Lilith HTBF

I'm hoping whatever the next HTBF is, they add the first set of chapters, instead of the second set.

You mean the Chapters used for 109 AFs? The fight for those are incredibly easy to solo though; even VD. I mean it’d be nice to see Chapters 1-5 but idk, I just feel like it’s not necessary? *shrugs*

Also, you can rifle through them super fast with sparks.

Or maybe I misunderstood?

As someone who has hit the 255 cap on chapters 7-10 (and close to 200 6's), 1-5 dropping from a BC that I'm not capped on gear from OR a convert option would be nice.

I'm actually surprised noone's thought to bring up using react to avoid spikes, and charm yet. That's what i started doing after about 20 runs straight trying to 4 box it, and every time, either slaughtering my squad, or suiciding to spikes. Works 99% of the time. Lag can still allow you to wreck yourself to spikes if you're not careful, but eh. what can ya do?

i mean, when i went with one dd, and all support, turning wasn't really an issue, but at this point, i've got nothing to prove by turning by hand 8 times in a row when she gets spammy.

And if someone already mentioned it, sweet. I skimmed, and didn't see it.

If HTBCs dropped Ch.1-5, there would literally be zero reason to do Macro fights (outside of campaigns). The gear sucks at this point in the game and the fights are braindead easy. Plus you can buy them with sparks as mentioned. I wouldn't be opposed to a conversion rate though, even if it was exorbitant. Funny when its something valuable like Omen Cards, the conversion rate is absurb @ 10:1. But something that literally falls from the sky cant be converted and you can cap it in a day. Just typical SE.

Dose react not work with battlemod?

Uhh, it sure does. Turnaround has been great for Thorns and Allure.

I just don't see "readies" maybe my settings are off.

I think the "React" addon works with packets, so wether you are filtering or not the "Readies" chat messages, it shouldn't matter.

Not 100% sure on that though, hopefully someone will clarify wether or not React works with packets.

I suppose most specifically React is based on the windower event:
windower.register_event('action',.....

Which I do believe ignores chat filters.

I will say I've had a *ton* of dropped packets in that fight over the last 3-4 days (I've been on mage healing, and get stuck in mid-cast as I never see the spells go off). So by essence.. dropped packets. I think server congestion.

In the past packet losses were really rare, especially in open areas.
I think where I started to notice massive amounts of lost packets is in Omen.

There probably were a lot of lost packets in Delve and Incursion too, but I don't seem to remember that ever being a major issue.

After Omen of course there's Divergence, the amount of packets lost in there is beyond comprehension. Several people hinted at the cause of that being the RP system that creates issues in the server<>client communication.

Other than that, we notice packet loss happening mostly in the so called "instanced" areas.
I don't think this is related to server population because, to my knowledge, servers do not have a dedicated instancing server. The server(s) that handle instanced areas are shared between the "world" server, so even people on a server with 300 players should experience a huge amount of packet loss in Omen and Divergence areas, just like people of Asura do.


The WoE BC where the Lilith fight takes place is not like the old BC areas (there wasn't any instancing going on there, just an area with ~4 BC replicated battlefields. Players trading an orb were being put into one of those, randomly), but at the same time I'm not sure if it relies on the same "instancing" technology as other more recent content like Omen or Divergence.

Personally I haven't experienced massive amounts of packet loss in there, but then again I can't claim I have as big of an experience fighting in that BC as I have fighting in the other mentioned areas/zones.

Regardless of how you want to see things, I think packet loss is the one true real enemy for "advanced" players like us.
More than simple lag, more than queues, more than anything else.

Real shame they never even tried to mitigate the issue so far. Wonder if they are completely oblivious to it, if they are underestimating its relevance or if they simply have no means to do anything about it at all and decide to ignore it because there's nothing they can do.

to do anything significant would probably be to setup data center in NA and have separate jp and na servers.

Uhm no. Having a "local" days center would greatly lower latency but it would do almost nothing against the loss of packets I'm afraid.

This goes against the very premise of the game. The designers wanted people of different nationalities to play together.

That was almost 18 years ago. With all the changes over the years I wouldn't base many decisions anymore off of original intent. A much better reason for it to never happen is cost/benefit. The amount of resources it would take to set up a NA data center would be far too high to justify any returns they might see for their troubles. If it hasn't already happened by now there's no way it'll happen at this stage in the game's life.

Good point. Just the first thing that came to mind, was all..

They already have a NA data center. It probably wouldn't cost much, but it would require a shitload of free transfers and pissed off players. So yeah...

...and it wouldn't solve the packet loss issue at all, like I said.

After 16+ years playing this game with default lag I'm fine with it.
It's packet loss that's the real monster here, not the latency.


I mean it's not like I would complain about having better latency, I'm not that stupid. I'm just saying that's not the issue here.

Are you sure it wouldn't help any? Even if distance itself isn't a factor, I imagine more internet hubs your signwl has to go through would have more points of failure for losing data.

I thought, for some reason, that some of those hardware down times they did were an attempt to resolve this.

I haven't done Dynamis-D in almost a year. I got my wins and said f' that noise. I love playing rdm - front or backline, but if I cast silence on something, and I have no idea if the spell landed because I get absolutely nothing in my log that says the target is silenced or if the spell was resisted, it's just dumb.

So, I try again and it's not until my 5th try when I finally get a message that says "no effect"? I mean, which of the previous 4 tries was the one that landed? Yeah, count me out. Dynamis-D is pure garbage with the packet loss shenanigans and I can't be bothered to fool around in there because of it.

off topic:
In 14 ppl, complained enough. Since latency was high so they increased mob ready/casting times.
On topic:
Question: VE with TH8~9 vs TH3 on easy?
I been doing 7-14 runs a day, for 2weeks since I been back.
E: In 7runs I got Pole/Head.
VE: On thf I got legs>earring>sword>daybreak.

I'm not 100% sure, but pretty confident.

It's a problem given by other factors, not the latency.
Server distance creates just that. Latency, lag, a delay in how much time it passes from when you select an action to when you see it going on on screen.

In areas like Omen and especially Divergence you do see this problem ("lag") amplified, but in those instances it's a fruit of the server being overburdened.
The one real culprit in Divergence is quite likely the RP system.
Every second there's this flow of information about RP that has to go from a client through the server to all the other clients, back and forth, completely.
This creates the massive "lag" and the server being overloaded is also likely the cause of the massive amount of lost packets that get lost, indeed, because the server can't keep up with the flow of information.

Having servers close to you would hardly make a noticeable difference in my opinion, and it would do ***about the lost packets because, again, they have very little to do (if anything) with the distance between you and the server farm.


I'm sure people like Comeatmebro can give a more detailed insight on the issue though.


Edit:
The fact that these few bytes can create such a massive overload on the server likely has to do with the way the network communication packets are structured at the core of the game. I think it's because these packets are too small (strictly tuned to have enhanced performance for 2004 standards with dialup connections, probably?) that such a frequent exchange of information, at a frequency that wasn't meant to be when they initially created the structure, that is ultimately the source of the issue.
With a different network communication protocol and larger packets, the servers wouldn't get overloaded so easily, but it's just my guess.

And Omen.
In Ambu... way less, I'd say in Lilith too.
Regardless the amount of latency/packetloss in Omen, Lilith and Ambuscade, while much higher than usual, is NOWHERE as high to the levels it reaches inside Divergence zones.
As I mentioned already, the RP system is probably the culprit here.


Anyway, I did a few group runs on Lilith D+ yesterday and indeed noticed some lag and some higher-than-usual packets loss.
Not as high as Divergence areas levels, but still higher than it should be.

Not sure what the cause is there. I suspect the huge amount of gyres might have something to do with it but who knows...

They updated their hardware multiple times. We don't know the specs or details but I'm confident to believe the hardware in the FFXI server farm is pretty decent.
It's just not a problem of server power and increasing that would do nothing I'm afraid.
It's their network communication protocol, at the very core of the game, that creates the bottleneck and you can't get around it with just better network bandwidth and/or better hardware.


You just described Dynamis D in a few lines, sigh.
There's also the problem that because of the packet loss you often end up casting stuff with the wrong set, you get stuck in Midcast because Aftercast doesn't proc and sometimes you also experienced increased lag between your action.
On some runs there are 10+ seconds between when you select a spell/action and when you see it going off.
Sometimes you don't even see the animation.
Sometimes you see stuff still alive even if it's dead.
Sometimes you see players still alive even if they're dead.
Sometimes their HP goes down, on your screen, several seconds after they actually received the damage.

It's funny how this last part (the "lag") is "dynamic". I mean that it's not the same for all the players in the zone.
Even for people from the same region, when we enter as a group some of us will be hyper lagged, some of us will be lagged, the rest will be "okaysh" (just a lot of packet loss, but "normal" latency).
It's not always the same people in the same group, it's different on every run and there are spikes through the run.

I can tell you that:
1) It's random (different people every time)
2) It doesn't depend on the zone (you get it wether you're the only one in the zone or if they're 80 other people), hinting that the problem is probably connected to overall amount of people inside Divergence zones (any) and not to the specific Divergence zone you're doing in that moment.

That's a different issue though and it's about pure ltency and distance from server farms (there are 3 anyway, one in USA, well Canada, one in Europe and one in Japan)
There were some fights that requires incredibly precise reflexes and timings, to the point that your network performance (and consequentially your distance from the server farm) made a competitive difference while raiding.
From that point onward they tried to create fights that were a bit more generous. We're talking about milliseconds here and minimal differences.
In general FFXIV is pretty responsive, even if you play on the Jap servers it's tipically much faster/responsive than the average latency we're all used to when playing FFXI.


I'd say it depends on:
1) How fast you can clear VE vs how fast you can clear E
2) How long are the queues

Long queues will make you go towards E
Much faster kills on VE and short queues will make you lean towards VE.

Just my two cents.

Does Lilith have some innate form of MDT? My Seraph Blades have only been hitting 4-5k during the fight. Outside the BC I've been averaging 12-14k on random mooks. I've had to switch to Black Halo and that's doing around the same damage outside compared to the boss fight.