[Megathread] Final Fantasy XIV

[The Casualty]

Gearing choices? In FF14? You wear the highest ilvl 99.97% of the time. You farm trivial shit ad nauseam to get the relic weapon because you get to customize the secondaries on it. There's no gearing decision to be made, that's kind of my point. I wish there was SOME decision making from an itemization standpoint.

I don't necessarily mind that everyone winds up at similar ilevels on catch up patches - and there are wild differences between effectiveness between someone who is in full script versus BIS with raid gear but I do agree that more horizontal itemization would be great assuming there were more varied secondary stats - because as it stands now, you could make a million different pieces, but it would always lead to a hierarchy - for most classes it would wind up with whatever pieces put you right at your acc cap and then stacking crit and all the other combinations just downgrades from there.

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If you're going to use 4 years for FF14 (since 2.0 dropped), its only fair you include vanilla so it'd be almost 13 years (not 10) for WoW.

Looking at just ilvl for a second. in FF14 it looks like we're knocking on ~ 150 ilvl an expansion. So we're at the end of the second expansion and knocking on i300. Assuming we continue down this trend we'd see ~i450 at the end of Stormblood. i600 by end of 3rd expansion, i750 by end of 4th, i900 by 5th. So taking that into context you can see where FF14 is building into the exact same issue WoW suffers from, just a whole expansion more quickly. This is assuming they continue with their existing development model (which I pray changes).

Wow has 6 expansions and is currently knocking on i900.

Now that we've established that the ilvl climb is actually more of an issue in FF14 than WoW we can turn our sights to the other metrics.

Let's look at HP values. In ARR your WAR might have had 10K HP in his FCoB gear. How much does he have now? Looks like they're pretty close to 40k from the world first pic I am looking at. That's almost a 400% increase. Is that what you consider a slow incline?

How about DPS values. In ARR I was doing roughly 450 dps by end of SCoB (measuring T8). (I don't have any hard data past that sorry). On A1S Faust (using ACT with ONLY FAUST damage, no cleave) I was doing like 1200 dps. That's roughly a 300% increase in damage dealt between those 2 points. IIRC someone mentioned doing upwards of 2K dps nowadays. That makes your side of the argument even worse.

In WoW EN I was doing roughly 500K single target. In ToV barely higher, about the same. In NH I am doing about 150k higher, for a total of 650k single target. So from beginning raiding to current raiding I am doing approx. 30% more damage.

Which is a slower climb? 300% or 30%?

To be fair, there were some rather steep climbs in WoW as well

Vanilla: 1k ???
TBC: 4-5k
WoTLK: 20k
Cata: 50k
MoP: 500k

I don't recall exact numbers but this seems right around correct give or take. The jump from Vanilla to TBC is right around the same mark you might see from 95th percentile DPS from FCOB to Creator. But it's also unfair to compare a miniboss fight like Faust in any iteration to FCOB, as the former is about a minute long burn with no deviation from start to finish. There is no downtime, and you can see parses of people with nearly 100% uptime on enhance balance and similar damage skewing buffs/debuffs. A11 and 12 would be a little more fair as both have significant downtime like some of the fcob fights such as Bahamut.

[Faroth]

If you're going to use 4 years for FF14 (since 2.0 dropped), its only fair you include vanilla so it'd be almost 13 years (not 10) for WoW.

Good grief, has it already been that long since the 10 yr anniversary?!?! O_O;

On WoW, are you factoring in pre or post stat squish? Because WoW was pushing towards 1 million DPS before the stat squish prevented it. That's Blizzard's words , not mine. And they've talked about the massive power jumps to keep raiding feeling powerful more than once. :P

They also didn't HAVE ilvl indicated until long after we were into expansions, so that could have been adjusted at the time they implemented them. I don't recall if that was in data and not displayed or if they went back to ID gear afterwards when it was baked into UI.

This is assuming they continue with their existing development model (which I pray changes).

I still boggle how people can seem to dislike everything about a game yet continue to play and discuss it on an ongoing regular basis.

Why do people who want FFXIV to be identical to WoW not play WoW, for instance?
Addons
Desire to skip leveling
Desire to have no quest/story connection to dungeons
Desire to have no MSQ
Set bonuses

"Just be World of Warcraft" seems to be the running theme. I don't get it.

[dope_danny]

"Just be World of Warcraft" seems to be the running theme. I don't get it.

There is a genuinely strange thing in the mmo genre where you see a lot of people who basically just want pallet swaps of World of Warcraft. Not like WoW but just WoW with another setting. They play for a while, realise its not that, complain and leave again and i really dont get it. Near as i could guess is its cases of proper WoW addicts that need that very specific fix but sticking with a game they are in some way tiring of makes them want a change but at the same time all the years and money 'invested' makes them feel like they need that specific thing. So they expect it elsewhere and when they dont get it go back to their dealer

[Katchii]

Gearing choices? In FF14? You wear the highest ilvl 99.97% of the time. You farm trivial shit ad nauseam to get the relic weapon because you get to customize the secondaries on it. There's no gearing decision to be made, that's kind of my point. I wish there was SOME decision making from an itemization standpoint.

That's fair.

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Let's look at HP values. In ARR your WAR might have had 10K HP in his FCoB gear. How much does he have now? Looks like they're pretty close to 40k from the world first pic I am looking at. That's almost a 400% increase. Is that what you consider a slow incline?

How about DPS values. In ARR I was doing roughly 450 dps by end of SCoB (measuring T8). (I don't have any hard data past that sorry). On A1S Faust (using ACT with ONLY FAUST damage, no cleave) I was doing like 1200 dps. That's roughly a 300% increase in damage dealt between those 2 points. IIRC someone mentioned doing upwards of 2K dps nowadays. That makes your side of the argument even worse.

In WoW EN I was doing roughly 500K single target. In ToV barely higher, about the same. In NH I am doing about 150k higher, for a total of 650k single target. So from beginning raiding to current raiding I am doing approx. 30% more damage.

Which is a slower climb? 300% or 30%?

You're comparing the ending raid from 2.0 (ARR) to a raid in 3.0 (A1S), so you're comparison is not apples to apples since in WoW you're using raids from within the same expansion to draw a comparison between.

By that measurement you should be looking at the difference between Hellfire Citadel and Emerald Nightmare not Emerald Nightmare and Nighthold.

[Aruhen]

Good grief, has it already been that long since the 10 yr anniversary?!?! O_O;

On WoW, are you factoring in pre or post stat squish? Because WoW was pushing towards 1 million DPS before the stat squish prevented it. That's Blizzard's words , not mine. And they've talked about the massive power jumps to keep raiding feeling powerful more than once. :P

They also didn't HAVE ilvl indicated until long after we were into expansions, so that could have been adjusted at the time they implemented them. I don't recall if that was in data and not displayed or if they went back to ID gear afterwards when it was baked into UI.



I still boggle how people can seem to dislike everything about a game yet continue to play and discuss it on an ongoing regular basis.

Why do people who want FFXIV to be identical to WoW not play WoW, for instance?
Addons
Desire to skip leveling
Desire to have no quest/story connection to dungeons
Desire to have no MSQ
Set bonuses

"Just be World of Warcraft" seems to be the running theme. I don't get it.

I was easily doing between 500k-1mil DPS (depending on the fight ofc) back in 5.4 with my shitty gear. I wouldn't be surprised if 3M was the average in Legion if the squish never happened. I mean we're at 800K being the average in Legion at the moment. What was the average in 3.3? 18K without the 30% buff in ICC? Two expansions and you go from 18-20K to 500K+.

You're comparing the ending raid from 2.0 (ARR) to a raid in 3.0 (A1S), so you're comparison is not apples to apples since in WoW you're using raids from within the same expansion to draw a comparison between.

By that measurement you should be looking at the difference between Hellfire Citadel and Emerald Nightmare not Emerald Nightmare and Nighthold.

Right. If you look at the averge dps on non cheesy fights back in HFC it was around 150-200K. When looking at Nighthold which is the proper comparison (both being raids that drop tiers) the average is around 800K. That's not a tiny increase.

Going from 500~ being the average in T8 to 2.3K in 3.5 which is by the way four tiers ahead and an expansion is actually pretty decent. Then again I point to the difference between HFC and NH which is only a single tier difference plus expansion jump and its about the same with the only difference being that it took longer for FF to get there. 400% for an expansion jump and one tier difference for WoW and 400%~ for FF with an expansion jump and four tiers. You do the math.

edit; Yay got my Ravana and Bismarck birds. Time to go back to Nid and Sophia to get those. It seems like my luck is going up.

[Remilia]

I still boggle how people can seem to dislike everything about a game yet continue to play and discuss it on an ongoing regular basis.

Why do people who want FFXIV to be identical to WoW not play WoW, for instance?
Addons
Desire to skip leveling
Desire to have no quest/story connection to dungeons
Desire to have no MSQ
Set bonuses

"Just be World of Warcraft" seems to be the running theme. I don't get it.

Everything must be WoW! After seeing it in VGD too many times I just kind of stopped caring about people that continuously post like that. Though I don't see it that often these days. And if anyone starts posting about it after this I will cry in a corner
It's why I stopped bothering conversing with him when it was so painfully clear.

[Advent]

I recall before I quit really liking the appearance/visual effects of the Monk Anima weapon but I gave up at I think step 2 or 3. It was just too much to get through, doing the same dull stuff ad nauseum. A shame, since I tend to enjoy story-driven games.

Everything must be WoW! After seeing it in VGD too many times I just kind of stopped caring about people that continuously post like that. Though I don't see it that often these days. And if anyone starts posting about it after this I will cry in a corner
It's why I stopped bothering conversing with him when it was so painfully clear.

Personally, it comes down to the framework of WoW. Specifically how they tend to focus on character progression. Arguably other games do it better, but there's no denying that after 12 years of development the game has only gotten more intricate. Recently I've started playing Black Desert Online--an extremely grindy game (Which I take little part in, to be fair). Some of what they do well, from combat flow/animations and ability activation to life skills and a seamless load-screen free world, I would like to see in new MMOs. However, every time a new one comes out, they tend to market to a niche audience. They'll have some of what I enjoy, but not enough to keep me interested long-term. It's a cycle I see a lot, and it is why I generally hop from MMO to MMO. Nothing has the complete package.

[Remilia]

Personally, it comes down to the framework of WoW. Specifically how they tend to focus on character progression. Arguably other games do it better, but there's no denying that after 12 years of development the game has only gotten more intricate. Recently I've started playing Black Desert Online--an extremely grindy game (Which I take little part in, to be fair). Some of what they do well, from combat flow/animations and ability activation to life skills and a seamless load-screen free world, I would like to see in new MMOs. However, every time a new one comes out, they tend to market to a niche audience. They'll have some of what I enjoy, but not enough to keep me interested long-term. It's a cycle I see a lot, and it is why I generally hop from MMO to MMO. Nothing has the complete package.

Nothing really wrong with that. It's practically impossible to have some complete package. It's also why I tend to have like 2-3 MMOs that I play at a time. Right now for me it's FFXIV, PSO2 and Warframe (arguably depending on your definition of MMO). Variety is good for us, having everything be so similar is boring and really brings a stagnant market.

[Advent]

Nothing really wrong with that. It's practically impossible to have some complete package. It's also why I tend to have like 2-3 MMOs that I play at a time. Right now for me it's FFXIV, PSO2 and Warframe (arguably depending on your definition of MMO). Variety is good for us, having everything be so similar is boring and really brings a stagnant market.

I suppose I can understand that. I think my issue is in that I can't make much reasonable progress in any MMO I play because I get bored/frustrated with some of the game systems in one session. For example I enjoy the flow of combat in BDO, but get bored by the lack of engaging instanced content, so I play Gw2. Then I lose interest in the lack of meaningful progression in that game and move on to FF14 and the cycle continues.

[Granyala]

Only Addon I'd really want is moveitall, because I'd LOVE to get rid of that huge, honking and completely useless golden text that appears for almost everything. ugh.

[Scufflegrit]

regarding power creep, scaling etc...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/wiki/pax_2017_interview

Reddit: What’s going to happen with the stat power creep that’s already starting to happen, for example are we going to end up with 100,000 HP by the end of Stormblood?
Yoshida: In terms of the formulas that are being used, we will be making adjustments so that it won’t increase so much as you’re going to your next level cap of 70. But there will be an increase inherently and it might be somewhere upwards of a hundred thousand, but we will be making an adjustment.

So yeah, take that however you want. At least they do acknowledge it and are attempting to rein it in a bit.

[Advent]

I never quite understood why numbers getting bigger was a point of worry for players. I welcome the jump in power in any game. I was baffled by the stat squish of WoW tbh

Only Addon I'd really want is moveitall, because I'd LOVE to get rid of that huge, honking and completely useless golden text that appears for almost everything. ugh.

I'd want weakauras, personally.

[Deleted]

My only option to get a weapon is either POTD or buyone? Cant quite get 230 as MNK due to 180 weapon ;P - NIN is 240 so im not sure if i can access anything on that to get a weapon for the MNK.

Still cant quite decided on a class to play...

[Berethos08]

My only option to get a weapon is either POTD or buyone? Cant quite get 230 as MNK due to 180 weapon ;P - NIN is 240 so im not sure if i can access anything on that to get a weapon for the MNK.

Still cant quite decided on a class to play...

POTD is a good option, though if you have the daily/weekly hunt marks unlocked (the ones that award Centurio Seals) you can get a 210 quickly to hold your Monk over until you can get the 230 then 255.

[Faroth]

I never quite understood why numbers getting bigger was a point of worry for players. I welcome the jump in power in any game. I was baffled by the stat squish of WoW tbh

I think because eventually seeing 873,957 per ability gets ridiculous, let alone 1,237,495 crits.

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My only option to get a weapon is either POTD or buyone? Cant quite get 230 as MNK due to 180 weapon ;P - NIN is 240 so im not sure if i can access anything on that to get a weapon for the MNK.

Still cant quite decided on a class to play...

If you want the crap shoot, there's Diadem.

You could also PvP for wolf marks and get those weapons, though a friend said it's cooled down a bit so queues are getting longer again.

I forget if there's a farmable weapon option from Alexander atm or if that's still behind the weekly lock.

[Aruhen]

I don't remember if Gordias had a weapon you could get outside of Savage but Midas lockout is gone. Since you have a 240 Ninja your best bet is to probably either get into a group for an extreme primal such as Sophia which drop 255 weapons or again do Midas to get the 230 weapons which you can then upgrade to 240.

[Wrecktangle]

Good grief, has it already been that long since the 10 yr anniversary?!?! O_O;

On WoW, are you factoring in pre or post stat squish? Because WoW was pushing towards 1 million DPS before the stat squish prevented it. That's Blizzard's words , not mine. And they've talked about the massive power jumps to keep raiding feeling powerful more than once. :P

They also didn't HAVE ilvl indicated until long after we were into expansions, so that could have been adjusted at the time they implemented them. I don't recall if that was in data and not displayed or if they went back to ID gear afterwards when it was baked into UI.

Yes it has indeed. I am merely discussing raw growth percentages in a few specific points of time I had personally seen. In Yoshi's desire to mimic certain WoW systems he is going to run into the same problems WoW's ran into. I wanted to bring that to your attention since you were under the impression that FF14 isn''t scaling out of control (it is).

I still boggle how people can seem to dislike everything about a game yet continue to play and discuss it on an ongoing regular basis.

Is this a personal jab towards me based on your perceived beliefs about me?

I've never once said I dislike everything about FF14. Nor have I ever implied it. In fact I very frequently defend it, but I also criticize its flaws because I am no rabid fanboy/sheep, nor am I some uneducated hater. In fact you'll find that my passion for the game and my willingness to discuss it is direct evidence that I like it, not dislike it.

Why do people who want FFXIV to be identical to WoW not play WoW, for instance?
Addons
Desire to skip leveling
Desire to have no quest/story connection to dungeons
Desire to have no MSQ
Set bonuses

"Just be World of Warcraft" seems to be the running theme. I don't get it.

FF14 is already identical to WoW. I don't want it to be. I want it to be better than WoW, but most importantly I want it to be better than itself. FF14 is too complacent. It needs to break the formula. It needs to grow.

Addons aren't a bad thing. It brings people who like to develop things like that into the game. Does FF14 need them? I don't know or care honestly. I barely use addons in WoW. I run 3 total addons: weakauras, elviui, and DBM.

Leveling is a multi-faceted issue. Do I want a new player to experience the story? Yes. Do I want a new player to be encumbered by a single player RPG for 100 hours before he can do current content with friends? No. Do I want the idea of players joining the game who might pay to skip leveling/story? Sure I could care less. Their decision has absolutely 0 impact on me (or you).

I love that story/quests are gated/included in dungeons. I have no issue with that, so that must be related to someone else.

I love the MSQ. I think it is a very good feature. I would like to see it streamlined or have the ability to replay it on a second job so I can keep up with a new buddy player and actually see what's going on. I think the MSQ needs to focus more on the real stuff and less fluff.

Set bonuses are an interchangeable concept. The actual draw of that idea is that the game needs more exciting itemization. Items are beyond stale in this game. Materia is one of the biggest let downs, nothing to customize yourself from another player from a gameplay perspective. Relics are the most boring fucking weapon progression system I have ever seen (and I've seen some shitty ones). In fact, just the sheer item management system in this game is so bad and so deeply rooted that they're only solution at this point is to keep exponentially increasing inventory size.

The thing that you and others fail to see is that we (as in people who share my philosophy) don't want FF14 to be WoW. We want FF14 to be better. Period. I see so much potential for this game that is being held back by a developer who won't take chances. WoW for all its shit, definitely takes chances. They don't always succeed, but every now and then they get something right. The reaction I get from some FF14 players is that they don't want anything to change. They want to live in their new coat of paint bubble every year with nothing new. You want to talk about baffling? THAT SHIT IS BAFFLING.

Sidenote: revisit the combo discussion we were having. I'd like your (and others) thoughts on the idea that popped into my head.

There is a genuinely strange thing in the mmo genre where you see a lot of people who basically just want pallet swaps of World of Warcraft. Not like WoW but just WoW with another setting. They play for a while, realise its not that, complain and leave again and i really dont get it. Near as i could guess is its cases of proper WoW addicts that need that very specific fix but sticking with a game they are in some way tiring of makes them want a change but at the same time all the years and money 'invested' makes them feel like they need that specific thing. So they expect it elsewhere and when they dont get it go back to their dealer

You're correct that in most cases its due to them having so much "invested". I mean imagine quitting FF14 to go play WoW for the first time now. You'd never stick with it. You have an accomplished character there, friends, etc. The same goes for the opposite scenario.

For me personally I love the climb. In fact most end game MMO's bore the living shit out of me. I'll try just about any MMO (as long as I have someone to play with) to see what the leveling is all about.

I don't necessarily mind that everyone winds up at similar ilevels on catch up patches - and there are wild differences between effectiveness between someone who is in full script versus BIS with raid gear but I do agree that more horizontal itemization would be great assuming there were more varied secondary stats - because as it stands now, you could make a million different pieces, but it would always lead to a hierarchy - for most classes it would wind up with whatever pieces put you right at your acc cap and then stacking crit and all the other combinations just downgrades from there.

Nor do I. I could care less about what item level someone is. I only want to experience some sort of character progression for myself (and others close to me). Unfortunately ilvl isn't a measure of character progression for me personally so I'm bummed when I play FF14 because that is the ONLY progression.

To be fair, there were some rather steep climbs in WoW as well

I don't recall exact numbers but this seems right around correct give or take. The jump from Vanilla to TBC is right around the same mark you might see from 95th percentile DPS from FCOB to Creator. But it's also unfair to compare a miniboss fight like Faust in any iteration to FCOB, as the former is about a minute long burn with no deviation from start to finish. There is no downtime, and you can see parses of people with nearly 100% uptime on enhance balance and similar damage skewing buffs/debuffs. A11 and 12 would be a little more fair as both have significant downtime like some of the fcob fights such as Bahamut.

I agree that there were. I was merely pointing out that FF14 is scaling out of control too because Faroth was implying it wasn't. I could say I like Chicago more than Camden because it has less murders, that doesn't mean that Chicago is good when it comes to its murder rate. It might be true, but its heavily misleading.

FWIW my A1S overall DPS was ~1k, encounter culling set to 30 so its 1 continuous parse. If I had any data from FCoB I'd have used it, but we quit after SCoB. Same thing quit after 1st tier of HW.

You're comparing the ending raid from 2.0 (ARR) to a raid in 3.0 (A1S), so you're comparison is not apples to apples since in WoW you're using raids from within the same expansion to draw a comparison between.

By that measurement you should be looking at the difference between Hellfire Citadel and Emerald Nightmare not Emerald Nightmare and Nighthold.

Agreed. I was merely using data I had on hand to illustrate a point. I didn't raid HFC.

I was easily doing between 500k-1mil DPS (depending on the fight ofc) back in 5.4 with my shitty gear. I wouldn't be surprised if 3M was the average in Legion if the squish never happened. I mean we're at 800K being the average in Legion at the moment. What was the average in 3.3? 18K without the 30% buff in ICC? Two expansions and you go from 18-20K to 500K+.

Right. If you look at the averge dps on non cheesy fights back in HFC it was around 150-200K. When looking at Nighthold which is the proper comparison (both being raids that drop tiers) the average is around 800K. That's not a tiny increase.

I used ST values, I think you're using overall damage values. Your average player isn't putting up 800K ST. I'm parsing 99th percentile and my ST is like 650k give or take how many people die and buff me. Also understand that I am not saying WoW's scaling is good, or better than FF14's. I am merely drawing a point that FF14's is ALSO out of control.

Going from 500~ being the average in T8 to 2.3K in 3.5 which is by the way four tiers ahead and an expansion is actually pretty decent. Then again I point to the difference between HFC and NH which is only a single tier difference plus expansion jump and its about the same with the only difference being that it took longer for FF to get there. 400% for an expansion jump and one tier difference for WoW and 400%~ for FF with an expansion jump and four tiers. You do the math.

500 was in no way shape or form "average" DPS for T8. That's on the extremely high end after progression was finished.

I'll reiterate above - Also understand that I am not saying WoW's scaling is good, or better than FF14's. I am merely drawing a point that FF14's is ALSO out of control.

Everything must be WoW! After seeing it in VGD too many times I just kind of stopped caring about people that continuously post like that. Though I don't see it that often these days. And if anyone starts posting about it after this I will cry in a corner
It's why I stopped bothering conversing with him when it was so painfully clear.

So you believe that I think FF14 should be WoW? Painfully clear? Mind citing some of these painfully clear examples as to where I explicitly stated or implied that FF14 should be WoW. If you unwilling, please edit your post to remove that piece.

[xerus]

I still boggle how people can seem to dislike everything about a game yet continue to play and discuss it on an ongoing regular basis.

He hasn't played FFXIV in well over a year.

[Granyala]

Question though - if you didn't raid, but did low M+ (3-6) and had an average ilvl of say 870. If the only content you did was WQ's and dungeons you'd be one shotting those monsters and you'd be doing very meaningful and competitive output in the content you're participating in, so in essence your gear wouldn't suck. It would be phenomenal actually. I have a hard time associating with people who want top tier output for content that a quarter of that power would make it trivial. Do you want to make trivial even more trivial? That's how you're coming across to me. Why does it matter to you that say a savage raider has access to gear that is twice as powerful if the content you participate in is already trivial with gear that's 1/4th as powerful?

Yo... until I get thrown into LFR (or a raid PuG) with a real raider, take a peek at recount and see that he can outperform me while playing one handed and watching 3 movies simultaneously.

Sure, to the average LFR hero it might not be an issue, but I am an ex mythic raider. I know how a properly geared character feels and handles.
Even though I am not raiding any longer, I still pay attention to my performance (even in LFR).
It sucks if the game tells you "no matter what you do, you don't stand a change against these dudes".
Just ruins my fun, so I essentially quit the gear grind.

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'RAIDERS NEED TO FEEL SUPER POWERFUL EVERY RAID!"

The main madness comes from the Difficulties and blizzards wish that players are able to feel a significant difference between each one.

(non raid content
(LFR
(normal mode
(HC mode
(Mythic

Add to that the Warfoged bonus and there is simply no way around an insane delta.
Legions TF system attempted to blur the lines a bit, but the essence is still there.

[Kazgrel]

Welp, kinda-sorta won the Coven Weapon Lottery last night. DRG weapon with 159 accuracy, 68ish crit and 70 something determination. Not the greatest secondary stats, but 1. at least the total of all the secondaries is proper for the weapon's ilvl and 2. it's a gigantohumongous upgrade over a 235 padjali spear.