Any new on changes the loot system?Follow

It's still a vertically-progressed game.

They haven't said how many gear options per item level there are in HW content, so no idea there one way or the other.

Relic weapons go through an expansion-long upgrade path. That Zenith weapon can now be upgraded a further six times to ilvl 135.

Yeah, vertical progression game is vertical. They're not going to change that. That's a design decision you make early on and stick with it.

Think of gearing as just a secondary form of leveling. Glamour exists that if you have a particular armor who's appearance you like, you can always use it as a base appearance for gear you use up the levels.

But if you don't like that concept, I'd stay clear of FFXIV all together. There's always going to be an upward path to progressing and armor is part of that.

I still enjoy coming back every 2 patches and playing through all the content, so I'm sure I'll still have fun.

You pretty much have to have some sort of restrictions though otherwise people would gear up too fast and get burned out on dungeons even faster than they do now. The tome caps and "one piece of CT gear a week" things aren't there to ***** you over and keep you from gearing up. They're to keep people coming back week after week instead of just running 100 dungeons in the first week to get everything, and then never never doing them ever again.

First, considering that coil content will be capped at level 50, and will probably not have better than 20% echo, T5 and T9 are going to keep the majority out of fcob due to mechanics failures (divebombs mostly ><). So actually, DF is doable on fcob, but still a good group in chat is for the best. So with the echo getting to and staying at 20% and the cap at level 50, I don't see final coil becoming too much easier than it is currently.

With that, there are nuances that, depending on your needs may make some poetic upgraded gear better, or may make dreadwyrm gear better. For instance, bards have 9 weapon damage to 1 dex to 0.34 crit to 0.34 det to 0.14 skill speed (rough estimate). So upgrading from 120 to 130 in some instances may hurt your DPS, if the dex increase is minimal (i.e. 5) and moving from 120 to 130 meant sacrificing 30 points each of crit and dex for 30 points each of accuracy and skill speed. If you were already capped on your accuracy and can hit Bahamut no problem, then that extra accuracy is a waste. And too much skill speed can hurt you on bard, making you run out of TP way faster than your invigorate can deal with, meaning you have to sing paeon and reduce your damage for a bit.

The upgraded poetic gear is equal to the dreadwyrm gear, not better, not worse.
The relic zeta weapon is equal to the dreadwyrm weapon in the same regard.
Sometimes, the demon gear for WoD is BiS. Very odd circumstances, but that is the case.

Ideally, you want to make sure you have enough accuracy to hit 100% in T13, then stack the rest up with the ideal stats for your job (i.e. crit and det for damage dealers). This could mean a number of gear combinations, which means you sometimes need to farm coil to get better stats, other times you might need to wait out poetics.

Edited, May 28th 2015 1:12pm by Valkayree