Dev Tracker: Discussion

[NynJa]

While your comparison is valid, that yes there are more Aegis and Ochain's out there, you're ignoring how available the currency is (Ochain doesnt have currency, but it had exploits to pop T3 without losing KI), and how long the weapons have been available also. On Carby, there are 70 HP bayld available in bazaar's. Its not much better for Bronze/silverpieces either right now, could be due to dead server lol.

So lets look at Shiva: 88 silverpieces at 600k, and 18 at 900k. Another ~1200 Bronzepieces at 6k. HP Bayld: 13 at 100k, 101 at 60k another 55 at 35-50k.

Each WKR generates 1 HPB per person (VERY VERY VERY rarely they'll get a pouch). Generally theres about 30 characters (Hard to tell because of all the fucking trusts) at each WKR. I will be generous and say "each one dies once per day". If someone wants to say my generosity is an understatement, and they die more often than that, go ahead. 6 WKR per day * 30 characters * 7 days a week = 1260 HPB every week. Presuming these all get pooled to one person (it doesnt), thats 24 weeks to generate enough HP Bayld for one Ergon.

[dasva]

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I don't think it's fair to compare Ergon gear with RME. It's too much of a higher hurdle to create the items, for little incentive. How many people actually made an Ergon? I know it's not a definitive list, but FFXIAH.com shows a grand total of 4 people (3 GEO, 1 RUN) who aren't Damane who made an Ergon weapon. Compare that to over 1300 listed for each of Aegis or Ochain 99....

How exactly do you think a new and not as generally accepted job is going to become popular over time, in fairly small community invested in their existing jobs? There are gonna have to be STRONG advantages to using it to get people to give it a shot.

GEO Ergon is WTFamazing and probably overpowered, and even then it's not exactly flooding the servers. RUN is worse off, Ergon GS is damn good but basically just puts it on par with the reigning incumbent tank, in a game where situations that actually call for a dedicated tank are relatively uncommon. Why would people start clamoring for RUN in the first place? They aren't going to unless it gets broken-level buffs. Just pulling even with the standard bearer is not incentive to create change. Maybe if HP Bayld became way cheaper and we were talking under 200mil to make the weapon it becomes a little more popular. Even then though, it's an exotic way to do the same thing a PLD already does. MDT tank is obviously not good enough reason to switch, if it was people wouldn't be happily doing Avatar high level fights with PLD/RUN with no issue. RUN needs something more..

It terms of time investment ergon does come somewhat close to mythic depending on server and 99 or 119 empyrean but ochain only needs 90 so meh. I think I already said so already but comparing pure number of ownership isn't really a be all of difficulty when 1 has been out for a few months and the others have been out for years. Is ergon still harder? Yes but nowhere near as much as the number made would suggest. I mean look how many mythics there are that's like a 300 mil weapon but a lot are around now due to time they have been out, people feeling like they have nothing else to do and/or exploits. I've also noticed skirmish piece prices dropping so might start getting people balyd farming again

That's more of a player problem than a job problem you speak. The problem with the job is they tried to fix a new job with a new legendary item. Both of which are going to be in short supply for awhile. That said just raising mob level shifts things towards RUN so I wouldn't count it out yet.

I think you are underestimating how much dmg ergon is reducing or overestimating ochain. Assuming capped pdt it's cutting physical dmg in half every hit no matter what. Ochain will depend on things like mob level and possible adjustments for nms but 126 normal mob you reduce dmg by 66% when you block but only block 70.23% so it's overall dmg reduction is 46.6% but some hits get thru for full dmg.. and then there is the whole not being able to block when stunned, terror, asleep, turned around, and ranged attacks sorta. Now pld does have access to reprisal to up that block rate up (though if you can full time reprisal priwen is better) but run has access to better subjob defenses whether it be utsesmi spam or seigan 3rd eye. If players don't want to take them that's there right but that doesn't mean they made the right choice. The game shouldn't be balanced around dumb players perceptions but actual capabilities. Ergon RUN is a perfectly valid tank... though making it so RUN needs ergon to tank effectively isn't. So changes that would make RUN plain stronger would just create the situation where ergon RUN would be king of tanking and why bring a pld if you can find one. Instead could add more easily gotten items that can enable effective RUN tanking (the jse weapon would've been a good chance for that say 15% would've made it decent) or some kind a buff that would primarily help non ergons (focusing on parrying maybe?) but wouldn't change much for ergon and of course ease the requirements for making ergons and/or the availability of H-Ps

[dasva]

HP Bayld: 13 at 100k, 101 at 60k another 55 at 35-50k.

Holy hell your server is cray. According to ffixah over on Bahamut there are a little under 900 highest price is 50k and that's only a couple. A few at 30k. About 250-300 at 35k. About 550 at 40k. Only 14 are 50k. Of course you see shouts buying or selling fairly often now so that might not be representative of the full amount. Most asking shouts are 30k most selling are 35k.

[Hitou]

(Hard to tell because of all the fucking trusts)

Kinda off topic, but you don't have other players trusts turned off? I think I'd go nuts seeing that many green names running around all the time.

On topic I don't really think Ergon are that much harder than Mythic weapons. There's a million more tiny steps you have to do for Mythics but most people have done most of them at this point in the game. It's mostly that the currency hasn't been around for 9 years and there isn't a lot in circulation compared to alex now. There's also no really fast way to farm up bayld besides spamming reives all day and imprimaturs. And there's no exploit to get a ton of extra bayld like there is/was for alex. Not to mention there's probably a ton of people sitting on millions of bayld that aren't selling it because they either want to keep it for something in the future or they don't think they can sell HP-bayld.

[Byrthnoth]

Putting PDT II on RUN's Ergon weapon was such a dumbshit thing to do. I hope SE feels bad about themselves.

[Hitou]

Yeah, it was an expensive band-aid you need to function in any real capacity on the job. It killed any hope that SE would fix RUN's glaring issues as a tank vs physical attacks. Since they can just point at the Ergon weapon and say "use that."

[Malithar]

On topic I don't really think Ergon are that much harder than Mythic weapons. There's a million more tiny steps you have to do for Mythics but most people have done most of them at this point in the game. It's mostly that the currency hasn't been around for 9 years and there isn't a lot in circulation compared to alex now.

Without changes though, Ergons will become by far the hardest to create (already are). We're at the end of SoA missions now, lets assume we've got another year or so of content here. Thus far, there's not much that would make us come back to these areas and do the content once we've moved on. Delve mats for 119ing RF is all that comes to mind, and I'd imagine that won't be a thing once they introduce the next ilvl step, either out dating the gear or allowing us to skip the old steps and pay more of a new currency/item to go straight to the new cap.

2.5 mil plasm? Have fun farming field NMs. 80k fragments? Have fun doing fragment runs in Skirmish, or copper coupons, forgout about those. 131 million bayld? Break out the reive bot and set it for a years worth of labor, at least this will give you the mats for your Skirmish runs! Mythics got a face lift with Salvage II, Nyzul II, and Odin II. It gave reasons to go back and do that content, generating that currency. Outside of making everything in SoA soloable, redesigning it all already for tier IIs, or adding some other item/gear of worth that gets us doing it well past it's expiration, how will the circulation of the currencies improve if they're not being created? Going to have to be some major changes, or requirements are going to get cut heavily.

[Hitou]

Without changes though, Ergons will become by far the hardest to create (already are). We're at the end of SoA missions now, lets assume we've got another year or so of content here. Thus far, there's not much that would make us come back to these areas and do the content once we've moved on. Delve mats for 119ing RF is all that comes to mind, and I'd imagine that won't be a thing once they introduce the next ilvl step, either out dating the gear or allowing us to skip the old steps and pay more of a new currency/item to go straight to the new cap.

2.5 mil plasm? Have fun farming field NMs. 80k fragments? Have fun doing fragment runs in Skirmish, or copper coupons, forgout about those. 131 million bayld? Break out the reive bot and set it for a years worth of labor, at least this will give you the mats for your Skirmish runs! Mythics got a face lift with Salvage II, Nyzul II, and Odin II. It gave reasons to go back and do that content, generating that currency. Outside of making everything in SoA soloable, redesigning it all already for tier IIs, or adding some other item/gear of worth that gets us doing it well past it's expiration, how will the circulation of the currencies improve if they're not being created? Going to have to be some major changes, or requirements are going to get cut heavily.

I agree that Ergon are harder than mythics. But if you're playing legit it will take you about a year to do all the crap for a mythic and it seems like that's about the same time frame for an Ergon based on what you're saying. Also, all the face lift stuff you mentioned is now dead content outside of mythic building. It was good a the time but no one does that crap now unless you're building a mythic. If they make 119 versions of all that gear later, sure. There's also the fact that mythics are 75 era while Ergons are item lvl. If/when the cap raises Delve and other crap is gonna be soloable, heck people 3 man Tojil already, right? There's also the possibility they add more vouchers per day via RoE, though I won't hold my breath on that. There's log in points too, which so far can be spent on wailing stones for fragments. Might not be the case always. This assumes you don't wanna spent the points on something else, though.

I'm not trying to make light of the crazy requirements for Ergon, but mythics are nuts too even now. Just cause some people exploited the crap out of the game doesn't make mythics easy. But if we wanna go with the hardest legendary weapons to make it's probably empyreans. VW is dead. Has been for a while. The only reason to do it is for relic upgrade items and those NM's only drop single plates and no cinder/dross. You'd have to solo Qilin 1,000+ times and probably get crap because you can't cover procs. And then you'd have to solo morta or ig'alima etc for the 60 dross/cinder. Again getting crap from lack of procs. I'm not even sure they are soloable without displacers. And all this work is just for 2 trials not even all the NM camping and abyssea spamming that came before it. Those parts are obviously easier than ever due to lack of competion, but it'd take a long time to solo it since people blew through that part with 8 people all holding pops back in the day. This is ignoring the fact that there's no point in making an empyrean to begin with, though. besides ochain/harp. And only harp is worth taking past 90. Maybe.

Sheesh, I didn't mean to rant like that. tl;dr Ergon are hard to make but so are the other weapons besides relics.

[NynJa]

heck people 3 man Tojil already, right?

Actually Mischief has soloed all 6. He needed a couple extra bodies to get to bosses, but he did the bosses 100-0 alone.

[PSOfanatic]

I agree that the game can't be fixed/balanced. Some of you people just talk in circles and think SE still legitimately cares about FFXI anymore. People are going to complain no matter what. You "Fix" something and it pisses someone off. You don't fix something and it still pisses someone off.

[Draylo]

You complain the most lol, all your posts are pessimistic garbage that bashes on the game. Why do you even care to begin with?

[dasva]

There's also no really fast way to farm up bayld besides spamming reives all day and imprimaturs. And there's no exploit to get a ton of extra bayld like there is/was for alex. Not to mention there's probably a ton of people sitting on millions of bayld that aren't selling it because they either want to keep it for something in the future or they don't think they can sell HP-bayld.

Imps is all right. If you got the imps supplies take all of about a minute to do for a little over 1 HP. Reives are kinda crap unless you are actually there running between colos. I've been experimenting with putting 2 bots nuking a lair (was slightly better than each one at a different lair) and I average about 1 HP drop per hour and 14k balyd per character. Only saving grace is afk and safety and all the skirmish parts to do some real balyd farming which can go to more like 100k balyd an hour per character if you have actual players getting pops and not someone dual boxing them all... though I'm sure there are some simple bots/scripts for warping back to do that fast too. Well and the small amounts of xp/cp/sparks are nice too

Edit: Note skirmish is still shitty when you think of how many you need. But nice in that it gives it to everyone in pt so could probably buy some easy.

[JeanPaul]

I've been experimenting with putting 2 bots nuking a lair (was slightly better than each one at a different lair) and I average about 1 HP drop per hour and 14k balyd per character.

Not sure if you knew, but the Reives in dungeons respawn much faster. Colonizations go down from 1 hour to 15 minutes, and Lairs go from 15 minutes to 5.

[Sechs]

I don't think it's fair to compare Ergon gear with RME. It's too much of a higher hurdle to create the items, for little incentive. How many people actually made an Ergon? I know it's not a definitive list, but FFXIAH.com shows a grand total of 4 people (3 GEO, 1 RUN) who aren't Damane who made an Ergon weapon.

Way more than that. My server has at least 4 Idris and 2 Epeolatry that I know of, probably more.
Your point of there beign waaaaay less Ergon than RME still stands, altough I'm not sure what are you trying to prove?

The "problem" here goes beyond Ergon Weapons imho, and it's an old issue FFXI has been affected with for many years already.
From a game design point of view imho it's a terrible choice to fix a broken job with a specific and very hard to obtain item.
More in general I could say it's a terrible choice to balance a job with rare gear.
This would apply to Ochain, Aegis, Epeolatry, Daurdabla, to a certain extent Gjallarhorn and many other items as well.
When a single item creates such a huge difference compared to who doesn't have it of course you, as a developer, are gonna be stuck in a very bad spot.
Job without that item is not strong enough, but you're gonna have a hard time fixing it because if you buff it you're gonna make job with item too strong.
Likewise you can't nerf it because it would nerf job without as well, and you can't nerf the item because the people with it would mass ragequit.
It's a tricky situation to solve for developers, so the "solution" here clearly is to AVOID CREATING such situations.
SE doesn't seem to have learned this lesson over the last years.

If some of those items didn't exist or were less powerful than they are, many of the issues we've been discussing over the last pages wouldn't even exist.
It's not even a matter of those items not being more powerful than other regular options, it's a matter of the gap being way too large than it ever should have been.


It's exactely the same with the things ccl was saying in the previous page.
How can a game developer create balanced fights when you have to take into account people who stack buffs outside, bring RMEs bards, Idris geos and Koga SAMs, and at the same time make so the fight is not too hard for the other players? (and I'm thinking about decent players here, not the completely random/casual ones equipped in ilevel 105 gear).
You have these 2 extremes on the scale: if you tilt the pointer on the left it's gonna create a mess on the right, and vice-versa.

It's impossible to have a perfect solution for these situation, they simply should never have happened, period.

[Sechs]

It's exactely the same with the things ccl was saying in the previous page.
How can a game developer create balanced fights when you have to take into account people who stack buffs outside, bring RMEs bards, Idris geos and Koga SAMs, and at the same time make so the fight is not too hard for the other players? (and I'm thinking about decent players here, not the completely random/casual ones equipped in ilevel 105 gear).

Quoting myself on this.
This is exactely the reason why other games like WoW moved to an homogeneization approach (to avoid cookie-cutter raid setups, buff-stacking etc) and the reason why FFXIV has a strict implementation of the Trinity System (Tank, DD, Healer) without hybrid or buff/support roles.
Because when you take that approach it might as well make things deeper and more interesting for players, but it makes them much harder for developers to balance and it creates these complicated situations where it's hard to stay in the middle and something becomes either too easy or too hard.

(It has to be said though that FFXI brings this issue to much worse levels than WoW ever did, imho. WoW never had issues as big as the current ones FFXI has with so many "rare" unbalanced equipment and cheap strategies involving buff-stacking, buff-holding etc)

[Ligray]

4gamer article showed examples of new gear, can someone translate?

Unity Concord:
http://www.4gamer.net/games/005/G000...005/TN/017.jpghttp://www.4gamer.net/games/005/G000...005/TN/018.jpg

SoA NMs drop:
http://www.4gamer.net/games/005/G000...005/TN/022.jpghttp://www.4gamer.net/games/005/G000...005/TN/023.jpg

[Kincard]

Just gonna list some of the more interesting stats on them.

Boots have healing/enhancing magic skill +11, haste +3, FC+4, and "Unity Rank: Fast Cast+1-3"
Staff has healing/enhancing magic skill +11, cure potency +24%, cure cast time -11%, and "Unity Rank: Cure Potency +6-10%"

Robe has Haste +9%, Refresh +3 (MNK/WHM/BLM/RDM/PLD/BRD/RNG/SMN/BLU/PUP/SCH/GEO/RUN)
Shield has Macc+5, Fast Cast +3%

So I guess this implies that the bonus stats you'd get from higher unity ranks was actually something that shifts based on the current rank, rather than when you got it?

[Sechs]

I'm about to cry
(tears of joy)

Can you type the jobs?
Think I recognize the SCH kanji in all of the items except the staff which is WHM only? (tears of eternal grief & tribulation)

[Kincard]

Boots are WHM/BLM/SMN/PUP/SCH/GEO
Staff is WHM only
Robe is MNK/WHM/BLM/RDM/PLD/BRD/RNG/SMN/BLU/PUP/SCH/GEO/RUN
Shield is WHM/BLM/RDM/PLD/DRK/SMN/BLU/SCH/GEO/RUN

[Sechs]

No BRD for Shield and boots
/crymeariver

Gonna need me a /wardrobe2 soon.