November 2022 Version Update

was hoping for something a bit higher considering the ML50 grind is upon us

Almost a 182k delta WT actual F.

Even DJ Khaled ain't out there grinding that.

I wonder what they'll call it from the new golden crabs.

The amount of bots is getting ridiculous, even on a dead server like Sylph. SE don't care.

How come they didn't mention fixing the Primeval Brew thing with Shinryu in the Patch Notes?
I did around 80 fights (I'm left with what, 600k Cruor now?) and didn't get a single drop with TH9+ on each of those fights, whoaaa


I'm wondering how they decided to bind TVR progression behind Prime Weapons stage.
I have a few friends from 2003 who wanted to come back just to do the story together like we used to do back in the days, but they'll never manage to get Prime Weapons, not even stage 1/2. They don't have jobs/gear/progression/time/will to do end-game content.

This is a first time in the FFXI history, right? That they're binding main story content behind end-game/RMEA content.
I dunno, I think it's pretty stupid.

Also the part about not being able to do Shield/Horn as your first weapon, I mean wtf, how stupid is that?

My group has barely even touched MLs beyond what we get from doing the content that we're already doing — hasn't been anything yet that required max MLs to win lol

Job points were an absurd grind at first too, and eventually we got all kinds of boosts that made it easy to cap quickly with even a halfway decent pt. Probably won't sweat the MLs too much until we see whether they get the same treatment. :)

Edit to respond to the question below: Not 0, but our BLM was ML13 and the SCH was ML2 (and it was windsday!)

Are you saying you guys killed Ongo V20 with ML0 jobs?


Job Points at launch were arguably more grind than ML50. I remember Byrth doing some calculation and to cap the JP potential of 10 categories with 30 levels each you would've needed over 300 days of 24/7 grinding.
But the job points were patched an insane amount of times, and very fast

1) Capes giving CP bonus
2) Rings giving CP bonus
3) New camps with monsters giving like 30 times more CP per kill than targets available before
4) Gifts with stacking CP bonus multipliers
5) Lotsa stacking CP multiplier bonuses coming from RoE completition

These came over time, one by one, bit by bit, and we went from everybody ignoring JPs to everybody spamming JPs.
In hindsight I think the process of JP adjusting has been much faster than this though.
Here we're talking about what, has it been 1 year since the introduction of ML? And things only got worse so far, to insane levels.

But all the kids on private servers claim EXP is premium XI content

They did under the resolved issues section.

Also looking more into it, this is the first time the Delta from X1 to X2 was higher than the previous delta X0 to X1. Can't wait to see how ridiculous 50 to cap is. The 40k+ exp loss on an HP death is going to be so much fun.

What he's saying is that the first 10-20 MLs were very quick to get just from doing a mix of segment farms, Omen, Dyna, pre-patch Ambu or Sortie with regularity (and we've included BLM and SCH for some of those). No need to specifically grind out ML30-40 or higher for anything.

Our group cleared every v20 with mixed jobs between 10-30 we didn't hard cap anything just to win. Pretty sure our blm was close to 20 same with sch for Ongo.

4 players 2 duo boxes, so we didn't even have 6 players looking at the fight. 6 players would have a better chance than we did even more so with capped ML.

The problem with playing an mmorpg for a long while is people can tend to get completely fixated on the goal point. This is a terrible mindset becasue it turns everything into a simple tick sheet.

Hardcore players tend to get to this far more than casual players, who just fixate on getting a +1.

The problem with this mindset is it not only ruins the game and new content but gets stuck in your mind for any new game you move to, and so you end up ruining everything you try to play by being completely fixated on the goal.

10-30 is not 0

Nobody but you said anything about ML0.

Also this feels awkward with Vaerix posting at the same time lol, especially since our groups seem eerily similar.

I know right?

Mlevel 10 is like a couple odyssey farms worth of EP, The only people who could possibly do v20 fights with 0 master levels have never received the master breaker KI. It took like 4-5 boss kills in gaol to hit mlvl1 on odd jobs that don't get played. No one is doing anything in gaol at mlvl0 for long.

Aerix Vaerix! I chuckled a bit seeing you guys posting so close to each other lol


@Vaerix
I dissent with your latest statement.
In my static we had several people at ML0 simply because they didn't had time to get ML levels on each of their plethora of jobs.
So as we were swapping jobs around just me and a couple of others had ML20+.
The rest had ~ML10-20 on some jobs, but 0 on all the rest which they never use for anything except for Gaol fights.

Story progression has always required character progression in XI. RMEA specific? Technically you have to complete all the footwork for Ergons to complete SoA, so it's not really a stretch. We still don't have all the pieces.

"character progression" is not "a partially completed RMEA weapon".
I mean are you talking about something specifically? Please enlighten me.
I'm not being sarcastic, maybe I'm forgetting something right now.

As far as I can remember the only thing requested was character level, there was a minimum level requirement for a lot (but not all) of fights.
Some things sporadically required a few other things like side-quests, side-content but it's not like the story has ever requested you to have beated Dynamis Lord or Pandemonium Warden or Absolute Virtue or any of the hard NMs or stuff that was part of the end game content.
Did they ever requested us to have beaten Kirin or any of the shijin?
Or to have killed Fafnir, Nidhogg, King Behemoth, Hydra or to have killed all 4 Chariot bosses or Ultima and Omega and so on?
I don't remember this ever being a requirement.

At best it was super simple things like "try this content once" without requiring anything specific.


I know because I've been doing ALL FFXI story missions with a group of people where two of them NEVER played the game "correctly" (they insisted on never swapping any item slot, they didn't farm merits, they had a single job to 75 each, no end game gear, blah blah)
But the fights were so incredibly easy that we didn't exactly struggle, like ever.
Actually we had to struggle a bit to finish CoP during the early FFXI days, but other than that we never had any trouble completing content.
Which was easy on purpose, without requiring grind or anything particularly specific to enjoy the story.


Here they're demanding for you to have a job good enough to be able to do Sortie multiple, multiple, multiple times so that you can farm enough Gallimaufry and whatever else needed to get at least stage 2 Prime Weapons.
Whoaaa!
It won't be a problem for me of course but it's completely out of reach for people like them, and I can't honestly think about anything else in this game ever requiring something so demanding to be able to enjoy the main story cut-scenes.



Wut?
You mean for the additional SoA side-quests where you see Arciela's father being mentioned, the +1 rings and Ygnas trusts?
Because I consider that "additional content" and not really part of the main story
(my friends did nothing of those of course and only have the NQ ring you get at the end of the proper story)

Problem is we dont know final version of weapons, so build a "sword" and in the end is the worst of all weapons

I mean, these days REMA-tier weapons are usually considered a basic requirement for almost all content by most groups. So it kind of makes sense that SE has adopted that kind of mindset for their endgame story content as well, especially if one ends up with a complete or nearly complete Prime weapon by the end of it.

Gaol v25 aside, they hopefully have some future content in mind where ML50, r30 gear and Prime weapons can be utilized to their fullest.

It's exactely why I didn't get a prime weapon, yet. I wanted to get one according to the final stats but they're making this requirement even worst.

At first it was "own a prime weapon stage 1", which is already a lot but it's okaysh.

Now it has to be one of the weapons who can deal damage and it has to be at least stage 2.

Watch them requiring a stage 3 in a few months.



I really wonder why they made this crappy decision to gate main story progression behind such demanding end-game activities.
As much as it won't really affect me personally, I still find it incredibly stupid.

Sorry but this doesn't make sense to me.

RMEA-tier weapons are wrongly considered "required" by a part of the community to be invited into end-game content activity.
We already discussed over these boards how, most of the time, this is a very un-inclusive and unjustified approach, but regardless it was the game community requiring that, not the game itself.

It's a big difference Aerix, a HUGE difference.
Story has always allowed ANYBODY to enjoy it. Even people who exclusively do the story and ignore everything else.
I'm not being like the fox & the grapes, this thing doesn't concern me at all. I have multiple RMEAs, I do all sort of end-game activity and you can bet I'm gonna get at least 1 Prime Weapon.

I'm talking about everybody else
People who don't have a RMEA, who never got one nor is interested in one. People who never did end game content, who plays vanilla, who logs in just for the community or for super casual activities. People who do Ambuscade vol1 on E with friends and they struggle even on that.
There's A LOT of people like that. You just don't hear from them because they don't post on FFXIAH and people like us usually don't hang around people like that, but trust me there's a lot.

Now they're gating the story, the motherfucking bloody main story, behind what would be a super intense and insane grind for them. It's like telling them "ok, watch this on youtube because you'll never manage to do it yourself".

Feels like they are just trying to force people to do sortie to increase engagement metrics since so little of the population ended up continuing or even touching odyssey.

looks like you might need the level 2 weapon for the VR mandragora mission quest.

All this crying about stage 2 weapon which requires getting 10k galli, which is like 3 Sortie runs top for worst PUG and defeating A boss (I assume all bosses drops new item) which is easier then most V1 Ambuscade at Difficult level.

If they will ever force you to get like stage 4 or 5 which will require like 6 months of grind, then you can start crying. Atm stage 2 is easier and faster to get than Kaja Sword.

NEVERMIND the item drops from chests too, so you dont even need to do boss. You can literally get stage 2 without even fighting in Sortie. Literally anyone can get it without any problems.