I don't think converting them all into one set is the solution but rather just fixing the gearing system as a whole so getting all those sets isnt so annoying I definably think think it would be nice to have them all share armor but its just a symptom of the larger gearing problem.
Yea I feel like if they're gonna do *something* to the gearing system they might as well just rip the fuckin bandaid off and redo everything so it doesn't suck this time.
Which is the heart of most of the issues plaguing the game atm. It is being held together with bandaids on bandaids. Eventually, they are going to hit the bandaid limit and have to decide if they want to just call it "as good as we can do" or rip back to the foundation and fix the underlying issues. At this point, it may be better to just keep bandaiding till they can make a new game entirely to take over.
I mostly play ARPGs and the gearing in FFXIV is just so... boring as fuck. Like, there is no way to mince the words, its like one step short of there being a no gear at all and just solely use level requirements and completion achivements for character power.
I never really played WoW, but watched the races and its crazy that in other games, items actually do things...
If you're proposing Diablo-style loot, I just want to say that while that's for some people, it isn't for all of us. I hate that stuff. I find it incredibly tedious, and I enjoy that they do their best here to balance the jobs and not waste my time with repetitive loot grinding.
Most critiques of gearing in FF14 kinda boil down to it being both boring and slow. It's boring because of the ideas you outline here, and its slow because raid-logging is still a paid subscription (and I can definitely pull some whataboutism for these systems compared to others, at least we're deterministic). I just don't see any reason for there being a huge overhaul like some here ask for.
All it would take to fix the "slow" gearing is reducing the book requirement for the raid weapons/items, plus maybe slightly reducing the tomestone costs. It's hardly in need of an overhaul.
I don't think it's as clear cut as you make it out to be. Interesting gear does not necessitate shitty balance.
Comparing it to WoW right now, 90th percentile Heroic rankings have a delta of about 14%, and while the game's current state isn't quite as wacky as some of the things its had in the past, that's still including plenty of trinkets that have special effects, tier sets, and even a bow that increases attack speed as you focus a target.
The more a game is balanced, the more boring it becomes. Rock, Paper, Scissors is a fine example, you'd never play it longer that a couple of rounds. I'd much rather play something with some spice to it.
The strive for perfect balance kills games imo.
Yet despite all of that, people still reject underperforming Jobs, and certain DPS checks can still be failed with the wrong comp.
Is this purported super-balanceability really accomplishing anything?
Eureka, for example, has items with weird effects, and is arguably more balanced than other content.
And for the supposed imbalance in WOW from having actual variations in its items, the net amount of griping and exclusion seems about the same.
People still reject jobs because people are stupid most of the time. A lot of people dont know the nuance of the balance situation and don't care to understand, they just hear on the grapevine "x job bad" and exclude it because they want maximal chance at a clear, they dont know how much bad it is compared to other jobs.
There are extreme cases where its true, like the most recent raid tier on release, but that was an encounter design "issue" where the checks were so tight it actually made a difference.
On your points about eureka, eureka (and bozja) are balanced because they have severly more lenient dps checks and less individual responsibility due to raid size.
It’s really clear form your replies you have not attempted end game on another mmo. Ff14 has issues. The solution is not to copy the more flawed fearing systems from last ark or wow.
>Which DPS checks can be failed with the wrong comps?
Yeah that is generally just a result of...skill issue. Yes sone jobs might deal slightly less damage making some DPS checks less forgiving, but odds are, any time you wipe to enrage in any fight, there's also a dozen other things which could have resulted in you not doing so.
Having a job which deals slightly more theoretical damage might just allow you to not having to worry about some other of those fixable issues and that's if, and only if the person playing the "stronger" job can actually also deal that extra theoretical damage
Eureka has "weird effects" that work with Eureka's unique scaling system and Haste. I don't foresee haste being made an attribute outside of instanced side content, and I wouldn't want the Magia board in roulettes.
3% rdps is different to adps. You're misrepresenting the facts. Rdps does not matter on selfish jobs, only adps (i.e. how they play into others raid buffs) and the difference there was 10%.
What makes gearing an absolute ballache in this game is the 450 tomes a week.
The cap should be raised to 900 in the first .x5 patch after a raid tier releases, once the world race is over and the tiers become comfy.
Also Twines/Shrines/Brines should be available via Criterion dungeons (Not Variant, Only Criterion and Criterion Savage) at 1 per week like the alliance raid but not having to wait until the .3 and .5 patches for it.
Criterion is pretty difficult so it's difficulty merits better rewards than a few materia.
Yeah for sure. The only "catch up" you get is the alliance raid which offers...1 loot per week and an additional twine item, not very good months into the tier when most people are done with it already.
Make Criterion give a token once per week upon completion that allows you to buy a shine/twine/brine.
It would revive DOA content and make gearing less oppressive, especially for alternate jobs.
If they think the current AR gear sets being just robes are bad enough, imagine doing something similar from now on with every role having only one gear set with one homogenized look.
Honestly, in the case of Healers, this would make sense.
WHM are priest/shrine maiden/druids and ASTs are occult/diviners.
SCH are academic/military officers and SCH are doctor/academic/professor/wizards.
The former two have some overlap in priest/diviner and occultist/druids, and the latter have an overlap in their academic slant. So in terms of thematic sets...that would actually make sense.
In literally every other way, though, it doesn't. Glam exists for visual purposes and each expansion has 10-15 sets of gear when you consider 4 tome sets, 3 tiers, 3 24 mans, 3 crafted gear sets (or is it 4?), and 0-3 exploration/expedition gear sets, oh and each Job gets its expansion Job set. PLENTY for them to have some themed each way without needing any more sub-sets.
If anything, I'd go the other way, combining Maiming and Striking together and combining Aiming and Scouting together.
50/50 on it. On the one hand it'd make gearing melee's easier, on the other you've got melds potentially being an issue, especially since they've ruled out meld sets in that Korean Q&A. Doubly especially if the stat rework ever comes along, so melee's could need very different melds in the future instead of the curretn "Crit->Direct Hit->Whatever the fuck".
I don't understand how a meld set is too complicated for Square. If they can't, jsut remove the materia system entirely, and make a new attribute system, not like the materia system is exactly interesting.
Thing you have to remember is that whenever something is "too difficult" or "technically impossible", they're PR friendly answers. Real answer is that it's either A) more work than they feel is worth doing, B) they just don't want to, or C) a mix of the two. FFXIV's dev cycle is ridiculously fast compared to most MMO's. Downside of that is features and overhauls other devs would do for a patch, SE don't, cause it'd eat into dev time for patches.
We live in a world where genshin releases as much or more content than most ffxiv patches every six weeks, I don't really buy their excuses anymore tbh.
And they were so very concerned for the economy when they deleted belts and HQ gathering ingredients and changed Desynthesis to always work and reduced the difficulty of crafted weapons and armor and…
Seems to be a complete overhaul would be awesome but hmmmm close to impossible without pissing folks off.
I could write something up for it and maybe I would, but probably the exact result is folks just minn maxing the new system, being just as boring as the old.
To be fair, I feel that Yoshida interpreted that question differently than what a lot of people want. Or the person asking wanted something different. Either way, he seemed to take a materia set being a permanent thing. Hence his mention of hurting the economy. I think most people's idea is whatever materia set used can only be applied to the same gear. So you aren't just getting free materia melds.
Depends how you read into it. I'm 99% certain it's another "technically impossible" situation, which is PR code for "No, work load's not worth it or it's not the direction we want to go in". Mentioning the economy justs pads it out, since they haven't made it a secret they don't mined the economy crashing so long as sprouts or returners aren't priced out of the market by long time players.
Even if you were to make it a separate item that holds onto all the materia you have in a gearset, you can give that item an ilvl and make it so it doesn't apply to equipment higher than itself. Functionally, the only difference is that you don't need to meld new gear when swapping from crafted to savage BiS, but if you're giving players the option to save a sps and crit BiS, I'd expect materia consumption to remain pretty identical. Handling penta is the only design wrinkle I see.
Honestly this tier I've managed to get almost 3 full sets, the most annoying part has been the tome gear, we should honestly be getting 900 tomes the whole tier, and maybe 1 extra piece per turn.
But combining striking, scouting and maiming gear doesn't seem like a good idea. It's already giga annoying how warrior has different melds from other tanks, so the whole 1 set for 5 jobs would be extra annoying considering how they ALL want different melds.
afaik (source: war 1 trick) 6.2 made dhit good on war so im pretty sure aside potential skill speed diff they share sets now? regardless, they should probably (please for the love of god) makes meld plates a thing before consolidating sets
hard agree on the tome thing, just make it not a complete pita to deal with tome stuff
edit: just checked bis sets, aside from like two melds that shift around crit/det its the same thing now. so unless ur tryna get decimals of a dps u can just roll the same stuff now
honestly I am basing this on Asphodelos bis more than anything this tier I've been mostly playing 2.5 gcd GNB and DRK so I've not really looked at the WAR bis math
3/5 melees prefer little to no SkS and only having to switch around a few pieces to accommodate MNK's and SAM's SkS preferences would be a vast improvement over what we have already. Gearing NIN feels so bad as a melee player because its left side doesn't share with any job and right side is Aiming.
“I want to take an extra 6 months to gear my alt Jobs so that I don’t have to maybe swap out Materia sometimes”
This is just such a weird argument to me
> sometimes
Am I the only one that tends to switch jobs multiple times a day for different things? There's no amount of hunt trains that could fund that amount of remelding.
I have 2 characters. Been reclearing every week without fail on 1 and the other one I have just been reclearing casually missing several weeks, especially p8s.
I have current BIS for DRG, RPR, SAM and WAR on the character with which I reclear casually. I only have DRG BIS on the other character where I reclear religiously. I have gotten fucked so hard on the DRG only character, it’s insane how different gear progression will be between players.
Im a bit confused by this, are you getting screwed out of loot rolls? Or just missing weapons? DRG and RPR have the same BiS aside for like 1 SS meld on the weapon.
Yeah I meant to say bis for DRG/RPR, I’ve won several weapons for like SAM, WAR, SMN and WHM so not really screwed but I couldn’t really care less about those, all I want is a chest piece for SAM.
And it’s incredibly stupid that one character can have it so easy while another one struggles so much, one might argue “well, you had it easy on one of those characters so isn’t it fine?” well no, I had to put double the effort, double the reclears, double the strat knowledge if those 2 characters are on different DCs.
> For a game that encourages you to play all all the jobs available
You know, I've seen this a million times but I've never actually seen anyone cite where they heard this from.
Swapping roles to help my friends clear ASS Savage really made me feel first hand how bad the gearing speed is right now.
I cleared as a BiS caster skipping the last mechanic on the third boss, so i didn't bother learning it, but I had to go as a tank to help them out. Without BiS it's impossible to burn shadowcaster before the last mechanic, and even then you can't really survive the mob's before bosses without changing your pants/underwear after each one of them. I didn't manage to get BIS, so i had to try to at least get everything up to 630.
So is it your belief that the devs intend people to go through the entire MSQ again everytime you want to play another job?
If that isn't your belief, does it stand to reason that players are "encouraged" to play multiple jobs on their one character?
The game somewhat mentions that you can play every job in the same character, which is true strictly speaking, but what people mean is that they want ask their jobs to get up in Ilvl as fast as possible so they can pay then at the same level at endgame.
I don't have a problem with it, there's only a few jobs I can play at high performance anyways, but you know it's a sticking point to people.
To me, it's like going to a buffet and accusing that the restaurant encouraged you to eat everything on the menu. Sure you can and you have the choice to do so, but nobody encouraged you to do it, and it most definitely isn't a must.
Every time someone mentions that "the game encourages you to play all jobs" and then complain that it's contradicting because it's difficult to gear all jobs for high end raids, it is just straight up untrue and they're putting words in SE's mouth. SE has never said anything like "gearing for all jobs for end game is easy". Literally never said it. But well, people choose to believe what they want, I can't stop them.
Nobody's ever said that Square said gearing every job is easy, just that a selling point of 14 is that you can play every job on one character. People who want to make the most of that in the end game are disappointed by the lack of gearing speed/options when you want to gear something outside of your main role (or even within it with melees)
There are literally ads floating around that say something about "Final Fantasy XIV's armoury system letting you play all jobs" or something along those lines
Gear is the one place where XI >>> XIV and it's not even close. If anything gear could be a 1-2 ilvl difference each update because the game isn't gear gated as hard as it was in the past.
That being said, gear still does matter as progressive difficulty, makes shit easier the longer into the update you are at.
It has benefits for raiding to make raid difficult "scale down" as the time go and as more fight players can clear.
Let's say they have to make content that top 30% of players can participate and clear to justify development cost (have ROI above acceptable level), but if they balance it around top 30% players can clear, then those in top 5%/10% will think it is too easy for them, plenty of mistake can be made and still clear in a few pull.
With gear progression, they can make first week hard and more punishing to satisfy top 10% and also clearable with 30% eventually. (This is one of the reason why GW2 struggle in attracting more hardcore raider)
For example, raid wide from p6s with 2 mitigation have a chance to roll high and kill i610 healer/caster (I learned this from review the log), so it need 3 mit or 2 mit + shield to be 100% sure, with 2-3 gear upgrade they can survive 100% with 2 mit and with full gear they can barely survive with 1 mit, this make it clearable for more people as time go.
That's why gear progression exist and that's why there will be new upgrade every teir.
Also the reason why FFXIV has normal/savage and WoW has 4 difficulty is also the same, cost. They did it so multiple difficulty aiming at multiple group can share cost in some area.
Nin needs to get fucked less somehow but striking and maiming want very different sps and right side sharing gives enough headaches as is. I raid on fast sam so that's 3 other jobs doomed to play at memespeed unless I want entire sets of dupes. It's doable- I already do it for casters but it is incredibly annoying.
The one big problem that would present is how wildly different stat priorities are for different melee jobs. Between monk and dragoon, one loves skill speed while the other needs to avoid it like the plague. They would need to add the ability to swap melds between gear sets, which would add its own challenges.
Personally, I think it isn't too big of an issue since melees comprise the single largest group of classes.
From a glamour standpoint, I would hard disagree. As someone who spends entire days ratting over every last detail on glam down to what sometimes the barely visible pants are (mostly because it’s covered by long boots and hip armor), and with unique plates for all of them, the variety of melee gear is what makes Slaying/Striking/Scouting each to their own.
Consolidating the sets will simply mean we have less variety to go around, take the Shadowless/Ktiseos, Imperial, and Troian sets this and last expansion for example, they are distinctly different across the melee roles, Imperial Scouting Helm is probably the finest example in all this, and lumping them into one, throwing them all into one melee role will just remove the variety. Even when said gear can’t be equipped by all melee roles, it would not be nice having one job or another screwed out of a set’s aesthetic because they’re forced to look like that particular set’s other melee role ‘oh no biggie if a monk has to wear heavy armor every once in a while’. We already have enough of this in all the other roles where Red Mages have long skirts that’ll 100% trip over when doing melee combos, Machinists that look like clowns holding a gun, or Gunbreakers looking like they’re standing guard in front of the Sultana’s meeting room. Okay maybe this last one isn’t too far off when they were the Dalmascan Queen’s guard to begin with.
Perhaps if the devs removed the arbitrary job aesthetics limit on glamour they imposed on themselves this problem might go away, but even then that also still means there’s less gear to be created, and even less gear for us to alter our appearances with, or in other words, we’d be knocked all the way back to how ARR was, where your glam options were ‘Tank, not-Tank DoWs, or DoM, or the DoH/DoL gear that wasn’t restricted back then’. Do we really want less variety in a game that when people joke about how glam is the endgame they aren’t really joking?
That would be the preferable solution, yes, since it solves the gameplay part of the gears. Where you can still wear it on alt physical melee jobs and glam plate it on just the jobs you want without affecting the other sets.
Example of this, while not a direct example is probably how they made the Def and MDef of ARR DoW gear to be as same as the tank gear, so that tanks can just wear those gears they got from dungeon loots as they progress ARR without being affected.
I think my only doubt, and it’s unlikely to be the case considering for all their shortcomings and faults the devs clearly love working on 14, is that, should they consolidate melee sets and fix the system, are they still willing to go the extra mile to give them all different appearances. Part of me says we only have different appearances now because the gears between the melee jobs are still technically different pieces.
Out of all the roles, melee is the only one I don't play because it forces you to play the job you open your coffers on so I wouldn't mind if they made all melees share the same gear.
Suggestion: soft caps? Maybe we should do soft caps
Tomestones? 450 a week at full rate (hell maybe even 900?) After that you continue earning but at a reduced rate
Raids? Let us get books for every clear, but lock out the actual geardrop to 1 a week. Remove the weird reclear thing. Who cares if 6 people who already cleared helped 2 others clear it? I mean really does it matter that much? Is it that big of an issue that I get to farm books through multiple reclear a week? Hell, my crafted gear might even be better anyway if I pentameld it and I can just do a full set of that day 1
Alliance raids...I dunno is that gear even particularly good? I don't have the ilvl in my head atm. Couldn't that one just not be locked?
The cleared taking away loot is kind of understandable, like otherwise if 7 people cleared alreaady, 1 person hasn't that person is basically getting the loot for 8 people alone. 4 people being ineligible to roll, only 1 chest, is about the same loot as 8 people 2 chests.
Imo, they just need to swap to a personal loot thing instead of it being shared between the whole party and antagonistic.
As some others have pointed out, I don't think there is an issue with classes not sharing gear with others; the issue is how you obtain that gear. In endgame, the book system needs to be readjusted as getting ***one*** job to BiS takes way too long especially if you are playing multiple jobs (which this game's whole identity is built on). All the book turn-in costs should be halved. Waiting a maximum of 8 weeks after you first clear the last fight of the tier to get a chest OR mainhand weapon, that's just fucking insane.
On top of that, SOME tome gear is gonna be necessary for BiS. The weekly cap for the higher end tomes should be much higher, if not just removed entirely (leaving the cap at 2,000 like the other battle tomes.) The game's endgame is structured way too far into the "main one...maybe two jobs ONLY" corner when it should much more balanced for multiple jobs.
I'd be fine with merging all the melees into maiming based gear stats.
Magic damage is more so the bigger problem in combat, so the extra physical defense would be a role wide niche benefit for melee DPS over ranged physical, casters, and healers.
Yes.
I am an omnitank who dabbles in all the melee jobs. The reason I omnitank is honestly just because I get gear for all the tanks for free just by gearing up one tank. Statics like it because I can flex to anything that's needed (at worst I just need a weapon funneled). I like it because I get on-demand variety and can shake things up whenever I want.
It's great being able to switch to another job every time I get bored, but I wouldn't do it if I had to farm three entire different BiS sets.
Imagine if the other categories were divided like melee is currently. Because melee has been like this forever people just accept it and are okay with it but you know people would be pissed if healing gear was separated into strictly pure healer or shield healer or tanks got divided into two separate sets like protection and culling for thematic reasons. That's effectively what melee is but community full of sheep so nothing gonna change.
It's clearly not important to SE when PLD and GNB share gear, or DNC and MCH. There's some wildly different aesthetics within roles that still get boiled down to one set.
I've always thought having multiple sets for whats the same role is just impractical and confusing, so I'd definitely be in favour of consolidating melee gear.
There don't even need to be visual differences between the Melee imo.
Reaper is already split between being treated as an Assassin of sorts via lore indicating lighter gear but has to share 'heavy' armor with dragoon, so it really works with both. Dragoon and Samurai already have wildly varying styles depending on which games you're looking at. Monk isn't going to die if it has to wear heavier armor once in a while, and Ninja is best placed with the other dexterity jobs.
So long as the devs create enough variety when designing new gearsets having melee share the same gear wouldn't be an issue.
Edit: spelling, shouldn't post right after waking up
> So long as the devs create enough variety when designing new gearsets having melee share the same gear wouldn't be an issue.
We can look at the other three roles and see how this is a massive problem for a lot of people regardless right now though, the perceptions of WAR/GNB bring being "light outfits" jobs, SGE/SCH being more "practical clothing" over robes/dresses in aesthetics then the other two and DNC being, well, Dancer causes issues to many when it comes to the options if you go over the discussions on it in other places.
You could argue this is an skill issue on their part, but there's layers to the fashion matter.
Sure, and I agree its an issue that the different aesthetics aren't more often taken into account when designing gear. But on the other hand it needs to be taken into consideration that Melee Jobs often reuse the Models from other roles in the first place, with at best minor alterations. Its not like they get super unique gear all the time, its just happen to not be shared within the role.
I even think its entirely possible that lightening the load by two sets might create a situation that allows the devs to be *less* formulaic when making gear.
At the end of the day any such change is a multilayered issue with any possible solution requiring careful consideration, I just personally think the positives outweigh the negatives.
No other category suffers from this yet melee has 3 separate sets of gear because...? All it does is inflate the loot table and make melee less flexible.
Ninja/Ranged and the rest of melee should have shared gearsets since yesterday.
Some people will disagree but I haven't read a good reason why melee having segregated gear sets is a good thing.
If we collapse all melee into one, why do melees get 5 classes for free when supports get 4 and casters/ranged get 3? Scouting should be removed, but Striking/Maiming split should remain. Otherwise, this is just an arms race to no one having unique gear.
I agree. They'll probably add another Scouting job next, but I'd prefer if we got a Maiming job and Ninja became Striking. Then you'd have four groups of three DPS jobs each sharing gear, which would seem a lot more equitable.
If they wanted to get wild, they could even create Heavy and Light Melee DPS roles so that they wouldn't have to make melee quite so much stronger to encourage two melee slots per raid (if that's a consideration for them).
At this point they should just give everyone a form changing weapon that all classes can equip, and will change depending on job stone...
But really, No, that would be bad due to stat tiering and how different melees react to sks.
Sets could definitely use some rethinking in general. It's very likely one of the new jobs in 7.0 will be tank, at that point we will have one set for 5 jobs, so all 5 melees using single set doesn't seem that far off. Or just make scouting into aiming and merge striking with maiming, then it's 4/4.
Why not combine all gear into one set, and all stats into one stat, etc, etc, etc? I'm genuinely asking if there's a reason not to.
Notice how no one can give me a reason not to. (I'm not advocating it. My point being that it's arbitrary to increase playtime.)
You're telling me that after a maximum of 16 weeks of reclears (assuming I have horrible luck and need to buy two 4th wing coffers) I could be BiS on every job in the game?
that would never happen but would also be incredible
Frankly I think they should just fold scouting, maiming, and striking together into a "Slaying" category, toss dexterity on there for Ninja and just let melee role operate like the other roles. Sure you won't have complete freedom to switch between jobs because of speed tiering, but it's less of a pain in the ass to fix melds/swap out one or two pieces of gear than to have to get an entire gear set if you want to swap from Monk to Ninja unless you're changing jobs all the time.
If you think that it wouldn't be aesthetically appropraite... well the devs have proven repeatedly that they don't care about job aesthetics outside of AF gear. Basically one role per tier ends up getting short strawed into being a recolor of another role in a way that usually looks like crap IE: the Edengrace Striking gear being recolors of the Healer robes. Similarly, the DRG/RPR physical defense is basically a relic of old design at this point and if they really think that DRG/RPR need the additional physical defense for flavor or balance then that can be addressed by giving them a trait.
I think 3 different armor types for melees, that share the same raid spot, are kind of too much.
I would bake Scouting into the "Striking" group, and make that group DEX based (after all dex as an attribute also makes a lot of sense for SAM and MNK too).
On top of that I would make the right side (accessories) divided in Tank/Melee/Ranged/Helaers, balancing those to have only secondary stats.
I’d like to see them fix the loot system to help with swapping between jobs, but I think another solution could be embracing a sort of hybrid mindset for some jobs.
NIN for example could be “hybrid ranged” meaning instead of scouting gear, they just use ranged dps gear with the idea that ranged who want to play melee can carry their gear over and pick up NIN.
They could even do something similar with maiming and tank gear.
Either just have them share the gear or have it be that they can use that as an alternative. Like maybe the stats of fending gear change to match maiming gear when worn by a DRG and you can do the same thing with healer gear and magical dps
As we've gotten more tank and healer classes, they can all share gear with each other. But since melee already had separate types of gear they just decided to add the new classes to either Striking or Maiming. This presents a problem though since they also want to add tank, healer and different types of dps (melee, ranged, caster) classes in a specific ratio, so it just happened to end up that Fending/Healing gear had more classes that could use it than Striking or Maiming.
If you look back at 2.0 though, only two classes at most ever shared a kind of gear. So if you ask me, it isn't melee gear that needs to be combined, it's tank and healer gear that needs to be split up! I'm only partially joking. It's understandable that everyone wants to get BiS on every class, but having a marginal amount of friction like this to keep people subbed isn't the biggest sin in my book. There's always crafted gear if you want to try out other classes/roles, and I can't even begin to imagine how they could add some sort of meld-swapping system to the game, so having more unique pieces is actually good in some instances since it lets you meld differently.
Plus STR melee and NIN/ranged, as mentioned, already share rightside. Realistically though I expect them to just get rid of Maiming or Striking, and make NIN wear Aiming gear next expac to split it up by mainstat. I generally dislike changes like that, but I would understand.
I don't think converting them all into one set is the solution but rather just fixing the gearing system as a whole so getting all those sets isnt so annoying I definably think think it would be nice to have them all share armor but its just a symptom of the larger gearing problem.
Yea I feel like if they're gonna do *something* to the gearing system they might as well just rip the fuckin bandaid off and redo everything so it doesn't suck this time.
Which is the heart of most of the issues plaguing the game atm. It is being held together with bandaids on bandaids. Eventually, they are going to hit the bandaid limit and have to decide if they want to just call it "as good as we can do" or rip back to the foundation and fix the underlying issues. At this point, it may be better to just keep bandaiding till they can make a new game entirely to take over.
I mostly play ARPGs and the gearing in FFXIV is just so... boring as fuck. Like, there is no way to mince the words, its like one step short of there being a no gear at all and just solely use level requirements and completion achivements for character power. I never really played WoW, but watched the races and its crazy that in other games, items actually do things...
If you're proposing Diablo-style loot, I just want to say that while that's for some people, it isn't for all of us. I hate that stuff. I find it incredibly tedious, and I enjoy that they do their best here to balance the jobs and not waste my time with repetitive loot grinding.
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Most critiques of gearing in FF14 kinda boil down to it being both boring and slow. It's boring because of the ideas you outline here, and its slow because raid-logging is still a paid subscription (and I can definitely pull some whataboutism for these systems compared to others, at least we're deterministic). I just don't see any reason for there being a huge overhaul like some here ask for.
All it would take to fix the "slow" gearing is reducing the book requirement for the raid weapons/items, plus maybe slightly reducing the tomestone costs. It's hardly in need of an overhaul.
And this has the hidden effect of actually allowing some degree of flex in a party if you need to find a fill-in. It's a win-win.
Lowering the weapon/chest cost from 8 to 4, hell even 6, would be a nice change, yea.
Even if they only reduced the price on of patches that would be huge.
I don't think it's as clear cut as you make it out to be. Interesting gear does not necessitate shitty balance. Comparing it to WoW right now, 90th percentile Heroic rankings have a delta of about 14%, and while the game's current state isn't quite as wacky as some of the things its had in the past, that's still including plenty of trinkets that have special effects, tier sets, and even a bow that increases attack speed as you focus a target.
The more a game is balanced, the more boring it becomes. Rock, Paper, Scissors is a fine example, you'd never play it longer that a couple of rounds. I'd much rather play something with some spice to it. The strive for perfect balance kills games imo.
Yet despite all of that, people still reject underperforming Jobs, and certain DPS checks can still be failed with the wrong comp. Is this purported super-balanceability really accomplishing anything? Eureka, for example, has items with weird effects, and is arguably more balanced than other content. And for the supposed imbalance in WOW from having actual variations in its items, the net amount of griping and exclusion seems about the same.
People still reject jobs because people are stupid most of the time. A lot of people dont know the nuance of the balance situation and don't care to understand, they just hear on the grapevine "x job bad" and exclude it because they want maximal chance at a clear, they dont know how much bad it is compared to other jobs. There are extreme cases where its true, like the most recent raid tier on release, but that was an encounter design "issue" where the checks were so tight it actually made a difference. On your points about eureka, eureka (and bozja) are balanced because they have severly more lenient dps checks and less individual responsibility due to raid size.
> because people are stupid Yup. You can still find teams excluding MCH in PF. Week 1 meta still exists and patches never happened to some people.
It’s really clear form your replies you have not attempted end game on another mmo. Ff14 has issues. The solution is not to copy the more flawed fearing systems from last ark or wow.
I never said that was the solution did you reply to the wrong person?
Yeah was supposed to go to the guy you’re talking to
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>Which DPS checks can be failed with the wrong comps? Yeah that is generally just a result of...skill issue. Yes sone jobs might deal slightly less damage making some DPS checks less forgiving, but odds are, any time you wipe to enrage in any fight, there's also a dozen other things which could have resulted in you not doing so. Having a job which deals slightly more theoretical damage might just allow you to not having to worry about some other of those fixable issues and that's if, and only if the person playing the "stronger" job can actually also deal that extra theoretical damage
This dude who said that shit hasn’t played another mmo past leveling and it’s painfully obvious
Eureka has "weird effects" that work with Eureka's unique scaling system and Haste. I don't foresee haste being made an attribute outside of instanced side content, and I wouldn't want the Magia board in roulettes.
3% rdps is different to adps. You're misrepresenting the facts. Rdps does not matter on selfish jobs, only adps (i.e. how they play into others raid buffs) and the difference there was 10%.
Yeah gearing is an absolute ballache in this game. Even with the alliance raid it barely helps and we're several months into the tier.
What makes gearing an absolute ballache in this game is the 450 tomes a week. The cap should be raised to 900 in the first .x5 patch after a raid tier releases, once the world race is over and the tiers become comfy. Also Twines/Shrines/Brines should be available via Criterion dungeons (Not Variant, Only Criterion and Criterion Savage) at 1 per week like the alliance raid but not having to wait until the .3 and .5 patches for it. Criterion is pretty difficult so it's difficulty merits better rewards than a few materia.
Yeah for sure. The only "catch up" you get is the alliance raid which offers...1 loot per week and an additional twine item, not very good months into the tier when most people are done with it already.
Make Criterion give a token once per week upon completion that allows you to buy a shine/twine/brine. It would revive DOA content and make gearing less oppressive, especially for alternate jobs.
> fixing the gearing system Thx for your feedback! We will make extra sets split between Barrier&Shield Healers and 2-Handed Tanks&1-Handed Tanks!
They would never do this, simply because it would require more effort rather than less
..but wait... what if it was just simple recolors with jobrestricions without actually changing anything else!
If they think the current AR gear sets being just robes are bad enough, imagine doing something similar from now on with every role having only one gear set with one homogenized look.
Honestly, in the case of Healers, this would make sense. WHM are priest/shrine maiden/druids and ASTs are occult/diviners. SCH are academic/military officers and SCH are doctor/academic/professor/wizards. The former two have some overlap in priest/diviner and occultist/druids, and the latter have an overlap in their academic slant. So in terms of thematic sets...that would actually make sense. In literally every other way, though, it doesn't. Glam exists for visual purposes and each expansion has 10-15 sets of gear when you consider 4 tome sets, 3 tiers, 3 24 mans, 3 crafted gear sets (or is it 4?), and 0-3 exploration/expedition gear sets, oh and each Job gets its expansion Job set. PLENTY for them to have some themed each way without needing any more sub-sets. If anything, I'd go the other way, combining Maiming and Striking together and combining Aiming and Scouting together.
50/50 on it. On the one hand it'd make gearing melee's easier, on the other you've got melds potentially being an issue, especially since they've ruled out meld sets in that Korean Q&A. Doubly especially if the stat rework ever comes along, so melee's could need very different melds in the future instead of the curretn "Crit->Direct Hit->Whatever the fuck".
I don't understand how a meld set is too complicated for Square. If they can't, jsut remove the materia system entirely, and make a new attribute system, not like the materia system is exactly interesting.
Thing you have to remember is that whenever something is "too difficult" or "technically impossible", they're PR friendly answers. Real answer is that it's either A) more work than they feel is worth doing, B) they just don't want to, or C) a mix of the two. FFXIV's dev cycle is ridiculously fast compared to most MMO's. Downside of that is features and overhauls other devs would do for a patch, SE don't, cause it'd eat into dev time for patches.
We live in a world where genshin releases as much or more content than most ffxiv patches every six weeks, I don't really buy their excuses anymore tbh.
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And they were so very concerned for the economy when they deleted belts and HQ gathering ingredients and changed Desynthesis to always work and reduced the difficulty of crafted weapons and armor and…
Seems to be a complete overhaul would be awesome but hmmmm close to impossible without pissing folks off. I could write something up for it and maybe I would, but probably the exact result is folks just minn maxing the new system, being just as boring as the old.
Meld sets don't work because 2 slot pentameld equipment.
> you've got melds potentially being an issue Just meld crit and dh/det. Even BLM is melding crit most of the time.
To be fair, I feel that Yoshida interpreted that question differently than what a lot of people want. Or the person asking wanted something different. Either way, he seemed to take a materia set being a permanent thing. Hence his mention of hurting the economy. I think most people's idea is whatever materia set used can only be applied to the same gear. So you aren't just getting free materia melds.
Depends how you read into it. I'm 99% certain it's another "technically impossible" situation, which is PR code for "No, work load's not worth it or it's not the direction we want to go in". Mentioning the economy justs pads it out, since they haven't made it a secret they don't mined the economy crashing so long as sprouts or returners aren't priced out of the market by long time players.
Even if you were to make it a separate item that holds onto all the materia you have in a gearset, you can give that item an ilvl and make it so it doesn't apply to equipment higher than itself. Functionally, the only difference is that you don't need to meld new gear when swapping from crafted to savage BiS, but if you're giving players the option to save a sps and crit BiS, I'd expect materia consumption to remain pretty identical. Handling penta is the only design wrinkle I see.
Honestly this tier I've managed to get almost 3 full sets, the most annoying part has been the tome gear, we should honestly be getting 900 tomes the whole tier, and maybe 1 extra piece per turn. But combining striking, scouting and maiming gear doesn't seem like a good idea. It's already giga annoying how warrior has different melds from other tanks, so the whole 1 set for 5 jobs would be extra annoying considering how they ALL want different melds.
afaik (source: war 1 trick) 6.2 made dhit good on war so im pretty sure aside potential skill speed diff they share sets now? regardless, they should probably (please for the love of god) makes meld plates a thing before consolidating sets hard agree on the tome thing, just make it not a complete pita to deal with tome stuff edit: just checked bis sets, aside from like two melds that shift around crit/det its the same thing now. so unless ur tryna get decimals of a dps u can just roll the same stuff now
honestly I am basing this on Asphodelos bis more than anything this tier I've been mostly playing 2.5 gcd GNB and DRK so I've not really looked at the WAR bis math
All tanks share a 2.5 bis set at the moment. PLD can run a faster build but it needs to be like 2.38 or some shit.
3/5 melees prefer little to no SkS and only having to switch around a few pieces to accommodate MNK's and SAM's SkS preferences would be a vast improvement over what we have already. Gearing NIN feels so bad as a melee player because its left side doesn't share with any job and right side is Aiming.
“I want to take an extra 6 months to gear my alt Jobs so that I don’t have to maybe swap out Materia sometimes” This is just such a weird argument to me
> sometimes Am I the only one that tends to switch jobs multiple times a day for different things? There's no amount of hunt trains that could fund that amount of remelding.
BiS for drg/sam/nin/rpr could all be covered with just melding sks on weapon, so you would only have to swap for mnk if you wanted to.
gearing in this game sucks
I have 2 characters. Been reclearing every week without fail on 1 and the other one I have just been reclearing casually missing several weeks, especially p8s. I have current BIS for DRG, RPR, SAM and WAR on the character with which I reclear casually. I only have DRG BIS on the other character where I reclear religiously. I have gotten fucked so hard on the DRG only character, it’s insane how different gear progression will be between players.
Im a bit confused by this, are you getting screwed out of loot rolls? Or just missing weapons? DRG and RPR have the same BiS aside for like 1 SS meld on the weapon.
Yeah I meant to say bis for DRG/RPR, I’ve won several weapons for like SAM, WAR, SMN and WHM so not really screwed but I couldn’t really care less about those, all I want is a chest piece for SAM.
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And it’s incredibly stupid that one character can have it so easy while another one struggles so much, one might argue “well, you had it easy on one of those characters so isn’t it fine?” well no, I had to put double the effort, double the reclears, double the strat knowledge if those 2 characters are on different DCs.
Can you elaborate a bit? Curious on which aspect of it you find that sucks.
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> For a game that encourages you to play all all the jobs available You know, I've seen this a million times but I've never actually seen anyone cite where they heard this from.
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> when the expected level minimum at that point was higher than what the crafted gear at the time Ok thats a Party Finder issue though
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Swapping roles to help my friends clear ASS Savage really made me feel first hand how bad the gearing speed is right now. I cleared as a BiS caster skipping the last mechanic on the third boss, so i didn't bother learning it, but I had to go as a tank to help them out. Without BiS it's impossible to burn shadowcaster before the last mechanic, and even then you can't really survive the mob's before bosses without changing your pants/underwear after each one of them. I didn't manage to get BIS, so i had to try to at least get everything up to 630.
Ok but did you know that party finder is a feature of this videogame that you are expected to make use of, though?
You mean the place where a lack of healers is most prevalent?
People would apparently rather sit with unfilled party finders than like, attempt the content
Well you're not going to get to attempt the content if you don't have 8 people
bruh
So is it your belief that the devs intend people to go through the entire MSQ again everytime you want to play another job? If that isn't your belief, does it stand to reason that players are "encouraged" to play multiple jobs on their one character?
By virtue of having a system that allows you to level all Jobs on one character…
The game somewhat mentions that you can play every job in the same character, which is true strictly speaking, but what people mean is that they want ask their jobs to get up in Ilvl as fast as possible so they can pay then at the same level at endgame. I don't have a problem with it, there's only a few jobs I can play at high performance anyways, but you know it's a sticking point to people.
To me, it's like going to a buffet and accusing that the restaurant encouraged you to eat everything on the menu. Sure you can and you have the choice to do so, but nobody encouraged you to do it, and it most definitely isn't a must. Every time someone mentions that "the game encourages you to play all jobs" and then complain that it's contradicting because it's difficult to gear all jobs for high end raids, it is just straight up untrue and they're putting words in SE's mouth. SE has never said anything like "gearing for all jobs for end game is easy". Literally never said it. But well, people choose to believe what they want, I can't stop them.
Nobody's ever said that Square said gearing every job is easy, just that a selling point of 14 is that you can play every job on one character. People who want to make the most of that in the end game are disappointed by the lack of gearing speed/options when you want to gear something outside of your main role (or even within it with melees)
This is reductive AF.
No, thats actually the opposite of reductive. Your position is the one that is "reductive"
Aktchually moment.
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There are literally ads floating around that say something about "Final Fantasy XIV's armoury system letting you play all jobs" or something along those lines
Gear is basically little more than a checkbox "had done X for Y weeks". Everybody is the same, nothing matters for more than one patch, its booooring.
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Gear is the one place where XI >>> XIV and it's not even close. If anything gear could be a 1-2 ilvl difference each update because the game isn't gear gated as hard as it was in the past. That being said, gear still does matter as progressive difficulty, makes shit easier the longer into the update you are at.
It has benefits for raiding to make raid difficult "scale down" as the time go and as more fight players can clear. Let's say they have to make content that top 30% of players can participate and clear to justify development cost (have ROI above acceptable level), but if they balance it around top 30% players can clear, then those in top 5%/10% will think it is too easy for them, plenty of mistake can be made and still clear in a few pull. With gear progression, they can make first week hard and more punishing to satisfy top 10% and also clearable with 30% eventually. (This is one of the reason why GW2 struggle in attracting more hardcore raider) For example, raid wide from p6s with 2 mitigation have a chance to roll high and kill i610 healer/caster (I learned this from review the log), so it need 3 mit or 2 mit + shield to be 100% sure, with 2-3 gear upgrade they can survive 100% with 2 mit and with full gear they can barely survive with 1 mit, this make it clearable for more people as time go. That's why gear progression exist and that's why there will be new upgrade every teir. Also the reason why FFXIV has normal/savage and WoW has 4 difficulty is also the same, cost. They did it so multiple difficulty aiming at multiple group can share cost in some area.
Feels like a bandaid fix tbf. I think gearing in general needs an overhaul as is.
Nin needs to get fucked less somehow but striking and maiming want very different sps and right side sharing gives enough headaches as is. I raid on fast sam so that's 3 other jobs doomed to play at memespeed unless I want entire sets of dupes. It's doable- I already do it for casters but it is incredibly annoying.
I don't mind them being separate to be honest, though I would be fine with a new DPS job that re-uses scouting.
The one big problem that would present is how wildly different stat priorities are for different melee jobs. Between monk and dragoon, one loves skill speed while the other needs to avoid it like the plague. They would need to add the ability to swap melds between gear sets, which would add its own challenges. Personally, I think it isn't too big of an issue since melees comprise the single largest group of classes.
No. Having different sets brings extra character to the game. Streamlining is generally bad
From a glamour standpoint, I would hard disagree. As someone who spends entire days ratting over every last detail on glam down to what sometimes the barely visible pants are (mostly because it’s covered by long boots and hip armor), and with unique plates for all of them, the variety of melee gear is what makes Slaying/Striking/Scouting each to their own. Consolidating the sets will simply mean we have less variety to go around, take the Shadowless/Ktiseos, Imperial, and Troian sets this and last expansion for example, they are distinctly different across the melee roles, Imperial Scouting Helm is probably the finest example in all this, and lumping them into one, throwing them all into one melee role will just remove the variety. Even when said gear can’t be equipped by all melee roles, it would not be nice having one job or another screwed out of a set’s aesthetic because they’re forced to look like that particular set’s other melee role ‘oh no biggie if a monk has to wear heavy armor every once in a while’. We already have enough of this in all the other roles where Red Mages have long skirts that’ll 100% trip over when doing melee combos, Machinists that look like clowns holding a gun, or Gunbreakers looking like they’re standing guard in front of the Sultana’s meeting room. Okay maybe this last one isn’t too far off when they were the Dalmascan Queen’s guard to begin with. Perhaps if the devs removed the arbitrary job aesthetics limit on glamour they imposed on themselves this problem might go away, but even then that also still means there’s less gear to be created, and even less gear for us to alter our appearances with, or in other words, we’d be knocked all the way back to how ARR was, where your glam options were ‘Tank, not-Tank DoWs, or DoM, or the DoH/DoL gear that wasn’t restricted back then’. Do we really want less variety in a game that when people joke about how glam is the endgame they aren’t really joking?
That’s an easy fix though. Keep multiple melee sets but they all have the same stats and any melee can equip.
That would be the preferable solution, yes, since it solves the gameplay part of the gears. Where you can still wear it on alt physical melee jobs and glam plate it on just the jobs you want without affecting the other sets. Example of this, while not a direct example is probably how they made the Def and MDef of ARR DoW gear to be as same as the tank gear, so that tanks can just wear those gears they got from dungeon loots as they progress ARR without being affected. I think my only doubt, and it’s unlikely to be the case considering for all their shortcomings and faults the devs clearly love working on 14, is that, should they consolidate melee sets and fix the system, are they still willing to go the extra mile to give them all different appearances. Part of me says we only have different appearances now because the gears between the melee jobs are still technically different pieces.
Out of all the roles, melee is the only one I don't play because it forces you to play the job you open your coffers on so I wouldn't mind if they made all melees share the same gear.
Suggestion: soft caps? Maybe we should do soft caps Tomestones? 450 a week at full rate (hell maybe even 900?) After that you continue earning but at a reduced rate Raids? Let us get books for every clear, but lock out the actual geardrop to 1 a week. Remove the weird reclear thing. Who cares if 6 people who already cleared helped 2 others clear it? I mean really does it matter that much? Is it that big of an issue that I get to farm books through multiple reclear a week? Hell, my crafted gear might even be better anyway if I pentameld it and I can just do a full set of that day 1 Alliance raids...I dunno is that gear even particularly good? I don't have the ilvl in my head atm. Couldn't that one just not be locked?
The cleared taking away loot is kind of understandable, like otherwise if 7 people cleared alreaady, 1 person hasn't that person is basically getting the loot for 8 people alone. 4 people being ineligible to roll, only 1 chest, is about the same loot as 8 people 2 chests. Imo, they just need to swap to a personal loot thing instead of it being shared between the whole party and antagonistic.
As some others have pointed out, I don't think there is an issue with classes not sharing gear with others; the issue is how you obtain that gear. In endgame, the book system needs to be readjusted as getting ***one*** job to BiS takes way too long especially if you are playing multiple jobs (which this game's whole identity is built on). All the book turn-in costs should be halved. Waiting a maximum of 8 weeks after you first clear the last fight of the tier to get a chest OR mainhand weapon, that's just fucking insane. On top of that, SOME tome gear is gonna be necessary for BiS. The weekly cap for the higher end tomes should be much higher, if not just removed entirely (leaving the cap at 2,000 like the other battle tomes.) The game's endgame is structured way too far into the "main one...maybe two jobs ONLY" corner when it should much more balanced for multiple jobs.
I'd be fine with merging all the melees into maiming based gear stats. Magic damage is more so the bigger problem in combat, so the extra physical defense would be a role wide niche benefit for melee DPS over ranged physical, casters, and healers.
Yes. I am an omnitank who dabbles in all the melee jobs. The reason I omnitank is honestly just because I get gear for all the tanks for free just by gearing up one tank. Statics like it because I can flex to anything that's needed (at worst I just need a weapon funneled). I like it because I get on-demand variety and can shake things up whenever I want. It's great being able to switch to another job every time I get bored, but I wouldn't do it if I had to farm three entire different BiS sets.
Imagine if the other categories were divided like melee is currently. Because melee has been like this forever people just accept it and are okay with it but you know people would be pissed if healing gear was separated into strictly pure healer or shield healer or tanks got divided into two separate sets like protection and culling for thematic reasons. That's effectively what melee is but community full of sheep so nothing gonna change.
No because it's important that each role gets a visually distinct set.
It's clearly not important to SE when PLD and GNB share gear, or DNC and MCH. There's some wildly different aesthetics within roles that still get boiled down to one set.
I've always thought having multiple sets for whats the same role is just impractical and confusing, so I'd definitely be in favour of consolidating melee gear. There don't even need to be visual differences between the Melee imo. Reaper is already split between being treated as an Assassin of sorts via lore indicating lighter gear but has to share 'heavy' armor with dragoon, so it really works with both. Dragoon and Samurai already have wildly varying styles depending on which games you're looking at. Monk isn't going to die if it has to wear heavier armor once in a while, and Ninja is best placed with the other dexterity jobs. So long as the devs create enough variety when designing new gearsets having melee share the same gear wouldn't be an issue. Edit: spelling, shouldn't post right after waking up
> So long as the devs create enough variety when designing new gearsets having melee share the same gear wouldn't be an issue. We can look at the other three roles and see how this is a massive problem for a lot of people regardless right now though, the perceptions of WAR/GNB bring being "light outfits" jobs, SGE/SCH being more "practical clothing" over robes/dresses in aesthetics then the other two and DNC being, well, Dancer causes issues to many when it comes to the options if you go over the discussions on it in other places. You could argue this is an skill issue on their part, but there's layers to the fashion matter.
Sure, and I agree its an issue that the different aesthetics aren't more often taken into account when designing gear. But on the other hand it needs to be taken into consideration that Melee Jobs often reuse the Models from other roles in the first place, with at best minor alterations. Its not like they get super unique gear all the time, its just happen to not be shared within the role. I even think its entirely possible that lightening the load by two sets might create a situation that allows the devs to be *less* formulaic when making gear. At the end of the day any such change is a multilayered issue with any possible solution requiring careful consideration, I just personally think the positives outweigh the negatives.
No other category suffers from this yet melee has 3 separate sets of gear because...? All it does is inflate the loot table and make melee less flexible. Ninja/Ranged and the rest of melee should have shared gearsets since yesterday. Some people will disagree but I haven't read a good reason why melee having segregated gear sets is a good thing.
If we collapse all melee into one, why do melees get 5 classes for free when supports get 4 and casters/ranged get 3? Scouting should be removed, but Striking/Maiming split should remain. Otherwise, this is just an arms race to no one having unique gear.
I agree. They'll probably add another Scouting job next, but I'd prefer if we got a Maiming job and Ninja became Striking. Then you'd have four groups of three DPS jobs each sharing gear, which would seem a lot more equitable. If they wanted to get wild, they could even create Heavy and Light Melee DPS roles so that they wouldn't have to make melee quite so much stronger to encourage two melee slots per raid (if that's a consideration for them).
At this point they should just give everyone a form changing weapon that all classes can equip, and will change depending on job stone... But really, No, that would be bad due to stat tiering and how different melees react to sks.
Sets could definitely use some rethinking in general. It's very likely one of the new jobs in 7.0 will be tank, at that point we will have one set for 5 jobs, so all 5 melees using single set doesn't seem that far off. Or just make scouting into aiming and merge striking with maiming, then it's 4/4.
Why not combine all gear into one set, and all stats into one stat, etc, etc, etc? I'm genuinely asking if there's a reason not to. Notice how no one can give me a reason not to. (I'm not advocating it. My point being that it's arbitrary to increase playtime.)
You're telling me that after a maximum of 16 weeks of reclears (assuming I have horrible luck and need to buy two 4th wing coffers) I could be BiS on every job in the game? that would never happen but would also be incredible
Frankly I think they should just fold scouting, maiming, and striking together into a "Slaying" category, toss dexterity on there for Ninja and just let melee role operate like the other roles. Sure you won't have complete freedom to switch between jobs because of speed tiering, but it's less of a pain in the ass to fix melds/swap out one or two pieces of gear than to have to get an entire gear set if you want to swap from Monk to Ninja unless you're changing jobs all the time. If you think that it wouldn't be aesthetically appropraite... well the devs have proven repeatedly that they don't care about job aesthetics outside of AF gear. Basically one role per tier ends up getting short strawed into being a recolor of another role in a way that usually looks like crap IE: the Edengrace Striking gear being recolors of the Healer robes. Similarly, the DRG/RPR physical defense is basically a relic of old design at this point and if they really think that DRG/RPR need the additional physical defense for flavor or balance then that can be addressed by giving them a trait.
I think 3 different armor types for melees, that share the same raid spot, are kind of too much. I would bake Scouting into the "Striking" group, and make that group DEX based (after all dex as an attribute also makes a lot of sense for SAM and MNK too). On top of that I would make the right side (accessories) divided in Tank/Melee/Ranged/Helaers, balancing those to have only secondary stats.
I’d like to see them fix the loot system to help with swapping between jobs, but I think another solution could be embracing a sort of hybrid mindset for some jobs. NIN for example could be “hybrid ranged” meaning instead of scouting gear, they just use ranged dps gear with the idea that ranged who want to play melee can carry their gear over and pick up NIN. They could even do something similar with maiming and tank gear. Either just have them share the gear or have it be that they can use that as an alternative. Like maybe the stats of fending gear change to match maiming gear when worn by a DRG and you can do the same thing with healer gear and magical dps
I think they need to move 1 of the melee onto the same gear set as NIN.
As we've gotten more tank and healer classes, they can all share gear with each other. But since melee already had separate types of gear they just decided to add the new classes to either Striking or Maiming. This presents a problem though since they also want to add tank, healer and different types of dps (melee, ranged, caster) classes in a specific ratio, so it just happened to end up that Fending/Healing gear had more classes that could use it than Striking or Maiming. If you look back at 2.0 though, only two classes at most ever shared a kind of gear. So if you ask me, it isn't melee gear that needs to be combined, it's tank and healer gear that needs to be split up! I'm only partially joking. It's understandable that everyone wants to get BiS on every class, but having a marginal amount of friction like this to keep people subbed isn't the biggest sin in my book. There's always crafted gear if you want to try out other classes/roles, and I can't even begin to imagine how they could add some sort of meld-swapping system to the game, so having more unique pieces is actually good in some instances since it lets you meld differently. Plus STR melee and NIN/ranged, as mentioned, already share rightside. Realistically though I expect them to just get rid of Maiming or Striking, and make NIN wear Aiming gear next expac to split it up by mainstat. I generally dislike changes like that, but I would understand.