PvE Raid Vendor Badge System will never come back?

[Boricha]

I never had an issue with the badges, including all the different types and being able to convert them. They didn't matter after an expansion anyway. VP and JP worked well too. Just anything other than this casino system they've created.

[dope_danny]

There is absolutely no problems in Final Fantasy for buying the best possible gear with the "old currency badges"?
Are they trully outdated?
Or are still relevant in any way once a new tier releases?

The best possible gear is for the most part raid gear which you can't buy. Its not like buying the base tier in ICC back in the day. A typical end of expansion patch is basically like this
base gear: Dungeon Drops that are comparable to earlier high level rewards as catch up gear, basically glamour gear or alt job gear for anyone whos not taken a huge break
previous highest level tome gear: now downgraded as its weekly cap is removed allowing anyone to get to that in a day or two of activities most often mixed with the dungeon gear as its all catch up gear now.
Alliance raid gear: 24 man 3 party raid gear thats comparable to lfr but it drops straight gear thats better than dungeons but slightly worse than the current tome gear and cannot be upgraded
Current Tomestone gear: capped per week and will later be upgraded with a item gained from spending a raid token, intended to last the longest and by the end of the expansion will be the baseline for the next expansion
Static Raid gear/Extreme Primals: The hardest difficulty pve content for the most part that drops tokens you exchange for whatever gear you like or in some instances drops a token and leg pieces require 4 token A but a helm is two of token B.

For the most part its staggered so instead of jumping from A to B in power theres increments to fill gaps. The key difference however is the power increase gap from .0 level cap gear and .X final patch highest ilvl gear can be as low as 17-30%, while in wow the power difference between the same gear stat wise can be as high as 70-80% increases.

For example:

A 4.0 tank chestpiece that was the first tomestone tier
>264 strength
>278 vitality
>174 crit
>ilvl330

A mid expansion tomestone tier
>307 strength +43str from previous tier,
>333 vitality +55 vit from previous tier
>277 crit +103 crit from previous tier
>ilvl360


A 4.5 tank chestpiece that is the current tomestone tier
>353 strength +46str from previous tier, +89str overall
>396 vitality +63vit from previous tier, +118vit overall
>313 crit +36 crit from previous tier, +139 overall
>ilvl390

When the damage, hp and hit/accuracy stat weights for the bosses you face are significantly smaller on incline it means often the power difference is much, much smaller and you are chasing new gear mostly for secondary stats to just ensure you can keep hitting the boss and getting critical hits or heals.

Compare to WoW where the reliance on stats is far heavier and a comparison is like this:

Legion tier 19 raid finder tank chest tier piece
>1238 str
>1857 stam
>366 mastery
>ilvl845+

Tier 20 equivalent
>1977 str +739str,
>2965 stam +1108 stam
>1000 mastery +644 mastery
>ilvl890+

After this its all changed according to the stat squish so you would have to look into percentages but as you can see the major difference that makes the tome system work in FFXIV is staggered reward options that feel less random because the overall power increases are much, much smaller increments of the 100's of percents rather than tens of thousands that modern WoW tends to do. Which really seems to be the crux of the issue where a lot of FFXIV is "can you move out of this, can you do this quicktime event, can you dps while healing, can you bring the player who can overcome a much smaller stat difference by knowing their class" as opposed to "you are too far behind in gear, yes you can learn the fight and do your best but mathematically speaking the power gap is simply too big for you to not be a massive detriment, come back with current gear".

Thats all the difference is really, gear is treated more as a reward than a requirment. Its why there is technically a "nobody below Xilvl" option in XIV's group finder but nobody uses it because by and large player ability is far more important than the best gear outside of the highest tier content purely because its easy to catch up and the difference isnt that significant. I guess you would say gear in XIV is a extra bump to the base character, gear in WoW is the character and denotes its relevance in the current tier at all. Which makes being able to buy previous high level gear far more significant, especially if its a new player playing catch up.

The easiest way to think of it is like this. Honour points buys whatever was last major patches raid finder gear, valour buys this patches raid finder gear. There is still normal raid gear to chase and upgrades to this gear, but it just means when theres a new patch the now older gear is the baseline. The only issue i see from some ex WoW players is "well then whats the point racing to get the best gear?" and the response is usually "yeah, whats the point if you dont want to?" because the stat difference is far less dramatic.


also bare in mind its not the raid or die game WoW is. If someone prefer to go chocobo racing and breeding, or do the independant levelling systems of deep dungeon or eureka or simply play as a chef or miner because those are classes rather than sub systems thats up to them. When 'get geared for raiding' is such a smaller focus for the playerbase people don't really care as much for gear outside of the hardcore raiders and all of this stuff is pre hardcore raid gear anyway so the weekly cap just means each lockout they get a little more of a stat boost and thats about it.

Personally i have 23 of FFXIV's 27 jobs at level cap and i havent' actually capped tomestones for a week in a few months because the upgrades are so small and i have so much outside of raiding to do that it doesn't matter as much. Maybe if WoW lowered the powergap and gave us more out of raid content to focus on something similar would occur with less pressure/prestige put on chasing the ilvl dragon?

[Big Thanks]

@dope_danny

Thanks for the information. I understand.

[voidillusion]

The badge system was a low rng catchup mechanic that it when it was made correctly kept dungeons relevant for this purpose. I much prefer this kind of system than the azerite crap we have atm.

[Hyral]

Not necessarily. Right now titan residuum vendor is more for not being screwed up that much rather than a catch up. Frankly, this is what we need, a badge system that allows to buy good gear to fix the crap that rnjesus keep trowing us.
I'm already halfway thru heroic bod and i'm still running a old 355 ring with a socket because is the only i have with mastery.

Semantics, I consider that part of catch up. Bad luck makes people fall behind. Same reason why badges existed, so you wouldn't get behind because of lack of drops. You are always steadily progressing your character.

I'd say the main point most would agree is vendors shouldn't be there so you can overgear content.

[Dhrizzle]

Like i said on the OP...the system needs to be convoluted to work...otherwise it could be exploited like it was in TBC (he talked about it previously to the part i linked)

How do you suggest the system would work without 5 kinds of badges?

2 kinds of badges - one for raids (Normal+) called Valour, one for dungeons and LFR called Heroism. Valour badges for the latest tier of rewards, Heroism badges for the previous tier of rewards (or a special lower tier to start the expansion.)

End of a tier/season Valour badges swap for Heroism, Heroism badges swap for gold.

[Kill Broccoli]

I'd say the main point most would agree is vendors shouldn't be there so you can overgear content.

It could be solved in many ways. Simpler way is badge for heroic raid ilvl gear, same as m+10, dropping only from +10 caches or heroic raid boss.
This way you won't overgear anything.

[Dhrizzle]

I know, i watched, why i said there is ways but they need to be fixed, for example just have 2 currencies "old and new" so when new stuff comes out, have it cost new currency, any stuff before costs old currency, and any currency now becomes old currency. and boom.

and no it does not need to be complex to not be abused, look at what i just posted.

Yeah this, and didn't they do it for Cataclysm?

[Hyral]

Yeah this, and didn't they do it for Cataclysm?

Yup. Justice and Valor for Dragonslaying. Honor and Conquest for PvP. But in their traditional MO of removing things that work it's gone now.

[Echocho]

It's a shame he despises the system so much when it was loved by the players. This is the man that's responsible for the diablo style loot system we have right now with excessive RNG and being literally showered in loot, a system he feels is perfect.

[Big Thanks]

It's a shame he despises the system so much when it was loved by the players. This is the man that's responsible for the diablo style loot system we have right now with excessive RNG and being literally showered in loot, a system he feels is perfect.

He no longer works at blizzard
Not really relevant, just pointing it out.

[Echocho]

He no longer works at blizzard
Not really relevant, just pointing it out.

Yes but he did during Legion and he talks about "helping" the wow team out with loot

[cuafpr]

they should come back....... but that would limit the RNG and since blizz thinks that's what keeps people playing wont happen.

[Fkiolaris]

Yup. Justice and Valor for Dragonslaying. Honor and Conquest for PvP. But in their traditional MO of removing things that work it's gone now.

With Honor and Conquest they had the perfect system in place during WoD (PvP items are low-level in PvE, but get a 30lvl boost in PvP while PvE items are hard capped in PvP below the boosted level of Conquest gear). They just fucked it up by having more pvp seasons than pve tiers, leading to the pvp gear leapfrogging the pve gear.

They could also have the PvE system from MoP for Justice/Valor, minus the (double) rep requirements which meant that often enough by the time you spent enough time grinding the rep(s), you already had better gear than you could buy. But Valor/Justice dropping from every kind of PvE content kept everything kind-of-relevant for the whole expansion, while Scenarios were literally 15mins long at worst and you could cap your VP in a week by avoiding them if you really hated them (daily quests, dungeons normal and heroic, all 4 levels of the raids were dropping VP).

Unfortunately, both of these scenarios go against Blizzards current casino-or-bust mentality so don't expect to see them any time soon.

[Mardux]

Semantics, I consider that part of catch up. Bad luck makes people fall behind. Same reason why badges existed, so you wouldn't get behind because of lack of drops. You are always steadily progressing your character.

I'd say the main point most would agree is vendors shouldn't be there so you can overgear content.

Its not semantics. Bad luck has nothing to do with being able to buy specific gear at an otherwise unobtainable item level.

[Evaddon]

They like the badge system, but they also don't like the badge system.

[FelPlague]

@Claitraith @FelPlague

But everything on the old currency must be useless for the new raid tier...
Imagine there is Mythic level raid items from the previous tier on the vendor.
Those are some busted items.

It would be the equivalent of us having today at our disposal ilvl 385 gear to buy with old currency.
Which is the same as Dazar'Alor normal difficulty.

and we do... you can buy 385 azerite pieces for almost no residium...

- - - Updated - - -

Yeah this, and didn't they do it for Cataclysm?

Yep, cata and mop. worked rather well, not perfect, but rather well, as the issue was that people would acidently buy weaker stuff... cause it still had to be there for people who wanted it.

- - - Updated - - -

It's funny, because they also had a different badge system which was more successful later on. In PvE you had 2 types of badges, Justice and Valor, and in PvP you had 2, Honor and Conquest, both of which were essentially a "big" badge for current gear and a "small" badge for old/weaker gear. After each season, the "big" badge got downgraded to the "small" badge, meaning you always had 2 badges, and all "legacy" gear was bought for the "small" badge. No confusion to be had.

EDIT: Saw your later post suggesting essentially the same thing, but without mention of us actually having had it in the past.

because to be honest i forgot that mop and cata had them, i thought they just had 1 currency that "reset" each season.

[Hyral]

With Honor and Conquest they had the perfect system in place during WoD (PvP items are low-level in PvE, but get a 30lvl boost in PvP while PvE items are hard capped in PvP below the boosted level of Conquest gear). They just fucked it up by having more pvp seasons than pve tiers, leading to the pvp gear leapfrogging the pve gear.

They could also have the PvE system from MoP for Justice/Valor, minus the (double) rep requirements which meant that often enough by the time you spent enough time grinding the rep(s), you already had better gear than you could buy. But Valor/Justice dropping from every kind of PvE content kept everything kind-of-relevant for the whole expansion, while Scenarios were literally 15mins long at worst and you could cap your VP in a week by avoiding them if you really hated them (daily quests, dungeons normal and heroic, all 4 levels of the raids were dropping VP).

Unfortunately, both of these scenarios go against Blizzards current casino-or-bust mentality so don't expect to see them any time soon.

WoD's system, PvP BiS being locked behind Ashran lootboxes aside, was pretty much perfect. Specially the ilvl scaling gear based on content. And as far as I remember back then everyone loved it. Again, putting aside fucking Ashran and the garbage lootboxes design.

But as usual for them: fix what ain't broken.

[nekobaka]

It was killed off because it was not exiting like RNG loot drops that supposedly do better from a player retention standpoint.

Perhaps makes me one of the odd balls as the multi layer RNG has actually driven me away.

[Zantera]

As someone who has played since early TBC, I always HATED the badge system. Both the part of capping the weekly valor points (it just felt like a chore, much more than WQs ever did for example) and when you finally got enough badges there was nothing satisfying about buying a piece of loot from a vendor.

Don't get me wrong, there's issues with the current loot system too but I much prefer it over the badge system.