Zepla on Endgame Gearing in FFXIV by Sfia on Forums 

Maybe reduce the cost of slots you have already purchased. You buy a chest for your main job, and for each alt job it has a reduced cost.

At this point I’ve been playing MMOs so long I just don’t care about gear anymore because it’s just going to get replaced later when a new raid or tier comes out. I just want to have fun with the story, people, scenery, music, and fights from new encounters.

IMO; costs should be lowered a little bit, but instead of buying a piece of gear, you buy a license for that gear slot. Then, you can use the non-capped tomestones to purchase ANY gear in that slot. E.g. I buy a chestpiece license with tokens from the raid, then the actual chestpiece costs 800 non-capped tomestones and I can buy ALL (or multiple of the same) of them if I sat down and grinded out tomestones.

I like your idea of simply reducing the cost with each piece purchased.

I comletely agree with this. Many times I want to change between caster vs phys ranged cause I like to ply both in high end, but if I gear one, I will lock out the other for some time, especially at the last raids in the tier, where i get bored the most as it takes usually the longest to get through in PF.

Tomestone gear costs should be tuned around being able to gear the trinity (tank,healer,dps) within one patch. Ideally every dps type as well, but at the very least 3 jobs.

I have always enjoyed playing multiple jobs to help keep things fresh. I agree that it takes too long to gear up secondary and tertiary roles to a point where I don't feel like I'm not doing my part well enough.

First purchase of a BiS slot is as usual (weekly cap tomestone ex. Causality). Once you've purchased an item in that slot, purchases of that gear slot can be done with either capped or uncapped tomestones (ex. Astronomy). Obviously this would reset when tomestones are updated/made redundant. This effectively allows you to retain the acquisition rate at release and naturally ramp up acquisition organically as the weeks progress.

Joined this game when patch 5.55 was already running since a while, Asphodelos was my first current content end-game so seeing that Abyssos was "one item per raid per week" really hit he hard. I've been enjoying A LOT of content (mount farming, treasure maps, blue mage, gathering, crafting, housing, pvp and probably some others I didn't even think about on the spot) so outside of maybe one or two jobs currently I barely have the item level to play actual end-game current content on a casual level.

The comment @Dessern posted is exactly what I have been saying since Shadowbringers. We should not have to have crafted, or raid gear to do the next content at all. We should be able to earn it in the dungeons and supplemental what we miss with crafted. Too many times I get to the end with my various characters to be stuck and having to craft or buy gear to do the current one if its not my raiding class on my main. (My response for the rest is below) I also miss the original diadem fate events but not the gear XD.. I still got a few of those random rings. ------------------- Personally, totally agree with lowering the cost of the gear. As for the 2nd part, I do feel sub-stats are an issue but I personally have no idea on what they could do to adjust that. It is noticeable on soloing a lot. Also the saying monk relies on it is not fully true cause I love blue mage and that is major on that too. The third part about lack of varied methods I totally agree on. Literally miss being able to do side quests and side content to access really good pieces than always having to focus on raids specially since I do not raid in a static anymore and its mostly Crafted, some tome and then Savage is the BiS most of the time from what I noticed. The 4th literally I can not comment on since I have not experienced Criterion Dungeons, I am still working on my varied. The big reason I care bout the top two so much is due to the fact that I am disabled and am playing this game a lot to socialize. I have two characters at end end game which I am doing omni on one and semi omni on the other. (One is almost all jobs 90, my other most played is 90s on Tank, healer, melee, Ranged, and magic dps along with all her crafts and gatherers. It is a lot but I am more focused now vs my previous characters having over 30 on crystal and some on aether as well.

maybe im a little jaded but i also find tomestone gear in general to be really tedious to acquire. running the same expert dungeon 4 times a week and your 300th run of crystal tower with half your kit gone because of level sync just isnt fun for me but its still required to reach BiS

Since Guild Wars 2 was brought up, here's how it works. The level cap is 80. This never goes up. The highest gear is capped at pink/purple. Purple you can change the stats of. What makes expansions over there change things is how classes get new subclasses. The guild wars 2 system can't work here except if they allowed you to change gear stats would be amazing.

I totally agree with Sfia on this. I too have been playing since ARR and I do main BLM for raid. As Zepla said, gearing BLM is like having another job within the role. Though I appreciate that fact because i remember a time when BLM did share a BIS with SMN and it was a hassle to change materia when switching between jobs. I also know the dangers of making the armor too unique, just look at Final Fantasy Strangers in Paradise. That being said, I have two ideas. Both ideas I have are based on system that currently exist which are repurpose. One way is implementing an existing system from coils. When you clear raids from Final Coil, you get a craftable version of raid gear set. Recycle that very system to our current tier. Have it drop generously and make it untradeable. This can incentivize people to take up crafting. Another way is have raid gear be an achievement unlocks and a reward. It will unlock based on which job you used to clear it. Having to clear once is enough to get the reward for each tier. This will significantly speed up the gearing but also, incentivize people to use other Jobs to clear.

The dynamic pricing reducing the more you buy is a brilliant idea

Even as low as just doing endgame ARR level 50 groups and raids, do I restrict myself with ilvl 60+ gear or get better stats and armor by using ilvl

I started playing about a year ago and finally hit max level and finished 6.0 a couple weeks ago. Prior to this, I would always get a questing job set nearing the expansion's max level and then outfit myself with tomestone gear which would last me until the next expansion. I always did the expansion raids and trials before moving on so I was ready to outfit myself again when I moved on to the next expansion. Things are kind of confusing now that I'm caught up. I have two sets of tomestone gear, both better than what the normal raids give. But I can only get weapons by killing the final boss in each raid tier multiple times. Also, I can only have one tomestone ring and one raid ring. It's an unusual way of doing things but I think I get it. I'm sure SE could make the system a bit better, seeing as that's one of the things they do best in this game. I won't even get into stats and min maxing. Been there, done that in WoW, thank you very much. I have no intention of doing Savage or Extreme at this time, though I'm certain I could pull it off should I ever change my mind.

As a very casual player who barely even makes eye contact with Extreme trials, I would LOVE there to be some kind of "frequent shopper" discount system for getting more tome/raid gearsets. I have quite a few jobs levelled and I spent a good deal of time in the previous patch gearing up all of them... and now I'm under geared in everything again. It really doesn't matter that much in casual content, but I don't like being far down the enmity list as dps (especially if I'm playing something like SAM or RPR where I'm not even bringing much utility to compensate). I especially feel bad playing tank or healer where the the trial/dungeon/raid is a lot messier than it would be if I was properly geared. The guilt is killing my enthusiasm to even play much, at least until the next patch when I'll hopefully be feeling less fatigued by the prospect of gear grinding. I could just do what most people do and choose one job to play & gear up for it, but as Sfia said, the game promotes being able to play all classes on one character and I've always embraced that.

What about purchasing a 'slot' with your tomes where you can get any piece for any job once you've bought the slot? Like if you bought the chest slot you could get any chest of any type.

I personally don't think we should stick with Item level in the future. It's really boring when having to climb for a 910 or 1200 iLvl set and it can get even higher. This reminds me of Lost Ark gear system where we must meet a certain gear power to clear. We could instead simplify by allowing a piece of gear equipable at a certain level and have more interesting stat variations. This will lead to slightly higher level gears don't always mean they're better and require players to pick which piece of gears they need for certain scenario and they will have a mixed set to achieve their desire goals. Like allowing people to have a cast-speed-focused BLM or a crit BLM, a raw strength raw damage WAR vs high vitality and crit WAR. This is just my take coz again i'm not a dev but i don't think sticking with ilevel system is fun like Boom full ilvl 600 set boom another full ilvl 650 set everybody gets the same stats!

I had a similar idea to your "reduce price as you buy". My idea was to increase the tome cap after having spent about 6-8 weeks of tomes.

Yeah I was 100% certain that the criterion dungeons would provide alternative gearing routes to mitigate this issue...pretty bummed about it. All my jobs are 90 but I can only play one or two at a time because of gear. I also have an issue with gearing roles like healer and caster. I main spellspeed astro, so I guess I can't play sage! Or I'd have to get a whole new set/different materia. It's also such a pain having to mix 610 with 620 etc. to avoid piety...idk; kind of wish you could select the substats when you buy them, or have more options.

My issue is definitely being essentially limited to one job per savage raid tier. Sure, I can buy a set of crafted gear, but unless I pentameld, which is very hard/expensive to do, I'm gonna be very much dependent on other people performing better than average to make up for my lower numbers. Not only that, but I'm pretty much limited to raiding with one single group. If a friend needs someone to fill in, I can't help them, I have to clear the fights with my group, and I can't do them with anyone else. I just don't get why its so restrictive. The rest of the game isn't like this, you can play what you want, get as much loot as you want, play other jobs whenever you want. Then suddenly when you get to savage raids, you're basically playing an entirely different game, one that actively wants you having as little fun as possible. You only raid once a week, you only play with one friend group, you only play one job. I've heard plenty of reasons why its like this, I don't think any of them hold much water. I got into savage when the most recent raid tier had unrestricted loot and I had no issues getting in there, learning the fights, and farming gear. The worry that people will just gear up their jobs and stop playing just does not happen in large enough numbers to be a concern. People wanna learn other jobs, other roles, if they geared up one job, they'll try out a different one and gear that one up. I think the other points brought up are definitely valid and worth looking at, but to me the biggest endgame problem is this restriction on fun.

The only reason I think the currency cap should be bigger is because they doubled the currency cap for crafters and gatherers already because they realized how restrictive a cap of 2000 was... but didn't twig to it being restrictive for combat jobs as well.

I would love to see them do more with the job gear we get (I don't think I've even picked it up for most of my jobs because it was never relevant). Maybe they could tie it to the criterion stuff, like spend X currency to upgrade a piece of your job gear. Limit it to 1 piece per job per week or something. The stats may not always be relevant and they could change the substats if needed, but it would definitely be nice to at least use it.

i'm a tank main, and i'm lucky that i can easely go between tank jobs, if i want to have bis on both is' a matter of obtaining savage gloves and it's done(yes there's melding too, but if you have Materia on hand, it's ok. even better if you can meld it by yourself. Messy, but effective). And i want to try out healing, because it's interesting from the side of tanking, to look on my job from another perspective. And it's a support role besides. But to every tier you condemn yourself to 1 class, and that's all. Melee's the worst in it, since there's 3 types of sets for Melee's and monk can play sam, that's it, you're done. Nin still selfish with the gear, but atleast he uses Ranged Jewelry. The only way to try out healing and don't miss out on gear that much is to make and Alt. It's has it's Ups and Downs, but like, not everyone that crazy to make an Alt.

Purely if you use chests, it'll take you at most, 11 weeks to get all the gear from raid but seeing you get 1 book per week that could be shortened down to 8 or 9 depending on what you use your books on. That's almost an entire patch cycle just to get BiS, and let's not even forget that during that time people are buying Tomestone gear that'll be augmented and match stats and Item Level of said raid gear you're trying to get. I don't do Savage but was willing to do the new dungeon with friends, until we see there's literally no reason to do ASS Savage. No gearset to help boost you up while still buying Tomestone gear and waiting for Alliance Raids, which is ANOTHER time sink of getting ONE coin for an augment per week. Whereas Eureka, Bozja, and Zadnor each had these. No extra means of getting augment materials aside spending 3,200 hunt currency which gives you ONE of said mat. Don't get me wrong Variant Dungeons were one hell of an experience and we've had fun. But the lack of gear that could relieve the feeling of being left behind by not doing Savage, something not just us, but many were hoping for Variant/Crtierion to fix and not doing so is... Disappointing. Hoping they do listen, because otherwise it'll be just be Deep Dungeons lite- Only do it when there's nothing else.

My idea; You gain 3 ‘colours’ of endgame tomestone (blue, green and red). The job you clear the activity you earn the tomestones on, you get maximum tomes… for that class. And half as much for the other two at the same time. Example; do the expert daily as a tank and earn 40 tomes of causality…. But also 20 Green (healer) and 20 red (dps). It means ad you are grinding for BiS for your ‘main’ job, you are also constantly earning the tomes for other classes too.

Part of what makes the limited gear worse is how quickly party finder starts requiring higher ilevel to join. Since I raid through PF, I'm pretty much locked into one job (when I played ninja) or one role (when I played phys ranged). I really like the idea of gear lockouts based on role not player; I would 100% also play a healer this tier if that were possible.

Ive actually recently gotten back i to ff14 and found that since i took such a long break and i wanna raid with friends that gearing for each class is super time consuming so i just do monk my main, healers and tank gear every other class ive just stopped touching honestly and i hate this fact i hope something comes up for this sooner then later

I like the idea of having the lockout on Savage per job. Sounds like a really good idea imO.

Sfia's issue #3 is "We don't have enough to do at content wall, QQ", basically

Love your content

A third gearing option would be nice. As far as balancing jobs and substats, I would make gear substats unique to the job. Your slaying gear would have +X Monk, +X Samurai. A monk receiving different substats than your samurai in the same armor. Change materia to be job specific. So you add monk materia to your slaying gear, making it better for Monk, but not benefiting Samurai by increasing specific substats for the monk job. Having multiple gearing option means you can have a set for monk and samurai. Materia being job specific would balance out the demand, and developers would know the exact substats for each job at every ilv and material meld. Sure it would remove the unique SS build, or tenacious tank, but you would receive job balancing and be incentivized to collect more gear without and within the same role.

You could make the gear lockout/ tome stone cap job specific, for example if you get loot and cap tome stone on one job, you can swap to another job and do it again. This way, it keeps the pacing the same, but you can just do double the work if you want to gear 2 jobs at the same time.

I think Raids and lockout should allow Need 1 item per class/job type or make specific Coffins for just Roles that always drop, so the left over can be claimed by their back up jobs

Even for non-raiders the tomestone gear takes waaaay to long to acquire, and it's not even BIS, so in a way, even more baffling as to why it's so restrictive and harshly time-gated.

With regard to the first point of one character to play all jobs, I honestly do think a reduction of cost or increase in combat currency rewards is going to be needed in some regard. Personally, I do not think that's inherently negative and is probably the most give and take type of change for max level content reward and engagement. For the second point though, you will NEVER get away from this problem as long as unique and complex stats do not exist. Stats that will be so complicated for 70% of the player base that they won't like it. Stats that will cause complete imbalance between jobs and that will have to be an accepted fact for players. This requires, without question, an acceptance for horizontal progression along with gear swapping mid-combat. A lot of players who are for it, don't understand what that actually means though. Horizontal progression does, factually, mean that when new gear is released, it will NOT often be an upgrade. It will mean the content you did for gear months ago, if not years possibly, will still be BiS for some, if not all, gear you got back then. That is how horizontal progression works and arguably the only way you can make substats "fun". For reference, try out FFXI. It is the only game out there that has successfully done horizontal progression, but it is also a good example of seeing how that success has caused its own unique problems that only vertical progression can fix. A balance between the two is necessary while also accepting just how broken gear stats will be.

Memoria Misera was a fun way to gear alts at the beginning of last expansion.

easy solution for upping tome cap is just increase the rewards on expert dungeon or current raid tier with it

They should match the tome costs with Scrips costs. It is reliable to cap it (with custom deliveries) and get all of your stuff and that was before they increased the scrip cap.

Just sharing my idea 4/5 Areas for Endgame Gear - Tomestones, Raids, Crafting, PVP and possibly Hunts, Maps or extra content (such as the new Criterion Dungeons) 1st - Raid Obtained Gear Suggesting to change the Weekly Lockout to Slot rather than Boss - ie. Get a chest piece from a Raid or Alliance Raid, and can't obtain another chest piece until the week resets. While I do understand that this could cause an influx of players within the first week or so then die out, it could be altered to be like a 'Top' piece (Head, Chest or Gloves) to keep bringing people back. 2nd - Tomestones With the uncapped Tomestones, I feel there is no need to change this, as it is no longer BiS but still decent to obtain. With the Weekly Cap, I agree that the costs should be reduced to make it easier to obtain. 3rd - Crafting I believe the Crafting system so far is good, crafting then trading in for Augmented things. Perhaps just an ilvl Tweak if needed. 4th - PVP As I haven't played much of PVP, I don't know how many PVP players also do raiding, but having that option there could be good if people do both or want to branch out and try something. 5th - Extra Content Possibly make it so that Seals/Nuts (whatever they choose to change or use) can be exchanged for recent Endgame Gear, and not just old Tomestone Gear. Make it a possibility that Endgame Gear can drop from Maps (or even the Portals from Maps) Possibly add in a Criterion Set as another way of reliably obtaining Endgame Gear On a final note, I think they should also add in Accessories from the newer Extreme Trials and not just the weapon drops (also could give some cool glam too)

I finally got to 612 ilevel, and was very happy, but i felt i lacked some punch, so i started to look around stat building and such. Turns out i lack over 1.000+ determination compared to what i should have with my item level, where i to do end game content, wich i dont im a casual sprout but man, that really blew my mind, no wonder people do more damage then me 😶

Some Job customization like that mastery stuff could be nice in FF

What is the highlighting tool Zepla is using in video?

In FF11 crafters can also make BiS gear and it can lv up aswell. Would be nice they implement more FF11 stuff in FF14 besides monsters and races.

Personally, I think one stop-gap solution would be to add RNG of sub-stats to the Savage gear. From what I get from this conversation is "it is too easy to min-max because of predictability" so introducing some RNG will give the min-maxers something to do. To increase the impact of sub-stats, they may need to buff the effect of SKS or SPS so that people will have at least 2 choices like BLM which is "hit more/faster" or "crit/hit harder". TEN is just a lost cause atm with how tanks can self-heal and how strong healers are. Another would be to introduce gear in-between Normal Raid/Crafted gear. Possibly from Criterion or Extreme Trials. Tbh, we already have these in the form of Alliance gear, although it only comes every other patch which would be every 6-9 months. If you either reduce the cost of tomestone gear or increase the cap, people will complain either way. Either they will complain about the grind to max out tomes or they will complain that it's too easy to get tomestone gear. With the new storyline coming, I think they should start to look at gearing as well.

I kind of just wish that if you won a coffer in savage, you could reopen the coffer more than one time in order gear multiple classe. since coffers aren't tradeable, I cannot really see a reason for having to get a chestpiece on every single class over and over and over again when there is realistically only time to gear 1-2 alts before an ultimate comes out requiring max ilvl

Maybe, they can reward a token for every piece of gear you purchase, which can be redeemed for another piece of gear for a different role.

Dumb question: what highlighter browser plugin does she use? This looks so helpful

im 8 weeks into reclears. ive been somewhat unlucky.. i need 4 more peices for bis on my main and 7 more for bis on my alt...we need more ways to gear 100%

Yoshi P: "Please try out healers!" I would if I could man.

I do wish it was faster to get BiS without Savage. I don’t have a FC/static and PF can be so iffy. I’d love to find a reliable FC to make friends so Savage can be more fun. It just sucks in PF with new groups over and over and not knowing who you’re talking to should they want to use Discord.

Would be cool to see overworld gear added, could add an rng aspect where if you get lucky you roll for the top stats, but counter bad RNG by letting you roll to upgrade from whatever you got. I.e. 100% is best, but you roll a 52%. So you reroll from 52-100% until you get to that 100%. From doing x amount of fates/hunts/rare mobs/w.e.

I like Relic Weapons and Artifact gear. I wish they would let us continue to upgrade those gearsets and let us augment the stats or add enhancements to the gear to augment skills or abilities.

I don't mind a little grind for gear but if it starts to feel more like work than a game it's over kill

I'm not at endgame so I'm a bit ignorant, but I absolutely hate the idea of being one role per patch. I love switching roles while clearing a savage wing. I may drift towards one role, but there will generally be one fight where I want to switch it up.

Btw GW2 is not as you think. Every expansion they release new gear with new stats or new stat combinations that do more damage with certain builds. I believe runes exist as well now. They don't have a lot of vertical progression but they still have it.

so even though I play FFXIV pretty casually by just getting on every re set,still at the moment I'm working on just getting my 610 to 620 full sets, I don't know if I'm up for the grind to get the 630 gear once the savage raid comes out, but at the moment getting the current gear and doing the brand quests is pretty much all I personally feel like is worth doing and then just coming back for every regular patch story/raid piece.

Wow mastery sounds like merit system from FF11 online. I loved merit system. It made me slightly more powerful at low level compared to new players.

Maybe trade in your Pentameld I for less tombstone cost on certain roles.

Zepla really getting into GW2 now

Zepla, where is that blanket from?! It's so cute. Big Animal Crossing vibes. I'd love to get one like it!

I understand Sfia's points, truly I do. But it is a MMO we are talking about. As soon as you start to increase build variety, some deplorable behavior will appear. "Oh, you are playing Direct Hit Ninja? You silly goose, Det Ninja is the meta, now switch your gear/skills or find another party." There is already so, so much salt online due to job balance, if you add a layer of each job having a preferred build, online discourse is going to become nonstop vitriol.

A big thing that has put me off on endgame raid activities is the gearing progress. I think rather than make people spam dungeons in order to get tomestones, they should make getting gear its own kind of gameplay. What I mean is having Bozja type area where you can take part on activities and get your gear that way. You could even add a story to this to make the process even more appealing. I’m actually not a huge mmo player so I don’t know if this sounds stupid to more experienced players, but right now gearing is so numbingly boring that I don’t even bother with it. If I ever have to grind a same dungeon or a raid multiple times I’m already out, because it’s not interesting gameplay.

For having "randomness" in stats for excitement, I had the thought that FFXIV could just have items drop with materia melded (maybe overmelded?). This would still have the excitement of "oh cool gear with maxed/semi-maxed stats" (and a degree of "I'm saving so much gil!") without unbalancing drops, and also without forcing people to farm gear for random stats.

What I would like to see is crafting upgrading of gear. e.g. right now, when a new savage cycle starts, the day 1 raiders use crafted gear, 5x melded, if possible. Then over the weeks those items get superseded by some tome gear, upgraded with savage item drops + savage gear/weapons. After a while, when the savage cycle has been going for a while (2 months?) they than open up upgrading the original crafted gear by 10 points (disallowing overmelding). We all know how that goes. The crafted gear is only of interest for raiders for the first couple of weeks, then it becomes outdated. And once that 10 point bump comes in, the BiS gear is already 20 points ahead. So ultimately, those +10 craft upgrades are useless, or maybe a temporary upgrade for an alt job. That is really dissatisfying for crafters. Why not give us an option at that point to upgrade crafted gear, via crafting, to a higher tier, matching what can be had from savage, but with different sub-stats. Meaning, it would be a third rail for an updated BiS. Also, I do not like this whole, new savage tier = all gear is outdated approach. Why not give us an option to upgrade (craft) from a previous patch gear version to a modified, upgraded version? Furthermore, why not allow us to upgrade (with tome stones, or savage drops) certain dungeon gear, to create another similar gear level item set, that can give us alternatives?! Even cooler would be, if we could take gear from 2.0, upgrade it to 3.0 gear, then 4.0 gear, 5.0, etc. etc. and you end up with something that is on par with savage drops, but takes a lot of efford to make. E.g. let us upgrade a 6.0 item, by using crafting + an extreme trial drop, or a dungeon drop, or a combination of things, to a current tier item, that gets close to what a savage raider can get, but is different/unique. Also, why increase gear level every raid. How about having extra stats, that offer special protection or buffs, for a raid tier. The item level could stay the same, but without the buff, the raid is barely manageable, etc. etc. How about another slot system for such protection/buffs to be temporarily slotted in, kinda like Diablo style gear enchantment, where you can slot in stones and remove them as you please. E.g. the boss is using lightning based attacks mainly, so the best enchants to slot are resistance against that and buffs that act opposite to the element. Right now, the gearing system in FFXIV is stale. It's the same cookie cutter system each patch, which has made it boring/stale.

Gearing for a very casual player like myself is tough. I don’t do savage, so I have to go with tomes. It takes months to gear my main

one member of my static suggested that you should be able to turn your savage gear in to get your books back so you can at least trade sets if you need to swap jobs

15% cost reduction up to 60% per item that shares the same slot? I don't know if that's too much or too little as I've yet to buy in-season gear.... I just have all poetics up to 80 for every job

I think ffxiv should take some ideas from eso. Eso gear is relevant throughout any expansion. I think it would be cool to see a sphere system like in ffx implemented into the game and function close to eso champion point system 🤔.

I think the savage chests are the most egregious, you can have crap rolls 4 weeks in a row before you can get 1 piece of gear and it feels very bad. Why not at least guarantee that you can roll on a raid drop until you win one? Personally if i miss out the first time i would go back in and reclear for a second opportunity

Raise the cap to 4k like Gatherer and Crafter scrips and weekly cap to 1000.

They need to make spell speed stack up better there's definitely a lack of variance in play.

What if like you could get say 1/8 of a twine or something from a lvl 90 map randomly. Untradable but you could get something to upgrade tomestones gear through maps. Maybe this is a terrible idea I'm just trying of thinking of other ways to give loot but nothing too good or grindy. Hmmm.

we need relic gear back, and not so far behind again ◇: progression gear ☆: can be BIS - 8 man raid gear ◇ - 24 man raid gear ◇ (☆) - crafted gear ◇ - savage gear ☆ - tome gear ◇ - tome upgraded gear ☆ - relic gear ☆ ... if we had another gear source, like relic gear, and not so late into the current raid tier (and if we could upgrade tome gear with mats frrom relic content too), than obtaining BIS would be much more enjoyable / motivationable, and casual players would feel "less behind"..) ... BIS could be a mix of upgrade tome, savage & relic (not all relic, .. or relic could replace some savage & upgrade tome gear, but not necessarily being better, just equal)

Although I almost never switch to tank, I'm wondering - What happens if you make a tank build that maxes out Tenacity as opposed to stacking Crit/DH? I always imagined you'd become nearly indestructible, but everyone seems to say it does nothing. Just curious.

How to make sub-stats more interesting: Design jobs around them and have stats change how jobs play. Which is something FFXIV has been actively getting away from. :/

Maybe put gear tokens into the challenge log, or maybe something more like Wondrous Tails with random weekly tasks giving tokens worth a fraction or an entire piece of gear depending how it's balanced. Cap it and randomize it weekly and give people another reason to engage in old content again.

Agree. They should just reduce it maybe after they unlock the restrictions for savage. If you're unlucky you have to run 8 times P4S/P8S to get your chest/weapon. 8 times! By the time you get for all of your job you'll be burned out.

I wouldn't mind special weapon materia that can alter how some spells and weapon skills behave. Like for whm, have holy deal more damage, but remove the stun effect as an example

I think they need to remove or greatly increase the weekly limit for the highest tier tomestones. If I do my roulettes every day I should I get the full reward every day I do it. If I want to grind, I should be able to grind

Isn't a fresh 90 with crafted 610 gear a good start? I haven't finished Endwalker yet but have at least one level 90 action job and working on others. At the same time of leveling those jobs I'm working on profession jobs specifically to craft that gear (armorer, leather worker and weaver).

My problem is that I'm MEGA casual and have only been following the MSQ. And since I have been catching up to current patch (im still not there) Im now being soft locked by my Item Level, causing me to now have to get into a grind I wasn't anticipating and don;t really enjoy just to progress the story. It's a bit of a downer to a story enjoyer, such as myself, to have to break out of it for a few nights a week to just obtain the required ilevel. I know it's not the biggest complaint, but it has frustrated me.

Materia should be completely revamped from increasing substats, into giving perks. Substats should be determined by the gear and that's it, no melding for more. Perks on the other hand should not be a power increase in regards to dps, they should purely provide QoL, or convenience as to not run into balancing issues. Let's say one perk increases mitigation skills by 5% for tanks. Or another perk adds 5% healing to your AoE healing spells, adds one extra regen tick for pure healers, or 5% increased shield for shield healers. For dps it could be a reduced timer on self mitigation, or group mitigation if available. Stuff like that. Things that affect your efficiency, but not your power. And make those drop exclusively from dungeons and normal/alliance raids. Things that casual players do, not just the endgame players. It will keep current and even previous expansions dungeons and raids relevant longer.

Perhaps I'm not creative enough to come up with a solution, but it seems to me that points 1 and 2 are incongruent with one another. In point 1 he mentions gear acquisition is too slow. In point 2 he mentions substats are a problem, and there isn't really creative expression with substats for and between jobs. If there was ANY more creative expression for optimization with a job's gear, that would only require more gearsets / meld priorities, making gearing cross-jobs even slower and painful? How can you fix both of those problems? It seems like you have to balance it between the two.

Set best rotations and bland sub stats is how you get easy balance. People complain about wow's balance, but that's the cost of having stats and skill combinatorial that can actually alter class playstyle. The fact there is just set rotations seems like more of an issue than bland gearing. You need different skills and abilities scaling off different stats, and not every skill needs to be a 1 2 3 combo.

The problem with more options, is that there's only 1 BiS. Maybe 2 BiS. If a game is SUPER balanced, 3 BiS, but I doubt anyone has ever seen that. Adding more gear isn't going to make players use those new options.

They simply need to remake the loot system for savage because not only is it out dated, but it does nothing to keep any raid tier relevant once the next tier launches. Why is this a problem? Well not only does it waste all the time devs (and company money) put into designing those raids, it makes it nearly improbable for new players to properly experience and enjoy those raids. A short term fix till that happens would be to have a role lockout. Also have a weekly count for each week you didn't clear on said role (maybe up to 10 weeks max), so no one is punished for not clearing week 1. Lastly reduce the book price of raid gear by half.

Having extreme RNG for optional content and giving a chase item for those that want it is something I'm sorely missing from FFXIV. It's too friendly for me, and it wouldn't hurt anyone for a mount or some weird fun glam to be behind a 200-350hr grind of some kind. It can even be done in a way that isn't overtly repetitive with the exact same content over and over.

If you don't get the gear from the fight and lose every role it can take up to 3 months to get BiS depending on the class........

If I had to have one major complaint, it's that with how substats are distributed between raid and augmented tome gear, pretty much all classes need 2-3 twines for left side and at least 2 moonshine shines for the right side. Now in a vacuum that sounds not that terrible, but with pretty much every class in the same boat you're fighting for a 1 time chance to get one of these per week between 7 other people who also need multiple of them. I don't understand why the raid gear is not the best by default with augmented tome gear being used for supplemental gear or catch up gear? It would make gearing in raids way less obnoxious. The other problem it creates is as soon as alliance raid comes out, everyone is going to abandon the third floor because for the most part the only reason why anyone runs it is twines.

Yes, that's really true. You can't play every job, when it comes to endgame content. And on the other side the game is very alt unfriendly. You could only use fully overmelded crafted sets, but this is much too expensive for most players.

this is where i feel Variant Dungeons were a massive failure, they could have been a way to finally get out of savage dungeons and dungeon roulette to gain tokens and resources for endgame gear that can be done by yourself and enjoyable

I don't want to play expert more than I currently do....

I dont judge nor say what is wrong or right. I only make claim that, when Zepla's channel goes for reading text more than doing something else. Makes me wonder why? Again i dont judge on make a question

Definitely needs a revamp - I understand the grind and its ok to a point but then it’s just frustrating after a certain time

tbh you should just get one piece of gear per slot on your character and the stats (and even the physical look) adaptively change depending on what job you're on. i'm not sure how the materia system would have to change to allow for this but it's not out of the realm of possibility the only exception is weapons, maybe you still have to clear turn 4 of the tier every time you want a weapon for a different job

Just make the Tomestone-cap per role ... problem solved. ... You cap your Tomes for Casters, then for Tanks, and so on. ... easy.

I really think they should invest in criterion dungeons more. The introduction of Mythic+ in WoW was huge, there are many where that became their choice of endgame content over raiding. It gives more for players to choose to do, but at the same time gave gear that is just as good or better than some raid pieces. Investing more into the criterion dungeons to be a legitimate endgame experience with its own progression and gearing would alleviate some of the issues with the current gearing system, and introduce a lot more to do once you have reached endgame. As someone who plays almost exclusively to raid, the game gets really boring quickly once you finished the tier.

funny thing is the gear is the same, the tomes dont change kekw.