I wanted to share some feedback on level sync, since it’s been bothering me more with each expansion and I suspect I’m not the only one.
I understand the intent behind it, and I think it’s reasonable. Scaling veterans down so we can’t trivialize old duties, and so newer players can experience that content closer to how it was designed, is a fair goal. Losing stats in older content doesn’t bother me at all.
What does bother me is that sync goes further than that. It removes a large part of my job’s actions, not just my power. As a Samurai main, being scaled to level 50 or 60 means losing Ogi Namikiri, Shoha, Tsubame-gaeshi, and most of the tools that give the job its rhythm. What’s left is a thinner, earlier version of the job rather than a toned-down version of my current one.
This gets worse with every cap increase. New actions are almost always added at the top of the level range, while the lower brackets keep the same limited kits they’ve always had. When the cap was 50, syncing cost a player only a couple of actions. At 100 it can mean giving back close to half a job’s toolkit, and with Evercold raising the cap to 110, that gap only widens. Over time, more of the game becomes content people can still queue into but no longer enjoy playing.
For comparison, Guild Wars 2 has been running about as long as we have, with six expansions since 2012, and it has never raised its level cap past 80. When it scales a character down for older zones, it lowers stats but lets the player keep their full set of abilities. I’m not suggesting FFXIV copy that model wholesale, since the two games are built very differently. I bring it up only as proof that a long-running game can keep old content relevant without stripping away a player’s kit.
I also recognize the balance side of this. If synced players kept their full modern kits at full strength, old encounters would get even more trivial, and I know tuning synced content is already difficult. So I’m not asking to be stronger down there. I’d simply like to keep my actions and the flow between them, with their potency, resource generation, and cooldowns scaled down as much as the content needs.
With the job system already being revisited for 8.0 through Reborn and Evolved modes, this feels like a good time to look at how sync handles job actions too. Thanks for reading, and I’d be glad to hear whether others feel the same or see problems with the idea.
Continue reading...
I understand the intent behind it, and I think it’s reasonable. Scaling veterans down so we can’t trivialize old duties, and so newer players can experience that content closer to how it was designed, is a fair goal. Losing stats in older content doesn’t bother me at all.
What does bother me is that sync goes further than that. It removes a large part of my job’s actions, not just my power. As a Samurai main, being scaled to level 50 or 60 means losing Ogi Namikiri, Shoha, Tsubame-gaeshi, and most of the tools that give the job its rhythm. What’s left is a thinner, earlier version of the job rather than a toned-down version of my current one.
This gets worse with every cap increase. New actions are almost always added at the top of the level range, while the lower brackets keep the same limited kits they’ve always had. When the cap was 50, syncing cost a player only a couple of actions. At 100 it can mean giving back close to half a job’s toolkit, and with Evercold raising the cap to 110, that gap only widens. Over time, more of the game becomes content people can still queue into but no longer enjoy playing.
For comparison, Guild Wars 2 has been running about as long as we have, with six expansions since 2012, and it has never raised its level cap past 80. When it scales a character down for older zones, it lowers stats but lets the player keep their full set of abilities. I’m not suggesting FFXIV copy that model wholesale, since the two games are built very differently. I bring it up only as proof that a long-running game can keep old content relevant without stripping away a player’s kit.
I also recognize the balance side of this. If synced players kept their full modern kits at full strength, old encounters would get even more trivial, and I know tuning synced content is already difficult. So I’m not asking to be stronger down there. I’d simply like to keep my actions and the flow between them, with their potency, resource generation, and cooldowns scaled down as much as the content needs.
With the job system already being revisited for 8.0 through Reborn and Evolved modes, this feels like a good time to look at how sync handles job actions too. Thanks for reading, and I’d be glad to hear whether others feel the same or see problems with the idea.
Continue reading...