New or Returning Players Discussion 2: SoA Homeless Veterans Edition

[Chumm]

RDM is good but gear intensive, and the only job with Flurry 2 for RNGs, so CPing with them is prob a good fit, as well as for manaburn type groups. Marin staff + augmented skirmish armor + AH gear is a good start.

Alluvion Yorcia really shouldn't need any obsidian spent until floor 6-7+, so if you're doing 3/3s there's almost no risk to not using it unless your group just can't find any camps. Colibri rush is good bc you can get started on the stronghold early, but definitely want to augment them with byakko asap. There isn't a onesize strat because a good booker is reacting to the farm rather than following a script, but those suggestions. minus the converting obsidian, are a good starter point.

Shout group UNMs are pretty rough for the 125+ ones, but almost all are fairly easy lowmans with competent people. The biggest thing holding people back is melees that can't hit the mobs. They're almost all tuned to be super evasive, so geo/brd/rdm/cor help a lot in mitigating that problem.

[HitomeOfBismarck]

Ah that's good and bad news! Thank you for looking over that strat. I've been in some pretty bad Yorcia (U) groups apparently. One in particular almost wiped on F1.

I did look into Vedrfolnir for the dagger when leveling THF but he seemed a bit difficult. That staff is awesome! Thanks for the help.

All aboard the BST train.

Two other question: is it particularly hard to acquire Steelflash Earring and Bladeborn Earring solo? Reading some of the descriptions on Wiki made them seem soloable.

Also it seems a lot of the good casting gear comes from regular Skirmish. Is this soloable or easy to get into with a PUG?

[Bail]

Ah that's good and bad news! Thank you for looking over that strat. I've been in some pretty bad Yorcia (U) groups apparently. One in particular almost wiped on F1.

I did look into Vedrfolnir for the dagger when leveling THF but he seemed a bit difficult. That staff is awesome! Thanks for the help.

All aboard the BST train.

Two other question: is it particularly hard to acquire Steelflash Earring and Bladeborn Earring solo? Reading some of the descriptions on Wiki made them seem soloable.

Also it seems a lot of the good casting gear comes from regular Skirmish. Is this soloable or easy to get into with a PUG?

Regular skirmish is easily soloable. As far as the earrings, they come from mobs inside delve. I'm not sure if they drop outside of the fracture (I never did out of fracture pops) and as of now you need 3 to enter. (Though I think this is changing with the upcoming VU)

[Kyreth]

Regular skirmish is easily soloable. As far as the earrings, they come from mobs inside delve. I'm not sure if they drop outside of the fracture (I never did out of fracture pops) and as of now you need 3 to enter. (Though I think this is changing with the upcoming VU)

You can always kill the mobs outside, get the KI, and simply spend plasm to acquire them if you don't get the (rare) drop. They do drop from a fracture pop, but the odds are much reduced vs. inside- but you'll get the KI either way.

[Rehn]

I can't recall when I saw it, but do MNKs have slightly lower benefit from DEX than everyone else? I know 4 DEX = 3 acc, but I remember reading somewhere H2H gets slightly lower acc from DEX. Or was that attack?

[Fwahm]

Offhand weapons get slightly less attack from strength, which includes the H2H's second fist, IIRC. Otherwise, DEX and STR give the same benefits as other weapons.

[Rooney]

H2H was set to be 8:5 ratio for str/dex for a long time, don't recall if they changed it or not.

[Chumm]

You can always kill the mobs outside, get the KI, and simply spend plasm to acquire them if you don't get the (rare) drop. They do drop from a fracture pop, but the odds are much reduced vs. inside- but you'll get the KI either way.

Also note that you can eat the bead the mob drops for 1k plasm, earrings cost 8k. Solo is doable for most of them, but they do all have gimmicks so jobs/trusts are important

[Trumpy]

Ive had many friends say windows 10 is stable for ffxi/windower, but a friend of mine since the last update it crashes i think between pol and the game loading or somewhere. anyone have any idea what it might be? He had been using it on win 10 for a month or more before that update messed it all up for him. this is also only when he loads windower, if he gets on vanilla its fine but he cant stand not havin the windower.

[Not Kuno]

What does having higher than cap on a synergy synth do? I'm trying to make an item that caps at 40 with 40 skill but it needs a lot of elements and I cant finish it in time. Do I tough it out or will I have better luck at higher levels?

[Rehn]

The only thing I'm 100% sure about is if your level is below recipe level, then you build up impurity faster and it will reach the exploding level much more easily. At >= recipe level, you only build up 5% at a time per fewell feed, and it has a chance to explode when its over 25%.

Not sure what recipe you're doing, but with multiple elements, its important to feed fast and release pressure fast (or w/e to reduce impurity level). You also build up pressure the moment you start synth, and that dictates when a leak occurs (furnace glows whatever element it is leaking) so it's more or less a race to get it done timely. Synergy can be done by more than 1 person, so you can get someone to help you do it by having them reduce impurity while you feed, which can make it easier.

I haven't done synergy in a while, so some of my terms may be off.

[Not Kuno]

The only thing I'm 100% sure about is if your level is below recipe level, then you build up impurity faster and it will reach the exploding level much more easily. At >= recipe level, you only build up 5% at a time per fewell feed, and it has a chance to explode when its over 25%.

Not sure what recipe you're doing, but with multiple elements, its important to feed fast and release pressure fast (or w/e to reduce impurity level). You also build up pressure the moment you start synth, and that dictates when a leak occurs (furnace glows whatever element it is leaking) so it's more or less a race to get it done timely. Synergy can be done by more than 1 person, so you can get someone to help you do it by having them reduce impurity while you feed, which can make it easier.

I haven't done synergy in a while, so some of my terms may be off.

No, it makes sense. I was just wondering if higher skill reduced "dot" amount, etc. Like, if you got more time for it. Also does "health recovery" or whatever actually do anything? is it worth doing?

[Rehn]

I remember reading a long, long time ago that capped repair furnace (so rank 5) can repair more than the furnace health can deplete, so it MIGHT be worth doing... but mines rank 1 because if you're solo, then it's probably not worth it.

AFAIK, the furnace health will naturally decrease the same regardless if you're way over or way under the recipe level.

[dasva]

You should also get better hq rates though how it's tiered is anyones guess. Also pretty sure it wont explode unless over 30% impuritym at least I've never seen it. 5/5 health recovery is kind of nice especially for soloing hard stuff. Just gotten spam the ability a bunch when you get low and there is some lag to it recovering so it looks like it's doing nothing at first

[JeanPaul]

Pretty sure the DoT values on synergy are fixed to the recipe, since it has been the same for a person with 0 skill making Fotia as it has been for someone with 80. There's definitely a huge difference in explosion rate (due to less impurity) when you have greater skill, and maxing out "Feed Fewell" nets you more progress in less time.

[Shadowstalker]

Sorry, I tried looking through the Vagary post to get an idea, but I'm curious as to whether or not things have really changed or not.

How do most people do Vagary nowadays? I need my KI for 119 upgrades and I was wondering just sort of general stuff like what classes people bring, how many people can clear a boss, that kind of stuff. Either that or a link with some strats would be cool as well.

[Destinye]

sparks 117 ----> alluvion skirmish gear (even if only for the base stats and no agument) ----> from there on work on your AFS relics Empys armor upgrade ----> augment some skirmish gear you got ----> proceed to escha

Touching on this again..tried alluvion but..didn't work too well haha, likely attacked the wrong things. But it's two people and trusts didn't really see many LSs when checking around and most shouts do want up to date people but yeah, mostly so far we've did our sparks stuff. Tried a few of the other yorcia skirmish (since forgot the edamon thing in trade) but aside that..haven't really seen what else we can do since our accuracy is floored on a lot of stuff, so getting CP is kind of a pain for us as well, especially now with the new monsters roaming.

So read the wiki page on alluvion, when they mentioned monsters..not the ones heading to the skull staff, but random spawns? Since touching the ones beeling towards us ...wasn't pretty.

[Isiolia]

So read the wiki page on alluvion, when they mentioned monsters..not the ones heading to the skull staff, but random spawns? Since touching the ones beeling towards us ...wasn't pretty.

Alluvion Yorcia is basically tower defense, if you've played those games. The mobs that march over to attack your tower have ludicrously high stats, and anyone trying to attack them directly will fail spectacularly. What you need to do is spawn mobs of your own, which can stand up to them, and move on to attacking the enemy tower.

The random spawns are Escalents, which are how you do that. Kill those to get Puissance, the currency you use to spawn mobs. They're usually concentrated in a few areas on the map, so you can try to widescan. You've got single butterflies (aggro, hit like trucks), twitherym swarms (nonaggro), and elementals/hybrid elementals. There are also the special ones - Lorissa can pop in there, and will aggro. She can be rough to fight, but if you drag her back to your mobs they'll usually one-shot her for you. There can also be a pink acuex, which drops high quality stones.

As gets mentioned, you can convert Obsidian Shards to Puissance each floor, up to 1000. While Obsidian Shards also come from Skirmish, you can redeem Copper Vouchers for them (1 voucher to 1000 shards).

What I'd suggest doing is building a 1/1/1 pop with a Sash for the Alluvion item. That'll give you Kirin as your Shijin, who in turn can summon the others. Convert vouchers for Obsidian Shards, so that you have at least 1000. When you go in, on the first floor, get on the book, convert 1000 shards to Puissance, and choose to summon a Shijin. Kirin will normally win that floor without you needing to summon any more mobs, or really do much of anything other than finish off the stronghold (requires a player to do that last hit, it'll just stay at 1% with NPCs beating on it).

Don't use Trusts, the attacking mobs will aggro them. They'll typically ignore players unless you act on them.

Even winning that one floor will net you a piece of armor and some personal loot, so it's a baseline to start with.

As you get acclimated to the event, you can convert fewer shards (or none at all), and work on completing additional floors. Kirin alone is less of a sure thing on the second floor, and unlikely to be sufficient past that.

[Shenrien]

I haven't seriously played the game since maybe 2012, every so often I'd log in for the free access time to check out somethings when I had but I decided to resub to day. My gear is pretty out dated, last I played Delve II and Skirmish II & III were all the rage. Any direction I should head in to work on acquiring gear? Probably going to be solo or duo for a good while until I can find out who is still around that I've fallen out of contact with on my server.

[Lolwutt]

delve 2 and skirmish 3 were 2014, you should really get a handle on time

besides that, alluvion skirmish will get you usable gear quickly and can be solo/duoed easily enough(fully auged, many of the pieces are still best in slot)

burn through rhapsodies missions to unlock 5x trust and the xp boosts, then get started on vagary/escha/sinister reign