Dev Tracker - Discussion

That also indirectly states that they still have more Job Adjustments to go through, despite what others have said.

Ninjas and Blue Mages rn...

The devs said before that they are adding a way for all jobs to be boosted, so probably more of a grind thing like JP's or something.

"we are considering adding new growth factors for all jobs in the form of adjustments in the direction of adding new factors."

They're gonna go all the way to Su XI, boys!
11,111 JP to unlock

Mobs need a boost not the players.

They are going to give BLU some QOL upgrades and call it a day. It's one of the most balanced middle-of-the-road jobs. Ninja though, S-E has no clear vision of what the job should be. In light of that adjustments will probably not be effective.


Paladin should just straight-up increase a target's physical damage taken with a JA ala Gambit. Or rune fencer needs a nerf against physical damage to balance out the tanking side of the job. The meva thing is a real issue for sure but addressing paladin damage contribution is more difficult. First of all, if you max out a PLD's dps today the HP swing between hybrid TP and WS is bothersome. You'd need to change existing itemization, put WSD on PLD JSE maybe to boost Savage Blade damage, or just flat-out give PLD more tiers of Max HP Up so that the HP swing doesn't matter because your base HP is over 3k (and it really should be). I actually think with content added in the last few years, where GEO potency is nerfed, RUN dps is a lot less pronounced of an advantage than for, say, aeonic farming. I'd rather S-E address the lack of utility that paladin brings, and magic/status evasion, rather than flat-out damage.


Fealty really should be on a 5 minute, or even 3 minute, timer. It's a powerful ability but 10 minutes is way too long a CD. 1 minute uptime/3 minute CD would be amazing.

make ranger spamming (ws here) great again.
I mean they literally went out of their way back in the day to dead sky burns.

One of the biggest problems on FFXI right now is the massive power difference between really well geared players and not so well geared players.

Most games just give away "welfare gear" to close the gap each major patch but the gap just keeps getting wider on FFXI, cause they keep making more and more uber powerful gear for top players with each addition. I'm not even sure what they can do about it at this point without invalidating lots of work people put into their gear.

I guess the easiest option is a new kind of merit system that only helps lesser geared players maybe, attack, triple attack, acc, def boosts via a kind of merit system but that only boosts to a strict upper limit. If you're already at that limit from gear, then you get nothing from them but if you're in base 119 gear then you get full benefit. They still need to make geared players the best option ofc but they do need bring in some equalization.

I cannot agree with your premise at all. How is the power gap between well-geared players and under-geared players a problem? That's a GOOD thing. It gives players something to strive for, a sense of accomplishment when they get there and a clear reward for the achievement.

FFXI has already kept improving easier to get gear from things like ambuscade and alluvion skirmish. Sparks gear IS the welfare gear... but its not exactly free. (which makes it better than welfare gear)

If you give out better welfare gear in this game, you will just ruin the game.

If players are poorly geared in this game, its because they are new or returning players, which poor gear won't last long. OR they are too lazy to learn how to play.

If you are not going to learn how to play, then you should play a different game. Tweaking and collecting gearsets is a MAJOR part of this game's gameplay. if you give it away, then you are flushing the game down the toilet for everyone else.

The idea is that as you play thru better content you improve your gear. but it sounds like you don't actually want to play thru that content...

"Equalization" huh? you want to make a socialist game? that never works anywhere.

That's not a problem man....like, at all. You sound like a casual DD that gets stuck on a support jobs, or you have too many friends that can't play with the big boys.

That's some FFXIV logic up in here.

You can already do just about everything the game has to offer using smartly constructed sets made primarily of cheap/attainable gear and players that know how to coordinate. You don't need better gear to fill in the gap, everything is accessible as is.

The min/maxing is the biggest part of why XI is still playable at all. It's more of a collection game than a combat game. The gameplay is incredibly slow and simple to begin with and people don't seem to mind further dumbing it down with addons/etc. That's because it's more enjoyable to most of them to collect gear and accomplishments and check them off their list than to actually play the game.

Adding welfare gear that closes the gap will take huge chunks of the collectible gear out of usefulness, and do far more to damage the game than it does to help.

NIN is a hybrid DPS with non-MP magical skills. Sure, it "could" be used as a tank, but it's a paper tank.

As long as SE realizes that the main thing that NIN has is the ability to negate damage while dealing good physical and magic damage (both in terms of WS and Ninjitsu), then the QoL improvements would reflect as such, like MAB or a stance that gives more magic burst damage on Ninjitsu nukes depending on the step of the skillchain (2 step gives 10% damage boost, 2 step gives 20%, 4 step gives 30%, so on).

I just hope that the BLU QoL improvement allows for enhancing magic duration + to affect BLU spells. BLUs can equip Telchine set, which can all have +10% enhancing magic duration on all of the pieces, that would solve a lot of BLUs "problems" now.

Technically we already have a welfare system in place. It's called Mars Orbs, Gobbybox, and the random event that gives out really good gear for little to no effort, such as NNI.

Gear is not hard to get at all in this game.

Ambu is braindead easy
Omen farms are a common occurrence and can be done solo
Dyna Midboss clears shouts happen pretty much everyday
Escha mobs are easy outside Woc and Helms


Outside of Empy+3 I hope they give us more powerful mobs before uber powerful gears.

So you want them to give scrubs a 007 Golden Gun

This entirely. People are either good at a job or they're not, and when they're aren't it's because they're either working on improving at the job or they're just half assing it and don't care. In the case of the latter, no matter how much improvement potential you make available to them they will never get better. We've all seen it. That one guy on that one job who plays it just as badly now as he did three years ago. The reason for the lack of effort can be different, but the results are always the same. Adding better welfare gear is not a good idea, and will actively hurt an already stale game.

What we need is forward progression. Real goals for players who are already at the top of their jobs something to strive for. And it has to be something with far more depth than "farm some money drops and a few points to upgrade a few items" that we've seen in the last many patches. By now people have huge gil stockpiles because they've run out of things to buy for their best jobs so cost is often a non factor, and farming a few points is just a couple day's busywork at best. Hopefully we'll get some more details of the empyrean upgrade system in the coming year, because it's actually harder content we need now, not easier.

Only on the larger servers.

Smaller servers do not have our luxury.

Only thing I think they should do to help out newer players is increase the points a bit on the normal ambuscade because right now it’s pointless to do. Too few points for a veteran player. Too grindy for a new player.

I've never liked that about other MMO's. FFXIV does that by converting the gear to the lower easier to farm tomestones. WoW did it in numerous ways with armor tokens and such. But when the game is like that, with new gear every 3-6 months that eclipses the old gear, the you never really feel like your effort is worth it. In FFXI, everything you collect at 119 is more or less useful and you get more power over time as you continue to fill out your gear sets, which makes my time investment much more rewarding.

So I honestly do not want to see a welfare patch with a bunch of free gear that invalidates all my hard work. I'd rather see them do the job updates like they have been to give every job a boost. The main complaint I have about the current FFXI is that new players are really restricted from farming voidwatch for empyrean items. I think making voidstones easier to accumulate would be a good move.

Yeah, I could never get into end game raiding in FF 14 for that very reason. The window for stuff to be especially useful is very limited, and there's so much content where actually having the best gear is pointless because the game level syncs 90% of it's stuff, and that includes a lot of still-relevant raiding events. It doesn't matter if your gear is fully top tier or just a level below when level sync caps all your stats regardless. The best raid gear is only really great for that raid tier, and then it gets replaced in a few months. Hell... when they release a new expansion the leveling gear blows away previous expansions stuff to the point your old gear won't even hold up in leveling dungeons and the ultimate gear is replaced by common drops, starting the cycle anew.

I mean I do get it. With the way Ilvl stats affect damage and healing output in that game they can't really NOT cap older content because the newer gear would just trivialize events, but...yeah. How would you feel if FFXI worked that way and your ultimate gear stats just vanished every time you queued lower tier content because the game level synced you to match "proper normal ambuscade stats" to make the content feel harder?

Which is SE's new cash cow, at least in terms of FFXIV.

Effectively, that's what XIV does too, within the way that game is designed. Equipment is fairly boring relative to XI, but it makes sense given how much synched content you end up doing.

The big difference is that XI is more of a sandbox, with very few limits on who can participate in what, save for Master Trials. Since so much does come back to gear/setup, it always favors the folks that have hundreds of millions (or more) invested in a mastered job. It may be overkill, but it's still an ever-increasing gap between where they're at, and where new/returning folks would be.
In XIV, for a lot of content, everyone in the group may end up getting scaled to the same general range, making their actual ability to play more consistently important.


Since it'd be hard to change XI to be a game more about achievement than collecting, at this point, perhaps a better way to approach it (if needed) would be to put some good items behind content with an independent leveling system. XI at least has Monstrosity they could copy/paste from, but I could see them rework Nyzul or Abyssea to be like some of the ones XIV has.

It might also be a way to put in some "new" jobs that may not balance with others in the game as a whole.

Putting more job point style lockouts on content to solidify progression more might also help, so you don't have people trying to jump into stuff they're not geared for yet.

Donno if its entirely a mob problem, seems more like a combination of that and being able to overbuff a player, which has always been possible, and now just how much you can weaken/neuter a target these days given the variety of debuffs stacking players have access to.

I don't think SE is doing a good job at telling you when you are ready to do things. They have an monster level that gives you an idea of when, but they haven't updated the ilvl in a long time.

I think they should add something like item level sync so you don't have to equip a soboro in Omen or else you kill the mob while doing objectives.

They're different games with different systems. I like FF 14 for the lore and if there's one thing s-e knows how to do right it's writing a damn good story and bringing it to life. While the main story quest has a fair amount of filler the cutscenes are detailed and immensely staisfying to watch, and the music and sound effects are crisp and several of the music tracks are absolutely brilliant. The feeling the world gives you is very real and that's what makes it so easy to enjoy, but the tradeoff is that the instanced content grows old and repetitive. The gear treadmill in FF 14 is literally "get new stuff every few months and sync older content so we don't break it" so I never bother with end game since it feels shallow and pointless.

FF 11 on the other hand has systems that give our gear lasting appeal. In 11 our achievements feel much more like achievements, and being recognized for excelling at a job or role is actually worth something. There's also a better sense of community in 11, since in 14 everything happens in instanced dungeons across multiple servers and the open world is just kind of there for you to enjoy looking at the visuals and farming for crafting materials. It feels very informal, whereas In 11 you actually know the people you're playing with, and being capable of playing your jobs right is far more important. FF 11 is much more about the people and community and helping and knowing one another, and that's a big part of what makes this game fun.

How would that work?

#BLUPDATE

Whether you think the massive gulf between players needs to be addressed or not is one thing (its far wider now than it ever has been before though), but if you start saying they need to increase the difficulty of content then you're kind of out of touch with reality. Especially since many who say this use all kinds of addons that the developers do not and cannot take into account when gauging difficulty.

I was reading WoW players a few weeks ago complaining about WoW classic, saying they remember it all being so much more difficult 10-12 years ago and they were so disappointed that it's so easy now. Then people were like, you're choosing to use all the best addons that greatly improve your performance, you have BiS gear everywhere based on what the guide tell you to wear (as does the rest of the people in your raid because you won't invite them otherwise), you're getting all the best world buffs before entering, you're reading a guide that tells you exactly what to do at every point of the fight. Compared to years ago when you went in wearing a bin bag and mismatched socks, didn't even know what an addon was let alone have them installed, invited anyone with a heartbeat and had no idea what the next phase of the boss even was.

No shiz it's easier now.

/onepunchman

I didn't actually suggest welfare gear btw (many seem to think I did), I've quit previous games when they did that. I suggested a merit system to boost lesser geared players stats up a bit. but I'm not really sure if it's a good idea or not in reality.

A lot of the appeal of FFXI is from the prestige you feel from getting to the big leagues.

They've been doing nothing but adding new/returning player friendly content for ages now. I think it's fair to want some stuff for the people who have been here for years that are starting to leave due to neglect. Players that aren't ready for that stuff yet are still tackling all the old content that's still out right now anyway.