Test Server Findings

[dasva]

Fixed?

I assume he means it is actually landable on stuff now

[dasva]

argh doublelameness

[Tarage]

How long does new SMN 2hour last for? 30 seconds?

Yes. Retardedly short for a 2hour.

[Spira]

i imagine merits will increase it to a minute or so

[CoreyX]

Did they randomly fix Shijin Spiral? I just saw the plague effect wear off on a dynamis NM, and I swear I've never seen it land on *any* NM ever

[Kaisha]

Wonder if it's related to the BLU stuff's additional landing more reliably now. Would be a nice system-wide fix.

[Helel]

There are NMs that plague can land on. I was just doing CS apollyon II the other day and it landed on the NMs there (not just the regular mobs). I'm not sure if dynamis NMs are an exception as well; I can't remember if it landed on the xarc demons . . . I almost think it did.

[chichicha]

Did they randomly fix Shijin Spiral? I just saw the plague effect wear off on a dynamis NM, and I swear I've never seen it land on *any* NM ever

It landed on VW NMs in normal server since day one this ws was released.
And various different mobs. I'm sure some NMs or mobs that we couldn't have the effect landed.

[pchan]

I'm not sure if dynamis NMs are an exception as well; I can't remember if it landed on the xarc demons . . . I almost think it did.

It doesn't.

[scaevola]

Yes. Retardedly short for a 2hour.

i'm not going to have to list all the two-hours that only last 30 seconds, am i

[Sechs]

Double

[Sechs]

Can always hope in the merit-enhancements they're gonna release which, likely, will affect only the new JAs since the old ones are already "enhanced" by AF2+2 augmented pieces.
Maybe I'm being too optimistic but there's a chance some of the currently "meh" new 2hr might turn up into something interesting with these possible enhancements.


Either way, sometimes I wonder why we or the devs themselves spend so much time talking about 2hrs. I have mixed feelings about it.
On one hand they are special, I love them, they are unique to each job, make you feel like you have a very powerful tool to "save" and use only in certain circumstances, and makes FFXI different from most other current-day MMOs.
On the other hand though, they are JAs with a recast time of 2hrs. Two hours guys, two hours. Up to which point do we really have to bother about balance/utility in something we're gonna use no more than once every 2hrs, in reality much less? And let's not forget about how the accessibility to 2hrs reset in nowadays' FFXI (compared to years ago) kinda changed the perspective, at least slightly, on these abilities.
Furthermore, 2hrs are part of the reason why a part of this game feels "broken" today. There are some 2hrs which are really too powerful, and we players would never accept nerfs to them, yet this probably forced devs into creating mobs that are retarded, frustrating and annoying to still give a false impression of challenge, up to the point that it makes such mentioned 2hrs no longer "options" but "required".

It's all a vicious circle and I have really mixed feelings about this all, atm.

[Zadimortis]

Knowing SE, I honestly would not start getting hopes up about merits for the new 2-hours increasing the duration. At least not for all of them.

On the other hand though, they are JAs with a recast time of 2hrs. Two hours guys, two hours. Up to which point do we really have to bother about balance/utility in something we're gonna use no more than once every 2hrs, in reality much less? And let's not forget about how the accessibility to 2hrs reset in nowadays' FFXI (compared to years ago) kinda changed the perspective, at least slightly, on these abilities.
Furthermore, 2hrs are part of the reason why a part of this game feels "broken" today. There are some 2hrs which are really too powerful, and we players would never accept nerfs to them, yet this probably forced devs into creating mobs that are retarded, frustrating and annoying to still give a false impression of challenge, up to the point that it makes such mentioned 2hrs no longer "options" but "required".

You say that we shouldn't worry about balancing something that can be used every two hours, then you go on to say how those same abilities are breaking the game because they're unbalanced. I can't tell what your point is. Two-hours are, in several cases, job-defining abilities (see: Scholar, Bard, Red Mage, etc...) and in endgame events, what a job can do in a clutch situation is just as important, if not more so, than what it's doing the other hour and fifty-nine minutes (give or take 2-12 minutes) when it's not up.

I do agree with you on the last point, though: SE really needs to stop designing content that requires 'invincibility or total destruction'. It's not fun to 'ramp up the difficulty' by throwing stuff at us that can one-shot everyone in a >9000 yalm radius without batting an eye; just ask any Dungeons & Dragons DM. There are ways to ramp up difficulty that do not involve simply upping the magnitude of numbers.

Of course, we can't forget that according to the Dev Team, none of us are ever playing the game 'right' in their eyes...

[Sechs]

I can't tell what your point is.

I'm not really sure myself, I'm confused about how I really feel about this all.
I think perhaps I wanted to say that I like the 2hr as a concept, for the same reasons you said and others as well.
The part I like most is the "feeling" it gives you as a player, to know you possess a powerful tool that you don't spam whenever it's ready, but keep it for the "right time".
I don't like jobs being balanced or un-balanced around the 2hr they possess.
In my view 2hrs should be an useful and situational tool that adds additional utility to the job and contributes to define its "character", its uniqueness.

Pretending a 2hr to be useful enough to "save" a job's "uselessness" is a wrong approach, because that way the job would still remain "useless" and it would be sought exclusively because of its 2hr. It should be ALSO for that, not ONLY.
Some jobs have such a bad situation that to be "saved" would require extremely powerful 2hrs, and these in return would create a bad situation making it harder for devs to realize challenging and entertaining things to do in-game (see below)
I think possibly this is how I really feel?
But I'm still a bit confused myself.

I do agree with you on the last point, though: SE really needs to stop designing content that requires 'invincibility or total destruction'. It's not fun to 'ramp up the difficulty' by throwing stuff at us that can one-shot everyone in a >9000 yalm radius without batting an eye; just ask any Dungeons & Dragons DM. There are ways to ramp up difficulty that do not involve simply upping the magnitude of numbers.

I agree with this, but I think part of the reason why they are doing it is an obvious consequence to the really high power of some combination of 2hrs. Not just that, to be more general I'd dare to say the "buffs stacking" system of FFXI.*
There are situations where you can stack so many buffs that it's hard to create challenging targets for such groups.
Their "reply" is to make the retarded NMs you and I are talking about, and the successive obvious consequence is that those before mentioned buffs are not "options" any longer but "required".
It's a vicious circle, as I defined it earlier.
I think part of this lies in the developers ineptitude to design original fights, but part of this also lies in the "unbalanced" power that some of these buffs provide to players.



*
To furtherly expose my thoughts on this, I've seen such a situation in other MMOs, but it got usually solved one way or another, altough some games possibly brought it too far, homogenizing classes and buffs too much. The "supporter" role disappeared completely in such games.
A common thing in many other games for example is that class-specific buffs that are party-wide, disappear from targets if the member who cast them drops the pt.
This is a strategy we've been using since the old days to "stack" a large amount of buffs from different classes in the same pt, exceeding what would normally be the max pt members cap.
Think about BRD rotations for example. Would force us to rely on stricter strategies, selecting less buffs etc.
But well, this was just a silly example, in all honesty I doubt such a solution would prove to be successful/enough in the FFXI context.

[Koyangi]

Unless I missed it, how is the new WHM 2-Hour?

[Julian]

dunno if anything new, but mining real quick before I leave for work, stuff up in the usual place.

all done in record time! dialog tables when i get back from work obv

[Spira]

they added the animations for the new 2hrs included. still no sound. not gonna record tho, a bit busy lately.

also this... lol.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ouboxL432d...00/ahriman.jpg

[Toth]

they added the animations for the new 2hrs included. still no sound. not gonna record tho, a bit busy lately.

also this... lol.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ouboxL432d...00/ahriman.jpg

I spy with my little eye...

One awesome hat!

[SargentRemora]

JP dat mining page with new gear.

[Byrthnoth]

Preliminarily it looks like they list any changed item twice (once with the previous stats and then again with the new stats/etc). These are marked blue and grey.

Google Translate shows me some new daggers and a few new armors, but a lot of old items updated and nothing that is obviously upgraded Salvage armors.