iLevel gear checks? Repairs more affordable?

[jenova_9]

New news, mew Looks like some of those additions are being added during 2.1


Repair changes and other fixes and stuff coming. : ffxiv

[Aeni]

Re: iLevel gear checks? Repairs more affordable?

The gear check is a good idea to thwart the exploitation of groups who are doing "speed runs" and increasing gear damage from deaths is also good, but they need to temper that to make sure they are not punishing legitimate players in the process. However, it's still not enough, and I want them to add the following:

-Certain packs that would normally not be avoided should not be leashed towards the boss (but leashed towards the exit, in case a group wants to "reset" a bad pull)
-If somehow a group manages to avoid the leashed packs heading to the boss, when the boss fights, he will have a summon ability (a quick server check on the availability of those leashed groups before that boss room) to bring in un-cleared groups into the same room so that those "cheating" players get their ass handed to them (or at least make them work for the drops)
-No loot dropped if an instance is cleared under an impossible time (e.g., since most dungeons pre-50 are level synched, this should be applicable to those dungeons only, since I don't know anyone, even if they are well geared 50s, that could clear those early dungeons in a particular time unless they've gamed or exploited the system)

Having these measures in place serves to protect legitimate players and punish abusive ones.

[Dux]

Re: iLevel gear checks? Repairs more affordable?

Really liking the reduced repair costs, its very expensive right now given the relative high cost of grade 5 dark matter.

[Firewind]

Re: iLevel gear checks? Repairs more affordable?

#1 and #3 are a bit excessive. Please don't take this personally but I think that #2 is downright moronic. It is entirely possible to miss out mob packs that you either didn't see or don't have the time to kill before the timer expires. Unless you're farming coffers, you will never kill every mob in a dungeon anyway. Lots of dungeons also have trash that is entirely skippable at well though it is often pulled pre-50 for the XP.

AK and Praetorium are the only fast way to get Tomestones so making speedruns impossible will need to give them a LOT more Tomestones as a reward, as well as them fixing the broken Instance Reservation system that caused waiting times of up to an hour for AK for a full group of 4. Otherwise all that will happen is that people will just Speedrun Darkhold, Aurum Vale and Wanderer's Palace instead and nobody will ever get their story quest and Lt GC Ranking quests done because there will literally be no reason at all to ever go to AK, Meriduim or Praetorian.

Gearing up for the next bit of endgame is already a grindfest. Making it worse will just lock out all but the hardcore endgame elitists. We need to make things more accessible not less.

Repair bills being reduced is a great change for us BLMs too. We tend to be the first to die when it all hits the fan due to being always close to pulling aggro and having the worse HP growth in the game.

iLevel check isn't a horrible idea as long as they go by equipped gear ONLY and lock you into the gear. In WoW I could just need endlessly on gear I can't use to pump up my iLevel to get into dungeons and raids I would never be able to clear with my current gear. Queueing naked but with an inventory full of iLevel gear is also a pretty widespread trolling tactic as well in WoW.

[Dux]

Re: iLevel gear checks? Repairs more affordable?

I knew somebody would bite..... It wasn't going to be me.

[Aeni]

Re: iLevel gear checks? Repairs more affordable?

#1 and #3 are a bit excessive. Please don't take this personally but I think that #2 is downright moronic. It is entirely possible to miss out mob packs that you either didn't see or don't have the time to kill before the timer expires. Unless you're farming coffers, you will never kill every mob in a dungeon anyway. Lots of dungeons also have trash that is entirely skippable at well though it is often pulled pre-50 for the XP.

Note that I didn't say "ALL" packs. Only the ones that can't be avoided on your way to the boss. You can avoid them by making the tank only get aggro, dying all the way up, while the rest follow behind out of aggro range and then rez the tank. Repeat process until you are in the boss room. My idea is to prevent that from happening.

AK and Praetorium are the only fast way to get Tomestones so making speedruns impossible will need to give them a LOT more Tomestones as a reward, as well as them fixing the broken Instance Reservation system that caused waiting times of up to an hour for AK for a full group of 4. Otherwise all that will happen is that people will just Speedrun Darkhold, Aurum Vale and Wanderer's Palace instead and nobody will ever get their story quest and Lt GC Ranking quests done because there will literally be no reason at all to ever go to AK, Meriduim or Praetorian.

Wait, you're seriously complaining that you think it takes too long to get gear with these tokens, so that it's justifiable for speed runs to exist? What if that was SE's intention? Whose timetable are you playing this game for, anyway? Unless you are an RMT group, there is no good reason for wanting to get all the best gear in an absurdly short amount of time. Why would you want everything in just one week? I mean, just be glad these things don't have weekly lockouts (although why SE hasn't instituted timed lock outs for end-game dungeons is a mystery)

Gearing up for the next bit of endgame is already a grindfest. Making it worse will just lock out all but the hardcore endgame elitists. We need to make things more accessible not less.

Yet we don't know when that endgame expansion will be out. It might be several months, and during that time, there'll be lots of players with more than one level 50 DoW/DoM class just sitting around in all of that pretty gear doing nothing.

[Wise Donkey]

Re: iLevel gear checks? Repairs more affordable?

...there'll be lots of players with more than one level 50 DoW/DoM class just sitting around in all of that pretty gear doing nothing.

Isn't that what endgame is?

[Firewind]

Re: iLevel gear checks? Repairs more affordable?

You get 80 Tomestones per run of a 50 dungeon. Darklight gear costs between 350-870 Tomestones. So to get a piece of gear you have to farm the same two dungeons repeatedly. You also need to farm 900 at some point as part of the Relic questline. To get a full set of Darklight Gear that means a LOT of grinding the same two dungeons over and over until you are sick of it.

Once you have that gear, you can start thinking of doing Hard Mode Primals for the weapon and your Relic quest which has a lot of tough NM fights and nees you to beat each Primal in HM.

Once you have done all of that you can FINALLY get into the Bahamut Raid.

Basically unelss you are already legacy with everything maxed you will not catch up on gear. You are kicked and people quit dungeons if you have never done the instance before. Nobody will help you because why bother? You will just turn a 20 min run into a 2 hour run and it only takes 15 mins max for a dungeon to pop at 50. It's cuntish behaviour but that is what the endgame community is like at the moment. All thanks to cross server Duty Finder meaning you can act like a cunt and get away with it.

I don't want everything done in a week, I just want reasonable access to endgame content without having to subject myself to endlessly grinding tokens so I can endlessly grind for a weapon, so I can grind for another weapon.

It's like levelling any class once you have done the quests in a zone, The only way to get XP at a reasonable rate is to farm Fates. Leves are limited and give miniscule rewards for time invested, plus they are a moneysink due to the inevitable repair bills.

There's nothing wrong with wanting efficiency sure but if you are trying to put me in with the elitists that refuse to deal with new members I can tell you where you can insert the Staff that I'm currently trying to grind to get but can't because I magically haven't done all the content before the game was released. If we have a new member then yes I will be helping them and telling them the mechanics of a fight.

Grinding is something I personally hate and I will always seek the most efficient path. But if you are trying to imply that I will put that ahead of someone else's enjoyment of the game (unless they're an idiot that deserves it) then you really don't know me very well.

Plus you are also implying that I attempt a Speed Run of anything with anything other than a full, organised group of people that know exactly what is going on. If there's one random in the group then we're doing the dungeon normally, I personally make sure of that. Hell I've even done a normal run just to piss off an Elitist prick that wouldn't just leave because we were teaching Wanderer's Palace to an LSmate that just dinged 50.

[Aeni]

Re: iLevel gear checks? Repairs more affordable?

I'm not accusing anyone in this thread of anything ... just relax. I'm just arguing against the speed runs (not saying it's "illegal" since SE hasn't said one way or the other on official channels) because it's detrimental to the community as a whole. Even without Duty Finder, it makes it extremely difficult for new players to break into end-game, especially if players decide that they would rather exploit and then sell their accounts (because let's face it, I can go on eBay right now and find many for sale) in an RMT fashion than to just ... enjoy the game as it was intended.

And if you thought this is a grind, then you've forgotten all about WoW, the endless dungeon runs (where they did have lockouts, let's not forget that) and the bane of all that's good called LFR. At least SE took the stance saying that bigger "raids" will not be accessible via DF as to foster more localized communities. I want that kind of community from FFXI but tempered with some convenience for lower-end and casual events that DF provides in ARR.

[Firewind]

Re: iLevel gear checks? Repairs more affordable?

Sorry if my post sounded confrontational, I was mostly frustrated myself having come off the back of some wipefests due to one random insisting on attempting speedruns leaving us unable to do the dungeon properly because there is no vote kick feature in the game. We we were stuck with a random dickish WHM who refused to heal or move unless the tank (new to the instance) started doing speedrun stuff. Plus Ampador Keep is horrible if you are any sort of caster. The game is heavily biased towards physical classes anyway but AK is especially brutal to anyone with a cast time. I'm sure it's not possible for a BLM to be able to do anything meaningful in the Demon Wall fight because of all of the movement involved. Anyway sorry if I snapped at you/

The worst Gear Grind I have ever done is definitely Warhammer Online. It was a PvP game where you could PvE to get your gear but it had lockouts and bugged boss fights. Plus grinding tokens means that you were stuck grinding city sieges, which often meant that the only way to gear was to let the other side reach your capital to farm the siege instance, where most groups would hop from one instance to the other to get an empty one to farm as having to fight other players meant you would get terrible rewards, then use a clearly not working as intended disconnect exploit to repeat it after the siege is over. After 3 months of doing this every day you might get a piece. This was from the same team that brought you SWTOR though thankfully the gear grind there isn't bad if you know who the server's crafters are...Which raises another problem of you being able to get a full set of iLv72 gear without ever having to raid since you can craft it all...

I do quite like how they have handled endgame gear though. The high end stuff you can craft is viable for endgame and the best pieces with good materia melds can sometimes be better than actual endgame gear. But stuff like the Darklight gear is great too, and the Lt level Grand Company Gear. Multiple ways of gearing up is always welcome.

Also I an an advocate of returning Limit Break quests. IMO every 5 levels your progress is frozen unless you pass the Guildhests and Dungeons of the specific level. All Lv50 are permanently synced down until they do these quests as well. A lot of the elitist pricks would never hit 50 that way.

Overall Balmung's community is really nice. Thankfully the elitists are the vocal minority who tend to populate a lot of blists.

[Dux]

Re: iLevel gear checks? Repairs more affordable?

Looks like they updated Amdapor Keep so that there is a magical barrier in front of the door preventing the speed run.

Doesn't surprise me but I am disappointed, no matter what way you spin it the 18 hours of pointless farming per job has now been increased to ?50/60? hours of pointless farming per job.

[Firewind]

Re: iLevel gear checks? Repairs more affordable?

So everyone is going to Speed run Wanderer's Palace instead...Bad side is I will find it harder to get an Ak group. Good news is that my invite rate on BLM will be even higher.

- - - Updated - - -

So to stop the people from skipping the boring trash, they added a barrier between the bosses and EVEV MORE boring trash.

They also made all of the AK mobs sleep immune for some reason. They are also unkiteable as they all get a MASSIVE run speed boost. So if you pull agro as a mage you are fucked. What the fuck, I don't even...

Why they didn't just put in less trash but add in a mechanic so the whole party ends up on the trash's aggro list? Result will be trash you can't skip and more incentive to run the dungeon properly if it is less boring to grind.

The people who asked for this before demanding SE to make the mobs WORTH killing haven't for a Lv50, or played many MMOs before. Or never did Dynamis at all.

SWTOR got it right. Trash drops enough Credits to cover all of your repair and consumable costs for the raid and then some, so people actually WANT to kill the trash because it is as lucrative as doing dalies. In FFXIV, all trash killing does is cost you money due to how obscene the repair bills are at 50, and how broken the economy in FFXIV is due to there being no ways to make gil at the level cap due to AH taxes taking money out of the system constantly.

But yeah getting geared from Primals and raids has gone from something you can get done over a week or two, or a weekend if you really farm it, to something that is going to take several hundred hours for some players, while the people already in full Darklight just get further ahead and will (understandably) not want to touch AK, WP, Castrum or Praetorium again..

- - - Updated - - -

Aaaaaand Emergency Maintenance again. I'm really hoping that the sleep immunity and run speed buff is a bug. It really does make AK and WP horrible to be in now if you aren't a tank.

[Dux]

Re: iLevel gear checks? Repairs more affordable?

Sadly I agree with you Firewind.

All this change has done is alienate new players from the well equipped players by actively discouraging the well equipped players from interacting in content with new players. Why spend 1+ hour in a dungeon with a new player when a party of full Dark Light people can do it in less than 40. To this end I am expecting a rapid increase in shouts in town demanding parties full Dark Light only and I can't blame them.

If such band aid solutions to problems are used else where many well geared players may just stop using the DF all together increasing the gap even further between new players and the well geared players, I know I have. My biggest fear is that when players realise that the gap is in fact increasing and not decreasing there will be more 50 page long threads on the forum and more changes put into place which will segregate the community even further.

Now you could argue that I am in fact, just being a dick about it all, and you may be right. The bottom line is everybody wants to make the most out of their time online and because of the changes some players wanted, for alot of well geared players taking new players just became much less attractive.

[Wise Donkey]

Re: iLevel gear checks? Repairs more affordable?

...well geared players may just stop using the DF all together, I know I have.

That really might be the best solution for now. Leave the DF to those new to end game and those interested in the story, and speed runs make groups the "old fashioned" way.

[Malacite]

Re: iLevel gear checks? Repairs more affordable?

I had some dick GLA quit our group in the middle of a Behest the other day that wasn't going so well. Thankfully, me being a hella pro SMN I was able to tank it just fine :D

Was the lv 30 one with the Morbol & the bubbles. Shit, Carby was doing a better job of tanking than that GLA was anyway (My gear is 100% HQ mind you so that prolly helps as pet stats are directly tied to your own).