The Odyssey - || Strategy And Discussion ||

This is how you should be looking at ranking this equipment. As a basic example. I could spend 6000 points to rank one piece to 15, or I could spend those same 6000 points to get THREE pieces to rank 10 instead. The final levels really don't give that much stats for the time invested. Your looking at these sets like they exist in a a black and white "all or nothing" scenario. But it's really just shades of grey. The first few tiers give a significant bang for your buck, and it's perfectly feasible to aim for a lower tier if you can't grind the finished rank. Seriously, much of the base equipment is good enough to use right now. Take that and add in rank 10 or rank 15 stats and you have an even better piece. It doesn't have to be rank 20 to be "good enough". Even the lower ranks are BiS pieces for many things. The gear is just that strong.

You should note that the pieces are heavily skewed to the end of the rankings though

Nyame Mail
Rank: 1
[1]Attack+2 Rng. Atk.+2
[2]Weapon skill damage +1%
[3]----------------

Rank: 5
[1]Attack+10 Rng. Atk.+10
[2]Weapon skill damage +3%
[3]----------------

Rank: 10
[1]Attack+15 Rng. Atk.+15
[2]Weapon skill damage +5%
[3]----------------

Rank: 15
[1]Attack+20 Rng. Atk.+20
[2]Weapon skill damage +8%
[3]----------------

Rank: 20
[1]Attack+25 Rng. Atk.+25
[2]Weapon skill damage +10%
[3]"Double Attack"+3%

1 rank 20 or 5 10s has a nominal difference

Why do players always have to do this math and mentally psyche themselves out by always focusing on the end goal. It's an MMO, of course they would create things that take a lot of time to complete.

Look at your examples above with Dynamis-D, which was done shortly after they were released. You could buy everything you needed once you got clears. Even Omen, besides farming bodies, you were done when you finally got the gear you wanted. And people STILL do both of those events even when they get next to nothing from it. Yet, the content doesn't survive long-term. Players complain.

Now they release an event that is going to be around for a lot longer (with as many items that you can upgrade and as many runs as you need to finish) and now the grind is too long? Damned if they do, damned if they dont.

@Kaldaek
We'll never know of course but given how "noobs" they are I don't really think that's the way they think. That's more our own players' elitist way of thinking, or the way of thinking of other devs in other games.

My personal opinion is that what they're thinking here is just keeping players busy as much as possible as they take their sweet time to prepare the Empy+3 reforge content, which is clearly gonna take quite a while.
They try with big numbers, if a massive amount of players complain then they go back and reduce it, if the majority is giddly diddly happy about it and behaves the way I described above, they just do an evil smile and keep working on the next content.
I'm partially joking lol, but you get what I mean I'm sure.


They just wanted a massive amount of grind, and they managed to deliver, period.
I'm fine if people like this amount of grind or even more, to each his own, but don't come at me saying it's not grindy at all or it's not massive because you're clearly lying to yourself.
(it's a general "you", I'm not talking directly to you Kaldaek xD)

You're making a perfectly valid point, I can't disagree with that.
After all that for the majority of these 60 pieces the amount of stats granted by the augments is much smaller than the amount of stats granted by the base piece itself.

Well... it depends lol, but I'm generalizing.
The fact that the "strength ratio" of these pieces is usually highly skewed towards the "base stats" rater than the "augments" is probably why they thought it would've been "fine" to make the augmentation process so grindy.
They thought "hey, even if they don't wanna grind this insane amount of time, they still get pretty nice items with the base stats!"
I dunno, maybe that's what they were thinking after all, wouldn't be surprised.
Almost... makes sense, in a certain way.


Mine is more an ideological irritation though, more than a practical one.
Don't think I'm gonna augment anything other than Nyame and a couple of Atonement1/2 items.
But I know myself, I know my limit, and any fight repeated 170+ is gonna be a big challenge for me, even if I absolutely love the fight itself at start. I don't really have that level of patience anymore. Did I ever to begin with, some could say?
(now if I had jobs who could use Sakpata my situation would be much more dramatic, but thankfully that's not the case! XD)

I think you're setting your expectations too high Sechs. It's always been the nature of FFXI that every player cant have the best of everything. I'm content working with just a couple jobs and making them as good as I can. You don't need to master every job to be able to contribute to an event. And it's always better to have a few jobs capable of performing at elite levels than every job but most are just mediocre. I think some people are focusing too heavily on trying to be everything they possibly can all at once because these sets are so good, when really ffxi has always been about grouping up with other people and combining your strengths with theirs, and letting their strengths make up for your weaknesses. This is an MMO. It's supposed to be played with multiple people. It's OK to not do everything yourself.

I agree that ranks 15>20 have higher stats. I also think you are of the mindset that you need rank20 everything.

SE is a for profit company, they dont at all care about how "grindy" our lives are. They hope the elitists that require "rank20orbust" will continue to subscribe, that is all.

Absolutely!
And again, the fact that you have to do activities that require time and become long term goals is not the problem.
The (subjective) problem I'm emphasizing here is the amount of time required.

Even JSE+2 necks or SU5 weapons require time, but they offered a lot of freedom, they had reasonable amount of grinds required and didn't demand you to log every day to farm a currency used to enter the event you actually need to do.
I'm not sure how else to rephrase it, each time you reply to me it seems like you're saying I'm against grind in general, I'm not at all!
I was super fine with the amount of grind required by Dynamis and the freedom that type of content gave us. I would've been fine even with a higher amount of grind.

But this amount of grind is astronomically more demanding, it's not just "a bit more".
Did I manage to explain myself better this time? I hope?



Here I'm completely lost.
No bloody clue what you're tryin to say, sorry °-°


Wut?
Not really sure I've seen a lot of complaints about Omen or Dynamis not being "Grindy enough".
Actually if anything I've seen some people complaining the other way around about the lockout on cards farming lol
I certainly haven't complained at all!
There was a certain amount of grind in both events and I think it was pretty reasonable and both events were really relaxing: as in you didn't have to farm "stuff" outside to access the event, the entry was free and you could store KIs even without logging every day and do several runs in a row that one time your life finally manages to let you login.
No complain at all! It was brilliant game design if you ask me.

Grind isn't supposed to be negative. You signed up to have stuff to do... and now you do!

*Happy Noises*

Absolutely no one can say "there's nothing to do" for a minimum of a year or so.

Oh but they do care!
Watch a lot of people suddenly complaining about something being to grindy and they'll patch the content in a rush ;-)

But if people take whatever grind SE launch at them no matter how unreasonable it may be without politely complaining and claim those who complain are pussies who need to grow a pair, then yes, SE of course will never do a thing about it because they will honestly believe the majority of the paying player base is actually perfectly fine with what they gave them.

See what I mean? :D

The piece eiryl used is also somewhat of a cherrypicked example. I can do that too

Gleti's Knife

Rank: 15 [1]DMG:+8 [2]Attack+30 [3]----------------
versus
Rank: 20 [1]DMG:+9 [2]Attack+35 [3]Accuracy+5 Mag. Acc.+5

Or Gleti's Gauntlets

Rank: 15 [1]Attack+15 [2]"Store TP"+4 [3]----------------
versus
Rank: 20 [1]Attack+20 [2]"Store TP"+5 [3]Accuracy+5 Mag. Acc.+5

There are a few select pieces where the final 5 ranks give a bigger increase in specifically useful stats than most. The bulk of the pieces aren't as impactful. The dagger example in particular is one where rank 15 is almost as good as rank 20, because the specific stats you gain aren't as impactful as double attack. It's all kind of relative.

I don't understand the comparison either tbh. You can buy time in dynamis grind (heroisms/astrals) and people farm astrals with a byproduct of cards in omen.

I think your concern here is that we are time locked with segments and there is no way to buy our way out of a time investment? The ONLY way to rank new gear is with actually doing the content, and that scares people.

I have mixed feelings.
On one hand, at least for now, I truly enjoy farming segments with my friends, rotating jobs etc.
I will eventually grow bored becuase as I said I'm a man with little patience, but so far so good.
On the other hand I can't deny it's quite irking that you can't store Moglophones (yet! Let me keep dreaming!) and that you have to farm segments... to enter the the actual event where you get the stuff you really want (RP).
It's... bad game design imho. And it hurts a lot people who can't login every day. Imagine you taking a week off the game, you're gonna be left behind because you didn't spend time farming segments in that week.
Now think about losing a week or two of Dynamis. You lose nothing. You don't get RPs of course but it's not like you'll be left behind
It would be better if you could store KIs. Still bad, but better.


Another big big issue with this Odyssey system is one that doesn't concern me at all, but it's a bad aspect in general.
Think about a static group of friends who are all overly stressed at the idea of how *** long they'll have to farm RP.
Now imagine if those friends want 3 different sets instead of the same one.
You don't have this issue with Nyame, but think about wanting to farm different NMs.
See what I mean?
Again it's not a problem for me, but it is a big problem in general, if you ask me.


Also, having options is always good.
I don't think I've ever bought a single Heroism Crystal in my life for my multiple SU5 weapons and Necks (I must have, what, like 20 of them?), but still it was pretty nice the fact that the option was there, for other people. Even if it was very unefficient, at least you had an option.
What option do you have here?
None.

I agree. It would be nice to see RP on any tier be able to be used for any gear. That would allow a static group to pick the best NM for their specific party setup and difficulty.

My opinion may be skewed, im happy with the base sets lol.

I wish KIs stored like canteens. Its a great source of gil too. We clear 1m-1.4m every run. Albeit less segments, but more gil (in sheol B)

"left behind" according to whose standards? If you play at your own pace, it doesn't matter how much progress others make in comparison. That's just commensurate to how often you play.

Taking time away from a video should not be looked at as "damn, im left behind now because I took a week off to enjoy my life".

The context must be in regards to everyone hitting r20 on the same battle?

I for one, have no concern if my colleagues hit rank20 before me. I can participate in getting them there while letting KIs hit the floor sometimes.

I'm still hoping that eventually they will allow then to store.
Won't change b the several bad game design choices they made for odyssey, but things will be much, much better

I can see this, if your group is willing to risk replacing you to do battles while you're out. They might not, or could choose to do another boss.

Realistically, as Sechs mentioned, not everyone is going to want to do the same bosses all of the time. If you miss a week and get "left behind", it's not really that big of a deal since there are going to be fights in the future that you might not need, but will do for the sake of your group anyways. I have personally burned thousands of segments, repeating fights on V0 for people who needed clears/gear but got "left behind", missing the clear when we did it as a group. It's fine. Nobody is going to be pressed about having to do an extra few fights to get your piece maxed out, they can convert un-needed RP back into segments anyways. The same way a player who needs nothing from said boss would do.

Yea I agree with that. I just don't understand people being upset with how hard it is to get to the "end" (rank20). I prefer the memories made in the grind more than I prefer the end result.

If we could r20 everything in a day, we would be bored and asking for more content.

Topic change for a moment.

I am struggling to want to login daily to do a moglophone run. I prefer 2 days with 2 runs as a minimum.

What strategies do people employ for segment farming and boss?

going with a 6.5k farm run.

26k segments in 4 runs (2 runs at a whack)

one night of bosses (8 bosses at a whack)

This makes for 3 odyssey nights per week.

Thoughts?

The standard of you can't login for a couple of days and when you're back online with your static group of friends you can't do more than X runs because u're gonna run out of segments.
And you can't recover because, hey, you can't store KIs (yet!)

The standard of you seeing a couple of interesting shouts but hey, u can't join because you couldn't find time to login the past two days.

The standard of wow! Finally you have a day all for yourself and u can spend it all on FFXI but nope, can't farm segments because you can't go more than twice (and that't if you remembered to store a KI before, otherwise it's gonna be just once).


I'm not saying it's necessarly good or bad, I guess different opinions, maybe diferent pros/cons that I can't see atm.
The point is more that you didn't have this aspect in Dynamis, for instance. You don't need to spend 30 minutes doing "something else" to be eligible to do the content you actually want to do (RP farming for your pieces)



Absolutely agree, but then again there's a lot of better compromises between "being done in a day" and "34+ V15 runs for a single piece" xD

This is my point. Get clears, buy astrals heroism, event is completely finished in 9 days. It wasn't long term content. THAT was the complaint.



This didn't exist when Omen first came out. It was a grind to get your cards, but for gear minus bodies, the event was not a long-term event. It died out relatively quickly. The only reason people still did it was to merc, gear alts, or farm bodies. If not for the absurd grind for cards during non-campaigns, Omen would have offered nothing for many players. Not only did swarts not exist, but the Ou path didn't either. There was one way to get cards, and it was not easy. Once cards got easier to acquire, you see how quickly Omen died out.


But people want challenging, long-term content that you can't steamroll and be done with in a week. Those are the vast majority of complaints you see from people about content. It's what people have asked for. Odyssey was only about Lustreless items and upgrading unity gear, people said "whats the point of doing Odyssey, I can buy everything". Now they close that gap and it's bad because it can only be done by "doing the content".

Also, you don't really know if they will allow you to store KIs in the future. The content for Gaol/Segment farming is still new. So saying you are time locked out of a new event is exactly the same barrier every new event gives you.

So the point you were making before is that you don't like the fact that there are people who have a lot of gil (or buy money) who manage to get some things completed just because they buy stuff of the AH or mercs instead of having a dedicated group?

Granted that I'm the type of person who 1) has been in an old style HNMls for the past 8+ years, 2) is particularly stingy and would never spend a single penny on stuf he can get for free
Granted all that, I don't agree with your point.

"Either people suffer the same way I do, or *** them! Go play another game!"
Is this what you're trying to say? Because if it is, it feels like I'm suddenly on KillingIfrit or BG and this is 2005 lol

I dunno, as I said before I never used that option, which was particularly unefficient anyway, but the sole fact that THERE WAS an option personally makes me happy and makes me feel like they are trying to cather to different types of audiences.
Given it's 2021, for me it's a good thing, even if it doesn't cocern me personally.
But to each his own I guess?



Hmmm not sure if we're playin different games but Ou (and card solo farming path) was added a few months after Omen Release.
Swart Astral Detritus later, I can check but I think it was like 1 year after.
People were still farming Omen because they enjoyed it when it was fresh and allowed a wide variety of different groups (from small groups, multiboxers, alliances).
For instance in my LS we've been having Omen as one of our weekly LS events for the past 4+ years.
Can't really do the same with Odyssey, but that's another story and I don't want to digress further.
There were important mats highly sought after in Omen, not just the gear (which took a while to gather for each of us) and the cards.

Is Omen less sought after now? Absolutely, but it's a 4 years old content, duh?
And for a "died out event" I had ~10 mins queues to enter yesterday, when we did our weekly event :-) (campaign is up and it's the culprit, but even outside of the event Omen is still pretty busy, despite being less sought after than it used to be when it was fresh).

Odyssey has been released almost a year ago, to make a comparison.
Granted that it wouldn't be a pretty fair comparison because Odyssey has been released piece by piece and Omen in 2 parts, but still...


I agree with this sentence as well.
And it doesn't look to me like Dynamis and Omen were steamrolled and abandoned in a week, were they? ;-)

So we get back to the initial point of: Dynamis and Omen, with different pros and cons, had overall much more reasonable challenges and grind than Odyssey.

As an example..for ranking up... not unlocking.

it takes 170 runs to cap 5/5 Nyame.

170runs @ 3ksegments = 510k segments.

510ksegments / 6500 (segments per farm run)

That's only like 78 days. Round it up to 90 for segment variance per run.

I don't think getting 5/5 rank20 augments in 90 days is a lot of time? mind you, that's 30 minutes a day. plus 90m-ish gil as a by product.

In an event that has ZERO drops behind luck and you can buy all the gear, they have to extend the content in some way. The way they have chosen is actually very fair in my book- the base items are extremely solid and available to you in total on your first kill, but for those willing to grind, the improvements are there. Sure, the quality of those improvements vary per piece- but so does the quality of the base version you get. Example: Sakpata gear is amazing from day one, but Agwu gear honestly needs the augments to compete with existing options for most of the jobs on it.

Imagine if Omen had let us just buy every regal item with gil after a single Ou kill. The content would have died off in a matter of weeks. It takes that randomness to keep the content alive.

Odyssey removes that randomness, and rewards all members of the party equally vs who wins the lot. Sure, it takes everyone longer than the first person who wins a lot, but everyone benefits.

This wasn't the point at all. I said when you offer that option, it's no surprise people finish it far too quickly and then get bored easily. They bought everything and the content serves no purpose for them.


Again, no. I don't care how fast anyone finishes content personally. But they moved away from that for a reason. Its supposed to take a long time. This has nothing to do with me suffering vs anyone else, it's SE's own design. They could have easily made this gear RP with an item; they just had a whole line of lustreless items. The fact they didn't go this route is just their way of showing you they want you to do the content (not me, them).


Because Gaol was completely separate from Sheols, and it didn't matter until they just added segments a few months back? I asked a lot of people to do Odyssey when it was new, and posted on this very thread every other day. Nobody cared to do the content because it offered nothing. Now the content offers a lot and people want to do it. But you can't compare Odyssey Sheol ABC to Gaol, they are totally different player experiences for the time besides the fat they linked segments.


I was not talking about 4 years after the fact. The only thing that keeps you doing Omen is cards (swarts) and bodies. The gear was pretty easy to see drop, it didn't take a while to get everything.


So you are on the most populated server during the most useful campaign this month and surprised there is a line? The line just gets exacerbated during non-campaign times because of swarts. Thats an easy money maker. The same way Odyssey is combined with people who farm for the gear and farm for the money. That's not an indication that Omen is still largely popular, its just a daily task that nets gil.


I said steamrolled, not abandoned.


Does everything have to have the same grind? This content is clearly not made in the same style as Omen/DYnamis, which more casual players could participate. They made this for specific set of players, so it is reasonable that the challenges are different here than the previous two events.

In general I agree with your point.
Specifically for the two examples though I don't really think people got bored fast, juding for how long (we're talking about years, not months) Omen and Divergence have been prime events and highly sought after.

Odyssey at start instead, was clearly an unwanted event with several cool ideas taken each on its own but put together bad without a very clear game design long term direction.
Was it for small groups? For soloers? For THFs who had wanted to key? Was it for people who wanted to farm?
90% of people didn't bother with Odyssey at all and skipped the event, period.

The problem here though is not that "you could buy Lustreless". The problem is that the event (the original one) was badly planned, period.
It's no coincidence that once they realized that (by the time they publically released Sheol B) they started working on Sheol Gaol as a way to make Odyssey as a whole an "interesting and sought after" event.
And they succeded. Not in the ideal way maybe, but they succeeded.


I didn't really want to compare them and if you ask me gameplay-wise I honestly enjoy both, I mean it and I've said it multiple times even in different threads.
It's a bit taxing though that to do one part of the content you need to do another. It couldn't be any other way of course, as I said before Gaol exists becuase SE wanted to make ABC relevant, so of course they're tied together.


I dunno, I think they could've kept us busy for a long time in more reasonable and balanced ways.
More RPs from NMs?
Less segments from Moglophone KIs?
Give additional options to buy MoglophoneII KIs with Lustreless (even if it's a very unfair amount).
Would actually be cool and would revitalize the market of Lustreless which, as fresh as it is, is already dying out.

Hope they will make these considerations in the future and try to balance things out in a better way, while still keeping the grind active.


I know it took me several months (1+ year probably?) to get every single piece I needed from our LS runs. (I'm ignoring the rare drops of course)




So ultimately the point you're making, about the rest of what you wrote, is that Odyssey is fantastic, it's perfect, best event ever thought by SE in the past 20 years and shame on all the infidels who dare say anything against SE's enlightened ways, right? :D

I don't know why you keep attributing unrelated points to my response. They are just incorrect projections. I said exactly what I said. It's not about whether its perfect or not. You may not like the implementation at all, but it's how they chose to make this one different from the past events we mentioned. They wanted to prolong this for as long as possible, likely because they have nothing else planned for the year. Whether that is bad or good, players can decide. But it will keep you busy whether you do like it or not, so they win either way.

You can remove Odyssey Sheol ABC and just skip right to the bosses, make segments entry buyable some other way. Gaol itself is still solid. Sheol ABC was just their cheap way of including UNity gear, they just wanted to get that out of the way. I wouldn't judge the first 12 months of Odyssey with that in mind, it was an unfinished product. You could gripe about it at the time, it was a solid complaint.

Looking at Odyssey Sheol ABC from when it first started to Gaol now are two completely different events really. Can't even compare the rewards, difficulty, nor the player interest (or grind even) between the two. So using "Odyssey" as being out for a year is kind of disingenuous to a degree. The only thing they did which was complaint worthy for some is link the segments obtained from Sheols to Gaol, which was kind of dumb.

The again, I think linking Mog Gardens progress to Ygnas trust and +1 SoA rings was dumb, but I still had to do it.

Honestly, I would rather they just put segments on the bosses and used segments to rank up gear.

Pop T3 boss for 3k segments and it gives 6k at R15 say? Make R20 take 600,00 segments per piece. Then people could just grind and grind 4eva.

There is a tiny, tiny, minuscule chance they might change the rate of some of the currently ongoing systems: lower the segment cost of Moglophone II, raise the segments you get from kills, raise the RP you get from kills, maybe from multiple runs, allow to buy a set number of Moglophone II every week with Lustreless... stuff like this could happen, unlikely but possible.

Personally I think what you're asking (completely removing a type of already existing currency) is way beyond any realm of possibility.