Tweet
Re: The Final Fantasy XI Team Answers Your Questions! (02/18/2011)
They're not really accessible; they're slightly less insane, but that's still insane. Either reduce the item counts by a factor of 10 so that players who don't have 100 hours a week to play can get them, or don't make something so much more powerful than other equipment in the first place.
Preferably the latter. Spending a lot of time chasing a particular piece of gear is never a good reason to break the game. Most gear is about as powerful as most other gear of the same level for a reason: so that gear doesn't excessively dominate performance. FFXI is mostly about bringing together the right players, with the right strategy, to win challenging fights; it shouldn't turn into a WoW-style "get gear so you can survive fights to get better gear" treadmill.
Fights can be a challenge, but repetition can't. Repeating the same fight 100x to get epic shinies isn't good gameplay or good game design. The only reasonable part of relic design was the shadows and animated weapons; those are tough enough that you *should* get a damn good reward out of them, but SE tacked on the ridiculous amount of currency for no good reason and then pumped up the reward from "damn good" to "they never should have made anything this strong".
As a result the same content can't be balanced to be a reasonable challenge to a group full of relics and a group without relics. SE should have taken advantage of the rising level cap to retire the whole concept of game-breaking weapons (and shield) and restored balance, or at least near balance, between different gear of the same level.
It's insane for any equipment to be "dominant". That's the opposite of game balance.
Originally posted by Malacite
View Post
Preferably the latter. Spending a lot of time chasing a particular piece of gear is never a good reason to break the game. Most gear is about as powerful as most other gear of the same level for a reason: so that gear doesn't excessively dominate performance. FFXI is mostly about bringing together the right players, with the right strategy, to win challenging fights; it shouldn't turn into a WoW-style "get gear so you can survive fights to get better gear" treadmill.
I feel like Empyreans are a fair challenge rather than an overpriced cockblock.
As a result the same content can't be balanced to be a reasonable challenge to a group full of relics and a group without relics. SE should have taken advantage of the rising level cap to retire the whole concept of game-breaking weapons (and shield) and restored balance, or at least near balance, between different gear of the same level.
Relic owners should be happy that SE is at least trying to buff them to keep them on relatively the same level, but it's still for any equipment that came out 7 years ago to still be dominant.
Comment