FFXIV 3.0 : Heavensward - Expansion Information and Discussion

[Adajer]

Maybe make the RNG on the gear and not the drop rate.

Get tokens for clearing. Turn tokens in for fear has default base stats with RNG for bonus stat amount. ie Body piece costs 3 tokens, has 70 str 79 vit baseline 30 determin minimum 30 skill speed minimum with RNG bonus stats that can vary for 5-20 more in each sub attribute. Also have bosses drop materia that can add 5% dmg to a weapon skill or reduce cooldown of an ability that can only be looted once a week as well.

also, if you get screwed on your rng bonus, pay 1 token to be able to reroll and guaranteed it wont be worse.

idk, just ideas, something to not have same copy pasted gear and rotation as everyone else.

[Destinye]

As much as I hate Abyssea, I prefer that progression. Make basic shit buyable with currency you earn WHILE DOING the content, e.g giving trash pull/shit chests a purpose.

Give us the ability to spawn tougher shit on alternate routes (..alternate routes in my FFXIV dungeons!?)
Make a hierarchy of bosses which basically drops the upgrades or tokens to buy the gear, e.g Neo-Nyzul style.

That'd be much preferred by me honestly. I'm all for more tomestones and faux currency grinds but...they've done better in their previous FF MMO despite everything.

[Stef]

As much as I hate Abyssea, I prefer that progression.

This.

I would love a tiered endgame system with forced-popped NMs and parallel progression - inspired by the best parts of Sky/Dynamis/VNMs/Salvage/Delve/Skirmish. Abyssea was pretty much the culmination of many of these raid concepts, with timed NMs, popped NMs, tiered bosses, mini games and puzzles, and parallel progression in the form of atma and atmacite.

If they took all the different types of battle content they currently have in FFXIV and included all of them in endgame progression in a tiered system I think there could be a lot of potential. They already add so much content with each patch, I would just like to see it organized in a slightly different way.

Currently, with each patch, we usually get something like 9-12 dungeon bosses, 1-3 trial bosses, and 4-5 Crystal Tower/Coil bosses, not to mention all the other side content. Now think of all the other systems that exist, like Treasure Hunts, the Hunt, Guildhests, FATEs, Levequests, Beast tribe dailies, relic progression...

Given all of this content we already get, simply rearranging it and requiring completion of earlier stages to proceed to later ones could give us something like this for each patch:

Entry level

- Stage 1 (ilvl +5 from previous patch) 9 encounters - Various poppable NMs (similar to A rank hunts or treasure maps) around the world that require a small group of players to kill.

- Stage 2 (ilvl +10) 9 bosses - Various poppable NMs (similar to dungeon bosses), either in the open world or in instances, that require a group of 4 to 8 players to defeat.

Mid-level

- Stage 3 (ilvl +15) 2 bosses - Various instanced NMs (similar to CT bosses) that require groups of 8 or more players to defeat.

High level

- Stage 4 (ilvl +20) 1 boss - One instanced, EX trial level difficulty boss aimed at groups of 8 players.

- Stage 5 (ilvl +25) 2 bosses - Two instanced, Coil level difficulty bosses aimed at groups of 8 players.

Rewards for the various tiers would include gear, upgrade items, tomestones (used to purchase mid-level gear and upgrade items for entry-level and mid-level gear), and keys to unlock the next tier. You might need to complete several fights for each of the earlier tiers to unlock the next one. Some of the later tiers would only require 1 boss clear to proceed to the next level, leaving room for players to choose their path (rewards and loot pools would differ for each boss). Beating a stage 5 boss resets your progress to stage 1.

This might even mean that lockouts could be more lenient as players would need to complete more content each time in order to access the top-tier bosses. As long as difficulty steadily ramped up with each tier and the rewards improved along with it, I think it would be pretty fun to work through the different stages to steadily earn gear.


I'd also love if they achieved something similar to FFXI's horizontal progression via materia. What I'm thinking is that they could introduce new types of materia that could be melded to individual skills and abilities. Each ability would have a certain number of available slots and you could attach enhancements to them depending on how you wanted to build you character.

It would be a mix between FFXI's horizontal gear progression and the way PvP points work in FFXIV right now. Working my way through lower tiers of materia up to something like Cure Potency+5%, Haste+5%, MP Cost -20 melded to Cure II would be pretty cool. They could have both generic stat and attribute materia as well as skill-specific enhancements in various tiers of strength. Spread these out as drops or rewards across a variety of battle content (like they do with Triple Triad cards) and you'd have a fun system in my mind!

[Spider-Dan]

The problem with a complex and rewarding system like the one you just described is that it has to be designed around a 6 month shelf life. You can't have hardcores racing through the bracket instantly and you can't have normcores stuck on one lower or middle leg, unable to progress.

That's what you get with vertical progression.

[Adajer]

The problem with a complex and rewarding system like the one you just described is that it has to be designed around a 6 month shelf life. You can't have hardcores racing through the bracket instantly and you can't have normcores stuck on one lower or middle leg, unable to progress.

That's what you get with vertical progression.

There are people still on T5 and T9

[Damane]

The problem with a complex and rewarding system like the one you just described is that it has to be designed around a 6 month shelf life. You can't have hardcores racing through the bracket instantly and you can't have normcores stuck on one lower or middle leg, unable to progress.

That's what you get with vertical progression.

there is no difference to people now being stuck on T5 and T9 and EX Titan Ifrit Garuda, the problem allready exists, and allways will exist. . . unless you give people an autowin button it will ALLWAYS exist

[Kaslo]

There are people still on T5 and T9

I was until a couple of weeks ago, but I wasn't really trying to clear

[Destinye]

There are people still on T5 and T9

Those who are legit stuck on this and are actually trying to but the fault lies with them in terms of player skill..these are the people YoshiP panders to and tries to keep on an even playing field when any other MMO (including WoW) they'd be more than willing to say: "you can't beat this? Too bad. Try a lesser difficulty raid or mode." Not try to keep everyone "equal" just to "please new people to the MMO genre."

Alexander and whatever HW End-game is called is already known to be the same progression style as 2.x but hopefully the route of "normal/hard" mode will actually offer different progression routes for our characters.

[Foxer]

The problem with a complex and rewarding system like the one you just described is that it has to be designed around a 6 month shelf life. You can't have hardcores racing through the bracket instantly and you can't have normcores stuck on one lower or middle leg, unable to progress.

That's what you get with vertical progression.

Not if you make gear upgradable as patches come by, a la relics in FFXIV, and a really good amount of equipment in FFXI.

[Lucavi]

Those who are legit stuck on this and are actually trying to but the fault lies with them in terms of player skill..these are the people YoshiP panders to and tries to keep on an even playing field when any other MMO (including WoW) they'd be more than willing to say: "you can't beat this? Too bad. Try a lesser difficulty raid or mode." Not try to keep everyone "equal" just to "please new people to the MMO genre."

Pandering to the largest audience keeps the cash flow coming in. See: Wildstar for the opposite.

...Man. That game died FAST.

[Stef]

Pandering to the largest audience keeps the cash flow coming in. See: Wildstar for the opposite.

...Man. That game died FAST.

Yeah, the big reason people didn't stick with the game was because it was so incredibly buggy. It had been in development for over 7 years but had an incredible amount of things that were broken. if you collate all the "The following issues have been addressed" text from patches and hotfixes in FFXIV 2.0's first year of release you get a document that is 17 pages long. The Wildstar Sabotage drop (the first content patch) patch notes alone were 35 pages long even when class balancing and new features are removed (i.e. only bug fixes). And Wildstar had a rather lengthy beta test and a PTR.

Levelling was grindy, PvP progression and balance were broken, dungeons were very hardcore, endgame required a lengthy attunement process that had to be done in a specific order to count, reputation grind was substantial and involved boring dailies. Endgame raiding was also incredibly buggy and unforgiving. People got tired of hardcore progression for months and months on end. Enigma spending 41 days (5 hours a day, 6 days a week) on System Daemons before they killed it (World First) is too much for most people. At most I think they had 3 or 4 guilds competing for world first and many of them quit entirely because of how buggy bosses were and how long they took to beat (a large factor was the "roster boss" i.e. replacing members that left the guild). The combat was also rather exhausting as it often required perfect execution for 20-40 people in rather long fights.

They've since released a series of substantial patches that have fixed a lot of things and added more content while also removing 40-man raiding. The game is looking better these days, but there are very few people that actually play it. Might be hard to repair the reputation it's gotten.

TL;DR Wildstar was a buggy, broken game that made hardcore guilds (raiding 5 hours per day, 6 days a week, for months on end) quit in the middle of progression raiding.

[Gulkeeva]

I played the wildstar beta, and mentioned all the bugs, and why I won't be playing even if it had catgirls. I guess people were really caught up in the promotional advertising and candy wildstar was throwing for people to notice how many that said the game is pretty bad from beta(even for others playing beta).

It was kind of fun lvling though... when it worked, the bugs were hilarious though.

erm anyway to get the thread back on track...

I'm hoping they give more details on personal airships, like possible looks, designs, attachments it can have and mainly an approximate cost. I've been told it will be as much as a personal house. "however" in 3.0 you can build your own... slowly, or so I've been told.

[Elcura]

I thought it was pretty obvious Wildstar was going to fail, and I didn't even play that much of the beta. As much as I liked the promotion materials and dev humour it didn't mean shit when despite their sweet talk their game still sucked.

[Stef]

So it looks like we'll be getting the full Heavensward opening CGI on April 6th during the Live Letter: http://jp.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...04d184dc5e62fa

I can't wait for the story cliffhanger. The next 3 months are probably going to be pretty painful lol.

[Shenrien]

Story cliffhanger? The CGI thing was delayed so if you didn't do the story it wasn't spoiled by the events of why we're going to Ishgard, if anything it will all be explained after Nanamo gets her head cut off.

[Stef]

I highly doubt that everything is going to be resolved in 2.55, that would be kind of sloppy story telling. Remember how boring the patch 2.1 story felt because there weren't any immediate threats after we beat the garleans? Shit is going to go down in 2.55 and some plot threads will come to an end, but the dragons attacking Ishgard, the dissolution of the Scions (?), the confrontation with the Ascians... all of this has to lead into the Heavensward story. It'll be like the End of an Era CGI where we see some climactic event occur and are left waiting to figure out what actually happened. I sure as hell was pretty anxious for 2.0 to come around after I saw that and the servers shut down.

[Rocl]

Not sure where you're getting the dissolution of the Scions? But yes, I see no reason why the CGI won't be the endcap to 2.0 storyline like End of an Era was to 1.0

We knew Dalamud was crashing, End of an Era showed us the crash and no real aftermath (and we didn't really learn wtf happened until 2.4); I expect 2.55 to have the beginning rumblings of the Battle of Ishgard while the majority of it will play out in CGI format and we'll be left wondering how the fuck Ishgard wasn't totally sacked between 2.55 and 3.0. (Though, it'll be different this time since we'll still have 2 months of a status quo game world to play after the CGI trailer release)

[Stef]

Not sure where you're getting the dissolution of the Scions?

It's just a guess based on the fact that the Scions are shown fighting for their lives in the 2.5 trailer. Yoshi-P said we would find out why the Warrior in the trailer had such a defeated look on his face. I'm also wondering why he's shown as being all alone. I really don't think that Nanamo's death on its own would be enough to shake us to the core in that way. We've lost the blessing of light, we've further angered the Ascians by killing one of them, we've also learned that in order to trap an Ascian it requires a large amount of aether so much so that it can take a Scion to sacrifice themselves. I have a feeling we're going to lose more than we expect. Also, Midgardsormr's last words to us were basically "Life for death. A fair exchange. Other bargains will be struck."

[Niiro]

Not sure where you're getting the dissolution of the Scions?

....wishful thinking?

[Qeomash]

I'm probably wrong, but I still wonder if Ishguard is going to fall.