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.