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)