.DAT Mining: 5/14/2014 Update - Findings and Discussion

[Damane]

1.None of those things have a mandatory 8 month wait attached, and most people had made significant progress into Captain, Odin, and Chariots even if they hadn't completed those.
2.If they'd announced those mythics a little earlier than a year into the expansion, you'd have a point. People only found out they were happening recently, and until the update a fair amount of people thought they would be literal mythics. So people could only reasonably be expected to start working on "mythic-esque" prereqs a couple months ago.
3.It's the dev's fault nobody did coalitions, they made the choice to design bayld as literally worthless. Furthermore, the fix for a broken job shouldn't be attached to a "thanks for playing neglected content".

no its the peoples fault not doing coal. WKR was considered endgame 6 months ago because they droped decent gear, however those people bitching now about the time-gate did shit for the colonization rate in various areas or to build up the coalitions themself that offers sigil. They were just ok to ride on top of the people doing stuff and profit from sigil/colo rates/WKR accessability due to other people doing your so called "non-endgame" stuff. It was "endgame" just tied everywhere inbetween.

when were mythics announced with any kind of prerequ in ToAU? i dont remember them being announced long looong looong time ago.

Seriously I reached legend in late november/early december?, and thats with me slacking sometimes on this stuff. you had to invest depending on assignments 2-3 hours per week TOPs to use all tags.

[Vedder]

There are four.
The first two give you one additional imprimatur stock (up to 16) and -30 mins recharge. They're the Bronze series and you get them once you've completed all quests and assignments up to a certain patch/rank.
Do all the quests/assignments released since then 'til before yesterday's patch, and you'll receive 2 more KIs, the silver series.
Basically the first bunch will grant you a not particularly significative but still welcome help with roughly half of the assignments you have to do, the second bunch will do absolutely nothing because by the time you get them you'll be legend in all coalitions already.

Are there details anyone can share about which specific quests are required for the cordon KIs? I had thought I would be eligible for the Bronze shovel cordon KI recently based on the description of quests/assignments needed, but Reja Ygridhi does not give it. Of course, it's possible I skipped over one, but it would be ideal if I could know which quests are required speicifically (assignments are easy enough to figure out).

[Fake]

well your fault you didnt keep up with assignments and ranking up i guess? and you need to get to legend only once for both weapons.

You are a moron if you can't see the issue with creating a 6~ month barrier to something, at this point how many people could even say with any certainty that they would be playing the game in 6 months. Mythics are bad enough with a 120+/- day barrier to a new character, and mythics were implemented at a time when gear and content progressed far more slowly.

Btw, I am actually one of the minority who is legendary in all 6 coalitions, that doesn't change anything but nice try.

[dasva]

If the total stone count needed is 200 ghastly -> 200 verdigris -> 200 wailing, that's trivial if you've kept up with RoE timed quests - you can convert 1 copper voucher into 1000 obsidian fragments and you can buy 200 of each for 70000 fragments. The only real timesink there would be getting one at a time from Ornery Dhole but they'll probably change it to let you buy stacks in another update if people complain enough on the official forums.

Except I've been turning them in for rem stuff . Also depends on gil value I suppose. ghastly are 12k a stack over here so 1 copper would get you 20ks worth. Wailing stone if you buy in stacks is 90k a stack so 7.5k each so I copper buys you 37.5k worth. 1 copper gets you 100k worth of verdigris. Average price of pluton over here is 40k so yeah guess it's actually more profitable to turn them into fragments

[dasva]

You are a moron if you can't see the issue with creating a 6~ month barrier to something, at this point how many people could even say with any certainty that they would be playing the game in 6 months. Mythics are bad enough with a 120+/- day barrier to a new character, and mythics were implemented at a time when gear and content progressed far more slowly.

Btw, I am actually one of the minority who is legendary in all 6 coalitions, that doesn't change anything but nice try.

Even if being legend in all is the minority (which I doubt) I'm willing to wager anyone that has been playing since soa came out has decent progress in it. Assignments and rank are tied to so many things unlike mythic requirements. So by doing them you aren't just working torwards the ergon weapon but actually accomplishing and getting in game stuff. If at the end you happen to decide to make an ergon good for you you now ALSO have a lot of the balyd you need for it too. And you ended up spending less in game time doing it than mythic stuff and most of it could be done naked while watching tv

[Cairthenn]

You didn't need to do assignments for anything relevant. At all.

[Fake]

Even if being legend in all is the minority (which I doubt) I'm willing to wager anyone that has been playing since soa came out has decent progress in it. Assignments and rank are tied to so many things unlike mythic requirements. So by doing them you aren't just working torwards the ergon weapon but actually accomplishing and getting in game stuff. If at the end you happen to decide to make an ergon good for you you now ALSO have a lot of the balyd you need for it too. And you ended up spending less in game time doing it than mythic stuff and most of it could be done naked while watching tv

None of what you just typed addresses the fact that 6 months is a fucking retarded artificial barrier for a game.

Saying that adoulin has been out for a year is completely fucking irrelevant, its still a 6 month pre-req.

[Snprphnx]

have people seriously forgotten how long the original mythic process was? even ignoring the original 50k alex requirement, you NEEDED a larger group to complete some of the objectives, like
killing the TOAU bosses (who had glitched pop timers) and
gathering 100k ichor, when you could only farm 2 chambers a week, and a lot of those we're tier 1/2 due to the original difficulty (this alone was an estimated 9 month process)

[Draylo]

They were useless outside of certain things, expecting everyone to be at max is dumb.

[Snprphnx]

Assault Ranks were useless as well, aside from ppl using RvB to get salvage points

[pancakesandsex]

I think the reason is that it's a very time-consuming gating system that artificially slows down players because of how often you can do assignments and consequentially how much time will be required for you to reach the required conditions (approximatively 200 days).
This is longer than any other previous requirement we've seen for anything in this game so far, and it's particularly out of place given the current state of the game (which is much faster/easier than it used to be, say, 5+ years ago).

It's not about it being easy or hard, just artificially time-consuming, probably more than anything has ever been in FFXI, with no possible way of making it faster.
On Relics you had several gating systems but in the end if you wanted you could complete everything in a couple of weeks if you had money/currency.
Mythics gated you down with Nyzul Points, Einherjar points and Assault tags (at least 50 days). Back when you could only do einherjar twice a week that was probably very time consuming, but I don't think it ever got as far as 200 days minimum (it's of course much faster today with the 20hrs or 24hrs cooldowns)
Empyreal didn't have much gating system either. If you had the gil/KIs and stuff was actually on the market, you could complete everything very very fast.

Don't want to go as far as to say what is better and what is worse, but 200 days would have been steep even during the golden years of FFXI, it seems even more out of place today.

But there is a way to make it faster. You complete quests and get the key items which make imps regen faster. This is from QUESTS not coalition assignments, so by the time the expansion is done we should all be able to obtain imps at a much faster rate than we can now, simply by doing quests which have no artificial time block. Make sure your imps are always spend while doing them and you won't waste any time.

[Fake]

Assaults were still more relevant than coalitions which aren't relevant to anything other than themselves. That is still irrelevant though.

Mythic could still be completed faster than 6 months even back then, when the game moved a lot slower anyway. They've introduced this ridiculous time gate at the time when its least relevant to the games current state.

[Sechs]

have people seriously forgotten how long the original mythic process was?

I don't think people did.
The point is that we're in 2014, not 2005. Things are MUCH different from back then and it's pretty naive to expect people to comply with what seems nowaday a pretty out of place requirement.
Again, I don't even need it, I've been legend for months, but if you can't see the huge contrast between JP/Ergon requirements and what the game has been for the last 3+ years then I don't know what to say.

I'm not even saying there should be no requirement or gating to artificially slow down people, it's just that the current rates are disproportionate with the game's current standards, period.

[Seol]

6 months is too much imo, and probably the dumbest thing, I don't play GEO/RUN so I don't honestly care about the weapons, I'm @57 days away from Legendary on all ranks. I only worked on them to cap the reduction of Naakauls KI back when they were 75k each, and relevant, after that I stopped caring about coalitions because they offered nothing else. I don't know if I'll be playing in 2 months, so anyone starting from scratch would have it rough imo.

[Fwahm]

Assaults were still more relevant than coalitions which aren't relevant to anything other than themselves. That is still irrelevant though.

Mythic could still be completed faster than 6 months even back then, when the game moved a lot slower anyway. They've introduced this ridiculous time gate at the time when its least relevant to the games current state.

Assaults had essentially zero relevance, unlike coalition assignments which have some relevance for WKRs and quick merits when you're just barely short of a hard mode fight. You could farm points for salvage as a second lieutenant no problem, and nothing bar Divisor Ring, which had an ungodly low drop rate, was sought after.

Not to mention that if you started from scratch, you could not lose a tag EVER, and it would still take about 5.5 months to finish. Not to mention biweekly Einherjar, which meant that it would take over 5 months to get even if you only did tier 3, never lost, and never missed a day.

Don't forget that you can work on assignments solo, while you had to have 3-6 people for every single assault, and 12+ to reliably beat Einherjar wing 3 back then.

Finally, it's possible to have the coalition thing already completed when Ergon weapons were introduced, while it was impossible to get more than halfway through assaults before Mythics were introduced, even if you were a go getter.

[ccl]

Are you really saying it's not dumb to have a 6months gate before we can even start the quest and then comparing it to how the game was in 2006 era to say it's not dumb ?

[Priran]

Assaults had essentially zero relevance

lol, unless you wanted to do salvage at all. Most people I ran salvage with had at least Second Lieutenant for the easy AP from RvB

[Draylo]

Assaults had zero relevance? Wat

[Fwahm]

lol, unless you wanted to do salvage at all. Most people I ran salvage with had at least Second Lieutenant for the easy AP from RvB

You could get Second Lieutenant by spamming a single assault over and over again, which is how most of the people I know that did Salvage back then ranked up (Excavation duty, to be specific). You're still almost as far away from Captain like that as if you just started. I suppose I should have said that ranking up to Captain had zero relevance, instead of assaults in general.

And to ccl, I'm not arguing whether it's dumb or not. I'm arguing that it's not the dumbest time gate they've ever introduced.

[NynJa]

You didn't need to do assignments for anything relevant. At all.

https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/Budding_Prospects
"The current belief is that 80-85 Imprimaturs need to be used in order to flag this mission."

Back when Entry KI's were a fixed 100k, and people werent swimming in millions of Bayld, and the only ways to get Bayld was through Reives and Ops, it made them kinda desired to do. When KI cost started to get reduced, Ops done was one of the core driving factors. At that, we still werent exactly swimming in Bayld either. You also need to have killed a WKR to be able to get Fracture entry KI.


So yeah, maybe TODAY you dont have to do ops to do anything relevant (which isnt entirely true, because without people doing certain ops, frontier stations and the waypoints wouldnt be accessible, but this is piggybacking off the work of others), but to say "Ops were always useless" is pretty dumb.