January Version Update Schedule Revealed! (12/15/2014)

[Hoshiku]

I feel like the challenge SE faces is that they have two completely different player bases. People with full reforge, delve, and htbf 119 gear find those fights ridiculously easy. Unfortunately SE also wants players in 113 gear with their party of trusts to be able to clear the content. I would have liked the challenge level of ToAU fights for these missions (doable but slightly challenging to everyone). Unfortunately that's not possible when your designing fights for people with a 6 level (or more) gap in gear.

[dasva]

Sounds like your friends weren't paying attention

Yeah sounds like enter key spamming during cutscenes to me

[Sechs]

Yes, but even with that said there were a lot of unclear stuff with CoP, mainly due to the overuse of metaphors, mistranslations (???) and a particularly creative use of language with very long sentences and very little meaning.
The CoP plotline discussion is still there for everybody to read.
It's clear it was an overall pretty coherent expansion which was "foresaw" by developers at least to a very high degree, and so it integrated really realy well with all the rest of the game and the plotline.
But c'mon, there were so many hard to understand/unclear things...

Not trying to demerit CoP which is without any doubt my favourite, just saying it wasn't "perfect".

[Rooney]

a particularly creative use of language

Just be glad the folks who did voidwatch didn't do CoP, or we might still be trying to decipher it.

Not trying to demerit CoP which is without any doubt my favourite, just saying it wasn't "perfect".

Don't think anyone is saying it was perfect, just better than what we got afterwards.

[dannyl]

completely agree about the lackluster of a story

I rushed through the missions for one reason alone, and that was the final ring reward. SE fucked up in making me care about the story or anticipate a new chapter during their releases. I blew through them last week simply for the crafting skill up campaign.

I hope for Jan they do something with these new fishies, at a minimum

[The Assman]

Personally, I Iiked ToAU and WotG storylines more than CoP, although WotG falls apart after the Throne Room scene.

[Spira]

I don't know anyone, either RL friends who've done CoP 2+ times now or anyone in my LS, who can confidently explain what exactly was happening in CoP. I'd argue it's probably the LEAST coherent story in FFXI. Heck, even thinking back to things my static was saying all those years ago: "So, Prishe was cursed with having to release Promathia? She says so herself, right?" "You guys know where this Louvurance clone came from? Did I miss a CS?" "I thought Tenzen was a good guy. Why are we fighting him?" Umm, is there any rhyme or reason to these Tarutaru? As if it wasn't hard enough to follow the other characters motives and desires as it is...", etc.

CoP's story does come across as pretty convoluted when you first approach it.. but it gets so much clearer if you have knowledge of the game's lore from other quests and missions, which is a part of the beauty of FFXI's stories and how they interlink. In the end CoP actually solves more mysteries than it creates, and as far as i can remember, there are no actual loopholes in CoP's story at all. It was that complete.

WotG does something similar, and draws from a different set of required lore (like missions and AF quests) but didn't have quite as strong of an impact probably due to the fragmented nature of mission updates and that it took 3 whole years to deliver all of it. It's very good if you do it in 1 sitting after the fact tho.

if you want a recap, i wrote a summary of CoP's story here from watching the cutscenes.

..as for difficulty.. i think i understand what some people mean. the ACP/AMK/ASA final missions were released much later than CoP, towards the end of the WotG era, but somehow were balanced in such a way that they proved to be just beyond the threshold of what was considered moderate difficulty.. and i think they should have done that with SoA. Then again, because of the way ilevel works, and that the devs said that these missions should be beatable in eminence gear (or something like that) i don't foresee that happening.

[Kainstryder]

Just to add to what Spira's saying, but again from personal experience, back when CoP was brand new just about, maybe chapter 3-4 was released? I don't know, May 2005 or so, because I was at E3 then, and I remember SE having prizes and such for answering questions. Most were CoP related, like chapter 3+ or so, NO ONE there was past Promyvions or barely into the Safehold. Hell, you should've seen the train wreck that most people did trying to fight the 3 promy bosses with certain set jobs SE forced them to play for prizes. The Holla one killed everyone in under 2 mins, (and that was listed as one of the lesser/easier ones I believe. Ultimate battle was against Tenzen back before it was ever released) but to be fair, SE gave everyone really, really stupid fucking job combos, and equipment. RNG/NIN with 1 axe and suppanomimi for Contaminated Colosseum for example.

Point is, shit was hard and people struggled to get through the lower end missions. This was before they were all nerfed, and back when Mammets+Omega+Ultima were crazy hard, but it was challenging.

Edit: Found the event on wiki, can read about it, was interesting since I managed to get picked from the crowd and did 2 fights, because our WHM dc'd at their station and their workers were confused and told me (i was the "party leader") to pick another fight because they'd have to reset the servers and it'd cause world problems. We were on Chocobo server. Did Contaminated Colosseum and Tenzen

http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Boss_Battle_Bash

[dasva]

I never found mammets hard. Though it kinda hinged on your rdm... but since I was rdm main that was taken care of.

Snoll was kinda hard at first too. Not so much survival as just dealing enough dmg in time. Especially in a day and age with more gimpness especially at level capped events. I ended up doing 42% of the pts dmg as a blm when we won.


Edit: meant just mammet fight

[Spira]

mammets/omega/ultima was crazy hard, both in terms of difficulty and time limit. possibly the hardest fight in the game at that point in time. theres a good reason why they made it a 45min fight.

second to that was probably ouryu, likely due to limited job access and a lack of experience in players fighting wyrms.

its funny how i still remember those fights.

sadly i don't even remember hades at all.

[Kainstryder]

Should've tried Ouryu at 45 cap. They had him at 45 cap, and Tenzen was 70 cap, and with terrible jobs/gear. I was a THF/NIN with thief knife only, full clown gear. Amazing.

[Classikmage]

Is that Haste II the puppet is casting on the master int he picture, lol? So, does that mean PUP's won't need to use Koru-Moru any more in Trust setups?

[Sechs]

Automatons have been casting Haste2 for quite a while, Classikmage... Well, the RDM doll, not the WHM one of course.

[Capuchin]

And if you're in a Trust setup you'll still prefer Koru-Moru because then you free up your automaton to be a DD frame instead of RDM frame.

Mage puppets are basically for true solo only (no trust - so Dyna/Salvage and the like), casual party support scenarios (say, WHM puppet if you're super light on healing doing a SKCNM), or unusual niche situations (PUP/NIN with WHM puppet works well in AAs, you can dump hate onto puppet with Ventriloquy and then Deactivate to completely erase that hate).

I hope to god there's more planned than just 1/2 of what December was supposed to get, which was barely anything to begin with.

The previous discussed Xol Triumvirate battles could be legitimately cool as a SOA epilogue of sorts (a la Bahamut/Apoc Nigh, or Alex/Odin prime). I'm kinda hoping those show up in January.

[arus2001]

Whole lot of, "I want..." going on about missions and such, but aside from that tinge of nostalgia and seeming disconnect between what is and isn't feasible of the player base, the big factor WHY things don't seem as quality is the game running on the skeleton crew and likely C-string staff with the kind of budget that entails. So, while I'd never want to see CoP again with all its stupid level capping and content locks, at that point, XI was also SE's baby. Now? It's pretty much the metaphorical adult whose parents kicked them to the curb while they focus on raising their younger sibling(s).

[dasva]

mammets/omega/ultima was crazy hard, both in terms of difficulty and time limit. possibly the hardest fight in the game at that point in time. theres a good reason why they made it a 45min fight.

Seriously you had to deal dmg faster than most could at that level. While also tanking very well and not dying. And somehow keep mp up. It was ridiculous. Most losses of any mission fight from any expansion ever

[Fwahm]

Seriously you had to deal dmg faster than most could at that level. While also tanking very well and not dying. And somehow keep mp up. It was ridiculous. Most losses of any mission fight from any expansion ever

Personally, I went 1/1 on the Snoll fight, and 1/2 on Ouryu.

However, I also went 1/8 on Promy Holla, and 1/42 on 2-5 Mammets. I leveled BST to 40 just to clear that fight.

[NynJa]

Went 1/1 on every fight up until tenzen, with a random (jobwise, not players) group of:
Thf
Pld
Drg / nin
Rng
Blm
Rdm

1/1 on holla on a "no med test run" cause it was late when we got up there.

Wish i could find the old videos

[dasva]

Personally, I went 1/1 on the Snoll fight, and 1/2 on Ouryu.

However, I also went 1/8 on Promy Holla, and 1/42 on 2-5 Mammets. I leveled BST to 40 just to clear that fight.

After promys I had a sorta static so I believe we went 1/1 on I think everything except ultima which took about 10 and we lost on Diabolos once because someone Leeroy Jenkins and got us all drawn in and it opened with nightmare the bio of which killed the mages before they woke.... but a lot of that hinged on me and our pld.

Like snoll she tanked like an utter boss considering I didn't pull hate till the very end and I literally 42% of the dmg myself. Still almost ran out of time.

And while we didn't lose we did wipe on mithra. Though it was somewhat planned/expected

Mammets almost failed because our plan was to have 4 players gang up on 1 mammet while a rdm held 1 mammet each... and the other rdm died within 30 seconds and I ended up having to hold both of them by myself. Luckily I did a lot of rdm soloing back then so on top of good enfeeble sets I also brought an evasion set and just evasion tanked them for awhile lol. And luckily they zerged the first one fast because one of the ones I was holding had turned mage

[Bukadan]

airship was a joke if your nin used shuriken for it. i remember only using manji shurikens too. from what i remember fumas were rare or something. maybe stacked only to 12? i forget.