By the time you get to the odd x.x5 patch, nobody cares about savage. Nobody gives a shit that casual players have access to free 660 gear. The more gear sources you have, the more content people will participate in. Having 4 sources of 660 gear at the end of a tier gives poeople a reason to keep doing content. If you give me the option to ditch my crit/ten gloves for a crit+det version of 660 ally raid gear, id immediately go farm it out.

i guess that fixes gearing up. but not the gear itself which is personally one of my biggest gripes. that being said wont complain too much about it since i know gear is more like an entry ticket for content instead of an actual mechanic.

I agree that we get relic weapon far too late for it to be relevant

Okey, so the real fix to gearing in FFXIV is to finally talk about the modding scene

I think one thing is still needed "Accesiability and variation" Criterion Dungeon stuff is nice to get new drops, but.. I rather have it there are multiplue ways to get new gear that all look different. Imagine getting something the equivalant of Savage Gear, but insted of just grinding savage constantly to get drops you can only get once. Have some other ways to get the drops you cannot get in savage. Eventually.. the dedicated people will get every savage equivalant anyway. Alliance Raid gear could be one, another dungeon one can be one, deep dungeon maybe of that patch? More ways of getting Savage level stuff without dedicating weeks to savage raiding.

For me there is a lot of good ideas, but the ending where you explained how it would go seemed way way to complicated for the average player to care let alone utilize. I don't raid but I have done a fair share of content and legit have worried about like....2-3 times in total. and it was more about my friends gear than myself. Personally I don't think relics or alliance gear should be used to become BiS as that incentivizes the groups that usually don't need it to go after it more when thats meant more for casual catch up not savage catch up. The alliance gear alone is more than enough to get you through the patch cycle and then some of the next. The relic honestly could be stripped of its stats entirely to me as I go more for the prestige of it like I assume ultimate raiders go for the fun and prestige of clearing something hard not getting good gear. My best thoughts as a non raider is as follows. Fix the savage gearing system. Add criterion as another way to gear up even more as its roughly equivalent in difficulty. Then after that on the off patch as people say unlock all the drops and tome cap period for everyone who actually cares to get better gear to obtain it faster. Extremes you could throw in somewhere too sure I guess. Everything else is meant to be chiller so I say leave it alone personally. Lest why not make dungeon gear possible to BiS is my thought at that point.

Very based video. Good job Rin. Now hope that SE actually wants to change something 🤞

Can you lower the music next video? Just a small bit, because its been for me very hard to focus on your voice because of the volume. Thanks!~

banger vid as always

Tome cap has been temporarily doubled

:LOOP: :looking:

"I want to do X content but the rewards arent good enough" shouldnt the content be the main goal, not the gear? So if gearing is ever 'too quick' that means you can just go do what content you want without any worries. Does this essentially mean i would be fine with gearing not existing? Yes, as it is gearing choices are: skill/spellspeed on a couple jobs. So if that choice stayed i dont see why you couldnt remove gear entirely. I pretty much agree with everything in the video though.

I understand the steep price to gear out your first job, but it's so weird to be keeping the others behind the same walls since most players won't have the other jobs lvled in the first place. It's handicapping the truly passionate for no reason. All the alts should be grindable without the time gating once you unlock the gear piece for the first job (if i get a best ilvl chest piece on BLM for comedy, i should be able to spend 10h+ doing sth to get best ilvl chest piece on WHM without waiting for the weekly reset and so on for all the other alts)

a 900 cap would make people feel pressured to keep playing till hitting that cap. i'd rather they just allow Alliance raid gear to be upgraded 10 ilvls. make a secondary cap for criterion dungeons

Tomecap needs definitly an increased, but Alliance Raid Gear and craftet shouldnt be raid equivalent. Currently every raid tier brings 30 new Ilvl then you could reduce it to 20 when there is only raid equivalent gear besides the Craftet and not upgraded Tome gear. I believe this would make Gearprogression even more boring and gives the casual & Midcore player no reason to do savage when the Alliance Raid comes out. I agree on that it could be handled better as it is now but i disagree on the solution.

i think your timeline is a bit fast for midcore players but i really wish we had more gearing options, especially right side stuff... using the tome ring augmented and normal feels bad, and using the raid ring + crafted is pure pain

let's be real here, none of this ideas are happening anytime soon. this game always gives it's players the bare minimum 🤷‍♂️. great video as always tho rinon 👍

The lockout shouldn't be lifted after 7 whole freaking months. One patch cycle is enough. Anything later than that is just a nuisance for statics that started late or have trouble clearing because of skill/scheduling issues.

I'm annoyed that I genuinely did not see where you were going with that first gag until the punchline.

Here's my idea: 1. Remove the lockout, completely. Nuke it from the game. Not only is it an anti-social feature that limits who you can raid with, there are 19 combat jobs in the game and unless you have alts you're not going to be able to play more than 1-2 in savage till you've already cleared the tier. 2. Remove the tome cap, completely. Again, the 19 jobs should provide enough time-gating for SE. Lets be real, the only reason the time-gating exists is because SE is scared you'll pause your subscription earlier/more often. What it really does is hurt raiding.

Call me crazy, but do away with expansion specific tomestones. Increase the poetic cap and just use those for everything. Also the token mechanics in normal raids sucks, just do weekly gear drops like alliance.

just unlock tomes to 900 after killing savage - tome gear becomes a non issue then. your suggestions around tomestones would mean you have to no life the game every week and most players work full time jobs and have responsibilities outside of teh game this suggestion would only punish them for not having the time to farm that much content just for tomes

I prefer dogs over cats

The endwalker relics were completely useless this expansion not just because they came too late for savage, but they were so easy to get when they are available thats theres no sense of rarity, everyones is walking around with these things like they're the latest happy meal toys.

A few thoughts about this. 1. Make the savage gear stats customizable. I never want to grind tomestones, I don't want to do expert roulettes, I don't want to do any casual content, just let me get savage gear and a full set of it is bis. The tomestone gear can have fixed stats but then you upgrade them and you can customize those too. 2. If you have relics and savage and criterion and alliance and and and, it forces you to do so much content. I feel like I I don't log on every single day to grind stuff, I will fall behind. God forbid I have to switch to a different job for an ultimate and go grind everything again. Especially for people that clear Savage in 3 months and then want to do ultimate after, it'd be so incredibly difficult to also juggle criterion savage and having to farm tomes and having to do alliance raids and having to..... 3. I would like for you to be able to buy a category of gear with tomes. I buy earrings, it unlocks every earring for every armour type. I buy chest, it unlocks every chest for every armour type. They can make it cost more tomes so it takes more weeks, if they want to.

And ofc they wont do anything about it and keep the HW formula till the game dies in like 10 years xdddd EW showed that they don't know what to do with the game now.

I am personally a fan of horizontal progression. I prefer to have it like the GW2 method where BiS is determined by stat spread and everything is equally powerful. Just get your level capped gear for the expansion and roll with it. Then again I just think gear is annoying and only good for glamour.

The Relic should be BIS for no less than a season (90 days) at a time, and four works best for the casuals as well as the hardcore because it lets the former enjoy their weapon while affording the latter a necessary rest period (to do what _they_ neglected) before the loop resets. That's the important thing people forget: the end of the loop is to _enjoy the rewards for all that work._ And at expansion's end? _Six months MINIMUM._ People NEED that catchup time, especially those coming in late and hauling ass. Finally, gear needs to translate to power in PVP or it's pointless for anyone that isn't a hardcore raider to more than the minimum to access Expert Roulette. Given how things are, make it _the_ factor in a buff co-efficient equation; if you put in all that work to get that gear, and it is not UNIVERSALLY beneficial in all that you do, then you are being robbed of value. Having it raise your baseline effectiveness as if it were an invisible and permanent level of Battle High in Frontlines would do (and yes, it would STACK).