What Do You Want From EMPY+3?

I feel you, K-dog.

FFXI felt right in it's prime with 18-man content. Some of my favorite old screenshots were from 18-man content.

It's kind of hard in this day and age. Some servers have enough people to where it's a non-issue to do 18-man with the number of people who still play. For some servers/groups, it's not very practical.

I personally wouldn't be opposed to tailoring content for 6-man but scale (rewards too) for up to 18 so that nobody is really punished.

18 player content just ends up being 6 three boxes anyway.

or 12 two boxes and 6 buyers. or some combination. it just doesn't work anymore. Static scaling is bad design, adding another healer scales exactly the same as adding another dd. And they're never going to do it dynamically.

.... They could do a thing where players are forced to participate, each dd must do 10% of the damage etc, but you'd all throw a damn hissy fit. So forget about things ever changing.

I will agree that across the board, your scenarios of what an 18 man alliance truly is comprised of is more time accurate than not. There certainly is a shrinking minority of people still playing the game where its 12-15real people single boxing, maybe 1-2 dboxers, but no doubt the number of people doing that gets smaller every day. Maybe in large part due to one of the constant trends seen in FFXI: as you are able to do content with fewer people, your personal rewards scale up, encouraging people to seek the smallest possible setups.

Earned RP a la Su5 weapons and JSE necks in Dyna-D has been a nice concept- perhaps let players "bank" RP regardless of job during participation the way we can in Odyssey and eliminate heroisms would see better large group participation. RP rewards have never scaled based on the size of the group, only based on what you kill (in Dyna-D).

For many, larger group= more kills= more RP. Now, if you have to split the heroisms among more participants, the benefit of more people working together becomes lost(heroisms being the only RP earned by anyone not on the exact job they need RP on). But if it banked that RP for the GEOs who wished they could have RP'ed their Rostams and WHMs who needed WAR neck RP, that split reward has no "numbers penalty".

People threw a hissy fit when they made job requirements in Gaol. They could force some kind of co-op participation similar to how Domain Invasion tracks your progress mid-fight and rewards you the appropriate beads. Everyone will just find the base minimum participation mark they need to hit and meet it, so nothing will really change.

Changing gears a bit; Both Omen and Dynamis, the events that offered JSE artifact and relic, were on quite lengthy cooldowns, which prolonged the acquisition of the armor. Whatever event they decide to go with for Empyrean +2/3, I am almost certain they are going to block progress to it by imposing a similar daily/3-day wait requirement. I don't think they will go the Ambuscade-style route where you can do it indefinitely.

Empy +3 pants and coats add inventory space... like pockets. Otherwise, the last thing we need at this point is more stuff catered to individual jobs, unless the respective set bonuses are absolutely shattering to make you store AF/Relic pieces.

I don't want MOST content to be 18-man, or to require it to get anything out of it... but I'd be sad if there was no relevant content that 7+ people can do together. With Omen not being in our usual rotation any more, weekly Dyna is the one event when our LS gets to do things together and not exclude people (we typically have at least 9 unique individuals, sometimes up to 12+, and if we're full a multiboxer just has to choose like... the 2 characters they want to bring). It's fun to just BS with friends, get points on another +2 neck, etc. Honestly feels a bit lower stakes and relaxing at this point (there's room for goofy stuff like intentionally trying to get charmed by a BST and killing your friends before they kill you!), and I like having that option.

Of course, I also like that you don't HAVE to bring that many people to Dyna, Omen, Vagary... but not being penalized for doing so is nice. And being able to bring some less than optimal friends along is good too - help get them leveled up with no real harm to the team, unlike something like Geas Fete NMs actively penalizing you with HP scaling, or Gaol RP fights having very little wiggle room for any of the members to be a little below the level of the top teammates.

There's plenty of 6 person max stuff these days with Odyssey, Ambuscade, high tiers, etc. I expect that's probably the default going forward too. But I kinda feel like the right balance is to keep one current/relevant event alliance-sized. With Divergence getting a bit long in the tooth, I hope there's one replacement Alliance-able event in the works - but that you can also make legitimate progress in there with a 6-man party (or less + trusts) or a "small alliance" (say, 7-10 people).

The thing is, the new "whatever it is" will be alliance content. But it'll be the same unrewarding job locked stuff that everyone hates.

"The geo" will still be stuck on geo. "the healer for life" will always have to be "the healer". "the tank" will always be "the tank" and they can't ever unlock anything else as no one else is competent or willing to do it. Just like always.

You'll all fight over the mnk+3 body piece and that nm/thing will be the only one done while everyone else wants to do other stuff but can't. But no one will want to be on monk to do it and the ones that want to cant because whm etc. And you'll savage blade everything, then *** about it. But not stop doing it.

Same complaints for the same things all the time. As predictable as it is irritating. "this is so easy when we take six corsairs" "this is too hard because we don't take six corsairs" It's exhausting.

TL:DR I want this!; no not like that!

I'd love something that forces job diversity like Voidwatch (initially, I know we all eventually just threw big *** dps at it) or Odyssey 3x does.

I don't mind job diversity if it is implemented like Voidwatch and not like Odyssey. The restrictions imposed on the latter made forming your own parties a literal nightmare if you didn't have an established group. At least with Voidwatch you could just fill the group with what you could find, and still had a good chance of beating the boss, especially since /fume existed. Having to find a person that has job XYZ that overlaps with another party member gets frustrating and wastes a lot of time.

I actually wish SE would have created an event based off of the restrictions within the Marble Bridge Restaurant. Always thought it would have been a cool idea to have an event that randomly rotates job "favorites" by giving certain bonuses to your performance if you have certain jobs or damage types in your group. "Today, Ranger's shoot twice as fast". "Today, Automaton HP is doubled".

I can't agree with this enough. I like Odyssey when it comes to the boss fights, but getting segments sucks unless you have certain jobs. It kills the flow of what I think is some of the most interesting content atm. In a game where the job diversity is what makes it so unique, it is annoying that they've locked that content behind what amounts to fewer than half the jobs in the game. I get that they want obtaining the gear and augments to be a challenge, but they've made getting the prerequisites for those fights the most difficult part unless you have certain jobs or a flexible static.

In segment farming, the 20 hour lockout combined with the 30 minute time limit for a single entry makes it such that you have to be stingy about your party, otherwise you waste your entry for the day and have to try again tomorrow. Most other content (Dyna D, Omen) has some room for flexibility, hell even the Gaol fights do to an extent. The system forces people into a mode where they want to be as efficient as possible and leaves little room for experimentation in C or Gaol since the cost is so high.

IMO the focus of the Odyssey content should be the boss fights, not grinding segments, and they should implement it in such a way that it is not so restrictive and/or implements a bonus for either rotating or using certain jobs. I think the framework is there to do it, they clearly wanted to see some diversity in jobs used with the system in Gaol, but it sortof falls flat in A/B/C unless you have one of a few jobs highly geared. I really like the idea of rotating bonuses based on jobs, but I think easing the entry requirements across the board would be a good thing also.

A lot of Emp has specific skill bonuses to certain weapon types, such as the Thf Emp Body giving dagger skill +28. I was thinking it might be neat if they added a new stat like "Dagger Damage +X%" that just was a straight multiplier to any damage dealt with a dagger. Perhaps this would be a better trait for the new job growth system though.

I just want anything to help take away from all the Naegling/Savage Blade spam. Ideally they would adjust weapon skills again, but they sadly don't seem to have any plans to do so.

I'm not tottally agreeing with you. you just mentioned 3 jobs so a person could rotate about those 3 jobs. yes the game emchancis does feed into it but the ultimate decision is the player deciding to only focus on 1 job and lock away flexibilty to rotate.

For dyna D i have been DD i have been on cor and i have been tanking
my wife has been on DD on whm and on brd

offcuase if everyone just level dd's its going to be hard faciltiy rotation

I liked how everyone brought tons of different jobs to VW at the start. It may have been artifical job inclusion but it was fun. Stuff like that and WoE was fun, missing something that people can do together alliance on the server without a concrete group.

I know a lot of people have divergent opinions but personally I hated Voidwatch.

The "bring all jobs" was super artificial, you didn't really want a job but wanted the unique things that were required to proc the monster.
Most of the time (except the latest tiers with harder content) you couldn't even play your job properly but were forced to play in an extremely artificial and annoying way to "proc". If that's what I have to "pay" for the sake of inclusion, I'd rather not have inclusion at all because it wasn't fun.

I mean, we have to contextualize. That game design choice came after 2+ years of Abyssea, where they first introduced the proc system as a mean to give players ways to "control" the drops to a certain degree. Such an incredible power in our hands, one that we never felt before until then. It was refreshing, it promoted party cooperation, diverse setups etc. It was good... at start.
Clearly it got old after all that time and the Voidwatch implementation wasn't any better than the Abyssea one. If anything it was confusing because abyssea and vw procs were different.


With that said I found the VW super cheap in the implementation, the no new zones, the incredibly frustrating drop rates (around 1/4000 for a Coruscanti in my case), way too dependant on luck. The methods we had to control that (build up lighs, use cells) always felt way too limited compared to what we got used to after 2+ years of Abyssea.
It was always the same people getting the drops they didn't need, and they couldn't give them to their friend who needed them so bad instead. It was a nice attempt to move from a "shared loot pool" to a "personal loot". I apreciate the attempt but it simply didn't work out imho.
I dunno, it felt like VW was all full of cheap stuff, cheap content and artificial stuff everywhere.



But ok, I know people here have divergent opinions and some hated Abyssea and loved VW. What can I say? I'm the other way around personally.

Only thing I complain about Abyssea is how they badly balanced the difficulty of content and grind.
Abyssea1 was way too easy (maybe to "bait" us?), Abyssea2 did a small step up but wasn't enough, Abyssea3 stepped up again but maybe too much.
It's like they went from 2 to 5 then 9 when, in hindsight, I wish things could've been around 7 from the beginning and for all 3 abyssea expansions.

BLU setting all the useless spells was the worst >.>

It meant you got to be afk 99% and cast one spell if someone calls. Free loot for no effort. The dream.

Its the dream for you. Person who enjoy gains from FFXI, but not the game itself lol

Perfect for the game where the players can't pay attention for 30 solid seconds because youtube on the second monitor.

BLU probably had it worst, I agree with you, but in my opinion it was bad for every job.

I mean someone could argue "Sechs why are you blaming VW for this when Abyssea had a similar concept and u're not blaming that?"

I think I explained this but it mostly circles around two main reasons:
1) Because for Abyssea it was a new, refreshing, empowering experience. VW came after 2+ years of Abyssea, so clearly not the same
2) Because in Abyssea the effects of proccing were quite noticeable for everybody in the pt/ally. In VW you just wanted to build lights and/or go for white, then zerg like there's no tomorrow. Plus the "empowerment" effect was taken away because while big numbers and statistic tell us that lights (and cells) clearly had an influence, it was way too small for players to receive that "feeling" you were getting with one of the two main Abyssea procs.


Maybe it could've been better if drop rates were higher, if you could exchange drops with alliance members, if there was less grind? But then the content wouldn't have lasted as long as it did and they would've been pressed to create something else, and the reason they made VW so grindy was exactely to avoid that, so it's a dog biting its tail I suppose.

I want DNC head to go to +35% for climactic flourish crit damage at least, but I would prefer 40-50% to make DNC shine again.