Random Question Thread (FFXI Related)

If those 3 jobs had a 100% uptime haste capping ability/spell they'd solve 50% of the party problems

Full haste, haste 3, haste samba 2, fulltime MG, etc

Healing and tanking still suck too though

Theyd just fit into the same "needed" job comp, so now the pt cant leave cause the dnc isnt showing up.

Taking haste options from 2 to 6 would go a long way, just not all the way

blu dnc bst rdm give good enough def- to be at least an ok replacement for minuets but being only 2 options for haste is the bottle neck

You got march or you got indi-haste and not ***else

It's a tough problem to solve, TBH. You see it not just in FFXI but also in loads of other MMOs, FPS like Overwatch, and basically any role-based game.

Balancing the game to make each role exactly proportional to the number of people who want to play that role in the community is difficult. It's made even worse by restrictions like 6-man (or even 4 or 5) parties. There's only so much space for different roles. If you have an undesirable role, they're guaranteed to take up at minimum ~17% of the party. So...anything that 1-15% of your players want to play will be over-represented.

There are games which eschew the idea of roles entirely and just have everyone play DPS, like Destiny, or make the roles a lot less important like The Division, and probably dozens of other examples. It's a matter of opinion but IMO those kinds of games are a lot more bland because of the lack of diversification and I think it really waters down the teamwork elements.

Not really sure what the solution is here but I agree with Nariont: all you're doing is pushing the issue from BRD to BLU. What if there's no BLU available? It could be "solved" by making each job have a way of contributing to the buff situation but that really risks turning it into a FFXIV situation (AFAIK) where every job is nearly identical and all variance/job composition goes straight out the window.

I strongly believe the difference between the jobs in FFXI is core to the strength of the game and the reason it's such a standout experience.

As a BRD player, I wholly support this because I'd like to play my other jobs. :)

Bring Diffusion down to a 5m CD!

I've been crashing rrandomly at the end of beseiged for a while. What's the .dat for al zahbi since the HQ .dat is the first suspect even if it only started around lv 12+

And add blue magic duration+ as a gear stat. Just retroactively sprinkle it on some existing gear, if adding new stuff is too much trouble. Make sure there's at least a few pieces other jobs can wear too, cause my god I'd like some more cocoon duration on PLD/BLU.

Or for a simpler option... just extend enhancing magic duration gear to apply to blu magic buffs(in before RDM/BLU suddenly has a 20 minute cocoon. <,< )

Wouldnt be opposed to more magic haste options, just not sure how feasible that is outside of things like MG(which ive wanted UL/affinity jas on charges for ages so win/win in my book) they tried in the past with cor and well, that went great. Make snort a seperate aoe haste?


In the same vein of stuff thatll never happen ive wanted diffusion to just be a standard ja on a 5~ recast and the merit category repped with duration plus in general. Sort of helps both issues(for blu anyway)

I don't know how they could have missed adding Blue Magic Effect Duration +% as a Job Point Category or Merits or something. Should apply to both buffs and debuffs. Huge miss.

BST buffs should be AOE. The Raaz's Zealous Snort Haste is 25%, kind of an awkward value. Anyways, pretty much all of BST's self-buff pet abilities are redundant or mediocre by most standards. You can cap attack without Rage (without the massive def penalty) or Lynx's Attack Boost, and the Haste from Raaz isn't needed. If you run Raaz, you get a weaker Defense Down (that can miss). Flipping through pets is a pain too. The slug is the best thing you can use, and that's to cap attack/physically weaken mobs. Defense/Evasion bonus buffs from pets suck. You really need those pet buffs to be AOE (not Rage, nobody wants that -DEF) at the very least.

You can bring SMN to stuff and be suboptimal, but I bet you could fit it if you worked in the comp. SMN GEO can cover hastes, movement speed, heals, and GEO can DD. The problem is PUGs won't be able to pull this off, which is who this change would stand to benefit the most. So it's a moot idea.

Capping haste is important, don't get me wrong, but even if the haste issue wasn't relevant, BRD would still be "mandatory" for nearly-100% of the content it's "mandatory" for now. Minuets are incredibly huge and BLU/NIN/BST/SMN have nothing that even remotely compares. When necessary, Madrigal is also massive and again, those jobs have nothing on par. Additionally: Soul Voice and Bolster are massive boosts to those buffs, so...you'd better hope that they're gonna buff Familiar, Azure Lore, and Mijin Gakure to help with that spike of power too...

You'd need an entire overhaul of several jobs to make it work, it can't just be "give haste to them, gg."

IDK what the meta is like with PUGs on those server but frankly, a HUGE percentage of the content in the game can be cleared without a BRD or GEO, without capping haste. It's a very solid boost to damage, but there's not a lot of content where having the absolute max buffs and 100% efficient DPS is necessary.

They should honestly just consider adjusting the duration to the very short duration buff spells. If they feel the need to raise MP costs and cast time to compensate, so be it. But stuff like cocoon, nature's meditation, harden shell, and even regular refresh and regen spells should have base duration of 3 minutes.

Also, while there might be one or two suspect ones, I think most 10 min JAs that jobs have could be safely brought down to 5 minutes. If they want to tie it to master levels like they tied the SP cooldown reduction to job mastery, that's fine too. I know they pushed the idea that master levels should never be "needed", but they said that about mastery rank and the hoxne earring exists now too. So they can change their minds on that if they feel like it.

The absolute maximum DPS is always neccessary

The game won't even let you afk bazaar without a brd cor and a geo in your party.

They could give every dd a JA haste buff that can be kept on indefinitely if they wanted to.

If you're not aware, capped indi haste from a geo gets you within 2% of capped magic haste on its own. Don't even need any other form of magic haste (you will be lacking 2%, deal with it).

That is enough to clear all aeonic NMs except helms in reisen and WoC and Kirin in ru'aun. Real world not theory crafting - I've done it.

they should give monstrosity instincts to blu/bst/smn. System revisited, game fixed.

and of course you unlock 1 slot every monthly RoE.

Idris, is ~41%
Dunna, is ~36%

Both require a haste 1 (from the geo, probably) (or /dnc for the Idris, and main dnc for dunna)

And that's perfectly acceptable. BUT that means you have to have 2 geos. It would be better to have more options, options are never a bad thing, and lack of options are always a bad thing.

22 jobs. 2(3*) jobs allow you to cap party haste, full time. 2 more allow it part time. 6~8 would be more betterer. There's like 25+ ways to lower mob defense.

Siren should have marches. Full time MG (or reclass flutter). Reclass snort and AoE. Haste Samba2. Remove the tp penalty from blitzers roll (and dw and martial arts) Give adloquim 15% haste.

Now we're cookin. Make tanking less miserable and you've almost completely solved PUG. All the best gear has max meva, tons of dt, max gear haste, they've made gear practically automatic but capping haste is still a struggle.

Eiryl: "This game sucks because no one wants to play the boring healer or buffer jobs like WHM BRD GEO, they need to expand options"

Also Eiryl: "If you have 2 geo's..."

You can still 8-Boss without a Bard, but it would take some coordination and it might be a pain for a PUG to pull off, but it could be done with preparation if you need to do a Sortie run.

2GEO RDM COR 2DD
1st Bolster can be a combination of Attune/STR/Precision + BOG Frailty/Fury + Stymie+Distract III on H (can cutting cards this GEO). 2nd Bolster on F, could change STR to Precision if it's Thunder hands. If it's wind, last the Distract III and you don't have to worry about losing songs. Silence spam might get annoying though. Haste II from RDM, alternate Entrust-Hastes on bosses so you will always cap. GEOs can Widened Compass and stand at range of bubble and toss Curaga IIIs. You might not need to run out of range of Fetters because you will have big magic evasion from Attunement (something you don't have with BRD). If you bring a hybrid DD like SAM, you can change attunement to Malaise and just destroy AECG (NIN BF using Blade: To, but that's an off-meta job). If you have DRK in your comp with Origin, they self-heal so they are easier to support. Of course everyone has to bring meds.

Don't forget Armor Break and Tachi: Ageha to improve DPS where it might be able to land. Less pertinent: have COR save Crooked for CG Bolters since no Mazurka.

You also could do the kite strategy after 50% on HF via Gravity II (like 9B) but by having your top DD Super Jump and the other one kites while the rest of the party wails on it from behind. If the second DD pulls hate, he Super Jumps and the next person on hate list resumes kiting. In this case, you entrust Gravity also and the boss would move at a crawl.

You could also just drop the second GEO altogether and bring the 9B comp using PLD instead of a healer (for 8B). PLD can face tank/heal all bosses or kite them and is a better party spot than WHM. It would be slower, but you could clear and you're safer with a tank and better healer than /WHM.

You could even keep the 2nd GEO and go something like:

GEO GEO PLD DD* COR* RDM*
the latter 3 are your main Damage Dealers (unless GEOs have clubs and sets, even better). You could drop /whm from GEOs in this case and have everyone full DD mode (/dnc Box Step/Haste Samba or /drk Last Resort).

TLDR You could make it work without BRD, just would take some level of organizing. I used to do stuff like this (party re-organizing) during Gaol clears and thought it was a ton of fun. The biggest issue is just people are tunnel visioned on one strategy and only ever build jobs for that one style of play, and are completely lost when you tell them to do anything outside of that.

SMN feels like the best candidate to improve their buff abilities. Just update Garuda to cast Hastega III and you can be done with it. GEO can cap party magical haste, BRD can cap party magical haste, why not let someone else in on the fun? If you wanna go crazy with Garuda buffs, make Fleet Wind match lucky Bolter's Roll for movement speed+. That's already "good enough" as a viable buffer to fill a slot, and you could do further adjustments to really bring it home.

And why not? WTF else is SMN doing these days that gets it regularly included in parties, outside of the fewer and further between instances of a good ol' ACAF zerg?

Sucks because if you actually play the job focused on buffing, there are some decently strong buffs including some that are unique among the usual buffers (e.g., Crystal Blessing AoE TP Bonus - lean into stuff like THAT more). I'd really love SMN having more tools to play that style.
- A buff "stance" JA that allows you to have multiple Avatar's Favors active at once?
- Perhaps a BP: Ward recast reduction?
- A use for elementals. RUN-like effects? Give me some Rayke/Gambit type action here! Or some easy element specific buffs/debuffs sort of like BRD's carols/threnodies, or COR's enhance elemental damage with Quick Draw.

I know I'm being pedantic here, but remember that DNC "haste" isn't a buff, it's a debuff applied to the specific mob. Not that you couldn't adjust that to cap haste by itself on the haste-dazed mob (or even change sambas to just BE an AoE buff), but it's different than songs/rolls/buff spells/indi-/etc.

Not correctly pedantic though!

An ability that caps haste is correct usage, no one said buff or debuff.

You should have gone for "it's not on 100% of the time because the first hit applies the daze" or "any melee hit before the dnc engages will be uncapped so not 100%" next time you'll get it.

I've done 7boss Sortie with the following setups

* geo whm brd dd
* geo whm cor dd
* geo rdm/whm brd dd
* geo rdm/whm cor dd

Other two slots are trusts.

Geo makes a lot of setups possible, but requires full timing indi haste (and idris but goes without saying on these boards), and a dd that can both use not trash gear and have good acc sets for both tp and WS.

I'd sooner drop brd than geo, given the choice.

If you acknowledge that idris is an obvious must (this forum), then you can't say that 7boss is acceptable (this forum)

If you weren't shorting yourself on haste maybe you could get that 8th boss

Its really not that deep, follow the thread logic:

-Felgar is tired of being 5/6, can't find a BRD for 8 boss, party disbands (becomes 0 boss)
-Wishes other jobs had utility beyond current meta
-Others suggest alternative ways to Sortie without optimal party comp, still able to clear and 7/8 boss
-"BUT IT'S NOT OPTIMAL" >> 7 boss is better than 0 boss

For a 4 character setup with two trusts, 7boss is about the limit of what can be achieved.

"acceptable" or not is for you to decide. Any boss is more points than not doing sortie cause you can't find a brd.

Eiryl with more room-temp-IQ takes.
If Idris your bridge too far, you have no business expecting to be part of a 5+ boss Sortie run. Idris is not hard to get. It'll take time, sure, because of the Legend requirement, but its not difficult in the slightest.

The ultimate in hilarity is I'm halfway between Stage 3 and Stage 4 horn just AoE burning as BLU with another BLU randomly. Haven't gone again in like a month. So I'm gearing BRD, by brainlessly casting Entomb for like 24k (ish?) a run lol

Do you just pick a basement quadrant and kill/respawn mobs for an hour?

I used to play with a BST Bro in 2005. We duo'ed our way from 1 to 65 back in 2005. I miss those days.

Basically full clear the trash from E-H. Do the random bitzer objectives like 30 second stare, empy lockstyle and exit/re-enter H. Grab the mini NMs like the pony, naraka and AoE them down too. plant NM can be a *** with charm, but we usually melee her down*.

* Sometimes it's me getting melee'd down if there's charm and I don't GTFO fast enough lol

Don't bother with the nakuuls though, but we'll still get 7 or 8 blue chests and then an aurum.

BST was super fun back in the day. The having to be in range for ready moves would be (slightly more) tolerable if it was for all pet jobs I guess, but I'd rather just see it go back to how it was. It's more annoying when you're fighting a larger mob and the pet aimlessly bounces around trying to get situated. It messed with some T3 tree fights when I couldn't tp drainkiss, yet my pet was basically tickling my prostate and can't get much closer. LOL

Eh, daze debuff from Sambas is substantially worse than a similar buff, because everyone who wants to benefit from it needs to fight the same mob as the DNC. That's not "100% uptime" to me, and it's a big negative in content where you're often switching mobs or people are off soloing their own thing. You know, like MOST current endgame stuff: Limbus, significant chunks of Sortie, Segments, Dyna, Omen, etc. Daze works fine on one big NM, not so hot on content with lots of trash mobs.

Compare to BRD COR, where you can get 10min+ buffs somewhere like Sortie, and then go run off to an entirely different area of the map with your full array of buffs.

Indi-Haste has the same problem if you split up

But blu smn bst cor(blitzer) and sch wouldn't if they got overhauls

And that wouldn't be a bad one to change either... why not just make it magical haste?