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!