Heated Endgame Discussion

[divisortheory]

So PLD/NIN was unusuable before Macuahuitl+1 was introduced into the game? Oh wait, people were almost as effective back then with it as they are now.

Just when you think they're starting to listen by not putting really worthless HNM into the game, by putting a really good club and sword onto a new HNM, they bitch-slap you by making the drops in the 1-5% range, while making Jorm-tastic JSE materials 100%.

But you're right, the sword is a piece of shit yo.

[Demosthenes11]

So PLD/NIN was unusuable before Macuahuitl+1 was introduced into the game? Oh wait, people were almost as effective back then with it as they are now.

I remember most plds going earth staff back then
While Hauteclaire has its uses (albeit nothing on anything that matters), it is not what we are looking for. We want gear that makes us go "whoa" like salvage gear. We don't want some subpar item with limited uses dropped 1/10 off a mob that is a pain in the ass to get to and kill.

[Not Kuno]

So PLD/NIN was unusuable before Macuahuitl+1 was introduced into the game? Oh wait, people were almost as effective back then with it as they are now.

I remember most plds going earth staff back then
While Hauteclaire has its uses (albeit nothing on anything that matters), it is not what we are looking for. We want gear that makes us go "whoa" like salvage gear. We don't want some subpar item with limited uses dropped 1/10 off a mob that is a pain in the ass to get to and kill.

1/10 if only

[Ninjiz]

I read most of this stuff... and for the LIFE of me, i cannot understand the arguments given for AGAINST progression.... it simply makes no sense.

So what if old gear is made obsolete? It wouldnt BE obsolete to the people who DON'T have them. WHY shouldnt there be something NEW to strive for after you get something else?? WOW has 8 million+ users for a REASON. Because they ofere PROGGRESSION, and the biggest thing of all, they grasp the concept of Time vs rewards. The 3 kings are YEARS old, yet until salvage came, NOTHING was better. Forcing teh same hundreds of thousands of players to try and fight the same 3 things. Spreading that conent over the entire game, and adding NEW content BETTER then the previous content, would do NOTHINg but good. I cant understand the arguments for being against this concept.

WHY shouldnt COP wyrms have had BETTER gear then Behe, Faf, Ada nq/hqs? WHY shouldnt ToAus 3 HNMs have had better drops then BOTH Ziliart, and CoP?? It came out after both of them, so please explain to me, why a natural progrression with better gear then the last expansion, better hnms to fight, new quests worth doing, new events with rewards over the last one is a bad thing?

Time sink does NOT equal difficulty.

And frankly id MUCH rather have one fight vs a really tough monster that takes flawless execution to defeat, then to fight the SAME old easy ass monster for 3 years trying to get a drop that just wont drop. If SE made challenging mobs, and even instanced things, that would not make every tom dick and harry have the gear. Not everyone would be on the same "page" ie not everyon would have progressed to the same exact time on the same "level" the fact that there was very little beyond the 3 kings is what made everyone reach teh same "level", that bottle neck crammed everyone to teh same spot to a hault. If there was "prohgression" then people who were AT the damn kings (most likley JP players at the time) when all of us joined FFXI, woul dhave been doing something new, while "we" were reaching King Level play. But as it stood, they were stuck at teh same spot, and when we reached it as well, we were all stuck at it. Then CoP came, and there was no "proggression".

Progression makes everyone happy, just because YOURE ok with the way things are, just because this is like your first mmorpg game, doesnt mean such a low standard has to be ok for the rest of us. So what if old gear is obsolete........thats the damn point. Not everyone would be on teh same page, so that obsolete gear to a certain player would STILL be usefull for the person who hasnt reached it.

I dont see the argument for against progression as being valid in the least bit. I care more about progression, and giving everyone the "chance" to be rewarded with good gear, with reasonable time they spend playing, over anyones desire to stroke their Epeen by having gear that no one else can get.

[Khalil]

So PLD/NIN was unusuable before Macuahuitl+1 was introduced into the game? Oh wait, people were almost as effective back then with it as they are now.

I remember most plds going earth staff back then
While Hauteclaire has its uses (albeit nothing on anything that matters), it is not what we are looking for. We want gear that makes us go "whoa" like salvage gear. We don't want some subpar item with limited uses dropped 1/10 off a mob that is a pain in the ass to get to and kill.

More like 0.0000000001/100

[divisortheory]

More like 0.0000000001/100

Wow, 1 out of 1,000,000,000,000? Is it really that low?

[Khalil]

More like 0.0000000001/100

Wow, 1 out of 1,000,000,000,000? Is it really that low?

Clearly you missed the point of my post.

[sleekmotorwurkz]

Yea we all know some of the best items in the game come from monsters that are 3 years old. HOWEVER, one thing SE doesnt want to do is make the game a joke. Lets get real, Merits, new merit abilities have made a lot of the game lolworthy. Hell Ive see rdms tank tiamat, and a jp ls Manaburned faffy the other day with burst 2. The more gear they give us the easier the game becomes. If they release uber gear to top previous gear every update people will be soloing wyrms in a few months. Do we need new gear yes, does it have to top king abj gear every update no.

They did make an attempt with salvage, so what its a challenge. You cant use all your awesome endgame gear youve accumulated right away. Thats the point, it levels the playing field, takes a lot of strategy and teamwork. Its not a joke like hydra/cerb/khimaira that will be destroyed the first day it comes out. Im sure the first groups that started dynamis before all the precise strategies came out that detailed every mob that came from every statue had a hard time for a few months too. Rest assured that salvage gear will become more common and obtainable once more is known about it and full mob to mob strategies come out.

[Sykes]

Merits are a large part of the reason this game lacks any sort of real progression. Or more specifically, the fact that up until recently, the player base has been happy with more merits as a substitute for any actual substantial content.

2 years (or more?) ago, SE saw that their end-game players were starting to get insanely bored with existing content. Now, the normal reaction would be to try to innovate and create new content with real progression. However, that doesn't mesh well with the programmers' general lazyness, so they created a system to simply extend the grinding treadmill which also caters to the average FFXI player's overwhelming desire to develop a larger e-peen.

And it worked. It worked better than they ever imagined. It worked so well that merits are always among the first topics brought up whenever people discuss "improvements" to the game. But it also created a really strange flow in terms of progression. Instead of people meriting so that they can go kill bigger and badder dragons, the first thing people do with their big bad dragon drops is go to a merit party to see how much higher they parse as a result of their shiny new Adaberk.

And since the player base has been mostly satisfied with the artifical excuse for real content that is the merit point system, the dev team has had no real reason to add new real content. Until now at least (most likely because people have started to max merits).

[Matricide]

They did make an attempt with salvage, so what its a challenge. You cant use all your awesome endgame gear youve accumulated right away. Thats the point, it levels the playing field, takes a lot of strategy and teamwork. Its not a joke like hydra/cerb/khimaira that will be destroyed the first day it comes out. Im sure the first groups that started dynamis before all the precise strategies came out that detailed every mob that came from every statue had a hard time for a few months too. Rest assured that salvage gear will become more common and obtainable once more is known about it and full mob to mob strategies come out.

Salvage is artificial difficulty and relies a lot on LUCK, vs things like dynamis and limbus where it may take time to have a proven strategy, and sometimes people fuck up so its not always perfect, but it's hardly luck based (with the exception of DL). I think salvage, and the cost to enter salvage, is bullshit.

[Not Kuno]

Salvage is artificial difficulty and relies a lot on LUCK, vs things like dynamis and limbus where it may take time to have a proven strategy, and sometimes people fuck up so its not always perfect, but it's hardly luck based (with the exception of DL). I think salvage, and the cost to enter salvage, is bullshit.

Everything in FFXI relies alot on luck. Are you talking about armors or cells? Cells in every zone except arra are dependable if you know what to do getting what you need unlocked really fast. And as for armor relying on luck well.. what fking game are you playing where you dont need a lot of luck. Almost every HNM/end game activity depends on luck, there's not alot of 100% drops that are very good.

[divisortheory]

Salvage is artificial difficulty and relies a lot on LUCK, vs things like dynamis and limbus where it may take time to have a proven strategy, and sometimes people fuck up so its not always perfect, but it's hardly luck based (with the exception of DL). I think salvage, and the cost to enter salvage, is bullshit.

Whenever I hear someone say that Salvage is artificial difficulty, it makes me think that person has either never been to Salvage before, or went once or twice the first day it was ever released. Which category are you in?

[Sykes]

the cost to enter salvage, is bullshit.

This is pretty loltastic. While the 2000 AP cost may hurt someone trying to obtain the armor (which has been out long enough for to obtain 3 full sets by now if they wanted to), anyone who says that the 20 minutes it takes to farm 2000 AP is too taxing is just plain lazy.

[divisortheory]

This is pretty loltastic. While the 2000 AP cost may hurt someone trying to obtain the armor (which has been out long enough for to obtain 3 full sets by now if they wanted to), anyone who says that the 20 minutes it takes to farm 2000 AP is too taxing is just plain lazy.

Let the record show that despite the fact that I'm doing 2x Salvage every week for the past 2 months, my net assault point gain is still in the positive enough that I have 40k Assault Points piled up.

[levish]

See, that's the shortsightedness that's a problem really. "Make my items easier to get and I'll be happy." No you won't. We need a reason to stay after we get said gear (not to say making it "easier" read: non-bottable wouldn't be a good thing). The fix is real progression.

It's kinda hard to progress if your items take 3-6 months to get for 1 person and you have to equip 4-5 people if not more before progressing.

=P

It was a lot easier to say that FFXI was good before there was something that had such good gear progression came out.

Limbus and AF+1 + Dynamis/AF2 is a example of good progression from AF1, it's plagued only by bad droprates and the fact that the gear is not always desireable/useful or is a sidegrade to something easier to get.

Clearly the progression aspect of the game is a afterthought or a patch job, no one ever said "well, what comes after af1 for quested armor?". AF1 isn't a random chance to be obtained so AF2 isn't really AF v2 rather Job Specific Armor with a chance to drop from Dynamis.

No one is asking for a whole set of AF2/Relic weapons from one weeks worth of Dynamis or a Set of Abjurations, but it would be nice to know that everytime you do one you get closer to getting yours instead of "LOLBADLUCK! more thieves/Better Moon/Learn2FaceWestwithLuckyEgg"

Too bad I don't like wow all that much graphic wise otherwise I wouldn't even be here complaining.

A lot of the people still here who no longer play probably share this opinion: I want to like/love FFXI but it's been a chat service with built in time waster for about 3 years now.

You hit 75, max out merits then what? run Gods/NMs/Dynamis to progress of course or level another job of course at the current rate you are better off leveling that other job while waiting and waiting and waiting for either your chance to progress in that first job or that lucky drop.

It's not 1 thing that would "fix" FFXI, it's a combination of things making it a game again, of doing something other than waiting and hoping.

The most reasonable thing to do now is to hope the next SE MMO is made of Win, Kittens and Moogles and enjoy what's here now and what content is upcoming through expansions.

[Ninjiz]

If you want to say Merits have made ffxi LOLworthy that is your own opinion. Bust last time i checked Faf is easy as hell, and could be mana burned before burst 2 came along.

A rdm tanking Tiamet... so what... Big whoop. Anything that can reduce taking dmg can tank something long enough, but witha rdm/nin having no way to Spike hate at will without MP, i doubt said rdm tanked for the entire fight. A rdm WOULD make a great tank... IF it was able to keep hate, and unless th eother people were doing LOLDot dmg, i fail to see how a Rdm kept hate the entire time, unless and army of SMNs were the only thing attacking. But... thats not the point, and merits didnt make the rdm tank tiamet any better.

Dont blame merits, blame the fact that NEW mobs with REAL difficulty are rare. So what if faf can be mana burned... whats that got to do with the other people that werent fighting it?

The more gear they give us the easier the game becomes

A highly flawed statement, because it soley relies on the fact that more difficult monsters wouldnt be added as well. Better gear makes OLD zones easier sure... but you know that thing progression? IF there was progression there would be totally new places for said players to take their new shiny gear too, leabing the older zones for the people who are newer to the game, and would allow ppl who dont get to fight Faf and kings a crack at it without massive bot cock blocking.

"If they release uber gear to top previous gear every update people will be soloing wyrms in a few months. Do we need new gear yes, does it have to top king abj gear every update no. "

Only reason peope woul deven attempt such a thing would be for epeen, but at that point the previous 3 year old mob would become obsolete to you, and lets face it, unless they raise the lvl cap, NO one will be soloing a damn thing let alone a wyrm. but if they COULD, no one would care, because in a few months people would be concentrating on something else far more difficult.

[divisortheory]

If you want to say Merits have made ffxi LOLworthy that is your own opinion. Bust last time i checked Faf is easy as hell, and could be mana burned before burst 2 came along.

A rdm tanking Tiamet... so what... Big whoop. Anything that can reduce taking dmg can tank something long enough, but witha rdm/nin having no way to Spike hate at will without MP, i doubt said rdm tanked for the entire fight. A rdm WOULD make a great tank... IF it was able to keep hate, and unless th eother people were doing LOLDot dmg, i fail to see how a Rdm kept hate the entire time, unless and army of SMNs were the only thing attacking. But... thats not the point, and merits didnt make the rdm tank tiamet any better.

A RDM/NIN with a BRD in the party (and possibly a COR just for shits and giggles) can generate absolutely ridiculous amounts of sustained hate.

[Ninjiz]

They did make an attempt with salvage, so what its a challenge. You cant use all your awesome endgame gear youve accumulated right away. Thats the point, it levels the playing field, takes a lot of strategy and teamwork. Its not a joke like hydra/cerb/khimaira that will be destroyed the first day it comes out. Im sure the first groups that started dynamis before all the precise strategies came out that detailed every mob that came from every statue had a hard time for a few months too. Rest assured that salvage gear will become more common and obtainable once more is known about it and full mob to mob strategies come out.

Salvage is only difficult because its trial and error, no one knows EXACTLY what to do. People dont know the BEST way to approach JUSt yet. And hey thats fine. I dont mind salvage. But you know what? It has REWARDS for yoru time spent. That gear is fantastic. Each and every set mayb mot be 100% useful (what full armor set is?) but its still good gear, instanced, and allows Anyone to give it a go, and their NO cock blocking. This is what i like to see. Not spending 3 hours standing around for something i may or may not get to fight because of bots.

And its not Epeen gear that make hydra/cerb/khimaira LOL. Kimeras fight is hardly "LOL" neither is Cerberus that much. Cerberus is EASY, and is ONLY difficult because of one move "gates of Hades"but that doesnt come until he is like what 20% hp?? Dont blame gear for that... blame SE's inability to make a Difficult fight without making lvl Caps. To them difficult means "More hp, more annoying AoE". SE Put that uber gear in the game, they SHOULD have also put in NEW monsters to are difficult, and not just because of HP. Tiamet, is easy if you throw the right jobs at it. However... if Taimet was more like a Bhamut Vr 2 fight then it would have been harder. What about Divine might difficult HNMs? What about more HNM that bring multiple mobs to the table? Its not epeen gear that makes Faf easy.... its FAFNIR that makes fafnir easy. Its the add new gear without newer monsters that is to blame. WOW doesnt have that problem. WOW doesnt take nearly as long to get godly gear, but you know what? People STILL play it, and its because something NEW was added to go along with it. Its a thing called time vs reward.

And i said before... ill take HARD TO DO QUICKER REWARD any day over EASY TO DO NO REWARD. Again... TIME SINK does NOT equal Difficult.

[Ninjiz]

A RDM/NIN with a BRD in the party (and possibly a COR just for shits and giggles) can generate absolutely ridiculous amounts of sustained hate.

How would that generate ridiculous hate for the RDM/NIN?? Like i said, only way i see a RDM/NIN holding hate from anything, would be SMNs.

[Siatdiat]

TBC expansion for WoW is progression beyond old content. If I level a new character I dont have to run the old upper 60s 5 mans, or any of the old raid content. But it didnt leave anyone behind. It leveled the playing field. But its still the same guilds as far as I can tell that progress quickly because of their dedication to it. However, their progress isnt cock blocking anyone, and outside a few haters, most people will cheer for the "big kills" guild of their faction. I know playing EQ makes you an expert on all mmos without playing them though so just ignore this.

Exactly my point. Content is not being progressed past- it is being rendered obselete. I've got a partner here at work- he's a 70 Priest on Mediveh, runs Initech- so it's not like I'm sitting in an ivory tower on WoW. Right now, WoW is one tier of progression- Original game -> BC.

What happens when it's Original -> BC -> next expansion? Or the next? Heck, you don't want to do the old endgame content already at all- what makes you think new players who want to play with you will if you don't? That older content will end up wasted server space- a dead zone.

Further, what happens when it take more and more time to bring up a raid-level guild from scratch? Are you going to do it the hard way, or hook up with the proven people...or get left in the cold if you're not what they want because they're full on Hunters and it'll take you six months-year of play to get started on what they'll be finished with and farming?

That's what I like about FFXI. A good player is a good player, but you don't have to spend cycles worth of farming a monster to make him useful in endgame play in any given job. (Though obviously, the gear makes things easier.)

Content being rendered obsolete isnt a bad thing when there is a whole boatassload of new content to play with. TBC is a real expansion to the game, patches now start with a 2 instead of a 1. It is the closest i could imagine a mmo to having a sequel without making a whole new game. If there is a shitload of new quality content why should people be bothered with old content?

Also, there was tiers of progression before TBC came out. Most guilds made it to the 2nd tier of content only the best made it to the 4th, anyone who made alot of progress in Naxx even if they didnt beat it are a very skilled guild. The new raiding system made a move to smaller raid, dropping to 25 from the previous 40. This makes it easier for smaller guilds to get into raiding. My point about the same guilds being the ones progressing is basically that only a small amount of players in any game will put much effort into endgame. Even in the best linkshells/guilds, there is alot of members who do nothing more than show up or get dragged through keying so they have someone to fill a camp/raid spot. If your standing around hoping to get picked for the A team, why not start working on making your own team and get out there on your own terms? Only excuse I can think of is laziness.

I came back to FFXI awhile for the general gameplay, and it seemed like the game was changing. However in my mind they just filled in the gap of "getting ready for endgame content" that was absent before. I ended up getting sick of being in places like sky, zones that I have spent so much time in that id rather watch paint dry than do sky again. In WoW, its all new shit, and the new zones and content ive seen so far are amazing. In WoW the raiders are having fun, when their epeen gear becomes obsolete they go out and start working on the new content. There is no bottleneck in WoW, and the guilds on top dont negatively effect the guilds still working on lower content. People dont have to work through raids at a fast pace, a guild could totally raid 1-2 days a week only and have a good time and be rewarded for their effort. Id like to see someone accomplish anything in FFXI playing 1-2 days a week. The players who play all week will just move faster.

As far as being forced to cycle people through old content, isnt that 100% of FFXI endgame? Or does doing it for a second job make it different somehow? The content is fun as well, so the guilds who have just started dont need to "catch up" to anyone. The mentality of WoW isnt as much farming gear as you think, its more about the fact that everyone is having fun. The endgame encounters are also much more interesting and require alot more skill than anything in ffxi ever has or will.