Changes to the Diadem comingFollow

Some interesting stuff from Yoshi in the latest live letter, but I'm personally most interested in the Diadem. Here's what he had to say on it:



At face value, I love everything here except for that bolded part. I'm thinking there's some kind of mistranslation going on -- or some kind of misunderstanding -- because the Diadem already doesn't rely at all on player skill. The only way it could rely on skill less would be to have monsters auto-die while you stand next to them and wait. What I'm hoping that means is that rather than insert lots of mechanics, the content will be designed so the gameplay remains more casual and focused more on completing objectives.I don't want Diadem to be so heavy with jump rope mechanics that it requires a static, too.

I also like the slight nerf to Diadem gear... I have absolutely no problem with putting it 5 iLevels below the current raid tier, and other casual/midcore gamers shouldn't either. That still makes for a strong endgame set for taking on harder content once it has been nerfed a bit.

Curious to see what others have to say... but this may be enough to make me a happy Eorzean again.

Edited, Dec 23rd 2015 11:03am by Thayos

It kinda does. If your group isn't outputting good DPS it's not going to get chests.

At least, that's usually been my problem every time I had groups trying to join the big zergfest, which they usually tried to do, which usually resulted in a lot of fighting for zero rewards. It's tiresome enough when you're actually getting chests; imagine what it's like when you're still doing the work but not getting anything to show for it. (I don't run Diadem anymore though, so maybe it's gotten less bad?)



When you have content that's struggling to stay afloat as it is, clearly the answer is to gimp the rewards. Yeah, that'll work.

Doesn't seem like they are actually going to do that though, just that they were considering "what could have been" scenarios.

Edited, Dec 24th 2015 3:16am by Fynlar

Diadem was never supposed to be a DPS-race between multiple parties/alliances all grouped together on one or two islands in the whole zone. To play the Diadem as intended -- where you explore with your group and kill monsters/hunt NMs without joining the giant zerg -- there's no need to compete with others for DPS percentages (or however it's gauged). This is why I say the system now isn't built with skill in mind. The fact DPS is even an issue just shows how poorly executed the whole thing was... kind of like hunts.



I don't like loot pinatas. In a game like FFXIV, I don't know many people who do. Players at least want to be somewhat engaged in what they're doing, and not just whack away at a monster with a billion hit points.

From my limited Diadem experience, though, you're not going to walk out of Diadem in full BiS gear after one session. It's still going to take a generous group and a lot of luck. But I get your point, and it definitely stands, which is why I totally favor keeping Diadem iLevels slightly below raid gear.


Edited, Dec 24th 2015 5:03pm by Thayos

They really need to add different stat improving or ability improving stats to gear sets... so lame and boring to only look forward to some higher "ilvl" number stat. So standardized its not even funny. Why I lost interest in caring about gearing and even playing. Borrriing.

One player might get everything they wanted in 3 weeks and the other player might spend 3 months getting it. For that reason, I removed RNG from the equation. You could apply that initial statement to either content so it's not really worth mentioning. That's why I framed the context of my post as content difficulty vs possible reward.

It gets far too complicated when you pull in RNG and difference in drop rate because you'd also have to account for things like lockouts, the frequency you can run each type of content, reduced drop rates in raiding, ect.

Thayos, when you add the same thing to both sides of a scale nothing happens. How often can you receive Diadem gear when you run the event? How often can you participate? How frequently can you get your tokens or collect gear from a boss in a raid? How much more time are you spending in a raid for a shot at gear versus a Diadem group? What item level requirements are in place to access Diadem? Raids?

The entry barrier, the time requirements, the difficulty, RNG, lockouts... there are more things at play here. Diadem having RNG doesn't tip the scale to balanced because the raids on the other side of the scale also have RNG as well as several other restrictions specific to raiding. That's why I only compared difficulty to reward opportunity. There is a case to be made for content that acts as a gateway into more difficult content, but if the reward threshold isn't proportional to the difficulty then it undermines the idea of difficult content in the first place.

Personally I'd add the token to Diadem and just have it be an every other week quest. They could also add some value to crafting if there was a set of gear that players could make, but limit the number of pieces equipped to 2 or 3 total. I don't really see a reason to make a full set of top tier gear easily obtainable, but I'd use it as a vehicle to get players involved in varying types of content. Spread it out at least...

Bottom line, the way to deal with unpopular content is NOT by gimping its rewards even further. Would it make sense to drop Savage's rewards from i210 to i205? Probably not, right? It wouldn't make sense for Diadem, either. Therefore, to me the better solution here would be to make Savage's rewards more... rewarding.

Does that make my stance clearer?

Prior to the initial Diadem nerf, you could actually walk out with quite a few amazing 210 pieces doing HM because Gold Chests "rained" in comparison to doing the normal branch. The point is more, you could literally spend less time in Diadem and get better rewards than you could spend in A3S/A4S (remember the loot lock) as you also have to wait to amass the manifesto pages you need as your "oh you didn't get what you want? wait 4-10+ weeks.)

Trust me, the RNG wasn't that terrible on Diadem Hard Mode. Hence why they nerfed it and Yoshi even admitted the gear it produced was far too unbalanced. The only time they nerf stuff "for no reason" is when people complain about not being able to faceroll content, hence Amdapor Keep and Pharos Sirius nerfs.



They can, but Yoshi usually states: "Players may choose x job over y job for content" and he's extremely petrified of "breaking balance" which is why everything is so homogenized. This is why I say they shouldn't waste development time on content like Lords of Verninion or any minigames until they get the actual game content in order. Whether you like or hate "raid content" or only care for "fluff content" this game really is in need of changes, it's been 2 years and an expansion literally did nothing new for the game. When have you seen that happen in an MMO? Even the tiny add-ons to XI completely changed things because of those Augmented gears then Abyssea COMPLETELY changing the game.

I think the solution would have been to start Diadem gear at wherever the nerf ends up putting it. There were a few of us(here, but more elsewhere) who expressed concern about this before the content even launched. As for those who might be upset about the nerfs, I can't really sympathize because as with many of SE's flubs, if you took some time to consider the effects before hand then you should have seen it coming.

Increasing the item level or even the effectiveness of Savage gear is an indirect nerf to Diadem gear so I don't see much of a difference either way they choose to do it. It would have made more sense to consider all of this before implementing it improperly.




Edited, Dec 25th 2015 6:16pm by FilthMcNasty

Just because something wouldn't affect you doesn't mean it would affect the game. You have to understand that gear is the key to player power. Item level and difficulty have an inverse relationship. Raise one and the other gets lowered... vice versa. By buffing Savage gear you would effectively be nerfing Savage difficulty because difficult content is balanced around players with high execution at a set item(power) level.

It makes more sense to reduce the rewarded gear level in content that's not difficult than to increase the rewarded gear level in difficult content because beyond the simple increase to stats, SE would also have to scale up the difficulty of the content to compensate. Diadem content is already easy enough that if the reduced item level made it more challenging it still wouldn't be difficult.

And Savage could use a nerf apparently, judging by the backlash + lack of people successfully doing/completing it, so what's the problem?



Here, I don't agree. I will never agree with nerfing the rewards of content that's already very flawed to begin with, unless all you're trying to do is kill the content off for even more people.

I also don't understand why Savage would need to be scaled up to "compensate" when it's already apparently very difficult. Giving a few more stat points to everyone is not going to suddenly make Savage a joke.

So in other words, you're saying: once you're past a certain threshold required to be able to win, gear doesn't matter in Savage, all that matters is being able to handle mechanics

Yet earlier, you said
By buffing Savage gear you would effectively be nerfing Savage difficulty because difficult content is balanced around players with high execution at a set item(power) level.

which in other words, is saying: for people that already have cleared Savage (in order to receive Savage gear) and already can handle the mechanics and have already passed the minimum gear threshold required, gear still does matter in Savage

So which is it, exactly? Your arguments are inconsistent.



That is why I think Savage loot should be buffed, not Diadem loot being nerfed. I've been saying this already, in case you've already forgotten my earlier posts. I also don't think they should be dropping equivalent loot.

Please shelve the whole talking-down-at-you act; I'm not as clueless about things as you seem to think I am.



That has absolutely zero to do with whether or not reducing the quality of reward for a piece of content is a nerf (hint: it still is a nerf)

Edited, Dec 27th 2015 4:58am by Fynlar

This is why I say it's hard to explain stuff to people who don't participate in the harder content.

This is as simple as it can be explained:

Alex Savage 1; If you mess up 1 bomb out of 4, game over unless your healers are on point like they were born to heal.
Alex Savage 2: Mess up 1 bomb during the quad doll phase it's game over because not only are you taking extra damage, but the tanks will be getting cleaved -HARD- so if the bomb goes off on the group while the double dolls are cleaving your tanks.,guess what happens?
Alex Savage 3: If you mess up Protein position, as in the first minute of the fight, it's game over. You won't meet the DPS requirement for the rest of the fight. That's just the tutorial level of Alex Savage 3, that's not even where the actual mechanic hopping comes into play.
Alex Savage 4: Nisi. That's all that needs to be said.

The difficulty is fine, it's the TYPE of difficulty it is because while you have the handful of groups who have it on farm, most people who did raid content can't get past A3S, not because they're bad but because it's such a dramatic shift from Coil that it legit was overtuned and can only be taken on by the top 1%.

As Filth said - Gear won't help, especially when mechanics failures deal 28-290,200 damage (yes, 290,000), but having higher rewards makes challenging the content worth it. Challenging content is what breathes life into a stagnant game, but Savage Alex was overtuned purely to keep raiders busy until 3.2 because they knew the content base isn't that great. Midas is supposed to be in between Second and Final Coil, which means depending on mechanics, it's going to be laughable and that will be quite depressing.

People say they're "midcore" but Yoshi himself essentially said even midcore content is too out of reach of casual players, so people honestly should be wanting more challenging content and less handouts and handholding. It doesn't have to be IN YOUR FACE..but at this rate, you may as well say ***** content and dump NPCs around housing areas that goes "Tee Hee Hee you want ilvl 210-240 gear? 40k gil please ^^" because that's the route they're essentially going and the route casual players will perfectly accept because it's an option to them.

Like Ive said before - by definition I'm considered a casual player, but I have more than enough time to push myself through all of the content of this game. It's not hard and 3.0 and later has proven it's just getting easier. The sad fact of the matter is, the community is a big part in why it's "extra hard" to get into certain content, they designed the game to the point you don't have to care about each other or grow as a guild because...hey load up duty finder and you're off.

How many people did you see wait until Bismarck and Ravana were in DF before even touching it? How many do you see say "let's build echo" rather than actually attempt the fight? I know people depise the whole "Must know the fight!" on day one, but that's a testament of how easy the game's content is by large - Yet you have people who don't even TRY to do the content or simply can't grasp simple mechanics. if everyone who plays the games did Thordan Ex, you'd all have ilvl205 weapons..that was a handout with a nice bit of challenge, but still a handout. Yet you get the same tired of excuse: "I'm casual, I don't have time, people only want experienced people."

Get your FC/LS and learn the fight. Clear the fight. Farm some (amazing) weapons. Be merry. Why wait until they nerf down the content to do it? It happened with Ravana Ex, when that and Alex normal were the only content people farmed them to death but you still had people want "other options", then Diadem came out which essentially nullified every other option outside of Thordan Ex and Alex 4 in terms of weapons. Options are good but destroying every route is bad.




Edited, Dec 27th 2015 5:48am by Theonehio