Abyssea - Casual Or Hardcore ?

After reading a lot of posts on different websites like ffxiah, alla, BG on abyssea, a lot of people consider abyssea the event "that everyone was waiting", especially "casual" players, whatever that means.

* I have seen reports of 5 hours exp parties in abyssea being awesome - how is that casual ?

* I checked the requirement for Verethragna, the empyrean H2H :

It requires 50 "Two-leaf Chloris Bud" ; this drops from "Chloris", an abyssea NM with unknown drop rate, not 100%. Requirements for popping Chloris are 4 key items :

*Veinous Hecteyes Eyelid => requires killing "Olphanim" not 100%
*Torn Bat Wing => requires killing "Treble Noctules" not 100%
*Gory Scorpion Claw => requires killing "Hedeteted" not 100%
*Mossy Adamantoise Shell => requires killing "Chukwa" not 100%

olphanim requires 3 "rare" items : "Bloodshot Hecteye" "Shriveled Wing" and a "Shriveled Pincer" - which themselves drop from either normal mobs or NMs that requires another item to pop. Hedetet and treble noctules work the same. Chukwa doesn't require pop (key) items.


Poping just *one* Chloris seems like more of a headache than poping a tier4 ZNM or the tier4 VNM, and you need 50 of its drop (hopefully 100% drop rate), making the difficulty to get the item much longer than getting a pandemonium warden drop.


How is this casual ? Did SE really manage to make us pay 10$ for a retardly time consuming event. It's not like Chloris is the only NM looked after, as there is one equivalent for each weapon it seems, and there a lot of other NMs dropping gear.

Did we really get an event 10x more *** blocking than Salvage ? Doing NMs in abyssea is not exactly the same as normal exp, you will quickly consume your time and be only able to enter once every few days alla dynamis/limbus.

Casuals suck

/hurray double forum posts!!!!!

this thread looks eerily familiar

edit: beaten :(

I'm going to trash the other thread with the same title.

Going from 75-80 in a few hours sounds casual to me, as opposed to looking for a party for 4 hours, and then EXPing for two. You can just /search the zone, usually alliances have spots open; if not, Whitegate is usually flooded with shouts for this.

Empyrean trials are a lot more solo/casual friendly than Relic, and Empyreal weapons.

If they made it ridiculously easy, then it wouldn't be worth it, would it?

Okay, what makes Abyssea "Casual" is not the content, but the implementation. Abyssea is incredibly flexible, this is what makes it great for "Casual" players.

-> Without the need to stick to rigid Scheduals, players do not feel as if they are "Losing" out by not going immedietly on cooldown.

-> NM's are generous, with fast cooldowns, great spoils, and respectable, non soul-deadening drop rates.

-> A wide variety of jobs and job combinations work in Abyssea, and large alliances are a plus, negating the "Elitist Only" stigma of most of the other exp camps in the game.

-> Abyssea is dynamic, it adjusts itself to your performance. If you are killing fast, monsters will respawn fast.



Even if you were working on one of the Empyrean weapons, a "Hardcore" and "Casual" Player would have the same chance. 30minutes every 20hours. Empyrean weapons appear to be the third tier of Relic weapons, opening up with their high DPS, and likely finishing with some decent augments at later content updates, as such, they are designed to be accessible but still time consuming. There is a difference between the two, which I will now explain.

Accessibility is Ease of Entry. For Example, abyssea, with it's flexible system, allows anyone, virtually anytime, to hop on in and accomplish something. Looking at something like Kings, with their fixed spawn windows, only the Hardcore of Hardcore will have a high chance to obtain anything, where a Casual Player, who might have a brief window of say, 4 hours of play a day, would maybe see two to five HNM's in that time slot, before they are gone for another week or two.

Time Consuming Means, that once you access the content (or whatever) it still requires a considerable investment. The main difference here in abyssea, is the time limit cap, which limits the amount of effort you can put on a single trip. This means that generally, a "Casual" player and a "Hardcore" Player will have roughly the same chance in Abyssea.




Casual and Hardcore in regards to an MMO are kind of moot, the real line of "Casual" and "Hardcore" comes from depth, not time investment. Portal, for example, is a very deep and engaging game, but it can be completed in just a few hours. Peggle, is a simple toy that can make you forget what day it is, because you've been dribbling like a retard glaring at the shiny colors for 19 hours.

You will have to schedule abyssea if you go for hardcore content. Abyssea requires more people than the 6 for salvage for instance. You are not going to convince anyone that gathering 6 peeps (in the optic of doing a salvage run) is easier than 10 peeps (in the optic of farming higher tiers NMs).



Have to kill the last boss 50 times at least so you still have to kill lower tier a HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE amount of time since they don't drop 100%. Upping the droprate is pointless if you have to kill it a lot more.

I've never noticed the elitist only attitude for "normal" exp. The elitist attitude for job choice, I agree, but technically any DD can replace other DD in events like salvage/limbus/dynamis/einherjar. Saying that large alliance is a plus is quite silly, easy stuff can only be done in low man parties. Anyone remember the hours of shouting to just get an easy CoP mission done (6 people) ? Farming abyssea NMs is no different, probably harder, you still need an party/ally of people sharing your own interest. Going for H2H empyreal weapon is a waste of time for the dude that wants the katana or the dagger.




Going for NM doesn't realistically allow you to enter whenever you want. You'll have to wait a few days. This is going to be the same annoying "*** blocking" as limbus or dynamis. So this is wrong.


Which means that the casual player has no chance at the content he paid unless he is ready to get his level 80 in three years maybe ?

Some thoughts:

- Many NMs in salvage could be done with less than a party. Aside from just having low drop rates, there was really nothing "cockblocking" about salvage at all. Well, unless you're like me and you found it incredibly tedious. I'm not really sure what you mean about that.

- Abyssea seems very alliance-friendly. A lot of the NMs can be done with a party or so, but your best results will probably be from going with your linkshell and splitting into several smaller groups to quickly make progress. That's not entirely necessary, though. The other day I popped the Thew Bomblet NM after EXPing on the Pachypodiums. People had a lot of extra time after we'd finished EXPing, and we were able to pop/kill 4 and still exit without cutting into the time we accrued from EXP.

- In the event you're doing Abyssea for NMs and not EXP, the max amount of time you can really have is 2hrs. That's the length of a CoP dynamis. That doesn't say HARDCORE to me.

- The alliance-style EXP has made many/most jobs desirable again. It's very inclusive, and assuming you're doing it right, you should easily be gaining EXP at 2-4 times the rate that we were in old style merit parties. I think that's very friendly toward the player that doesn't have a ton of time to spend leveling their jobs from 75-80 and continuing to merit.

- There are a ton of different things to pursue in these zones, so it's not like you're going to run out of content quickly.

- Even if you relied completely on stones and only went a couple of days a week, I don't see how that's unfriendly toward casual players. Regardless, if you EXP there for a decent amount of time now and again between NM runs, it really shouldn't be an issue. You can store up 120 minutes from an EXP party and then have 2hrs for your next run without the use of stones.

- Jaochim does not seem to have a cap on the amount of stones he can hold for you, similar to assault tags. This makes Abyssea incredibly less limited compared to most other events. If you can't play every day or can't play for extended periods of time every day, those stones will be accruing for when you do have time in your schedule to FFXI. That seems incredibly casual-player-friendly to me.

- You can obtain all kinds of NM pops from gold chests, including the 4 key items that pop the zone boss. If you EXP as a linkshell, it's not particularly far-fetched to build an entire pop set primarily through gold chest key items. Even if you only got 1-2 of those key items, that still significantly reduces the amount of time you spend trying to build that pop set.

- You can even obtain the lower tier pops from gold chests there. For example, I got a jug or jar or whatever of acidic humus from a chest. That's the item that the Thew Bomblet NM drops to go toward the next NM in the chain. You can skip tons of steps like this.

- Drops from NMs seem to be relatively decent, especially compared to some other items. We've seen more of those bows from Chukwa drop in the few times we've done Abyssea than we've seen RDM AF2 hats in the last 2-4 months.

- Empyrean weapons seem like they're going to be kind of along the same lines as a relic/mythic, potentially minus the intense monetary investment. It should be incredibly obvious that this is intended to be an "ultimate" sort of weapon, and trying to use this to illustrate your point is akin to trying to use relic/mythic weaopns to demonstrate that old world/Aht Urghan content is not intended for casual players. It doesn't make any sense. They added content that has appeal for all types of player. This portion simply was not meant for those who don't have much time to put into the game.

Your evaluation of this add-on seems like you either haven't tried much of the content or you're purposely looking for reasons to be sour. Much of what you said does not apply.

This is harder to setup than a /shout salvage run. Salvage is hardcore.


Dynamis says hardcore to anyone. But for CoP dynamis you are coorect. The only problem is that it blocks you from going in anytime you wish.

You make it sound like EXP is impossible to get for some jobs, and this doesn't sound right to me.



This means that gathering people for what you want is going to be a headache. For salvage you chose between 4 zones. For abyssea you choose 3 zones and the multiple possible content inside.

This is interesting, but also increasing the requirement to achieve EXP and NMs.


You can enter salvage/limbus/dynamis etc even you take breaks, NPC are not blocking you. I assume you are hinting toward assault permits ? Not farming assault for 2 weeks is not hurting you since you are not going to use the points anyway.




That's interesting but again, it's not the easiest way to get the pop, is it ?



How many augmented refresh hairpins did you see ?

Did you try to get the good gear from the update ? Your post sounds like you do a lot of exp-abyssea and try to convince us that randomly getting pop items is going to let you progress through your objectives. By definition the drop from the chest are random. What if it pops the pop item for the club instead of the H2H ?


The reason I mentionned empyreal weapon is because this is presented as the reward from the abyssea-expansion (on their website, with shiny falsh animations) just like the final reward for ASA/MKD/ACP were presented to us. That should be the goal for people entering or buying this expansion IMO.

great exp location

easy to loot a few NMs in 90min or less

quick respawn

harder to spawn NMs

items to complete the "good" magian quest

actual quest for fame (solo content?)

good loot via NM and points (sell-able and rare/ex)

wide variety of mob types and levels

VNMs

key items to boost ur stay and experience in the zone

...idk i think it has a decent amount of everything...***even some of the box loot from exping is pretty sweet

(pchan)...but it is not salvage so this ***is *** lame!

honestly...just gtfo, you sound mad because they did not add more salvage or something

no1 should complain over this ***, be hardcore or casual players. sometimes i honestly don't know what people expect.

EDIT: ITT pchan strokes salvage's long hard *** >.>

No.

Casual players are not interested in joining alliance to farm NMs that are not probably going to benefit (rare/ex) them or whose drops will be split (what's a 1 million drop when it's split between 10 ..?). How is killing NMs inside abyssea more rewarding than outside. You are facing the same issues with splitting drops and droprate. Casual players want easy gear and easy exp. Abyssea doesn't offer the easy gear as stated (abyssea gear is not easier to obtain than ZNM) because you can buy for extremely cheap gil the cruor gear at the AH without entering or even buying the extension. Abyssea doesn't offer the easy exp because it's long as hell before exp beat normal exp parties. Again, 5H exping is hardcore. And you already have to be level 75 for this anyway..

And Chloris has doomga!

who says you have to be 75 to exp in abyssea? i've heard of brds on my server going from 60-65 in like 2 hours...

he was on refresh and chest opening duty

The difference here is, im actually serious, it does have doomga u_u

since you like to break up everything:

you do not need an alliance for all the NMs, really i have no idea what this thread is about. Are you asking if it is hardcore or casual?

have you even done any of the abyssea content?

Do you really miss 1/100+ salvage runs?

If you have done any of abyssea you would know you can clear a few NMs with better then salvage drop rates with about a pt or so.

not easier then znm? wtf r u smoking. I would love to see how easy it would be for a casual player who has no means of sleeping a mob get the zeni to pop multiple NMs and kill them all in less then a day, abyssea all it requiers is a few decent players and to pick up stones...

i honestly have no idea what you are driving at with your posts. Even salvage i would say is more of a hardcore event then this because you can not afk in a salvage run w/o losing valuable time where as abyssea you can leave and reenter at will and not lose your time. Not to mention not needing to make points as well which is further limited by tags.

oh and the exp does not start off strong you are right, but around 15k for the first hour with a much less then exclusive job list is a hell of a lot better then seeking or looking for the super brd+cor+dnc pt..not everyone can duo/tri box a pt for themselves etc.

Seriously dude, lern2abyssea, or lern2make sense.

woot trollin!!!!!!

Did you ever stop to think that the abyssea NM's that are a painfuck now, wont be that hard at lv 99? Once were 99 for all you know you can solo/duo/trio to lower tiers to get the pop items for the "Boss NM's"

Edit: People are acting as if this is the end of all updates, when its really just the beginning.

Edit 2: Painfuck is a word.

ref:

As far as empyrean weapons go, people are assuming difficulty will scale with the level cap increase. It is very time consuming to even get the base weapon as of now, so who knows how ridiculous the trials will be that actually augment the weapon from 80+?

Build a Ruby chain of at least strength 5 and then farm Key items, see what your results are then.


Generally though, PC's topics/posts consist of the following

Puppetmaster > Your job

or

My Puppetmaster > Your Puppetmaster.



So it's refreshing to see something new for a change lol.

Did you ever stop to think that getting 50 chloris drops is only required of 75->80 (5 levels) and that the level 99 update will require 5x more work or 250 mega boss drops , and much more lower tier kills (1000 ?) ? Getting a relic seems a joke compared to this.

This sounds like salvage and znms. If you consider salvage/znms hardcore then so is abyssea.

I only post about monk on this forum (and other forums), so me think you are full of sh**t. Let me clarify ; PUP is junk.

your point is?

Yes if you gonna rush and get your 50 w/e crap ***for your weapon the first week of the expansion it will be painfull.

If you are patience, which you probably gonna have to have unless you have friends that want nothing more than to spend their time getting you your weapon, it will only be the last stage of the weapons that will be as painful as you say it is.

Never done abyssea, but I'd think going into an area with a group of friends and getting exp is casual <.<, then there's stuff for hardcore players too (the higher tier NMs) it's really a mix of both

Says the guy with a PUP equipment set for their display pic thing :p

My point ? Easy, it will be impossible for anyone to have a level 99 weapon, simple.

Ok, so we agree that the 21st June expansion is not worth it ? Did you really have to pay 10€ for EXPing 5 levels (=2 evening of astral burn at worst) ? Also while level 99 is likely to make the fight easier, it's not likely to make gathering 50 drops a lot faster as droprates and time granted in abyseea is not increasing with level. I mean we gained 5 level but dynamis is still as annoying to get.

We had people below 75 in our alliance yesterday and we were getting 5-8 xp per mobs. When they dropped to see if it was that which was causing it xp jumped up to 100xp again. This was as we were starting out. I think this was what was changed in the emergency maint. yesterday.

We earned 70k in 3 hours yesterday even when we ended up with on 2 parties. That is better than most parties. Most, not all.