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.