End of 2010 pics!

Wow, has it been a month already since my last post? Lots happening in FFXI, most of it fun. I figure this update would mainly be for those who stopped playing so that they can get an idea of how things have changed.

The main changes would be... the level cap is now 90 and that the Abyssea content is now finished. The level 90 cap pretty much makes any old-world content a joke and everything significant/fun is in Abyssea now, including almost all the gear. About the only thing that isn't purely Abyssea that is 80+ are the magian weapons, and a good number of their trials do require items from Abyssea.

So... anyway, I've been working on my magian dagger, the "occasionally attacks twice" high damage version. The good news is that since finishing the initial VNM step, and the two "get drops from NMs" piece, the dagger has become fairly easy to maintain, just using points from various new battle systems that popped up (bastion & Dominion)

The armor everyone is after now is what people have been calling "AF3", the job-specific armor. The base pieces are fairly easy to get, with some work needed to get the +1 pieces which is where they start to become useful. The +2 pieces are where the job specific armor really shines, and we've just barely started to work on getting those pieces for everyone. Here's a pic of my DNC +1 set

New armor & weapons mean newer mobs to fight, right? Exactly! Bigger, meaner battles including this one!

Raja is one of the more fun tanking fights I've done on DNC. Lots of large AoEs, gives silence, amnesia and more. Basically I'm the only one engaging it/tanking it with the rest of the alliance spread out to support me and come in to do damage when possible. Abyssea NM fighting also requires more attention compared to fights in the past. Now we have to perform specific weaponskills at specific times, cast certain BweaponsLM/BRD/BLU spells or even turn away from the mob when it does certain moves. Many NMs now absorb physical or magical damage depending on the situation or move that they make. A single person not paying attention could end up healing the NM for thousands of HP.

One new game mechanic that was added with Abyssea was the concept of "atmas", buffs that you can get inside of Abyssea. These include things like more HP, regain, additions to attributes and more. There are some funny ones like Auto-Reraise III, and significantly increase the damage of everyone, especially 1-handed jobs like THF, NIN and DNC, which leads to funny weaponskill damage like this:

All three Abyssea expansions have been released now. These mini-expansions have a plot of sorts, though the story itself is much shorter and more straightforward compared to even the previous mini-expansions like the moogle and Shantotto ones. At the end of it, you get to fight this:

and meet some old friends:

After everything is done, one of the things you get is the ability to buy the Primevel Brew, an item that gives you +999 stats, +9999 HP/MP, crazy amounts of regain, regen, refresh, etc. for 3 minutes for 200k cruor. It's basically the cheat code for FFXI and lets you solo anything inside Abyssea. You can WS constantly, and with Chainspell, RDMs can nuke down anything in the time.

I'm still figuring out the optimum way to use the brew myself... my weak DRG managed to do this:

but this is really weak compared to what other people have done, or what my DNC can do xD I still have to figure out how to best use the brew.

Finally, some more random pics! Seems like this is the new DNC uniform as I'm seeing tons of us running around like this!

Kelhor(Rooks) & I went to do more WotG quests... Interest for WoTG is at an all-time low even though they.. i think they actually finished releasing it all? Anyway, it's been so long since the last time anyone did anything in WotG that I've forgotten most of the details of the storyline. There isn't any significant rewards at the end, and the way they split the questlines up makes it nearly impossible for people to cooperate in WotG. I consider this expansion to be the most well done story & cutscene wise, and the biggest failure of FFXI simply due to the game mechanics and how long they took to release it.

Anyway, here is a pic that I'm calling "attack of the clones"

That's it for now! Happy New Year!

Long time no post

Been a while since my last post... mainly because of RL stuff. I've taken a new job with more responsibility and better opportunity. It also takes up more of my time so I don't have time to put together blog posts at work. FFXI itself hasn't really been that exciting either, just the usual gear acquisition with minimal challenge except for the randomness of drops or claim competition. Abyssea is the only "real" thing going on now, with the magian trials for those who have multi-hours during the day to spend their time.

At this point, I'm not quite sure how much longer I'll keep playing myself. It seems that there are people who want to step up FFXI activities to the point where events are held for multi-hours for most days of the week... Kinda weird for nearly 9 year old MMO game, and... well, I'm not sure if I want to commit that kind of time. I don't mind spending a few hours every other night playing, but nearly every night, and during the day on weekends? A certain South Park episode comes to mind...

Anyway, for those who don't play anymore, here's a little pic of my latest WS gear for DNC!

The new FFXI

I figure that since there are a quite a few people actually reading this who are no longer playing FFXI that I should put up a post summarizing the changes to the game. If you left or cut down on playing FFXI before the latest series of "Abyssea" expansions, I think you'd be in for a huge culture shock if you ever started playing the game again.

The new level cap
The highest you can go now is level 85. Now remember that most of the original hard mobs were around level 85 or so back when the level cap was 75 and you'll see the problem. Basically, all the old content has become easy. Just about anyone can low-man or solo older stuff, anything released pre-abyssea. Missions of all sorts, including the previous 3 expansions (Shantotto, Moogle, etc.) are now a joke instead of being a challenge. As long as there is no level cap on the fight, you almost always duo or solo it do it.

Exp
There is no more exp outside of Abyssea. You may see a few people out doing some FoV, or some random sub-30 parties around, but basically, Abyssea has taken over everything, and with good reason. Since you can easily get around 50-80k, maybe 100k+/hour with the proper setup, exping outside of Abyssea is just plain inefficient. You can enter Abyssea starting at level 30, so once you hit 30, you can start going in to "leech" exp. However, even leechers have a purpose, that is, to open chests that the people doing the real work of killing mobs can't do. For an exp alliance of 13-18 people, you might have 1-2 leechers just along for the ride.

Exp has also changed from a "get together a party and go at it" for anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours, to a "the longer you're at it, the better the reward" endurance session of at least 3-4+ hours. Our typical exp session on Sunday mornings (yes, mornings... people are setting alarm clocks JUST for exp) runs from around 9am - 3pm at the very least, 6 hours of exp, and that is followed by a couple of hours of NM hunting. Near the end of the session, the exp rate does easily hit 100k/hour, but that is also around the time that people are hitting both level cap, and merit cap

Soooooooo... for people entering Abyssea at level 80, they can expect to leave at 85 plus capped merits after a full session. Many people have leeched jobs from sub-60 easily to 85 in a couple of sessions. And yes, exping that quickly means that you leave a session with horribly underleveled skills no matter how much you put in it.

Colibri camps have never been more open for skillups.

Older content
Old content is obsolete. There is no real reason to go do anything that isn't Abyssea anymore. Dynamis, Limbus, Sea, Sky, Einherjar, all the old content is neither a challenge, nor is it rewarding. We took a group in to Dynamis last Thursday, barely 14 people and completely wiped the zone... twice. Relic armor is a joke and basically everything went freelot. I guess there are some people still working on relic weapons since the coins still sell, which is kinda amusing since the relic weapon trials to upgrade those relics is something only an insane person would do.

About the only thing that SE added to make old content somewhat relevant was that they reward people who completed the mission stories, that is, the expansion stories, the original 3 nation quests, and the various expansions like CoP, Zilart and Aht Urghan, with "atmas" which can be used in Abyssea

Abyssea & Atmas
Atmas are "power ups" that you can earn inside Abyssea. You can get them through quests, killing certain NMs, finishing mission lines, etc. They can give you power-ups like extra strength (+50), extra HP & MP(my PLD has over 3000 HP), or gives you certain things like Refresh(+10/tick), Regain and others.

And the way you get Atmas are from doing certain things to NMs in a certain way. For instance, using specific elemental weaponskills on NMs depending on the day, under very specific conditions (mob must not be casting or doing TP skills). You can also increase the drop rate by casting specific elemental magics on the mob as well. (rendering TH obsolete to an extent?)

Now we have a random assortment of jobs being brought into Abyssea simply for the reason of using their elemental weaponskills, or casting elemental magics of various kinds. I'm not just talking about BLMs here to nuke, but we also need to bring BLUs for their (lol)magical spells, SCHs for their Helixes, etc. I'm amused that they haven't found a way to work PUP into things, and I'm wondering if the COR Quick Draw cards might come into play here.

Soooo... Abyssea has broken the crown of the usual SAM+BRD combination and people are essentially free to bring whatever they please if they aren't part of the core group of WHMs, RDMs and to an extent, PLDs.

Abyssea NM fights
With all the atma buffs, as well as exp being a joke to get these days (you actually GET exp from killing NMs, anywhere from 500-5000 per kill), most NM fights become a free-for-all where everyone just goes all out. If a DD gets killed, it's no big deal, throw a Raise out there and put him on the bench for 5 minutes. All the buffs out there makes it pretty hard for a PLD to keep hate unless the DDs hold back. There aren't many fights that actually require PLDs now, only the zone bosses and a few tough NMs. I'm sure by the time we're level 90(or higher since SE said that 99 would be the final cap), these would be easily low-manned by a group of DDs.

Essentially, everything now is either a simple free-for-all that is done in less than 5 minutes (with a few random people dying along the way) or a kite fight where it's mainly on the nukers (BLM, SCH, and even RDM). Rarely do we actually need to bring out real tanks. People not paying attention is the norm, judging on how many times we have to shout on linkshell for people to actually do thing properly. (You'd think that they would pay attention since the objective IS to get things for them... at least bidding has people's attention after a few people lost out on things that they wanted because they didn't bid properly in the 20 seconds and hopefully taken more seriously after Mday lost 2000 points bidding on a random item that nobody wanted)

Current Content
With all old content essentially obsolete, the new content is mainly focused inside of Abyssea itself. The only things I've seen people do in the old zones is either Magian Trials (the kill 2000-10,000 of various mob families under specific days/weather conditions/killshots/proccing of addititional effects stuff that takes months to do), or people doing missions specifically for atmas (Crystal prices are going for anywhere from 1500-3000/stack since nobody exps anymore -- there is a huge shortage of crystals since people are using them for rank points)

In Abyssea, the content is essentially quests, NMs, and popped NMs.

Quests
There are around 8-9 quests per Abyssea zone, some of which are repeatable for seals. This is the super-low seal drop rate method of getting seals required to upgrade the "AF3" armor to be useful. I estimate around a 5% drop rate, and you need 8 seals to do a single upgrade of a single piece. I spent 4 hours on Friday night to try to get just the final 2 seals I need for my DNC feet and the only thing I had to show for it was a loss of 4k exp.

This is the "solo" content that SE promised us. Yes, it's possible to solo. It's mind-numbingly boring. With a 5% drop rate, on average you'd have to do 20 repeats, or 160 repeats of the SAME quest in order to complete one of your AF3 pieces. If you're lucky like me and can actually repeat the quest in a reasonable time of around 5 minutes, that's only 13 hours of grinding a quest and on average, you'd be able to finish a piece. Of course, that only the average... I'm already waaaaay past the average for this quest.

And if you're not lucky and have a quest that requires items from IT mobs... well, I'll be surprised if you actually succeed with this method.

NMs
Around all the zones there are various NMs that drop some good items. Some drop seals for AF3, giving another method of obtaining them that doesn't involve mind-numbing grinding, while most drop some sort of gear that is useful, including various job-specific accessories, some crazy pieces like the mage piece that has +100 HP & MP, and gives Refresh & Regen. Most NMs also have Atma.

The respawn time of these NMs is actually fairly decent, around 30 minutes after they are last killed. The bad news is that with the drops being so desirable, people are low-manning them and taking forever to kill. Since dying isn't a big deal anymore, reraise, doing some damage, and getting killed isn't a big deal anymore so people are low-manning them and taking forever to do so... Glitching of the mob's paths is unfortunately common and requires a GM call every time.

Popped NMs
Most of the exp mobs drop pop items to pop various NMs that also drop seals and various items. The pop items themselves are pretty common, and can be sold on the AH. The good news is that the ??? that pops the NMs has a short, 3 minute repop. The bad news is that there are also tons of competition for these since, well, they are just about the only thing to do. It's fairly typical to walk up to a ??? area and find another group already doing it, or have another group barge in on you as you're working through pops. Most people are generally polite and either move on when they see another group there, or work in an alternating schedule so that people take turns to pop. However, there are lots of jackasses out there too who won't communicate or cooperate.

My blacklist is unfortunately full :( I need to talk to a GM about increasing it!

Oh, and the Abyssea "storyline" consists of... building to and fighting a high level NM(about the only time a serious alliance with a tank party is needed) and a bunch of crappy cutscenes.

Sooooooooo... that's FFXI right now. Quests, NMs, and occasional exp. Oh, one more thing. While a typical "old school" event like Dynamis would end up with people losing exp, the Abyssea mobs all have exp and give them out generously. 500 exp tends to be on the low side per kill, with 5000 exp being easily possible. Typically you'd leave an Abyssea NM hunting session with 4-6 merits, with the highest I've ever done was going in with absolutely 0 merits or limits and coming out fully capped.

With only 300 merits left to cap all my jobs, even the ones I never use... well, DO said it best that exp is no longer relevant.

Long time no post

Hmm... does anyone still read this? Hello? Hello?

Well, just for those of you who still do read this... I figure I owe an explanation of what is going on.

No, I haven't been been caught up playing FFXIV... in fact, if I were playing that more, I would probably have more posts showing off the world (it's very pretty!) FFXIV is as bad as the reviews out there say it is. I haven't played it in over two weeks at this point. I think I have until the end of November before the initial "free trial" ends, at which time I'll most likely shut off my account.

Instead, I've been playing more FFXI, ironically... The Abyssea atmas have finally got me started on doing the nation quests, getting rank 10 Bastok, working on Windy right now and I hope to finish Sandy by the end of the month. I've also been doing a LOT more in FFXI then I had planned, partly because of the way Abyssea is structured where the longer you stay in, the higher the rewards and... well, wanting to beat the silly time stones things.

I've gotten a lot of good gear from Abyssea and stuff so far... including the Pluviale, lots of seals for DNC, SCH, and even completing my DNC "AF3" set (though I still need two more feet seals). Big thanks to DO and everyone else who stayed after exp last Sunday to farm these. I know that DO was capped merits like me and was just there to try to get drops.

So... now for the good... or bad news, depending on how you look at it. I just accepted a new job at a very fast-paced company, so... it'll take me a few months to build things up to the point where I can automate my job. Which means... no more weekday events before 7:30pm for the most part. Or just assume I'll be late. This is pretty much the same schedule as when I was in grad school!

Which should be fine since FFXI is dying, right? ;)

First FFXIV post

So, while there are tons of problems with Final Fantasy XIV such as a pain to get it working smoothly and lots of other minor issues, I'll say that one thing they did do right was how pretty they made it. Even in the alpha I thought that FFXIV was a beautiful game.

So... this post is going to be about some screenshots I took in FFXIV last night :)

(And yes, I gave in to the pressure that stupid Fuuji and others put on me to get XIV :P )

Meet the new Ascy:

Started out on the "Pugilist" job, though I keep wondering when I'm going to get the "Screwdriver" WS. I have no idea what the acronyms for the jobs are, but I'm sticking with PUG for now!

Special ability: Float

Soooo... looks like they haven't fixed the problems of models interacting with the models quite right. That's one of the starting cities, Ul'duh in the background. I take no responsibility for any spelling mistakes. It's their fault for choosing such weird names.

Impressive rendering

First view upon stepping out of the city is incredible. I stood here for a few minutes looking out... that is, once the weather cleared out. The sandstorms are also incredible, very realistic!

Running around the city at night

If your graphics card can't handle it, running around and movement becomes very jerky and disconcerting. IMO, it is better to reduce the load on the card and get a smooth framerate. I'm using an ATI 5870 and I can't even play this game on the highest settings and had to drop down to merely "high" and shut off some features

Beautiful in-game cutscenes (and mi'quote)

One of the main storyline NPCs for Ul'dah. Also apparently also one of the reasons why some people start here! I wonder if each strand of hair is rendered separately...

That's it for now. Still looking for people who are supposedly on the Kashuan server. Tasya, or now known as Aenea gave me a linkpearl to her erm... HNMLS. I hope I'm not supposed to be camping Fafnir or something... especially since I saw Fafnir Nidhogg spawn right in front of me when I spawned. (He's a tiny lalafel, so should be easy prey!)

Low-manning NMs/farming NMs & seals

I'm not sure how the upcoming release of FFXIV will affect things... It sounds like there are quite a few people who intend to start playing FFXIV when it comes out this week. (Wednesday I believe?)

The next couple of weeks should be interesting at least. With Kelly taking a break, the release of FFXIV and well, the latest Abyssea expansion completely changing expectations of FFXI again, who knows who will be around after the shakeout is done.

In any case, I'm still around and intending to poke things. All jobs are 85 now in record time (2 weekends of Abyssea exp -.-) After looking at things, I'm currently left with 2 1/2 jobs left to get up to 49, and about 250 merits left to completely cap all jobs. That's about 13-14 Abyssea exp sessions at the very most, and while having more merits on my jobs would be nice, it isn't something that's too high of a priority for me, especially since I intend to mainly focus on DNC in the first place xD The bad news? AF3 feet being gold chest pops... considering the super-low drop rate and the difficulty(annoyance?) from building up Amber lights enough for it. I'm not sure how to structure an event to farm AF3 feet... We'd pretty much need people to be on their "A" jobs and be willing to focus on getting giant gold chests and forsaking exp/merits for hours at a time.


In any case, yesterday evening the VNM prep crew (Fuuji, Vanh, Ghiren, me and... Val) went to low-man some NMs with some success. Beelz joined us later. Setup was:
- RDM - Fuuji - Haste, backup heals + lots of enfeebling
- SMN - Ghiren - Hateless DD, -na spells with /WHM
- SAM/THF - Vanh - TA DD
- DNC/NIN - Ascule - Evasion tank
- THF/... SAM - Val - TA DD, bait, TH
- PLD/NIN - Beelz (joined us later in the night)

Which... pretty much describes my default low-man strategy. Get a tank + support capable of holding the mob indefinitely, then add in as many DDs as you have available people to take it down to speed things up. TH if possible, though at the end of the day, the core of the strategy is a tank + support.

This seemed to work well against the VNMs, plus last night we tackled Khalamari and Gieremund. We tried the frog NM, but that one ended up killing us as it spammed Waterja and Water-ga x.x

The other low-man tactic I've seen executed is... well, nukers ping-ponging hate, kiting the mob around until someone else can pull it off. Works especially well among NMs who have slow movement speed, or if you have enough room to pull the kite, but is highly risky if you're fighting something that hits hard or has many AoEs.

I'm hoping to continue low-manning NMs to get some gear for people, or seals, whichever it may be. I try to avoid the "dying" types of fights where you use damage-over-time attacks and either die & reraise, or run until the mob deaggros simply due to the time it takes to do these fights

Farming seals/Which NMs?
So... the big question is which NMs to hunt, and when to hunt them... I'm hoping to make this a regular thing on Sunday nights, but... we'll see... too much in the air right now.

So far the list of possible wants are:
Ascule - DNC stuffs
Fuuji - RDM stuffs
Ghiren - WHM or SMN stuffs
Valharin - THF stuffs
Vanh - SAM, THF stuff, BRD feet

I'm looking to build a list of NMs that people want to kill and figure out how to kill them. So far my list is:

Khalamari (Squid - Konschat)
- Wanted by: Ascule - Charis Necklace
- Other drops: Varangian Helm - Str+12, Accuracy -20, Attack+24
- DNC evasion tanking, has some heavy hitting moves, Utsusemi + full time Fan Dance a must
- Success - Probably can be duo'ed or trioed

Gieremund (Hound - Attohwa)
- Wanted by: Ascule - DNC seal: Head
- Other drops: WAR, DRG, THF head seals, Yoshihiro (magnus stone GK)
- DNC evasion tanking, has heavy hitting moves that go through Utsusemi. Howl causes Paralyze and needs to be removed ASAP
- Success - Possible trio, better with 5 or more

Ironclad everything (all new zones)
- Drops: Various job-specific accessories, some nice body pieces
- In theory, nuke-kiting should work, just be sure to ping-pong hate. Movement speed atma or gear would help
- Doable? Possibly... half-assembled remnants of an exp alliance was able to kill this twice, so a coordinated low-man effort should be possible

Seps (Puk - Vunkrel)
- Wanted by: Fuuji - RDM seal: feet
- Other drops: SCH seal: feet
- No further info on Wiki at this time. Probably can get away with evasion tanking. Probably has AoE moves

Iktomi (Spider - Vunkrel)
- Wanted by: Fuuji - RDM seal: feet
- Other drops: SAM, PLD, THF feet seals
- Sickle Slash goes through shadows, double attacks frequently. PLD/NIN tank possibly?
- Probably best to test with DNC & PLD tanks

Gukumatz (Peiste - Misareaux)
- Wanted by: Fuuji - RDM legs, Ghiren - WHM legs
- Other drops: SCH, BLM legs, magnus stone Great Axe
- Lots of annoying moves, gaze attacks, knockback, lots of ignoring shadow moves and plague
- Probably can do ping-pong nuking with this. Face away from the mob to avoid gaze attacks. Would need at least one person WHM or /WHM to remove plague & erase bind

Wherwetrice (Cockatrice - Attohwa)
- Wanted by: Fuuji - RDM seal: head, Ghiren - WHM head
- Other drops: SCH, BLM, Divinus Grip
- Popped NM. Has Sound Vacuum which causes mute AND en-amnesia. Sounds like a pain to fight... I think I'd rather go after the Peiste

Pallid Percy (Worm - Attohwa)
- Wanted by: Fuuji - RDM head, Vanh & Val - THF head
- Other drops: SAM, PLD head, Incantor Stone
- Popped NM. Has draw in, AoE damage, lots of -ga spells like Silencega, Slowga, Graviga, Aeroga, Stonega. Probably a pain to fight

Granite Borer (Wamouracampa - Attohwa)
- Wanted by: Ghiren - WHM head, Ascule - DNC head, Vanh & Val - THF head
Other drops: COR head, Volley Earring
- Popped NM. High movement speed, casts Firaga IV. No fast cast
- Might be doable. Covers a lot people's jobs. Bring a stunner for Firaga?

Whiro (Eft - Attohwa)
- Wanted by: Ghiren - WHM head, Vanh - SAM head
- Other drops: DRK, BLU head, Fluid Crossbow
- Conal stun, AoE damage, AoE dispel. Can spam AoE damage moves. Sounds like a pain.
- Probably skip this one and find easier sources

Npfundlwa (Rabbit - Misareaux)
- Wanted by: Ghiren - WHM legs
- Other drops: WAR, COR, DNC legs, Quire Grip
- Popped NM. Don't rabbits have that evil AoE move that one-shots most people? Mmmm... Wiki only has Dust Cloud listed as the ability, might be worth checking out... or waiting for more info to be posted

Mmmm... that's enough NM checking for now... still many more to list/check.

If you have a NM or specific seal that you'd rather prioritize, let me know so we can check to see if we can fit a strategy to it. If the quest is SOMEWHAT reasonable to do (as in, you can get all 8 seals in like... under 6-8 hours), then it is probably better to just do the quest method.

Oh, also, if there are other NMs that drop things people want, like job-specific accessories(like Khalamari), let's check them out as well

I think I prefer Dynamis

Details on the new AF3 & what it takes to upgrade them are coming out. I think I prefer Dynamis to this new system they have cooked up.

Base pieces
There are three different ways to get the (generally useless) base pieces:
1. Buy the hat with Cruor (easy)
2. Buy the legs with Resistance credits (still relatively easy)
3. Possible rare drop from a large gold chest when you kill mobs (someone bomb SE headquarters)

The first two are easy... everyone has loads of cruor already, so getting the hat is a breeze (unless you're a DNC, in which case you might want to consider flying a plane into SE headquarters... too soon still?). The leg piece takes 1000 resistance credits, the new currency the added to the game. However, Bastion (the Abyssea version of campaign) comes frequently, and resistance credits essentially falls from the sky. Getting 1k resistance credits could be as fast as participating in one 3-minute battle.

#3 is the one which make me want to quit. These pieces of armor are possibly found inside the large gold chests that have a chance to appear after you kill mobs. However, to get these gold chests to appear, you have to:
a. Build up pearlescent lights so that chests will actually drop
b. Build up azure lights so that you won't get kicked out of Abyssea
c. Build up amber lights so that large gold chests will actually start appearing

Essentially, you're looking at at minimum of 90 minutes in Abyssea before things start to possibly drop. The appearance of the large gold chests with feet armor is pretty rare in the first place, so even if you do build up to this point, you might not get any drops.

So... instead of being a "casual-friendly" event like Dynamis where you spend between 2-3 hours with around 8-15 pieces of ready-to-use relic armor pieces dropping... you end up spending 4-6 hours grinding away and getting around 3-4 useless base pieces which still need to be upgraded.

On the flip side, you do get exp here... so... I guess there really will be no excuse to not have completely capped merits for all your jobs. I don't mind exping once in a while, but having to dedicate 4-6 hours on a regular basis on an event just for the chance of the base piece isn't my idea of a friendly game.

Upgrading to +1s
Almost all the base AF3 pieces are useless compared to other equipment in the game. The +1 pieces are where it starts to get interesting. So, what does it take to upgrade these pieces? Well, pretty simple... job & slot specific "seals" that you can get either by killing NMs or doing quests.

First, let's talk about the quests. I've encountered two types of quests so far:

Quest type #1: Clicking various spots
This quest is pretty simple... talk to a NPC, go to another area of the zone and click a ??? or similar spot, go back and talk to the NPC. Sometimes the ??? moves so you have to track it down, but with confluxes, transporting between them does not take too long. You can repeat the quests, but you have to zone out of abyssea and back in (and re-get visitant status) to do it. A single quest cycle takes about 2-3 minutes.

You get cruor reward, and a chance at a seal. My experience last night was that a seal be awarded approximately 10-15% of the time. Soooooo... figure that you'll be repeating this quest a few times

Now... the seal you get won't necessarily be for the job you want. There seem to be 4 jobs per different quest, so divide that % by 4 to get an approximate rate of 2.5% - 3.75% drop. This means that on average, you will need to complete the quest 26-40 times before you get one seal.

Oh, and you need 8 seals to upgrade one piece. On the flip side, if the quest reward is seals for multiple jobs you have that somewhat counters the fact that you're tossing all these other BST, PUP & DNC seals.

So, let's review.
- 8 seals needed
- Repeat quest 26-40 times per seal, or 208 - 320 times for one piece of armor
- Each quest cycle takes 2-3 minutes
- In total, on average, it will take 416 - 960 minutes, or 7 - 16 hours to complete one piece of armor using this quest method.

Finally, since this quest is a solo thing since nobody can actually help you do it, you're essentially doing boring data entry for all that time. You're not actually playing the game... there is no challenge, you're going through the motions typing on your keyboard/controller to repeat it over and over again. In fact, if you have a programmable keyboard, you can essentially do it with some code along the lines of:

(11:39:53 AM) Ascule: /target maw
(11:39:56 AM) Ascule: up, enter
(11:40:04 AM) Ascule: /target "cruor surveyor"
(11:40:06 AM) Ascule: /follow
(11:40:14 AM) Ascule: down down, enter, down enter
(11:40:19 AM) Ascule: /target Quest NPC
(11:40:20 AM) Ascule: /follow
(11:40:27 AM) Ascule: enter enter enter enter enter enter enter enter
(11:40:30 AM) Ascule: /target conflux #01
(11:40:37 AM) Ascule: right right enter up enter
(11:40:52 AM) Ascule: Wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
(11:40:57 AM) Ascule: /target logging point
(11:41:00 AM) Ascule: enter enter
(11:41:05 AM) Ascule: sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss
(11:41:09 AM) Ascule: /target conflux #07
(11:41:14 AM) Ascule: down enter
(11:41:16 AM) Ascule: /target NPC
(11:41:18 AM) Ascule: enter enter
(11:41:20 AM) Ascule: /target maw
(11:41:22 AM) Ascule: /follow
(11:41:28 AM) Ascule: enter up enter
(11:41:29 AM) Ascule: repeat


Of course, doing so would probably result in a perma-ban! I'm completely insulted that SE would try to pass this off as "gameplay". At least in Dynamis you were actually playing something, interacting with the environment, other players to do something. Here? This is data entry. This is something that should be automated, or out-sourced to other countries. Hell, even a trained monkey can do this! If I were running a RMT company, I'd start selling this as a service... $20 per upgrade completed for you by grinding out these quests.

Quest #2: Bring me items
The other quest I discovered so far (for BLU, PLD and other jobs) was to bring a NPC drops from a Murex.  We're talking about drops from a IT mob that casts fun spells like Aero V. Soooo... you need a party to get it, farm a bunch of them, then... you're still subject to the same probabilities as above. Instead of a 2-3 minute cycle, you're talking about... however long it takes for a party to gather and kill these mobs.

Supposedly the drops go on AH for 100k+ each... fun

NM hunting
The "group" way of getting the seals would be NM hunting. The NMs tend to be up especially since they have a short repop time (at most 1 hour) and they aren't really hunted, but there are some problems with it.

Last night, we went and hunted the Spider NM whenever we saw it up. Small group of what we had available... DNC, PLD, RDM, BRD, THF. Annoyances with the NM:
- Spams TP move including Silence-ga, Gravity-ga, Slow-ga making it a bloody pain in the first place to get shadows up, remove silence, echo drops, etc.
- Seems to be glitched in that it constantly uses draw-in even when everyone is sitting on top of it. This means that your camera is constantly messed up and you have to keep moving around to even try to hit it. Extra time wasted just repositioning and moving out from the mob's model. Draw in also ensures that mages will be hit by silence-ga and have to use echo drops
- Sickle Slash for about 2000+HP. Beelz took one on his cruor-buffed PLD85 that took him from full HP to about 100HP or so. I took a few for 200-400 thanks to Fan Dance(90/80% damage reduction). Keep in mind this NM spams AOE TP moves, so having Utsusemi up isn't something that can be relied on

I can't imagine any average group being able to tackle this NM with any consistency. The fight itself was relatively short, maybe 6-7 minutes but it did push our capabilities. And... each time it dropped two seals.

If you do the math, it almost doesn't make sense to hunt NMs. Let's say you fight and get the two seals each time. Let's also say that you don't have any time wasted waiting for people to gather, or time spent teleporting between confluxes, getting cruor buffs and only consider spending 6 minutes fighting the NM

Now if those 5 people were doing quests instead, in those 6 minutes, each person could have done 3 quests, or a total of 15 quests done. With the reward rate of about 10-15% for seals in the quests, you would end up with between 1.5 - 2.25 seals in the same time. With no risk of dying, no waiting for people, and everyone targeting the seals they want.

+1 Upgrade summary
Essentially, the seal rate is about the same no matter if you do quests or hunt NMs, so it comes down to this:
- Do you want to just do this solo?
- Can you stand grinding away doing boring data entry?
- Can you gather a party actually do a challenging fight?
- Are the people in your party willing to risk death?

I really doubt many people will want to take the NM path since it is relatively easier to simply go grind away at it on your own. This is why I'd rather go to Dynamis then do this quest. At least in Dynamis, you're actually playing a game instead of doing data entry. At this point... I'm seriously considering giving SE a great big "fuck you" and quitting.

Oh... and this doesn't even cover the +2 upgrades either. No concrete information on how to gather the items for that yet.

Dancer upgrade, new update

New update, new stuff, new opinions about what I think might be behind SE's thinking when they planned the new events.

Before that though, news on Dancer upgrades!

About a month ago, Fuuji moved up the ZNM start time to 6:00pm Pacific in order to make time after ZNMs to do VNMs. Interest in VNMs have picked up recently, with many SAMs (and one RNG) going after their Empyrean weapons, while Vanh, Ghiren & I were working on the "occasionally attacks" daggers.

Well, the first significant result from that has come in as:

This is probably the most significant upgrade to my DNC since.. erm... maybe when I got my Joytoy with Tasya? Using this together with the Joytoy is essentially equal to using a fresh Saber Dance full time. In fact, I can't tell the difference when Saber Dance is on or off anymore. The only way to potentially improve this would be to add a 2nd "occasionally attacks twice/three times" dagger to take the lower sword skill out of the equation. 

I'm still planning on upgrading this further if at all possible. The next two upgrades are at least easier since the items can be purchased relatively cheaply from bazaars. If I go crazy sometime in the future, I might end up working on the other dagger to complete my DNC. 

As it is right now, I feel like my DNC is sturdier than my PLD for tanking things /NIN (with /THF support of course) and stronger than my DRG due to the musth faster TP accumulation rate and fairly competitive WSs.

Next up on the VNM list is to move the SAMs further along their paths, and to complete Vanh's dagger next.

Sept 2010 Update

Here are some of my early thoughts about the Sept 2010 update.

• Kindred's crests and the limit break quest
• Very annoying to introduce a rare drop into the game and have it be required for the limit break quest at the same time. What this means, of course, is hours and hours of people out there camping various mobs trying to get these to drop. At least there are plenty of zones to choose from, but the drop rate is crazy low
• It took me, Valharin, Beelz & Zyn 4 hours to complete just my 5 crests needed to break the quest... and that's only because the three of them conspired to pass me the last one I needed so that we'd have at least one person done! Big thanks you three!
• So many better ways that this could have been done... a little foresight or planning would have helped. Like, they could have introduced Kindred's crests in the previous release, maybe even let them be stored by Shami and use them for whatever other thing they have planned... BCNMs or something. That way, at least people would have already had these ready to go.
• Abyssea & magian trial armors
• It appears that the future of FFXI is going to be locked up entirely in Abyssea. I don't see any real 80+ content being added in non-abyssea zones... (not counting the random high level mobs that are clearly for exp or skilling up in various zones)
• Seems like there is a new "campaign in abyssea" event now called Bastion... Haven't tried this yet, but it sounds interesting. If it is anything like how campaign used to be, it might be fun. I just hope they don't make it tedious to keep doing. I liked campaign until I wanted to take a break and found out that taking a break means to lose your medal unless you abstain from it completely after doing a ton of work. (That's the #1 reason why I simply don't campaign anymore)
• Further more, the new Abyssea job-specific armors (or AF3 as people have been calling them) very clearly outclass everything that has come before, effectively eliminating and shutting down events like Dynamis, Einherjar, Limbus, Salvage, Nyzul Isle, etc. as being out of date and useless. You might be able to argue for some very niche things like sea gorgets/torques/obis, but I wouldn't be surprised if more stuff comes out soon until all slots are filled with job-specific items
• Atma purchasing
• I'm not quite sure how this works yet. In the new abyssea zones, I talked to an Atma Synthesizer who let me buy 6 different Atma. The dialog basically says that you qualify to buy different Atmas from the battles that you've endured, and that different mobs will give you different Atmas.
• Well... it sounds to me like they are trying to encourage people to go exp on different variety of mobs. 6 Atmas feels like the right amount for the mobs that I've exp'ed or farmed on in Abyssea - Bugards, Frogs, Limues, Mandies, Gnoles
• DNC upgrades, BLU nerfs & upgrades, COR nerfs
• DNC - Presto is finally useful! Now that it is on a separate timer, it actually makes sense to use Presto! If only I could figure a way to macro this so that it fires automatically whenever it is up when I use a Step
• BLU - Weird state for BLU... Battery Charge was awesome at 4MP/tick, even more compared to RDM Refresh. Unfortunately, they reduced this down to 3MP/tick, though they increased the duration so that you end up restoring more MP per cast. However, I've always had an emphasis on MP recovery rate and I think of this as a nerf. On the other hand though, BLU picked up another series of spells including one supposedly powerful Goblin Rush
• COR nerf - This is a funny one... the 10 minute duration of a 11 Phantom Roll was a little weird to manage around. You really had to think about what rolls would actually benefit from a 11 roll, and whether to force an 11 using Snake Eyes. I've actually had to use Fold a few times to remove 11s which needed to be replaced. Still, it was fun while it lasted

So... we have all this new content, but it almost entirely tied up in Abyssea. Abyssea also has the stone limitation. Even if you have the Abyssite to speed up how quickly you get a new stone, the most non-exp time you can spend in Abyssea is about 5-6 hours per week.

Essentially you have these 5 hours to do everything in Abyssea. This include NM hunts, exploring, quests, Bastion. Since Abyssea has essentially become THE place to go to for things like exp, armor, weapons and items, doing anything else would be pretty silly. I mean, why go camp NMs when the gear in Abyssea is better? In fact, if you go away from FFXI and take a break, you're rewarded by having tons of stones available for more time to do what you want in Abyssea. About the only thing still worth doing outside of Abyssea is possibly the tedious "kill XXX mobs" weapon trials which you can actually do without entering Abyssea.

In effect, SE has successfully implemented the FFXIV "7 hour limitation" to FFXI. I believe that these changes are done to encourage people to keep their FFXI accounts active and play for about 5-6 hours per week, then play for another 7ish hours in FFXIV, reducing the load on their servers while still collecting money.

Lack of updates - More of a pattern

It has been just over 3 weeks since my last blog post... I'm still here, though feeling a general lack of interest in XI. The lack of updates isn't limited to just me either. The few XI blogs I follow are also down to almost no activity, including GM Dave, Talint's blog and of course, Kanican.

This is... despite the new content added so far, announcements of the next level cap increase, new armor and everything new that we're doing. It's not that we aren't doing new stuff... we actually are doing a lot of new things now (VNMs, Abyssea missions/NMs, even MMMs are now part of the regular stuff.

It's just... it's not really that exciting to blog about.

I guess a big part of it is my general feeling that everything happening in FFXI is transitionary. We've been promised a level 99 cap, and the level cap is increasing at (now) regular intervals of barely enough to get your jobs and subjobs up to the next cap. The level cap increase also means that things that we struggle with now will be a cakewalk in a few months.

It also means that nearly everything we are currently working toward will be obsolete shortly. The most obvious example would be how the new Abyssea Cruor armors completely obsoleted all the ZNM and Nyzul gear, and is obtainable at a fraction of the effort. It really reduces the incentive and reason to go after get and do events since you know that at level 99, there will be some other piece of gear to replace whatever you're currently working on.

Finally, the one thing that might not be transitionary is the Trial of the Magian weapons, or Empyrean weapons. However, there are two major things working against this.
1. SE continually revises the requirements of this trial... and revises it downwards, meaning if you just wait a little, you won't have to put as much effort/time into it
2. The trials become easier as you go up in level

Last Wednesday CTR fought Kukulkan, one of the Abyssea popped NMs that is for the Abyssea mission line. This mob drops a fang that is a requirement for the staff Empyrean weapon. To upgrade the weapon, you need 50 of these in total. The mob can drop between 1-2 fangs. It took our full alliance (really closer to 24 people) 3 weeks to farm and pop this mob 3 times, in which a total of 4 fangs dropped. Furthermore, this wasn't exactly an easy fight. Each pop took about 30 minutes to complete with quite a few deaths and complete concentration from the tanking PLD/NINs and their support crew to avoid wiping.

Granted, we only spent 2 hours per week doing this. It would be, in theory, possible to coordinate an alliance to focus on gathering items and popping this mob to farm fangs. At a rate of 4 fangs / 6 hours, you'd need 18 people to spend in total, 75 hours working on this just to gather the 50 required to upgrade one weapon. And... keep in mind that this is only one stage in god knows how many stages. The level 80 weapon would probably go on further all the way to 99, if SE's marketing is truthful.

Wait another week, then another few months, and possibly in another year, two people could probably duo these mobs on their level 99 jobs. Of course, by then SE probably has some other mob that will need 50 drops from some super-mob that requires 18 people to kill and 4 weeks to farm one pop set if you're lucky. (Supreme Virtue? Omega Warden?)

So, there really is no point in working seriously on Empyrean weapons at this time. Just wait a bit, and the requirements will drop, you'll get stronger, and who knows, maybe SE will offer to sell it to you for purchasing another $50 trinket (or attach it to a FFXIV subscription! Have access to a relic as long as you have an active XIV character!)

On FFXIV
Another big reason behind the transitionary feeling of FFXI would be the imminent launch of FFXIV. Who knows how many people in CTR are planning on quitting XI to go there? Would we be able to field people for upcoming XI events? Is the item that you help someone get going to go completely to waste as they quit XI to go to XIV?

Too many changes at one time is just leading to me not really getting into XI enough to blog about it... Other games beckon for now.

(Side note, my prediction of FFXIV is that it will launch buggy but strong, then rapidly lose people over a 6-18 month period until the SE directors come out and blame the XIV failure on their catering to the stupid western audiences)

Where FFXI is going / Long-term support

We're trying to bring the ZNM event to a close at this point. The content itself is mostly outdated with the gear in it being replaced by easily obtained Abyssea gear. Fuuji intends to replace it with VNMs (and is planning on starting the event earlier) with the intention of working on the "Empyrean Weapons" that SE sold us with the new Vision of Abyssea mini-expansion.

Wait... what? You mean it's not just farm rare/ex items for 3-4 cheaply assembled cutscenes and go do a final battle that has some sort of trick? Oh wait... it's much worse then that. Instead of farming a few rare/ex pop items, you have to go farm... tons of pop items to farm even more pop items to pop even harder mobs to get the rare/ex items... and do it 50 times per weapon you're interested in.

And that's just the beginning.

After talking to Fuuji last night, I decided to finally take a look at what these "Empyrean Weapons" were all about... what it would take to make one, as well as which one to get. I kinda went at this backwards, thinking about what weapon I might potentially want. The draw of these weapons appear to be their very high damage ratings with relatively decent delays, and the potential that they will grow to all the way to level 99 through "magians and other methods" as SE stated.

Job wise:
SCH - No point in a high damaging staff. I don't melee on SCH, and my staff skill is embarrassingly low!
COR - High damage gun would be fun. However, my COR's equip is pretty sub-standard when it comes to shooting, and I have no marksmanship merits. That's one of the big reasons why I use Coffinmaker on COR. I'd be hesitant to give up the accuracy bonus. It is also one of the reasons why I tend to default to Leaden Salute on COR even though it does less damage compared to Slug Shot
DRG - Potentially a good choice. As a DD, higher damage is better. I generally do not have accuracy issues on DRG due to the job's accuracy bonus trait. However, I really don't use DRG that much! The DD role is too simple for me to be entertained with in FFXI for long periods. I'm not sure if it is worth putting effort into a job which I don't use that often
DNC - Considered this for a while... normally it would be my default choice, but for a DNC, the main thing that I'm looking out for is the ability to hit (accuracy) and the ability to get more TP. Damage is a secondary concern. Ideally, I'd have two "occasionally attack" daggers for faster TP gain and simply WS more if I'm in a DD role
PLD - While tanking on PLD generally requires +enmity, sometimes I do break out my Organics to have fun with Vorpal Blade. However, in tanking situations where damage is a component, I usually try to use Atonement spam there, so again, TP gain is more of an issue.
BLU - If I'm doing my job fully on BLU, I rarely swing my sword but instead am constantly casting spells. Furthermore, Chain Affinity would also meant that I would almost never hit 100% TP, especially if I every finish the merits I want there. BLU damage is based on blue magic skill + stats + accuracy, so sword damage wouldn't do much good.

So... not looking too good. The sword at least would be useful on two jobs. For DNC, I think I'd rather be focusing on gaining as much TP as possible. The polearm for DRG might be the one that makes the most sense. However, I rarely use DRG as is... not sure if it would be worth doing.

The Empyrean Trials
The trials for the weapons are fairly standard in format, just varying in the details. They generally go:
- Kill a bunch of lottery pop NMs
- Kill a bunch of Tier II VNMs
- Collect 50 EX items from Tier IV Abyssea NMs.

The first is a pain... lottery pops aren't interesting to do and mainly involve staring at the screen. If you're lucky, you might end up spending 1-2 weeks taking care of these requirements. The second would take longer, but at least the fights would be somewhat interesting and you have potential for some interesting drop items. At this point, Tier II VNMs should be easily duoable or trioable, though doing it with a party/alliance would of course, be more fun.

The third item is a pain. We're talking about 50 EX items from a Tier IV Abyssea NM. This means that in order to even pop the NM, you need to have killed at least 8 NMs before hand and gotten the necessary pop items/key items to pop the next tier. That's also the minimum since the pop items are not a 100% drop from the previous tier. What's even weirder is that the Tier IIIs are key items, so... well... I'm not quite sure how that works.

Finally, the Tier IV you have to kill only has a chance to drop... maybe two of the item you need? So... rinse, repeat a minimum of 25 times for one person. And these are mobs that take an alliance to kill, so multiply the time it takes to do this by the number of people you're doing it for.

Of course, once the level cap hits 99, we'll probably be able to do it a ton faster instead of having to go hunt NMs for 18 different people. We're still looking at a minimum of... (25 + 25*8)*6 = 1,350 kills for a party of 6 (or 4,050 kills for a full alliance!) That's minimum... remember that the mob probably can drop 0-2 of the various items, so... multiply that by how unlucky you think you'll be! Assuming that you can kill one NM every 30 minutes, you can kill a maximum of 8 mobs per week in Abyssea (assuming the default 20hours/stone, 30 minute stone), meaning that it will take 169 weeks to get all the items for a single party(or 506 weeks for an alliance of 18... also known as 10 years!!) Maybe you know a way to speed things up, but there will still be overhead like travel time, gathering time, etc.

Long-term FFXI 
There's one big unknown at the moment... that is, how will SE update this, and the rest of FFXI? The release of FFXIV just around the corner (supposedly in just over a month's time) is another factor here. How will SE handle this?

Well... let's think of how they will handle it from a business point of view. No matter how much you think that they will be loyal to the fans, or that they won't do silly things, at the end of the day, SE wants to bring in money and the decisions that SE makes will reflect that.

Currently, FFXI actually brings money into the company... barely. SE can do a few things to improve this like stop spending as much money on it. i.e.: Reduce the support staff (when was the last time you actually talked to a GM? Or talked to someone on the phone? Or gotten anything more then a stock reply on email?), reduce development costs (Hello mini-expansions and content that an unpaid high school intern could probably put together!)

If FFXI stops bringing in as much money as it did before, SE will have to either reduce costs by taking even further steps (consolidate servers, basically put the game on life support) or simply shut the game down. FFXIV is an interesting point in FFXI's life. Basically, if FFXIV pulls enough players away from XI, SE will have even more incentive to reduce the amount that they spend on XI.

On the other hand, if FFXIV flops, then SE will want to keep XI active just so that they can continue to draw money from the paying customers, as well as to claim that they have something in the MMO market. Sequels do not always succeed. EverQuest 2 and Asheron's Call 2 were good examples of games which did not do as well as their original game. If anything, I can't think of a single MMO sequel which has actually done better compared to the original... Lineage II maybe?

So, SE has every incentive to keep FFXI on life support. Basically, keep whatever player base still stays with XI entertained enough that they keep paying the monthly subscription. You can see that they are basically stretching their existing content out as long as possible and throwing in randomish content to keep people entertained. WotG was released... 3 years ago now? And we still do not have a conclusion. In fact, most people have given up on bothering with this content since there hasn't really been any reason to do so.

FFXI on long-term support
Which... brings me to back to the Empyrean weapons. At first glance, it almost appeared that SE wanted everyone to do the weapons since they advertised it as being associated with the first Abyssea mini-expansion, kinda like how the first three mini-expansions were presented. However, if you look closer at the quests and requirements themselves, you'll see that the effort to even get to the first level 80 phase isn't a minor undertaking. Who knows what the next few trials to get from 80-90, then 90-99 will contain.

While a part of me was hoping that SE would eventually adjust the requirements for these quests, I realize that SE really has no reason to do so. The next update will be when SE is hoping for an exodus of people from XI to XIV, leaving only the FFXI loyalists still playing. For SE, there is every incentive to make things take as long as possible so that loyalists will always have "content" to play. Just think about how long it has taken for them to finally adjust the dynamis drop rates... It was only after they had enough other time-sinks in the game that they bothered to do so. For Empyrean weapons, they have every incentive to keep things as convoluted as possible to keep the hardcore subscribing while they spend fewer and fewer resources updating XI.

Thoughts?

As a side note... I noticed that nearly all the FFXI blogs I frequent, including people who play with us, haven't really updated in months. Even my own blog, which used to update about twice a week, has gone to a once every 2-3 weeks schedule.

DRG relic completed, Abyssea exp, job stuffs, FFXIV

I guess Dynamis probabilities worked in my favor last week!

6/6 on DRG relic armor. That's the 5th complete set of relic so far with BMO/CTR and more importantly, +4 inventory spaces! Currently missing the PLD body and back pieces for my last job. I'm also missing only a couple of pieces for WHM, BST & PUP, all jobs that I would have considered leveling if not for the level cap increase.

I'm not too hopeful of being able to complete the PLD set given the stupidly low drop rates of these items, especially considering that we've been going after these items in every Dynamis for as long as I can remember.  I'm also not very hopeful of completing my DNC relic +1 pieces. Funny thing is that I'm only missing the relic -1 feet & hands which are not the super-rare Tav pieces.

In any case, Dynamis seems to be wrapping up as an event. With almost everyone at level 80 now, the event itself is becoming a joke at how quickly we plow through the mobs. Unfortunately the drop rate for the things we need is also a joke since we're barely getting any drops at all now (yes, with TH4) and rarely anything people actually want. With new events and new items popping up now with Abyssea and Walk of Echos, I wouldn't be surprised if interest in Dynamis started to taper off. Unfortunately, there are still lots of items in Dynamis that have attributes that can only be obtained via Dynamis. Many of the newer jobs like SCH & COR for example, have job-specific buffs that can only be found on relic armor.

Abyssea exp
Nice part about Abyssea exp is how quickly you can finish a job... The bad part is that it really requires a dedicated amount of time to do.

This past Saturday, we did yet another Abyssea exp alliance... 9am - 3pm Pacific time. I managed to take SCH from 17k into 75 to capped at 80 plus two merits in that time. This was the 3rd job I took to 80 (or near 80) using Abyssea, and 2nd last job that I have to complete. My COR is my last sub-80 job at level 77 and will likely be completed next weekend during another Abyssea exp session.

The draining part about Abyssea is simply the time it takes to do. Even in a properly executed Abyssea exp alliance, you're still looking at spending at least the first two hours getting into a proper chaining position where you can expect chest drops and time extensions, as well as the exp rate to increase to a reasonable amount. It really makes it tiring to actually do one of these sessions, but the alternative -- spending many more days exping in various parties in different locations -- is even more painful to get a job to 80.

Still... I can't imagine doing this all over again for all 6 jobs for the next level cap increase.

Job Stuffs
Since getting more jobs to 80, my perception on my jobs has changed somewhat.

* Dancer
Still overall my favorite in terms of soloing and healing capability. The ability to do heal people outside my party has made this job even more powerful, though I am disappointed that Healing Waltz does not work. The changes to the job itself haven't been really that useful -- I rarely use Presto and Climatic Flourish is amusing, but overall not something I would really use for damage. The biggest change has really been Sekkinoki since that gives DNC/SAM a lot more damage dealing potential. DNC/NIN still wins for overall survivability and damage reduction in nearly all situations.

* Paladin
Native Phalanx and that new Divine Emblem job ability have really enhanced the ability of a PLD/NIN to tank. However, the nerfing of the RDM enmity spells has also severely crippled a PLD/RDM's ability to hold hate. PLD is no longer my #2 favorite job simply due to this, though I still like tanking in PLD/NIN situations.

* Blue Mage
BLU was my first job due to the flexibility and capability of the job, going from anywhere from heavy DD to magical nuker, debuffer or even a full-time support job. The main reason why I avoided playing BLU was due to the support that it required in terms of Refresh. This update gave the spell Battery Charge, a 4MP/tick Refresh that lasts for 150 seconds. Yes, that is higher compared to the RDM Refresh spell, and pretty much means that I almost never run out of MP on BLU anymore.

BLU also got some other interesting spells, including a new full-strength Haste spell that lasts almost twice as long as the normal Haste spell, a new healing spell that also increases attack & magical attack, a regen spell and some more magical nuking spells. Furthermore, BLU/RDM gains the ability to Convert, meaning that a BLU could effectively go on forever. However, I haven't dared to actually use BLU/RDM for anything yet given the amount of hate BLU already pulls simply from doing damage and casting healing spells

Since the update, I've actually been pumping my merits into BLU. Just one more upgrade to Assimilation, then I can move on to completing Enchainment, Chain Affinity Recast and Physical Potency. BLU may end up being the 2nd job I actually finish meriting!

* Dragoon, Scholar
Both of these jobs are now 80. Neither has really gained much from the update. The most I can say is that DRG/SAM can now WS a little more often, and SCH/RDM can now Convert and never run out of MP.

FFXIV
The Final Fantasy XIV beta has started up, and I popped in for a quick look. Pretty much nothing has changed. It's still just as laggy and slow as before. It's also just as pretty as before, graphics looking like they are taken out of a CG movie. However, gameplay is pretty horrible and boring still, with no direction for plot, no guidance and... well, considering this is the second time I played through the opening sequence and it *still* took me about 20 minutes to figure out how to get out of the very beginning area... (it's not obvious and there's a gate preventing you from running directly out) You should see the shouts of people asking basic things like how to fight or form parties! (actually, how do you form parties? I still don't know how to properly do this)

Except for the opening cutscene, there really hasn't been any real NPC dialog, with everyone I talk to so far giving very generic, forgettable statements. It's as though someone turned off the storytelling element that SE used to be good at? Also, I thought that SE added a "new player" tutorial/set of quests in FFXI recently... years after the game launched... You'd think that they would be applying the lessons they learnt to their new game? I haven't seen anything resembling a tutorial or anything to teach you how to do anything in XIV. Keep in mind that this game is supposed to launch in less than 2 months.

Still.. it's amusing to see hundreds of people camping rats like NMs :)

Abyssea - Current impressions

I'm sure that by now everyone actively playing FFXI has already discovered the craziness that is Abyssea, so this is mainly a post for those who have retired from XI, or are taking a break :)

Abyssea & the level cap
Back when the level cap increases was first announced, the first thought I had was how painful it would be to exp all my jobs to cap, and that I'd probably end up dropping most of them in favor of my favorite one or two jobs. The 60-75 stretch is the most painful for me simply due to the high amounts of exp required. The amount of exp for 76-80 does increase, but at a reduced rate. In total, you end up needing almost 200k exp to get from 75 to 80. By previous merit party standards, this is still a long time, about 9-10 hours assuming an average 20-24k/hour rate.

Well, Abyssea pretty much turns exp around and makes it a simple one night/afternoon affair. This is how it works:

Abyssea has an initial time limit of 90/120 minutes depending on entry conditions. Killing mobs inside Abyssea gives you the possibility of dropping chests which may give exp, temp items, augmented items, cruor (the currency used in Abyssea) or more imporantly, time extensions. There is a semi-hidden "chain" factor in play here -- the more mobs you kill that are the same type, the higher the probability that a chest will appear. There are also other factors at play here, such as how the mob is killed (WS, magic, or something else). As you kill more mobs from the same family, your exp/mob killed will also increase. Initially you might get about 80-120 exp per kill, but as you kill more and more, this will go up gradually. For CTR's initial run, we peaked at 610 exp per kill, and yes, we were killing at merit party rates of one mob every 20 seconds or so. Also, the amount of exp you get isn't affected by the number of people.

Yes, this means that exping with a full alliance is what happens inside Abyssea. In fact, it is ideal since more people = faster kills.

The trick to Abyssea exp is that it takes quite a long time for you to "ramp up" in experience, chest drop rates and time extensions. The first time we did this, it took about 70 minutes before things started to noticeably improve. However, once they started improving, things really took off. We were in zone doing this for about 4 1/2 hours when I went from 17k into level 75 to 16k away from level 80 on BLU. That's about 48k/hour including the initial 1 hour ramp-up period, and we could have kept going except that it was already nearly 2am Pacific and people on the east coast were starting to see the sun rise. People have gone for 9+ hours, and many people have already capped all their jobs and merits in this system. One Abyssea exp session would bring you from 75-80 easily, and I can see this being the way people level all the way up to level 99. However... I also wonder about people being in Abyssea for 9, 12, 24 hours... wasn't there an article about how FFXI makes people physically sick some time ago? Is someone writing Yahoo! about this new development?

The only downside to Abyssea is the time it takes to ramp up. While this is awesome when you have 5, 6, 10, 12 hours to exp a bunch of levels, if all you want is 10 merits, or if you don't have that much time to spend in game, Abyssea simply wouldn't be worth it. The initial ramp-up time would cut down on your exp/hour since the really good exp only comes from when you've been doing it for a few hours. If you're capping merits, taking a break to go spend them would mean that you're resetting your Abyssea exp "chain" and have to ramp-up again. The other possible downside is that if you join an Abyssea group that isn't successful, you'll lose your time for the day and have to wait for more entry stones to pop.

Still... if not for the discover of Abyssea exp, I probably would not be considering leveling my other jobs. Right now, I've gotten DNC & PLD to 80, COR to 77 (through traditional means), BLU to 79, nearly 80 through Abyssea and plan on taking DRG & SCH through weekend Abyssea sessions to hit 80.

Abyssea & armor
Cruor is the new type of currency inside Abyssea. You get it by simply killing mobs or opening chests. As you can imagine, cruor is extremely easy to get with exp alliances, with a single session easily netting over 40k cruor.

There are three sets of armor that can be purchased with cruor, one for light melees, one for heavy melees and one for mages. These are all level 78 pieces and each piece is relatively cheap, 3k for most pieces, 5k for the body piece. And... most of these pieces easily replace almost all reasonably obtained level 75 gear in the game.

Yes, we're talking about Askar, Denali, Goliard, Enkidu, most Hachiryu, Homam and other pieces being basically replaced by gear that can be bought cheaply with easily earned currency. You can even buy these pieces off the AH too! Yes, there are people who will argue that such-and-such piece has 1 more str, but for most people, this basically levels the playing field. Someone who hasn't played the game for years can simply pick up the expansion and be on 90% equal footing to someone who spent the last few years collecting endgame gear. I'm guessing that future expansions will contain gear that will blow these pieces away, making the old "endgame" pieces obsolete unless SE makes up some funny new system to accommodate them. (Trials of the magians for armor anyone?)

The funny part is that many people are complaining about the design of the new armor.. I don't see anything wrong with it! I think it looks cute! See!

(This is the Aurore Doublet set, light melee for DNC, BLU, COR, THF and others)

Abyssea & NM drops/time management
On a side note, Impact has been poking some NMs in Abyssea too, most notably the Thew Bomblet NM. This is an ammo item with Str+2 and Attack+8. It was surprising easy to get with a relatively high drop rate and fast repop time for the ??? to pop the NM. However, it still sells for quite a bit of gil, which is a little surprising when you first look at it.

The thing about Abyssea is that there are tons other NMs, as well as quests and other things to do. By limiting us by the amount of time we can actually spend in Abyssea(30 minutes every 20 hours, stackable), SE has put an artificial limit on how much you can get out of the expansion. Do you want to go farm NMs? Go explore? Go learn BLU spells? or go exp? It's really an ingenious method of controlling how much people get out from the expansion. People are basically encouraged to go do other things between their Abyssea sessions.

In theory, this will also let SE stretch FFXI out over a longer time since... well, we're basically rationed by SE how much time we're allowed to spend in Abyssea.

More update impressions, glitches

Update has been out for a while... here are some randomish pictures and impressions.

One of the new job traits that came out of this release is "skillchain bonus" which is given to DNC & SAM. This happens when one of the jobs close a skillchain, and the resulting extra damage shows up. Here is an example of me closing a darkness skillchain for more than what my weaponskill did. In this case, it was a 16% increase in damage compared to normal.

Abyssea is buggy! If you level sync inside abyssea, you'll get some additional exp compared to spreading the levels out, but the difference isn't that much. We're talking about a 10-15% difference between a level 80 person and a level 75. However, the funny thing is that if you do level sync, for some reason whenever you kill a mob, you might get the level up animation completely at random. In this case, none of us were actually leveling up to level 76. I think I was actually level 77 at this point and we were synced to 76.

This one is funny... I R0'ed and DC'ed right in the middle of a MMM session. It was enough of an R0 to kick me out of FFXI, but I managed to get right back in from POL instead of having to quit the game. However, once I was in, my auto-translate was completely screwed up and everything that was in auto-translate came out with the same Japanese phrase

Now this is a fun one...  inside Abyssea, you can sometimes get chests that will appear after you kill mobs. Some of these chests are huge, such as this one over here that is much, much bigger than a taru! It can probably hold 3-4 tarutaru bodies!

This is what I call cutting it close :)


Other Impressions
So far, I'm finding that I'm liking the Abyssea aspect of this update a lot... I guess we're kinda getting what we paid for here. The time/stone constraints aren't that big of a deal really. 1 1/2 hours for an event is a significant time, enough to make progress, but not enough to really burn out on doing it like Dynamis. The rewards from this event are interesting too, making it a possible exp area, as well as a good point system that allows you to buy armor like Einherjar instead of hoping for lucky drops.

The level cap raise to 80 hasn't been quite as painful as I feared. Managed to get DNC up to 80 fairly quickly, and of my other jobs, I've gotten PLD to 78 and COR to 77. Allied Rings help a lot, and the new potential places for exp have helped, plus of course, MMM.

What is kinda annoying, however, is how the new equipment is basically making a lot of older gear obsolete. The Enkidu armor set that I got through ZNMs is basically going to be completely replaced by the Aurore Doublet Set. The Perle Hauberk set would be good for DDs, and replaces Askar as a much easier to get set of armor. With the level caps going higher up in the near future, I'm wondering if it is even worth doing events for the generically good pieces of armor?

I mean, there are certain situational pieces that will always be good... for example, I don't see them making a replacement for the RDM hat or THF gloves, nor do I see them putting "enhances jig effect" on a generic piece of armor... (though wasn't there talk about an "AF3" line in the higher levels?) However, multi-job pieces that have the usual suspects... accuracy, str, haste, MP, cure potency, recast time, etc. such as Hachiryu, Homam, Nashira, Enkidu, Askar, Goliard... I wouldn't be surprised if there would be an easy to obtain level 88 piece that blows them away, making it pointless to do those events.

Another interesting thing is the "trial of the magians" developments. As expected, they expanded the paths even further. However, what disturbed me was how they changed. If I had actually spent more time on this, I would have been aiming for the Athame with "occasionally attacks twice" through the VNM route. However, the "solo" route which "merely" involves killing thousands of mobs develops into a dagger that "occassionally attacks 2-3 times" which is a much better dagger for DNC. Given that these daggers are only at level 80, would this mean that the future weapons will change even more? Could someone spend weeks, months on one of these trials only to end up with the wrong weapon?

Surprisingly, FFXI has gone from a fairly static place where you know what you'll be getting to... well... having a lot of uncertainty and... to an extent, excitement. Definitely a strange time to be playing XI, and who knows what the future brings.

June 2010 update impressions

Whee... possibly the update with the biggest impact to FFXI has arrived. With level caps being raised to level 80, this update has the potential to totally change how we play the game (or even IF we play the game).

First off... here are my impressions on the new content.

Abyssea (or more specifically, Visions of Abyssea)
The plot for this so far is pretty simple and straightforward. There's an alternate dimension which looks like our world, but where there are tons of tougher beasts that have basically beaten civilization to the point of collapse. Some of the interesting changes to the world:

- The sky is a different color (kinda explained in the cutscenes)
- There are no crags, at least not in mea. So, if you think about the FFXI storyline, Zilart and stuff never existed? Quite possibly there aren't any cities and all that are left are refugee camps
- Lots of weird/different mobs, in addition to reskins of the mobs we know of. There are some giant-worm creatures around, and some weird floating things. I think there were some released screenshots of squid-type mobs from sea around too.

Some random screenshots of Abyssea:

The last pic is where the crag of Mea is supposed to be.

Some things we've discovered so far:

- Mobs have some weird aggro rules... some mobs that don't aggro or link will suddenly either become aggressive, or summon reinforcements after you kill a bunch of them

- There are random ???s scattered around the zone that ask you to feed them various items. I assume that these items drop from the mobs around the area, and maybe it'll pop a NM

- There are chests in the zone, some of which appear after you kill mobs, some of which are simply there. They have different opening conditions, and can do anything from give you Cruor, restore your HP to... make you glow funny. Also, some of the chests are Mimics which enjoy eating tarus

- Speaking of Cruor, this is a new currency system. I guess you can think of it as similar to nyzul tokens since you can use it to buy the new level 78 armor sets, or to buy temp items or teleport around the zone. In the various zones are these weird stone waypoint-like devices that you have to activate. We activated one last night that cost 400 cruor, but I think that this is on the high end for cruor cost as this was all the way across the zone, and it was labeled #8

- There are a bunch of NPCs near each entry area which have some quests... no idea how to complete the quests, but at least a few of them are fetch quests or HELM quests.

- There are also no exp chains, so it doesn't matter how long it is between kills. However, your body does seem to have some weird glowing that increases when you kill faster. No idea what that does. There are random mobs around that seem to glow and give higher amounts of exp (400-500 for a single VT kill)

- There are also NMs around the zone. We found a little rabbit in La Theine that hits for 4-500

- Abyssea is a dangerous place for tarutarus. In the two times I've gone in so far, both times had over 100% taru fatalities, with tarus usually dying a couple of times

Personal feedback:

- 30 minutes every 20 hours is just... stupid. I do hope that this is a temporary measure to reduce the load on the server. 30 minutes is barely enough to walk out of the area, and forces you to basically skip over all the text that the NPCs give you. The most you can save up is 90 minutes, and that is waiting for 3 days. I'm feeling quite ripped off by the $10 price. Maybe we should give a condition to SE that they can take our monthly payment from us, but only use the money during the time we are logged into FFXI? The rest of the time they have to give the money back to us.

- On the other hand, I can appreciate the trickery that they've used here. 30 minutes means that it'll take at least a couple of weeks before we've entered the zone enough to start figuring out what to do and what the trick is. In WotG, people figured out how to sign up for campaign and start doing campaign ops within a few hours of release. Just imagine what WotG would be if we could only enter WotG zones for 30 minutes a day! They would have extended the life of FFXI by at least 3-5x and could have put off developing FFXIV!

- The reuse of the zone just sparks of complete laziness... Come on! I'm sure you can hire some unpaid interns to create new textures, or at least lay out the zone differently? I mean, you don't even have to pay them!

- I'm liking the idea of using Cruor for buying the new gear. It comes easily even if you have no idea what you're doing and just running around killing things

I'm cautiously optimistic about Abyssea. It's a new area, new rules and a place to explore. The time limit is what goes against it, making this yet another "twice a week" event instead of something you can go do on your own or whenever you want. If I want to go in and explore, I can't do so if I want to do this with friends in a party situation. Doing quests isn't something to do solo too, unless you want to abandon doing this with a party. I guess a schedule would have to be worked out

Walk of Echos

REALLY flimsy plot here... a moogle declares that you can enter this super-secret zone? Erm... okay... I guess the zone looks pretty at least. 1000 gil entry fee, no big deal, and you get to see some pretty zones. At least they weren't lazy this time around. Maybe they found some unpaid interns!

Some random pics:

Up to 36... random... people can enter one of the zones at any one time. You get 30 minutes to do whatever you want, and there are no claiming rules for mobs. Also, the mobs move fast, and pretty much patrol the entire zone.

The one we ended up entering was full of antlions (#3 I believe). There were a few ordinary sized antlions running around which a party was able to dispatch, but also running around was a giant one that very quickly ate everyone in zone!

This... feels like a level 80+ place. I wouldn't want to touch the big one without a full alliance (maybe two alliances) and without level 80. It hits hard, fast and felt like fighting something like Tinnin or Tyger. Also, it wasn't just one giant antlion, but multiple running around in the zone. That's also only on the first level. I read a report that a THF managed to flee down 4 levels before getting demolished by the mobs at the bottom.

The good news is that there is no exp loss in Walk of Echos. The even better news is that there ARE skillups, so... maybe this will be a good place to go skillup your weapons after you SMN burn to 80.

Other thoughts on this new feature:

- Entrance needs some work, maybe better positioning. In Xarc, close to a well known BLM-burn location means that people going to it would probably lag the BLM party there. Not very nice placement

- Xarc[S] also means that the giant flying dragon will get many more snacks as people zone in (or try to teleport out) and get eaten in one shot

- Not sure how good this reward system is. The notes imply that the people who contribute the most will get rewards. However, it also says that there is a lotting system... More people trying to get killshot on mobs? It's annoying enough in campaign... 

- Not being able to "lock" a zone has some dangerous issues too. To take on the big mobs, we'll probably need some sort of strategy and have to work together in an alliance. However, any joe who walks into the area can zone in, aggro the whole zone and MPK people who are actively trying to get progress

- Plus there is the lotting issue... Just imagine entering a Dynamis, going to arrange to kill the bosses then have some random person zone in, lot all the AF and coins and proceed to run around the whole zone popping every mob they can

Holding off on Walk of Echos at the moment. Unlike Abyssea, the 'recast' time for this event is more reasonable, 30 minutes in, then you can re-enter in the "next vanadiel day" with the only cost being 1k gil. If anything, this might end up being a decent skillup area even if nothing else comes from it.

Other update thoughts

Here are just some random thoughts that came through my mind after exploring the update and reading up on things.

Dancer

Big update for Dancer which addresses some of the biggest weaknesses of the job. Being able to use Waltzes on people outside the party should go along way to changing how curing DNCs are used. This really has the potential to put DNC as the #1 curing job for larger events. With proper cooperation from WHMs, MP should no longer be an issue for long events.

The only problem I've run into for curing DNC + WHM combinations is that most good WHMs consider themselves the main healer. What will frequently end up happening is that both a DNC & WHM will heal someone at the first moment that they see damage being taken which ends up wasting MP & TP. Since a DNC's heals are instant, the DNC's heals will generally hit first. In that kind of duo-healing situation, it really needs a WHM to take a backup healer mentality, focusing on removing status effects, giving buffs and curing only when necessary as a backup curer.

The addition of Divine Waltz II at a higher level will help tackling AoEs. I think my moogle expansion hat with the -waltz recast is the better choice here compared to Waltz potency from relic since it gets me back into curing. Plus, I believe the HP cured/second is actually higher due to the reduction in timer

The other enhancements to DNC are all oriented towards dealing damage:

- Native dual wield - While this does increase TP gained, the big win on dual wield is that it increases damage-over-time

- Skillchain Bonus at level 45 - This is very interesting because SAM doesn't get this until level 78! Is SE expecting DNCs to skillchain more? Testing shows that this seems to be about a 15-20% boost in damage. People who /DNC at 90 should be able to take advantage of this. If you close a darkness skillchain, the darkness damage ends up being higher than your WS damage.

- Conserve TP & Sekkanoki with /SAM - With these two abilities, even a curing DNC can actually weaponskill even more frequently without worrying about not having TP to cure. I already WS when I have 5 finishing moves or meditate ready for use. With Sekkanoki, I can WS even more often to contribute more damage, and more importantly put evasion down on more mobs.

- Critical Attack Bonus & Climatic Flourish - Not exactly sure what these two do yet, but they appear to have to do with more critical hits. Critical Attack bonus is only available for WAR, THF & DNC and has a description that it improves power of critical hits. Climatic Flourish is supposed to "allow you to deal critical hits". If these stack with the skillchain bonus, it could make a DNC focusing on DD do even more damage.

I'm under the impression that SE developers are not exactly sure how they want DNC to develop. At lower levels, it is a buffing/curing job with a focus on -enmity. At 75, SE gives us +enmity gear, and even +enmity merit abilities. At 45, then later at 80, SE turns around and gives us DD abilities and traits. It'll be interesting to see how this ends up working for DNC.


Blue Mage
I didn't pay too much attention to the BLU enhancements at first, but closer examination shows that BLU actually got quite a few interesting enhancements. We now have our own native Refresh (self-target only), a full power haste to replace Refueling, and a interesting cure and buff move that not only restores as much HP as a Cure IV, but also enhances attack for whoever we cure.

Besides the new spells, BLU/RDM is now an interesting possibility for BLU, essentially giving us an unlimited MP pool to do damage. Finally, BLU is very much more effective against VT or lower mobs. In Abyssea, all we've encountered so far are T & VT mobs, other then the NMs, so BLU might end up being a very effective job for this area. I'm quite curious to see how BLU ends up at level 80.


Paladin
PLD didn't receive much in terms of enhancements, but due to the enmity nerfs that probably targeted RDM/NIN tanking, PLD/RDM has become significantly weaker when distance tanking single mobs.

I was talking to Kelhor about this and how this might affect our strategies for various events. Basically, it boils down to PLD/RDM only working for events where you use bar spells to generate enmity. For single-target tanking such as Oryu or JoL, PLD/RDM isn't as effective anymore. The most likely solution to this would be PLD/DRK, which still has a decent selection of hate tools including Stun, the Absorb-* series of spells and the various job abilities like Last Resort and Souleater.

Personally, the nerf to PLD/RDM has turned me off from exping on PLD. For starters, I'm really not interested in leveling DRK from 1-49. I don't even have DRK unlocked!

Scholar
The new Libra ability looks quite interesting. By showing everyone's enmity as a % of the top person at the enmity list, it should make things like HNMs safer. Just check enmity levels once in a while, and if some DD is too close to the hate cap, have them back off. I'm not certain if this works in alliances, but if it does, then I'd definitely want a Scholar along for the next time we do Tinnin or Tyger.

I'm also highly amused by the outrage that people are expressing about Accession not working with Haste. I guess most of them are WHMs hoping to be able to cut out their haste cycle. I'm even more amused that SE bothered with this since it seems to me that it would take even more effort to make an exception to Haste. It feels kind of strange... I mean, I guess they want people to be stuck doing haste cycles?

Personally, I haven't been playing SCH much lately. I leveled it mainly for the nuking capabilities to help out in Limbus, and because the AF looked cute. This is probably going on the back burner and might not see the light until much later

Dragoon
Conserve TP is a job trait that only three jobs get, Dragoon, Dancer and Ranger. I'm surprised that Samurai didn't get it, but I guess they don't need it? With Sekkanoki coming down to level 40, DRG suddenly becomes a lot more interesting for DD since DRGs can, in theory, get more TP faster, and WS more. Maybe DRG can get closer to SAM for being a top tier DD job.

Personally, while my DRG is entertaining, I generally don't like going to events as a DD simply due to the lack of control DDs have over the flow of an event. You're just one of the cogs in a wheel, there to do one thing only. If things go wrong, DDs can rarely salvage things

Corsair
I'm highly amused at the new movement speed roll, and the new attributes of rolling a 11. I guess running across a zone won't be as big of a chore anymore! However, I am also appreciating movement a lot more due to the long distances we have to run around in Abyssea. Given the time limit in the zone, I'd say that a BRD or COR who knows when to use the movement speed buffs is a huge benefit to Abyssea.

With Caster's Roll and the level cap at 80, COR now gets an interesting role in a PLD/NIN tank party. With the Fast Cast of Caster's Role and the Refresh of Evoker's roll, COR/WHM might become a viable replacement for a BRD in a pinch. The ultimate tank party now becomes 2x PLD/NIN, WHM, RDM, BRD, COR for maximum Refresh and best speed for Utsusemi recasts!

Finally, COR/WHM also gets Haste now at level 80, further reinforcing this and BRD/WHM as the ultimate support jobs.

Personally, I could barely afford to level COR to 75. I don't think I can afford to pay for 75-99, given the amount of exp and how long it would take, so COR is likely to be the last job I'll touch.

Other stuff
Just some thoughts on other things...

Trials of the Magians - Supposedly they lowered the requirements for these quests. For my trials though, I didn't see any differences. I'm aiming for the "occasionally attacks twice" dagger. I'm currently on the "kill black triple stars x3" trial, and it really is a trial given the annoying pop conditions for this trial. I'm not sure if/when I'll actually work on this. It's very frustrating to spend hours (at half an hour at a shot) to not get any pops. Furthermore, they did add more trials to further upgrade the weapon past level 75. It seems that the new trials require even more drops from somewhere else. Not looking forward to doing this, but I know I'll have to in the near future

Level cap quest - I'm amused at the requirements... 3 merits + 5 kindred seals. I was joking with some people that there would be a quest and that it would be 10 merit points. I guess SE gave us a break there! I had 7 merits saved up for exactly this possibility so I'm happy at how easy this quest was to finish.

Level cap increase - Talint has an interesting blog post about the level cap increase concerning the amount of exp required to go to level 80, and of course, to level 99. He also talks about the sheer contempt that SE has for their player base. I'm in full agreement over the contempt that SE, or at least, the Final Fantasy teams have towards their player base. Those who read my blog know how much I didn't like FFXIII. There's a big reason why I haven't played the FFXIV beta for over a month now.

SE has reduced the rate at which the exp for the next level increases. I was fully expecting level 76-77 to require 46,000 exp, 77-78 to require 48,000 to hatch the previous pattern between 70-75. Instead, they are increasing it at a rate of 500 more per level, which... is somewhat more tolerable. If we take an average rate of 20k/hour (taking advantage of things like allied rings, level sync, etc.), it would be possible to go from the beginning of level 76 to barely level 80 in 9 hours of straight exp.

Ya, 9 hours -.-

Not counting overhead of gathering people for a party, or seeking

Or finding a camp. At least with the adjustment of the "distribution and level of certain monsters", there are new possibilities of places to exp. However, I don't see this opening up anytime soon.

I'm not quite sure if I want to take multiple jobs up to 99 right now. The thought of having to do 9+ hours of exp just for one job is already... painful. If I were to take PLD up, I'd have to level DRK as well to be fully effective. BLU might be interesting to take up, though I'd have to go spell farming again...

We'll see what happens in the next couple of weeks.

Hmm... how much does it cost for a leech spot in a SMN burn again?


Other "non-update" stuff
Some more random stuff :)

Fuuji put together a group to do Fiat Lux, the stupid Shadow Lord campaign op. The party was: RDM(Fuuji), SCH(me), Tristenn(DRK), Mday(WAR), Cron(SAM) and Vanh(BRD).

First off, this isn't an easy BC ~.~ Annoying hate reset moves meant that I ended up having to choose between letting people die, or pulling hate and dying myself. I died three times in the BC, twice with RR2 up, and I had to use a Hi-Reraiser simply due to running out of MP for Reraise. We also had to have Vanh sac-pull the extra summons the the Shadow Lord brings up, sacrificing more tarutaru in the name of drops.

Anyway, it was a relatively long fight, but at the end of the way we managed to win thanks to Tristenn holding Shadow Lord while we were recovering. We ended up with complete crap as drops.

At the end of the day, the worst part about this BC wasn't the fight itself, but the wait to get in. When we arrived, there were 7 parties already there waiting to enter, so we got in line behind them. Only one party can fight at a time, so this ended up being over an hour of simply waiting there, unable to do anything else in game while waiting our turn. When we finished up and left, there were about 15 parties in line.

To make things worse were the complete jackasses who would arrive, jump ahead of the line and enter ahead of everyone else. Yes, the Cerberus/Hades server has complete assholes. I blisted them and will make their names available if people want. These are the absolute scum of the planet and deserve to be hung upside down from their toenails while people beat them up with rusty picks. These are the people for whom I hope that hell truly exists. If you know of someone who jumps lines, you had better give them a huge /slap, warn them never to do this again or else cut off all friendship with such people

Oh ya, GMs are completely useless, but that won't stop me from entering GM calls as many times as I want. After all they are supposed to be customer service.

In other news... I tried out my Novio earring on some mobs for some fun damage