Catch 22 GamingFollow

I get it. I totally get it, and I am no longer upset at all by people asking for Relic or DL or whatever for runs. They can ask for whatever, and they will get it or not.

When you get your gear, especially weapon, from item level 50 to item level 70, suddenly your are doing around 150% of your previous damage. I expect this goes for healing and tanking as well. That is a huge increase. By now most people have done runs where everyone is low gear, and runs where everyone is high gear, and all the variations in between.

When you are trying to help your LS friend at Chimera, you have maybe 4/8 LS mates available, 2 of which just hit 50 and don't have much gear. You start shouting, you get 7/8 but now 4~5 of your members are freshly minted level 50's with low gear. At this point, you shout for someone with Relic. Why not? Someone will help just to help. You just need to add a bit of firepower to your party to get over the difficulty hump. This goes for nearly all of the endgame content to some degree.

If people want to blow through speed runs, so? Feeling left out because you need to keep using DF to run CM? So? That party shouting for "Relic onry" represents 5% or the server population. The vast majority of players are in the same boat as you, working on gearing up.

I guess everyone realizes this eventually. There is a progression:

> hit Lvl 50, need gear
> See shouts for runs you need with crazy requirements, feel sad/mad
> find ways to get gear, in DF or with LS
> realize the gear really matters
> have the gear, now you want runs to go faster/need the gear to help lower level friends succeed
> realize there's nothing to be mad about when people ask for high level gear

Not so catch 22 after all.

I'm pretty sure this business here is former FFXI players dragging their Delve mentality into FFXIV, where they would often shout for Delve weapon only melee for the very NMs you get the delve weapons from. Maybe they got it from someone else in another game but as far as I am aware it's coming from FFXI, and it's just going to spread like wildfire here with so many playing. So you have either those FFXI players to thank or another game that made this popular.

And yes any job could merit but let's face it, FFXI was so bad that the difference between all welcome and the very best choices was like 8k vs 30k a hour. This isn't quite the same as people demanding grade A weapons for content where said grade A weapons come from. One is saving countless hours of extra meriting. The other is mere minutes saved because someone is in a hurry to stand around in game doing nothing or to log off until the next content patch. How endearing. I'm totally in with not joining any relic groups until I get my relic. oh wait-

So let me tell you why people fear the Catch 22.

I stopped playing FFXI for about a year. During that year, Meebles, Voidwatch, and a few other items rolled out. When I returned for SoA, the first block came from not having those items, and the second came from missing the window of when players had infinite time to defeat a Delve NM. The problem became being locked out of content because either I was expected to have said content already, or expected to somehow magically catch up to said content without help.

That is why people are saying that the mentality needs to stop. It isn't for today, it's for a year from now. I sincerely hope SE does somehow hear my fervent prayer and make crafted gear that stays a step below endgame at all times. That way, you at least have the option of crafting your re-entry into endgame if nothing else.

The problem is that history doesn't bear it out that crafted items can equal dropped. Right now, Delve gear is leaps and bounds above anything that is crafted, unless some major patch has changed it, and either you have to grind older content to get "acceptable" gear to be allowed entry into the velvet-roped "elite" raids, or you have to hope to find others screwed like yourself, and struggle forward. Honestly, I know that it is quite possible to do. They have already talked of lowering requirements for current raided gear, but I'd love to see a way to simply make ilvl-equal gear that you can prove works. Then at least if the elitist block you off, you have some option to find more reasonable minds to band together in your rag-tag crafted stuff and be able to run the dungeons yourselves.

I'm well aware of that being the current state of affairs, what I am saying is that I hope that remains the norm, rather than being a "just for now" thing. Remember, there was a time in FFXI where you mixed in crafted +1 items into your dropped gear as well to make better sets of things. My worry is that crafting will either start requiring dungeons that you need better than current gear (IE requiring dungeon drops of today) to run, or that crafted gear will simply be left totally in the dust.

I know there are people on both sides pushing for what they want (for dungeon grinding/endgame gear drops to be above all, and for crafted gear to be kept up to snuff), and I really hope the balance remains like it is. I hope that this time next year (or the year after), we will have crafted gear better than Coil gear, and endgamers hunting for gear above even that. It would help with the gap that will happen eventually between newcomers to the game and the top-heavy community of tomorrow.

Only problem I have with this is that any crafted gear that is close to endgame gear or raid gear is vary expensive and I don't see how some newcomer to the game is going to be able to drop a few 100k on one piece of gear to catch up, let alone a whole set. I remember when I played xi (stopped around wotg) crafted gear was just as hard to come by as the endgame gear and+1 gear was even harder then endgame gear to get cuz the cost ends up being so high.

Yeah endgame crafting gear is just way too expensive, on Tonberry 1 piece of gear cost about 500k-900k.......

I was thinking of getting a dark steel huby for my drg and it's 500k and then the materia it's around 40k a pop, very unfriendly to new incoming players

People used to desynth those? I just wore them around town.

Wouldn't being a tank or healer make getting your toms faster? Just wondering if the minority can farm for their gear faster?

How about some crafted gear that isn't quite so strong and also isn't so damn expensive?

Crafters need to be able to make more high(ish) level gear if we're to remain relevant.

It's called one star gear. The militia gear which is I lvl 55 can be melded with materia for very good results. I made the entire astral set for my blm and I now currently have 4800 HP. While my main stat isn't ilvl90, my remaining stats are. By putting 5 melds on the ilvl70 accessories, I gained a great boost in crit/det (320)/spell speed reaching 500+, while my main stat is stuck at 470.

Seeing as ilvl55 is a lower i lvl, you would probably want to put lower teir materia on it (III). You would still have stats comprable to ilvl 70, but your main stat would be lower (Depending on your weapon). There are options for everyone, however what you just asked for already exists in the game. Even though you say you want "not so strong" gear, I don't believe you because that "high-ish" gear already exists in the form of 1 star crafts. It's quit easy to get AK gear/WP gear/Darklight Gear. But the stats on those are a bit all over the place, and doesn't optimize our jobs for the best results. It simply gives you a bit of everything, not specializing in the stats that really make you shine.

I hope people realize how much the "I want it now" mindset is driving these comments. Since the game started I had my eye on those crafted pieces, because I knew how much potential they had with materia, it wasn't only recently I was able to craft them (2 weeks ago). The Philosophy items are now running for 35k each, and seeing as having all crafts 50 makes HQ guaranteed, you're looking at spending 315k-945k for items that cost 1-3 of the phil items respectively.

I know the concept of "work with what you've got" is lost on many people. If you have a gear set goal in mind, then you should work towards it, and not wait on the developers to make it easy for you to do so. I don't understand these craft-centric posts. You want things to be cheaper, but you want to make ALL the big gilz while crafting. Which is it? Set a singular goal and aim for it.