Dev Tracker: Discussion

[Bukadan]

were you doing all higher tier pops? i stuck to mostly 555's, did a few 4's when 5's werent available and complated every skirmish gear to +1, and 2-3 lehbrailg +2's on each character. it didnt take that long lol, but it was shitty having my mule full +1'd on all equip just as main was +1'd on just his first.

[Malithar]

I don't understand how people can support the plasm purchase system. Do you like having nothing to do for 6 months+ while afking in town in your Oatixur while your friend list dies off from boredom? I don't think anyone would have supported that system for Delve v1 if they knew they'd have literally nothing else fun/challenging to do in SoA until Delve v2, which has the same asinine system. The only silver lining for the more dedicated players is that the system has allowed for insane gil accumulation, especially recently with reforge armor.

I was actually a huge fan of the system in it's early days, pre-boss kills. Solid 5 NM+B attempts with LS, alliance plasm farms during off hours, and as long as you had the NM kills, the progress was solid enough to feel worthwhile.

Once that first boss kill happened though and it was reported that 5 NM+B was 70k+ plasm, it all went out the window overnight. I think SE should of balanced the plasm yields a good bit lower, maybe even 50% lower, to make the content last. But alas, it is what it is. As you said, it's simply an insane gil faucet now.

Pretty sure you're right on the money regarding WKR augs too. From their release, it sounded as though you used up a KI and picked one static aug and one unique aug (from the KI? to the gear?) to apply to the gear, and that's it. I'm really hoping it's more indepth than that, for the sake of the HPB market gaining some stock.

[EjinCaitsith]

To put 18man vs. 6man difficulty in context:

6man can either use DD x3 WHM SCH BRD or DD x2 COR WHM SCH BRD for all Delve zones.

Using Tojil as the target for comparison, the average optimal DD has a DPS of 460 and 600 with COR. We'll go with the more optimal setup of 3 DD in this case, where their combined DPS is 1380. Delve MB has 300K HP. It would take the 6man group 3.6min to kill.

Now take an 18man setup where they take 2 parties of 4 DD with 1 BRD and 1 WHM and a 3rd party of 2 CORs, BRD, SCH and a GEO. The average DD DPS is now 775. With a combined DPS of 6200. MB has 1M HP. It would take the 18man group 2.6min to kill.

So, in fact, the 18man group is theoretically killing 28% faster than the 6man group. The only actual difference/difficulty that arises is the increased TP spam with more DD, but in reality, the TP spam probably isn't that much different than 3 DD. And since you're theoretically killing faster, it'll probably end up using the same amount of TP moves in the end, anyways.

This was exactly the case with 36 man legion. If you could somehow manage to actually get that many people together and who were all optimally geared, the HP increase didn't matter. You had so much more DPS to plow through it.

[Sechs]

Yeah, well, look at what happened with Skirmish III. They tried to add a semblance of longevity to the system and people screamed bloody murder, so now they are nerfing it even further.

I agree with the concept of what you're trying to say in general, totally.
But you'll have to admit that if we go specifically in detail into Skirmish III, they kinda overdid it.
Their "intent" was nice, but the implementation was clearly unbalanced.
The upgrade rates were too low even with 5/5/5 (KI should have been next to 100% with a 5/5/5 run, imho), the random augment system was painful especially for some sets which have way too many possible augments, the performance difference between ilevel 113 and 119 was definitely smaller than expected. For many items we're talking about 1 stat point difference. That's not a really good way of making a single item "sought after".

As for your augment suggestion, the one they're going to use in the upcoming WKR might be a good test for a future system. I kinda like it on paper, let's see how it works in game now.

yeah man I hear you, it's pretty annoying at this point, but not really too terrible. i do vastly prefer the merit system to seals .-. imagine having to farm 20 of those for every AA.

There are pros and cons in both.
I'm comparing the BC system (Tales 1-5) to the merit system (Tales 6-10).

BC system
- It's a mess to farm them when there is no campaign, it gets really boring and frustrating, but once they allowed the conversion rate (even with 3:1) it's not really such a big deal for the majority of old time players. It's of course quite a pain for new players or those few who have 0 in every seals category (can get seals with login campaign too though, don't forget)
+ Each player has his own orb. When you organize a run, you can do multiple instances of the same fight one after another, typically 6. When it's over you walk out with quite a big bunch of tales, even if you do just D level (which is very quick and relaxing). This in addition to the fact you only need 5 tales per upgrade, makes you able to farm quite a lot of sutff at the same time. Basically one run of one tales type and you're set for quite some time.
+ Can store as many seals as you want
+ Can get with Login Campaign
+ You can leech from someone else. That means you're not required to farm seals yourself to enter the BC and lot stuff. For instance you could use a mule's seals to enter if your setup allows you to

Merit System
+ Easy to farm. Boring with abyssea but can be done afk. Fast with Voidwatch. Can spam assignments too, whatever, there are several more or less effective ways to farm merits. It might take a while to farm 30 tbh, but you normally need 15-20 (soon 10) to enter.
- You can't do multiple runs. Or should I say you couldn't. With the reduced costs (and soon the incresed merits cap) you can indeed do multiple runs but the thing is that when you enter each participating member will need its own "access". Comparing to the BC system, it's like if all of the players were to use their Orb on the same, first run. This slows down a lot the speed at which you can obtain Tales, and it's made even worse by the fact 8 are needed instead of 5.
+ Very impart aspect altough not strictly related to the system itself. It made "making merits" important again. Before this system there was little to none relevance in making XP/Merits anymore, a big part of the game was basically dead. This system cast Arise on it basically. So thumb up over 9000.

eh, idk. only takes an hour to hit 30 if you go do them with trusts. 20-30m if you get some people and do iggy.

Don't wanna sound like an ass and I'm not saying it's faster with the BC system but... "only" an hour?
In a game where you have more stuff to do everyday and it's harder to keep up and farming what you want to farm (Relics, Mythics, Empys, Ergon, whatever), in a game where 98% of us are grown up, got a life, a job, whatever else and aren't teenagers anymore with 22 hours of freetime everyday... blah blah blah.
In such a scenario "only" one hour? It's fine sure, but multiply that for the amount of runs you have to do it to get the tales you want, or the item you want because it never fucking drops and when it does you either DC or lose lot.
Compare it to the Seals system (not saying this is faster, don't get me wrong, it only is if you have stocked up seals). For a full BC run you'd have to get SIX phantom KIs, actually more since 8 tales are required compared to 5 of the 109 version.
That's over 6 hours of solo farming.

Your 20-30 mins of Voidwatch is very optimistic too. At best you get what, 19-20 merits per 6 runs on Morta/Ig using Xanthous cells and capping lights?
And lol 20-30 mins in a shout group waiting for the leader to say "ok let's go and pop" and waiting for people to get cells, stones, warp, trade cells etc.
Good luck being done in 20 mins, it's gonna take much more realistically in the majority of situations.

[ccl]

I really fear WKR augment will be one trade=> cap this path augment and that we won't get any other content this month I hope I'm wrong :/

[Sechs]

Once that first boss kill happened though and it was reported that 5 NM+B was 70k+ plasm, it all went out the window overnight. I think SE should of balanced the plasm yields a good bit lower, maybe even 50% lower, to make the content last. But alas, it is what it is. As you said, it's simply an insane gil faucet now.

They went off track with the huge difference from normal farms/outside farms/plasm farms and 5nm+NM.
We're talking about 10k vs 70k, boss itself being worth wath, 60k or whatever it is.
It's way too much.
Boss alone should have been worth something like 10, or 15, no more than 20 in a 5nm+boss run.
It definitely killed the longevity of the Delve/Plasm system. Which was a dead system until it was rejuvenated by the addition of reforged Relic and 300k buyable materials.
Altough in the end the system did a good job imho, despite this clear mistake with the unbalanced rates.

Another way they could have easily solved it is with daily/weekly cap.
Allow you to farm only a max amount of plasm per week/day.
That way you could still keep going to runs to help friends or lot items, but the amount of Plasm you could farm would have been under control.
This is fairly obvious knowledge to all developers to implemented currency-based systems in their MMOs. I don't know why SE sometimes develops stuff pretending they're the only developers in the world and that no other software house exists in this universe.
I'm not saying they should copy, but at least learn from others' experience?

[Shenrien]

A daily/weekly cap on kill wouldn't have slowed down much. That and I have my doubts that the systems they could come up with would allow entry in to the zones but locked people who had killed Tojil, Daku, Muying within that week from being able to access the boss chamber, that and people could just clip through walls and drag it out to everyone else, not like those zones are monitored at all from the things I've seen done in them.

[Sechs]

A daily/weekly cap on kill wouldn't have slowed down much.

And why do you think this?
Because farming 2mils Plasm in a day compared to a 200k/week cap looks like quite a big difference to me.
I wasn't talking about entry lockout btw, just cap on Plasm.
Think about Valor Points in WoW or Mythology in FFXIV.
You can do events that yield those currency as much as you want (well... there are exceptions of course) but there is a weekly cap and once you've reached that cap you can still do those events but you won't receive any more currency.

Translating this to FFXI, you could do Delve as much as you want but once you reached the cap (whatever it was) any plasm gain would have produced no difference for your character.
Now I have no clue if they had the technology to do something like that, but since they created Delve anew, this should have been part of the newly created stuff. I don't see how they thought it would have been balanced to allow 70k plasm runs compared to the 10k average you could get in the same time through all the other means.

[ccl]

Weekly cap in XIV feels awfull I much rather 1% drop rate than weekly point

[Malithar]

I don't see how they thought it would have been balanced to allow 70k plasm runs compared to the 10k average you could get in the same time through all the other means.

By Matsui's own admission back then, they didn't expect players to actually be able to do 5 NM+B runs for a much longer period. Not defending them giving out as much plasm as they do, but that reason at least makes sense. I think once it became widespread, they simply left it as was, instead of adding some nerf that would surely piss off anyone who was farming the content, and piss off those that hadn't even cleared it yet.

Not a fan of caps either, because really, who's going to go and do content that they're not going to get rewarded for? Sure, maybe to keep up good standing within a LS, to help a good friend, but outside of that, no one would. Not that I have a better suggestion either, as there's a massively different scale between players on Delve.

Some have cleared it all, farmed it to hell and back, and made hundreds of millions off of it, while being gear capped quickly. Some do it occasionally with LSs/friends/pugs and see mild success, maybe they've cleared a few areas. And some haven't even touched it yet. Outside of hard caps or lock outs, there's no real way to "balance" the plasm flow. And hard caps and lock outs aren't fun/rewarding/community building. It'd just give the most active players even less to do, while hindering everyone else very little if at all.

[Byrthnoth]

Weaponskill post is up. It's big and informative!

[Ramzii]

Skirmish III wasn't that bad. I was spamming t2 body + head in ~5-10 min a run and was getting 1-2 KI a run on average across 6 players. The drop rate wasn't that different between t1 and 5

[Byrthnoth]

It is unclear to me whether or not they're including Alpha in their calculations for modifiers. My impression is that they're not, which means that single-stat Empyrean/Relic WSs generally gained 20% mod. Quietus gained 40% mod and Camlann's gained a 60% STR mod. notbad.jpg


lulz, they buffed Tachi: Fudo's fTP progression.


Overall, these adjustments are a massive win.

[shepardG]

Honestly, i'd like to see something like salvage @ 75...

Lemme 'esplain

imagine all the salvage NM's dropped a "token" instead of randomly dropping nothing 90% of the time. o.k. cool.
Now make it so that each piece of armor cost their equivalent in said tokens, lvl15, lvl25, lvl35 > and the final upgraded piece cost 50 tokens... total of 125 tokens
So let's say the NM's drop 1-2 tokens a piece (40% drop rate on 2 with TH3) and the final boss of the zone drops 5-6 tokens a piece, with a d-ring's chance of dropping a "mega token" redemable for 1 lvl 15,25,35 armor
alexandrite, drops like normal or maybe a bit higher, whatever, that's not the point...

On average, that would probably take a group of 6 1.5 months to get a fully upgraded piece of armor, and quicker if you get lucky a few times with the mega token.

Make the tokens EX and now it can be done as a daily, take away the assault point requirements, and let 1 person, or 18 enter. hell if they get 16+ people, multiple the HP of the mobs by 2.5 and the token drops by the same.

[Byrthnoth]

Leaden Salute and True Flight might actually be useful now. 100% AGI mod and improved fTP progression.

Similarly, Vidohunir and Omniscience were bumped up to 80% mods. Factoring in the iLevel increase in magic WSs . . . well, I was already using Vido against D Puppet in Peril for 2000+ damage.

[Ramzii]

RIP Victory Smite for Glanzfaust owners?

[Gannon]

OMG Scourge's mods are going to be STR and VIT! :D

[Byrthnoth]

RIP Victory Smite for Glanzfaust owners?

The way they presented these changes is kind of confusing. For Ascetic's Fury, for instance, they have:
Ascetic's Fury - STR 50% / VIT 50% - TP Bonus increased when the user has 1,000 or more TP - The attack power of the weaponskill has also been increased

Now, the mods are unchanged. They gave it an FTP boost, which it desperately needed, but it already had a 2x attack multiplier. Did they even further increase the attack multiplier, or are they just being redundant and mean base fTP when they say "Attack power?"


Geirskogul is now a DEX mod!

[Kincard]

Remains to be seen how true the "tactical choice in WS" thing will be, but they're certainly putting effort into it, and I'll have fun playing with it.

Also I'll go look for dev posts now, though I'm guessing most of them have been translated already. It's been hell the last few days for me. (well, for months really, but these last few days especially lol)

[Malithar]

Exenterator is now a two fold attack when 1/5? wut