Dev Tracker: Discussion (Old)

[noodles355]

The problem I'm facing now is that I've been saving gil for marrows for a while (VERY sporadic playtime). I want to know if I should keep saving for them or not (which is going to take a long time, I'm probably only about 25% there on the 50m and I don't play much at the moment).

[Buffy]

No one can answer that question since they seem to have their thumb up their butt with figuring out how to keep RME relevant.

[arus2001]

A crash on the marrow market seems more likely than a rise or even stability. Would just say to keep saving until SE settles on their plan... or just remains silent and let the rage quitters do their thing.

[Byrthnoth]

Google translate is telling me that they decided to go with the 20 minute depop option on Delve NMs. I hope all the casuals managed to get their wins in during this brief period when they could actually beat the monsters.

Also, I love how Google Translate begins every post from this new guy with "Hi there is rocks." I can't tell if it's messing up his name or it's some reference to Delve.


The second post appears to indicate that they are going to remove the automatic progression from Delve. You will need to kill NMs, because the walls will not fall in a timed manner anymore. They're basically making all aspects of this system more hardcore.

[Kincard]

Yeah they're going with the 20 min depop idea for now.

Iwagami literally means "Above Rocks", so that's probably what's causing the weird translation. Delve is called メナスインスペクター "Menace Inspector" in JP.

So basically with this change anybody who's not in a competent LS will be unable to beat Delve now? I think that's just going to cause even more people to unsuscribe.

[Prothescar]

dig that hole deeper SE, you've almost reached Eorza

[Damane]

dig that hole deeper SE, you've almost reached Eorza

I seriously dont see a problem in those chanfes. Infact they are good. No more NM holding for 5 hours if you dont have the setup to circumvent the gimmick.

[Yubar]

Isn't this what people have been asking for years now? An event that rewards you based on how skilled you and your ls are and not because of how fast you can zerg it down.

[Byrthnoth]

Isn't this what people have been asking for years now? An event that rewards you based on how skilled you and your ls are and not because of how fast you can zerg it down.

Maybe. How does imposing a hard 20 minute time limit move us towards non-zerg setups?

[Prothescar]

I seriously dont see a problem in those chanfes. Infact they are good. No more NM holding for 5 hours if you dont have the setup to circumvent the gimmick.

What we had now was a happy medium; sure you held an NM for hours to kill it, but as long as your group had some semblance of competence you were going to get what you wanted. Now you'll need to have an upper tier group in order to even break the first layer. Delve rewarded better, more efficient groups by allowing you to farm it far more rapidly and reap more rewards in a shorter period of time than lesser, more casual groups. It was the correct way to balance content: rewarding better groups through better rewards while still allowing less advanced groups to progress, albeit at a much slower rate. I won't personally be affected by these changes, but I do not at all agree with this sort of content gating that rewards the same old tired melee zerging bullshit that we've been pigeon holed into for the last forever over a system where everyone can succeed with enough work/time and more varied approaches to combat.

[Kincard]

They're not bad changes in concept (The whole concept of rage is dumb when you can just time the fight anyway, I will agree with that), the problem is that very few people have access to a competent 18-man LS these days. LS Teamups are viable too, but even with that the majority of players are not in these linkshells.

If Delve was a 3-6 man event there would be no problem whatsoever, but there's not a single casual EN player that's going to be able to assemble 17 competent players through a shout.

[Jem]

I have 2 issues with the 20 min timer really.

1. It should have been there on implementation if that's the route they wanted to take. It doesn't achieve much after the majority have got their KI's.

2. Their second change about the walls no longer falling is likely to undo any congestion easing from the above. You're not going to be farming 6-9k per run when the walls don't drop. Which means people may revert to spamming an outside NM instead. I can foresee allies spamming whatever the easiest/quickest NM is for points meaning nobody else can pop it.


From a difficulty standpoint the 20 minutes timer is fine because mobs dies way quicker than that if you kill them using SE's gimmick. It just means that PUGs became a lot harder.


Hell, the walls dropping thing is a bigger kick in the nuts than the timer really. It means you can't do dry runs for Naakuals to see what time you would have. It also means you can't practice on the Naakual to see what might work without pissing away beads.


EDIT: I don't think the timer completely cockblocks PUGs/casuals. Look at how many VWNM's were difficult on release yet PUGs eventually managed to kill them all with whatever herp-a-derps they could muster. Even before they added the weakening items PUGs had managed kills of everything.

[Damane]

i agree with the wall part. but the 20 min timer is good

[Kincard]

I guess we'll see, but pickup VW still contains a ridiculous amount of derp, the only reason anybody wins is because you are literally invincible in the fight and the monster does basically nothing as long as you have a handful of people proccing it to carry everyone else. Even WITH that pickups died all the time on VWs. I'm skeptical that taking that derp and transferring to delve will result in anything but hilarity.

[Jem]

On the whole VWNM's were a lot more threatening though. Pre-rage, Delve NM's aren't really all that bad. If you take the right set-up, they're basically going to boil down to DPS check fights.

Worst case PUG's only need to be able to down 6 of the 15 anyway for KI. So they will basically be looking at Raptor + Peiste + Craklaw + Orobon + Chapuli + Wamoura

[Kincard]

that's still not very comforting considering the typical parses on VW fights

[Jem]

Do you really think PUG's won't be able to manage Raptor + Peiste + Craklaw + Orobon + Chapuli + Wamoura? Because that's basically all you need to manage for full KI's.

[Byrthnoth]

I doubt it. I have parsed over 40% too many times to believe anymore!

To put it another way, if I am a good DD and you need 4 good DDs to win, then any VW party where I parse more than 25% of the damage is going to fail delve. That is every Lakshmi pickup.

[Isiolia]

A different angle they could take is actually adjusting the rest of SoA content/rewards.

What if Coalition weapons were 5-10% lower base damage than the base Delve weapons? Skirmish was actually reasonable to get a pop set for, and the augmented weapons were about the same? Would you still have the hordes of people really that concerned with Delve, or would it be Legion 2.0 for the groups/players who dig that kind of content?

I think most players are more concerned with not being subpar, and not seeing an option for that outside of Delve. Give us that option, and you can make Delve as ball-crushingly difficult as you damn well please.

Not completely invalidating nearly every weapon in the game would still help more, and not saying REM don't need attention, but the reason you've got PUGs willing to throw bodies at these NMs for hours is that sheer gap between Delve weapons and the next best thing. Reduce that, and more would be happy enough to do something else.


Or, give us different ways to get the needed KIs (at least). Making them buyable with Bayld or something would likely still leave killing the NMs as the more appealing route for large, competent LSes, while still ensuring every player can get them if they choose.

[Therin]

Trueflight is good in abyssea, sadly rng isn't.

The snapshot on mythic would probably need to make you shoot at repeating xbow speed to be worth it.

We had a Gastraphetes in the LS.. not sure he ever bothered to test it really that much though.

The problem I'm facing now is that I've been saving gil for marrows for a while (VERY sporadic playtime). I want to know if I should keep saving for them or not (which is going to take a long time, I'm probably only about 25% there on the 50m and I don't play much at the moment).

2 hours a day in pre-update Dynamis would get you the 50M in a month. Now you'll have to do Delve and sell airlixirs, but it's even faster (theoretically if you were some kind of superhuman who could do 8 hours of Delve a day, you could literally rake in 8-10M a day off of Airlixirs).

Maybe. How does imposing a hard 20 minute time limit move us towards non-zerg setups?

Seriously. SE has no idea how to make mobs. They make a mob with 500,000-1,000,000 HP and ask us to kill it in 20 minutes. That is FORCING us to bring nothing but the hardest hitting DDs jobs, rotate BRDs and zerg the hell out of it. People have been crying for interesting and difficult content, not a bunch of fucking zergfests. That's the most annoying thing about this update (even more annoying than not knowing the future for my relics). They could have easily given the mobs regular HP (100,000-200,000) and made their TP moves and attacks much stronger, way too deadly to zerg. This would require the players to actually exploit mob weaknesses and bring particular setups to the fight rather than ZOMG DRK BRD COR WHM ONLY PLZ.

Do you really think PUG's won't be able to manage Raptor + Peiste + Craklaw + Orobon + Chapuli + Wamoura? Because that's basically all you need to manage for full KI's.

Pugil is much easier than Craklaw.. it's literally dead in 2 minutes with a good alliance. I would imagine it's one of the only ones a pickup could do in less than 15.

I don't believe ANY pick up will be able to do all six of these unless there are major improvements to pick ups or major nerfs to the NMs.