Brainstorming for fun: Itemization, Encounter Design, etc. Long read.

[Wrecktangle]

Please feel free to read and discuss. This is for fun. These are just some open thoughts I posted on reddit a week or so ago and thought i'd do here as well.

1) Gear should have random stats (a la Diadem), and gear should have random # of (say 0-2) Materia Sockets. There should be ways for crafters to reroll stats on gear. It shouldn't be expensive, but it shouldn't be free or cheap either. Effort vs. Cost. I'd also like the ability for gear to have the option of dropping with a budget dedicated to entirely one secondary, or multiple secondaries (i.e. more than 2). I understand that theory-crafters will math out stack crit or det or whatever, but that ties into another issue of proper balancing of secondaries.

Gear should also have ways to be powered up. Have it unlock item level increases, the ability to be dyed, and multiple dying areas. (They really should have 2-3 dyeable portions on EVERY single piece of gear. It is such a huge disservice to be stuck dying just the main color while the sub colors remain and may not conducive to your individual player fantasy. My goal for gear is that you should WANT to search for that perfect roll, build it up and enjoy it.

Others have commented that this is not a good approach, and I can certainly see the limitations, but then the argument becomes how do we create a fun environment where gear is more than just a number? Right now I find the gear treadmill to be the worst experience I have ever encountered in an MMO.

2) Materia should be fun and useful, not just useless stat sticks on outdated gear. Make Materia colored, and have it have fun bonuses.
Example for DRG:

Blue Materia (Support):
Dragon's Repose - Regenerate 200 TP after using Elusive Jump.
Serpent's Celerity - Reduces CD of Elusive Jump by 60s. Also reduces enemity reduction by 60%.
Scales of Resilience - For 6s after casting Feint, all magical damage you receive is reduced by 20%.

Green (Magic):
Dragon's Wrath - Hitting 2 or more targets with Geirskogul causes no reduction in Blood of the Dragon.
Hyper Jump - Casting Jump immediately before Spineshatter Drive instantly refreshes the cooldown on Jump.
Asclepius' Recoil - Casting Jump reduces all damage received by 50% for the next 2 seconds.
Leap of Faith - Spineshatter Drive's potency is increased by up to 100% based on distance away from the target. Minimum 10% increase.

Yellow (Command):
Viscous Puncture - After casting Full Thrust, for 12 seconds your next Full Thrust will deal 25% more damage.
Crushing Talons - Casting Phlebotomize when duration is below 6s instantly deals remaining damage and refreshes half the TP cost.
Sweeping Flurry - Your Disembowel has a 50% chance to instantly refresh the cooldown on Leg Sweep.

The goal here is that there should be options and choices based on playstyles, maybe a progression encounter, etc. It is expected to be unable to have access to all the available materia, and I understand that some choices would undoubtedly be "mathed" out and that's fine considering a lot of the choices are utility based.

The general purpose of the materia I thought of was that blue would typically be based off of support and utility based actions. Green would be job based effects or skill changes, and yellow would be tied to normal skills (i.e. class). I understand that not all jobs have classes and that honestly the class system is dated and unnecessary so I am definitely open to discussion on this.

3) Dungeon/Raid & Encounter design:

Dungeons
I feel like Dungeons need to have bonus objectives and significantly more danger. Dungeons could stand to be less straightforward and more ambiguous. Here's a scenario:
Your team approaches a crossroads, an NPC comes running out with mobs chasing it. You save the NPC, or keep moving. Up to you. If you choose to go down the other path you meet resistance and have to save the NPC. Tank needs to secure threat, and DPS need to do work prior to reinforcements. Healers have to balance restoring the NPC to health and keeping the team alive. The team should be rewarded for completing these optional objectives, their overall performance, i.e. clear time, # of deaths, damage done, etc. and are rewarded more treasure/better treasure.
It should be ok that these dungeons have difficult mechanics and objectives. It should be acceptable to fail, and learn and progress. It should not be like vanilla WoW where a dungeon took hours.

Raids
FF14 really needs to reinvigorate its raiding content. 4 bosses isn't acceptable. It really should be minimum of 6, with more being better. There needs to be a clear curve, think Ravana EX, Bismark EX level first boss, A1S and A2S 2-4 bosses, then Thordan EX level bosses from 5-6 with like A3S+ being at the end. I understand that hardcore raiders would be 6/7 in the first week probably, but guess what, they are in every MMO and there honestly isn't a fix for that. The fix needs to be more towards the mid-core and the aspiring raiders.
Raids need to not be seperate instances. Make it one large instance. Make it so that you can pick and choose which early bosses you want to work on first. Remove the timer. That's just a bad feature.
Use the dungeons and raid to tell a story. I walk into the arm of alex savage. Why is Faust there. Who/what is he? Who is the oppressor? A2S kinda makes sense so I'm good there. Who is the living liquid? why do I care about it? Why is it there, what cause it to pop up, why is it attacking us?
Encounter Design
I'd like to see more mechanics that don't insta-wipe you, but make the fight progressively more difficult. Think adds spawn that if not killed convert part of the room to a constantly growing void zone. They may spawn directly on the boss, so the tank will need to move him and DPS will need to kill it to prevent the void zone from getting too large. If killed the void zone is smaller and doesn't grow. Make the DPS check hard, missing it won't prevent the fight from continuing but missing more than 2 may cause you to run out of room before enrage, while simultaneously making other mechanics more difficult to deal with since there's less room.

Another example would be something like making tank swaps more exciting then a binary stacking debuff. Think like the boss hits an ability that turns the MT into a living bomb of sorts, he needs to get away from the raid, and the OT needs to pick up aggro quickly and re-position, or make tank swapping mandatory to soak boss tank busters. Make him use busters more frequently to promote tank swapping to ensure a CD is available for all busters. A failed buster doesn't need to be an insta-wipe, but make it punishing, that it requires some sacrifice or external cooldown to get back to stability.

Another neat example would be the boss soft enrages anytime a member in the party including the tank is put below say 40% HP. If someone misses a mechanic and takes a lot of damage the boss begins to do increasingly more powerful and frequent attacks. The counter to this would be a tank swap to hold the soft enrage while the healer restores the player to a safe health that triggers the soft enrage to fall off. I'd love to see more dynamic and responsive mechanics, rather than be here at x time or else wipe.

4) Diadem
What I really hoped diadem would be would be procedurally generated zones that had randomized scary enemies for small partys 4-8 people. Think like larger versions of normal enemies with different # of boss mechanics based on their rating. A low rank enemy may have 3 mechanics:

a) Adds that continually spawn until a boss is burned a certain %. Adds put stacking bleed debuffs on tanks.

b) Tethers that are put on 2 players that if they don't come together/split or whatever, get a 25% healing/defense/damage debuff, something to make it harder, but not impossible.

c) Ability that needs to be interrupted. Say it petrifies random member for 1 minute.

A stronger enemy may have 5 different mechanics. Again, the system would identify 5 random mechanics from a pool and combine them into a fight. It is possible that the combination of mechanics could create a significantly more difficult monster that your team is unable to take down in the time limit. In this case your time is better spent finding another one and coming back to that one later. It should be ok to fail with bad RNG.
The most powerful would be early to mid raid boss difficult pending mechanics.

Battle Arena
Now that I've detailed the random monsters with random mechanics we can talk about what I'd love to see in the battle arena.
You fight increasing more dangerous monsters with handicaps. For instance first fight may just be a strong 1v1 monster. Nothing you can't handle. Some examples of handicaps could be materia breaking (no longer do you get the small buffs you had before), poison (your life drains until the boss is destroyed), No healing (as it says, no regeneration at all), 1/2 HP, or TP, or MP, etc (self explanatory), or permanent incurable paralysis. Things like that. Not sure if something like mini or toad could be done.

In closing
I know it's a long read, just a bunch of random ideas I had and felt like sharing on an excruciatingly slow day at work. Go ahead, discuss, pick apart, add, etc.

This is for fun, what are your ideas? What do you think they could do better, differently and why?

[Deleted]

I''m a big fan of FF14. I would add.

- Support Role would be cool and unique but I think this ship has sailed.
- More exciting Talents. Some basic version like WoW's old schools talents would be awesome imo. Much more exciting than having all 50 point in STR.
- Speech bubles for /say. Even the NPCs have them.

[D3athsting]

I would add random boe/bop gear drop from normal mobs and a-s ranks
Also i don't get why lv60 blues don't have materia slots making lv60 materia next to useless, dow/dom materia goes for 15k gil while doh/dol materia goes for 1mil at market board... materia melding should be something similar to tera enchanting/masterworking but here is restricted to subpar crafted items...

[Sorrior]

I would add random boe/bop gear drop from normal mobs and a-s ranks
Also i don't get why lv60 blues don't have materia slots making lv60 materia next to useless, dow/dom materia goes for 15k gil while doh/dol materia goes for 1mil at market board... materia melding should be something similar to tera enchanting/masterworking but here is restricted to subpar crafted items...

Starting in 3.2 it will they have said

[Wrecktangle]

Starting in 3.2 it will they have said

The problem with that is that the materia is still useless stat sticks that provide absolutely no positive gameplay interaction.

[Fkiolaris]

Before they touch any of that, they should change 2 things imo (subjective opinion is subjective):

1) The speed/ease of levelling up jobs other than your main. It really is a downer to get into the expansion only to find that you don't like how your job plays and the only other option is grinding at best one of the new ones from 30.
2) Bring more pvp earlier and lift the GC restrictions at the very least to allow pvp to get a bigger crowd. I mean really, since it's not meant to be serious, would it hurt to make it available earlier and be more accessible?

The above two are the reasons I am taking a break soon. I want to pvp, my BLM sucks balls in pvp and I can't be asked to lvl up a machinist to 50 only to perhaps find out that sucks too.

[Wrecktangle]

As much as I love FFXIV, I don't think we'll ever see that kind of depth in the stat/equipment systems. They just don't seem interested in that angle at all.

And that is frightening to me. The game of oozes of style, but has some of the worst QoL control and some of the systems are almost impossibly generic and uninteresting.

Before they touch any of that, they should change 2 things imo (subjective opinion is subjective):

1) The speed/ease of levelling up jobs other than your main. It really is a downer to get into the expansion only to find that you don't like how your job plays and the only other option is grinding at best one of the new ones from 30.
2) Bring more pvp earlier and lift the GC restrictions at the very least to allow pvp to get a bigger crowd. I mean really, since it's not meant to be serious, would it hurt to make it available earlier and be more accessible?

The above two are the reasons I am taking a break soon. I want to pvp, my BLM sucks balls in pvp and I can't be asked to lvl up a machinist to 50 only to perhaps find out that sucks too.

Fair points! That definitely need tuning. That is the exact reason I never got to level NIN, and I really did want too.