May 8th, 2022 Livestream Thread

To add to your statement, recent ML changes have fundamentally shifted the balance for healers. Both RDM and SCH are now extremely good as options for fights as they now both have access to Curaga III on demand. RDM lets you drop a march for something else while also providing stronger debuffs and better defense via Phalanx II. SCH has impressive passive and active healing power, AoE Regen V + double light weather Raetic Curaga II / III lets them just pour HP onto the party.

Unfortunately BRD and COR are still going to be mandatory, both provide so much power that it's not even a question. GEO really depends, if they continue the nerfing of offensive geomancy by 75% then it's boils down to if a second DD is preferable (assuming a tank).

For tanks, PLD is pretty impressive, RUN got shafted hard-core with Odyssea gear but was already strong, NIN/RUN got super interesting. Lots of hate tools and the ability to AoE valiance for massive hate and damage mitigation.

my thoughts in a quick summerized nutshell.

Screw you NA/EU this is a JP ONRY event

Hour: 0-4 cool new game were making and FFXI assets will be in it. (ok. so why is this a taking up 60% of the anniversary stream?)

Hour: 4-5 reminiscing FFXI
(to be expected and completely acceptable)

Hour: 5-6 going over already announced content that will be added in the next couple of months.

5 things of useful info i actually got out of the content
1. new awsome temp trust Cornelia
2. mog banazna has 2 10 number marbles this year
3. the new quest line will likely lead to empy +2/+3 shadow relics
4. new splash screen and BGM for login to celebrate anniversery
5. new 10m gil event of some sort

all in all. a bunch of info that could of just as easly announced at the normal community portal. it seems like most of the festivities was reserved for the other game. i feel like it was much over hyped. still excited. but meh. wish i wasn't up from 4am-9am for it.

It's going to encourage people to be more restrictive in the diversity of job choices. Can you get away with using a WAR as tank instead of a PLD or RUN? The tank spot goes to a Naegling WAR. Have the option to get additional DPS from your support jobs? The spots go to Naegling COR and BRD. You don't even have to get into Sheol Gaol to see that certain jobs are heavily favored for use in Odyssey. With only 6 kids on the dodgeball team, the kids with Naeglings are the ones usually picked.

Specifically for segment farming, BRD/COR's ability to equip a Naegling and pump out Savage Blades place them far above GEO, especially with the current trend to nerf offensive geomancy, not to mention the hassle of staying in bubbles and GEO's lack of access to movement speed buffs. If Sheol A-C had allowed alliance access, it would have been possible to split the parties across floors in a more stationary fashion rather than the murder hobo mad dash to the end, or tailored each team in the alliance for killing the different types of enemies, e.g. as Cruel Joke vs Halo vs other enemies.

Additionally, since we're on the topic of Odyssey, restricting sub jobs is just as damaging as limiting participation in my opinion. While the concept was more tenable in Dreamlands Dynamis where the maximum number of participants was much higher, it still completely disregards one of the most unique elements of FFXI. It also means that non-meta jobs are going to have an even harder time participating due to greatly reduced utility. That may emphasize tank and healer roles in party composition, but jobs already struggling such as MNK, BLM, THF, SMN, and NIN definitely weren't done any favors.


If we're talking about higher difficulties of Intense Ambuscade, the majority of setups I see from month to month favor Naegling WAR/COR/BRD except for the rare situations where specific mechanics both actively encourage the use of alternate forms of damage and make zergs highly unreliable. Even then, Naegling empowers a lot of brute force clears.

I don't disagree with your assessment of Naegling at all. In fact, I feel like we're saying the same thing from different directions.

Specifically in regard to 6-man content, my experience has been that having limited slots for an event means non-meta jobs have to exert a disproportionate amount of effort to overcome both class stigma as well as the perceived advantage(s) of a meta job also vying for the slot. This isn't a new issue. I've seen it since endgame was sky. Heck, even in 18-man content, this was and to some degree still is a problem. That said, it's fairly simple to see that if you only have 6 spots, at least 16/22 of the jobs are gonna get benched versus potentially only 4/22 with 18 spots. Even if Naegling didn't exist, there'd still be a meta and the majority of jobs would be dissuaded from participation in 6-man content.

The current choices happen to heavily skew toward Naegling, a weapon that scales the attack power of weapon skills proportionate to the number of buffs, and jobs that can contribute to the number of buffs to scale said damage while using it. Incorporating SCs and MBs wastes TP with overflow and dilutes melee buffs if any are given to enhance SC or MB damage. This is aggravated by the strength of melee buffs and X-attack gear in regards to TP gain, white damage, and WS damage, which in turn encourages a mentality to avoid synergy, in general fomenting a dislike for pacing your fight interactions around other players and specifically devaluing the systems of SCs and MBs.

And that mentality spills over into larger group content. Why coordinate with another DD when you can just self-SC and get mad when anyone else wants to WS too? Why wait for someone else to SC when you can just drop another big e-peen Savage Blade?


I can't speak to Legion having never had the opportunity to do it, but I did a goodly amount of Delve (both inside and outside of the factures), from its release when people were still trying to figure out Skirmish. Perhaps because it was still early on, I also never had the fortune to find myself in the specifically structured Delve groups that you're talking about.

I'm very confident of my memory of the timeframe because it was the only time in two decades that I ever won a piece of gear the first time I rolled on it, and ended up with a pair of Oatixur from my first Toejam. I remember going into an Abyssea XP party on MNK directly after and being blown away with 1K+ damage per swing.

ya this part shows the inability of the player-base to call out bad design.

there are 30+ posts here a month railing on the old days of EXPing in the dunes and it taking forever. but they are craving more master levels so they can grind for a couple weeks straight essentially doing more work than they would have in any other era.

you're probably going to bot a new job because most of you that's what you do, but if you didn't it would take you longer to get a job to 99, get jp to 2100 and get master level to 30(and then double that time to 40) than it would have to get a job to 75 back in the day. accept this reality and never put this dumbass "hur dur don't have time to level up in classic eras" ***on my screen again

make up your mind and realize deliberate time sinks for what they are

For alliance event some people wont be able to find 18 players. Thats also not fun.

PUG for 18 people is also a pandora box experience.

18 people events lag like ***.

You could make 6-18 scalable event, but it would probably be too easy for 18 people or too hard for 6, simply because how many buffs and debuffs are available for tank and dd in 6 and 18 ppl groups.

That is only because current content is Odyssea Gaol which restricts SJ, hopefully they rethink that and allow us our SJ inside. Besides that any new content, which is what we are looking forward to, will have SJ's.

I doubt new content will be limited to 6 players especially if the JP community is complaining about the difficulty/exclusion in Odyssey. They seem to take feedback from them more than others.

The fact the game is smaller and pulling together groups makes sense though. They said a new 99 could participate, which would lend itself to just being easier content or allowing carries.

The most sensible thing is to have it scale but still allow alliances, but who knows. I just hope it isn’t some Vagary derivative

Sleepga II is kinda notable. RDM & GEO often /blm.
That'd be like saying ML50 has nothing notable either, overlooking /RUN Foil.

I still remember this night and how happy and excited i was, i miss that with this game. Almost 10 years ago

If ff14 didnt start out so bad, I doubt we woulda ever got SoA.

Why'd you use naeg on 3 people in ambuscade? Majority of ambu NM takes SC dmg well, and pdif is capped that naeg attack bonus is pretty useless.

Chango for SC, yes please. You know what's better than a 50k+ SB? 50K+ SB follow up with a 50k+ light SC.

This is simply what I've observed in a large number of the parties I've seen beyond the ones I've been a part of. I personally prefer to mix up the job/weapon I use as I get bored pretty fast after several runs. If I'm on WAR and someone else is putting out a lot of Savage Blades, I'll usually switch to Decimation if I'm not already using something else as /SAM.

Edit: Now that I think about it, a lot of the groups I saw queueing were multi-boxers. I wonder if that had anything to do with it.

What people likes to use is not the same as what produces mathematically max dps.

Back in 2017 people also bandwagon Ragnarok even though Montate+1 had better DPS on spreadsheet. Why do they spent more money to bandwagon a worse weapon? No idea! But they did it anyways.

I can only guess that people bandwagon Naeg because it's one weapon for MANY jobs and good enough to get things done. So they do it anyways. That doesn't mean it's always the best choice dps wise.

Tbh Naeg SB isn't even the strongest WS in C from what I've seen. Leaden/hybrid WS hits harder I think.

I'm more nervous than disappointed. Disappointment was within the realm of reasonable expectation.

Many of us wanted a roadmap and we sort of got one. July is new content for empy reforge and at the end of TVR which if I read correctly is end of May 2023, we will be getting a new style of REMA weapons.

There's some blood left. The train will be chugging along for at least a few more years, but I think the writing for FFXI has been on the wall for some time now.

Wait did you just say Leaden/hybrid as if that takes more skill than SB at this point? In my eyes they one in the same cor got the bandwagon because of leaden. Savage blade was icing on the cake for cor because now the job can do it all and buff on top of it. Same with bard now which is only gonna push geo out with se nerfing everything geo touches.

The biggest highlights for me are these 3




I'm honestly surprised that we're only haflway through the voracious storyline right now. By the way they were ramping up the drama in the recent cutscenes it sounded like something fairly major was coming soon. I certainly wasn't expecting like... 7 more chapters beyond what we currently have.

As for the others.... mastery level grind is already tedious. I hope they add better ways to get EP with the new empyrean stuff, whatever it may be. Getting Mlvl 40 on more than a couple jobs sounds like a full time investment in and of itself. And apex camps get old after a while. Also, we already knew they were planning veng 25 Oddy at some point in time but I hope they hold off on releasing it till next year. I'm not ready to grind another tier of Oddy any time soon. The JP concerns about difficulty levels aren't wrong... V20 is really challenging. The bulk of the playerbase is still working around veng 15 or lower, and the few who have beaten veng 20 have a backlog of augs to catch up with. We aren't ready for Veng 25 yet.

not really true, if you have a group that's consistant about segment farms and you got v20 clear in the first month you likely have several sets capped by now(if you had segments saved prior to v20 release, you likely have everything you want capped and are saving for v25)

just a minor nitpick though, the bulk of your post is still spot-on: most players are probably over a year from feeling caught up at v20, and it's kind of dumb that leech RP runs effectively double in value every v5.. so teasing a near term v25 drop is probably a bit demotivating for those people

They must be treating TVR like its a full blown thing, when most of us know its not as big as they make it seem. Just feels like a watered down add-on. I guess we'll just have to scrape by with that stuff for another year or so and hopefully once TVR is done something else can be had. If they continue with the slow drip of content they are just going to bleed more players though.

It's funny how they want to push Master Levels and EXP grinds, something the 75 cap kids all were desperate for and yet they never care to participate in it. I've had so many friends quit the game because "Abyssea made leveling too easy" and yet whenever they come back to retry the game they prefer to skip anything related to EXP or bot it. Really hypocritical, I don't now why they keep creating certain content to cater towards that 75 era only crowd.

I really hate having to temper my expectations with anything related to the game. Just feels so unfair and makes me very jaded towards this company. Why do I have to constantly expect the worst and never get excited for new things? Paying an increased sub fee and more than most games and yet we have to act like this is some indie company and understand their budget concerns. Don't give a ***about their budget, they still are profiting and actively have a sub. I could understand that if the game went free but man what a burn.

This whole thing reminded me of the Digimon Con they had earlier this year, it was also for an anniversary of the series and it was super underwhelming with no new games announced. Then the next day Pokemon came out with a huge info drop and a new game to start their next generation. Feels like most things I like and want to succeed are constantly failing or underperforming and the new or more popular thing is getting everything I had wanted for it.

Honestly, even I'm disappointed about them using Ra'Kaznar for empyrean content. They just made a big cash grab with wardrobes, the stream was apparently a huge product placement thing, and they can't even spring for a new zone in content we've been waiting on for 3 years..?

It's possible they make in depth content, given the size of the zone, but if they didn't bother to make a new zone for content that's been this long-awaited, it makes me suspect they likely also didn't make new models or invest significantly in the content itself.

It'd be really nice if we could get a zone that wasn't dim, dark, or dismal if they're going to recycle an area anyway.

I've been hoping they reuse Temenos and Apollyon, one of those zones is grim dark and dismal, but those zone designs were far away better than the later designs

It's folks taking what seems to work in one place and attaching it to everything else. WAR/SAM with R15 Chango is gonna beat out Naegling in sheer DPS, WAR/DRG Naegling just produces pretty numbers more often, which is what people tend to pay attention to. WAR has had Fencer SB setup since looong before Odyssea though it required some WSD augmented gear. Odyssea Goal strips SJ and frequently puts you in situations were SC's are either ineffective or a giant negative, so stuff like SB becomes the best solution.

I'm very nervous about V25, my group is absolutely sick of Odysseal Gaol and it's absurd restrictions on SJ and NM's with really dumb mechanics. I really hope they take a step back and reevaluate how they approach it going forward.

Remember that we thought they had two adds per boss when it was first released, then we found out there were none? Yeah... those are still in the dats.

This just sounds like you're going with the wrong people. I get in on VD V1 Ambuscades all the time as jobs that aren't necessary, especially since it encourages going with 6 people even when you don't need that many. Have a PLD? Slap on a great sword or a Naegling and come DD, or even just tank even though it's not really necessary. Have a RDM but you already have a healer? Bust out your sword and stab the enemy instead. This has been true of pickups as well as parties of friends for me.

That's because Odyssey farming is still a high-intensity event because the time limit is not enough to clear everything 99.9% of the time. If you allowed 18 people with no changes then yeah people would be more flexible with jobs, but again that's because it'd be easier, not specifically because it's 18 man. If they tripled the number of mobs available while making it 18-man, you can be sure that the majority of groups would be exactly as picky as they are now.

Except in events where SCs literally do 1/10th of their normal damage or your preferred alliance events, this is absolutely not true; either self-SCing or group SCing when you don't have very many people on one mob is absolutely better than Naegling. Wasting TP with overflow doesn't matter when so many good WSs have excellent scaling, nor does splitting buffs because you don't need any to boost SCs. Nyame's SC bonus on every piece makes it even better. Magic bursts are worthless unless the mob takes nada for physical damage, but SCs are absolutely more powerful than Naegling in most situations. There will be some people that just spam Naegling even when they shouldn't, but that's not even close to universal in Odyssey, let alone in places like Ambuscade or Dynamis.

Again, you're thinking of post-ilvl. I repeat, no one was doing Delve mega boss runs without very strictly structuring their alliances until the ilvl patch that happened just a couple months after delve released. Heck, it took over a month after release before even the top groups in the game managed to kill it on a three bead run because it was so overtuned at the time.
Formless strikes was so all important for clearing Tojil/Dakuwaqa fractures quickly enough that MNK was basically forced to be 80% of the DDs, and the same went for rangers/corsairs for Muyingwa. It was only after ilvl updated drastically boosted our power that setups started to relax more and more than just the top 3% of linkshells were able to clear.

Are you trying to say here that you think there were no adds? If not, I'm confused.

What's sheer dps? Damage without SC? Without SC Naegling wins. Solo skillchain Chango wins by far. Ukonvasara beats Naegling easily without SC tho, but only with AM3, which might be kinda hard to keep up in something like Odyssey C, when for example you will need to switch weapons frequently between different groups of enemies.

Another factor is that it's just much harder to execute. You need 1-2 people per mob max and usually everyone need to split and coordinate in ambuscade to make it worth it. WSs might scale nicely, but with tp bonus weapons or Aeonics and/or Warcry you will cap to effective 3000 really fast.

It's generally something that PUG will avoid and just use Savage Blade approach.