Player Opinions: ToAU

[Septimus]

I find it funny when I hear people waxing poetic about how great CoP missions were as my second character sits stalled at 5-3. Any time I try to get people together to do CoP missions I hear people grumble something about their Aunt being on fire or having to take their poodle to the airport if I am not outright ignored. On the other hand, when someone asks for help on a ToAU mission it is generally easy to get volunteers to help out with the BC fights. From my perspective which do you suppose is the failure: the expansion where my second character is stuck spinning his wheels, or the one where my second character has a Glory Crown and Captain rank?

I'd say that's a problem with the company you keep, I've helped several people through CoP and enjoyed doing the stuff over again, then when they added an EXP bonus to completing the missions I was even happier to help people with them.

I know a good few people who feel the same.

Sounds like someone just volunteered to server switch to Bahamut to help me with CoP missions.

[Avé]

I don't like how all the ToAU areas were open from the beginning, I want to unlock some new areas by going through the missions. Just not as drastic as CoP was.

SE really improved on their cutscene direction. Compared to ToAU, many CoP cutscenes are pretty bland now. And I also loved the new quests they added with this expansion, especially the Serpent General quests.

[Almalexia]

Relic Armors, please.
AF+1, please.

They are needed, first to give these jobs some sort of goal, second to improve their resources.
I fear there won't be any more ToAU oriented updates aside from the november one so... does this really means 3 jobs got nothing?

Count on more attachments, more dice, and more blue magic in the future. Maybe they'll do a sweeping equipment update for all the new jobs, TAU and WoTG, at one point.

ToAU brought out some involving/awesome quests, even if the reward wasn't that good (2 Gold Coins?). It all kinda added up, but it was involving indeed. I particularly enjoyed the quest regarding the generals, and was thrilled to have someone let me know the "final" part of the quest with the Mithra (I originally complained that why there isn't a quest for the Mithra). :D (until the update)

The Serpent General quests are some of the finest pieces of SE storytelling; their episodes really sealed the TAU story for me when the main plot turned out to be a disappointment. They need their own game. 8)

They did so much good in this expansion that it gives me hope for the next one. And I hope that the people who came up with the level capped areas and missions in CoP were sent to some horrible dungeon somewhere where they are tortured endlessly for their crimes against humanity.

They were damned to Silver Sea Remnants to spend eternity not dropping the cells we want. Hammerblow Majanun was once the event director of CoP.

[Bardlet]

Am I wrong that in the job adjustment you left out Benediction curing all status elements in addition to HP? I could have sworn that was included in the job updates.

[Gwynplaine]

For some reason I still believe that ToA isn't fully over yet. I kinda remember the developers saying that there will be some form of overlapping because although ToA is mostly done, there was abit more, i think..

I think so too, so this threads a little preemptive. But I figured everyone will be talking about fanfest and the expansion soon enough and AU will drop from the radar for a while. There's probably at least one last update left to tie everything up.

Not unique. UFOs and sharks in Sea are both untargetable until they aggro (yeah I'm nit-picking.)

Am I wrong that in the job adjustment you left out Benediction curing all status elements in addition to HP? I could have sworn that was included in the job updates.

Yep, forgot both of those.

[Amele]

it's pretty clear that the only ways they've figured out to really challenge people is to take away their abilities and gear and stuff via level caps or salvage crap or whatever. I say give em time to work it out, they're still adjusting somewhat to how strong the average 75 has gotten these days, and have always relied heavily on level caps.

This might be more complicated than it sounds really..

the gear gap between a peak character and a freshman 75 is much bigger than it is at any other level (and only going to get wider) and combined with the fact that SE doesn't do tiered endgame (you don't need gear from regular dynamis to do cop dynamis, you don't need gear from sky to do sea. etc) it makes it increasingly more difficult to balance content for both the peak player and the unequipped player.

taking away gear is the easiest way to take away this imbalance, (which is why first floor salvage is very much about discipline and job mix and not at all about whether or not you've got good enough gear - although discipline and gear go hand in hand usually)

the other easy way to take away this imbalance is to cap it down to a level where the gear gap is smaller between perfect and average.

I'm not sure there's an obvious 3rd way (although I'm a fan of: "just assume that content aimed at hardcore endgamers is built assuming they have the gear from previous content and vice versa for casual content; I'm not sure that would go over well with the community - we'd find stuff 'too easy' and 'zam would complain that some content was 'impossible'.)

[Khajit]

Most of tau was great looking back on it.

The bad parts only hapen to be:
We didnt get to violently hurt naja and shove that mace up her ass.
Einerjar- what abjurations? The only groups that havent given up on or barely are able to get enough people to sign up for the irritation einerjar are HNMls that have the time to waste during times when fafnir is down and they're waiting on tiamat/cerb. At this point it's difficult to even get people to do it for the ampoule items which i actually want to get but cant due to a lack of "enthusiasm" on my server.
only 2 camps in the game you can convince anyone to go to at any given lv. even when there is a better alternate camp that happens to be in TAU it takes a riduculou samount of bad crap we knew was gonna happen to the pt to drag em over to mamook or the periqua fomor or anything non colibri. That part is mostly the players fault except for at 75 when the availiable camps are very restrcted and congested(on weekends) so it barely counts as a con.
The misions. They started off too easy and got alot better during the final stretch but honestly I enjoyed the challenge of COP and I was extremly dissapointed when that got nerfed which deprived me of some fun/hard fights.( do COP nerfs technically count towards this?) The final TAU reward wasnt anything special either. mostly it was just a free upgrade-anygimp-that didnt-own-an-nq-sniper ring.
Glory crown hasnt shown itself to be useful yet and we have no way to remove that accursed name from it.


All those cons mean nothing compared to the severe buttraping SE gave to gilsellers this year so i think it's a pretty fair tradeoff.

Salvage is also made of win in its current state although i still hate how thieves (in my ls at least)get the short end of the stick when it comes to cell drops. At least i have a skadi mask to upgrade

[yrpaine]

RoZ is a trap, hard to get out of. has good content but it's impossible to be done with RoZ if you're in a hnm shell. Travel was very slow in RoZ areas until recently.

CoP lacks rewards, only real rewards come from instances and can only be worked on for 90 min with 72hr breaks. There are some good accessories, but it's easy to go without them. It was nice to watch RMT dead on the floor in sealions den and more coordinated players in the end game area, too bad there was not more to do there. There were a lot of gil making methods added in this expansion, but again there was a 5 day limit between enm's

ToAU made the game playable. A lot more relaxing, casual and a lot of low man content which was a lot easier to set up, it was no as necessary to be in a hnm shell to get decent equip, and meriting camps supported more than the ~7-10 party max there was between RoZ and CoP. ToAU also came with a lot of adjustments to banning RMT, and even though it is still an issue, it's completely laughable now compared to what it used to be. Rewards from HNM in ToAU still fail in comparison to RoZ though

[Kaeko]

I think one of the big things ToAU has done that I've seen is the killing off of Big Endgame LSs.

Anyone that has played in endgame since NA release can kind of attest to what I mean here. Prior to ToAU, endgame was kind of dominated by the huge endgame LS - the ones where 50+ members was not uncommon. I think LSs got this big to accomplish feats like Dynamis Lord, Vrtra, Tiamat, etc. - the really hard stuff that used to just take that many people.

I think what ToAU has done has shifted the focus of endgame towards smaller groups due to a variety of changes - the new events are now more focused on smaller groups (Einherjar excluded). ToAU has also made leveling multiple 75s much easier and faster, so most groups have a much better job variety (which lowers numbers as well). Then add major changes like the 2hander equation fixes, a year's worth of gear progression, Merits... and just players learning more strategies... I think this has really led to a focus on the "low manning" concept by a larger % of the endgame player base. If you just look back before ToAU and now... how many more crazy low man attempts have been accomplished you'll kind of see what I mean - 6 man Jorm, under 2 party Tiamat, the whole low man Limbus thing on this forum, 18 man DL, etc.

It probably saved endgame so I'm not complaining.

My biggest complaint to ToAU is how the new events have "minimum characters to enter" requirements. If someone wants to 'waste' points or tags to solo something they should be able to. I'd be pretty miffed if they had a 3 man minimum for Limbus routes, or a 12 man minimum for Dynamis, etc.

[Dakana]

I loved TAU alot Salvage, Assault and the like are all a ton of fun. I hated the story line though. I hated it so much, it was short and boring. I loved CoP level caps and all - it was fun and exciting and hard. Honestly the fact that I feel more accomplishment form getting Captain that form finishing the storyline is a very sad thing. I play FFXI for the story, sure the General quests were awesome but it's just sad I wasn't he main focus.

[quannum]

One part that has been overlooked is the update/patches.

I remember CoP updates bent us over and didn't say sorry or take us out to dinner first.
Nothing ever got fixed, well except for RNG right? every update sounded like it was going to turn things around only for us to read the full detail on patch day and have all our dreams shattered into a million tiny pieces.

In contrast, TAU updates have been sunshine in a bag. fixing older content, 2h, constant tweaking of tau jobs. Every update may not have been win(choco race) but at least it didn't leave you butt hurt.

Also I believe the system of assault is perfectly designed. Instanced, you win points instead of random drops (well in addition). points are rewarded to everyone and are redeemable for drops. low-man, optional level cap, 15-30 minutes per tag. the actual point rewards could have been better, but that doesn't have much to do with the system design.

I hope "assault points" are carried over to WotG

[BRP]

CoP's downfalls are often greatly exaggerated. Granted, it did have some pretty bad downfalls, but people baw'd back then like the baw'd now. Many BG members will cry and cry on cue for no apparent reason. Someone could make a topic about Registration Server Maintenance every month and there will be someone who will be complaining "Where are my Black Mage changes?".

[Tobatobu]

I don't believe that ToAU is complete yet.
What about the so called "Colloseum".

SE legalized Gambling Tables!

In order to make other areas more appealing, SE gave Signet benefits.

[Izzy]

ToAU was bad. I did not get a club skill cap raise.

Serious post:

I'm one of those people who loved CoP for the storyline and was actually pretty disappointed in the lack of difficulty in ToAU missions Q_Q.

[Spider-Dan]

I don't see where this great storyline of CoP is. In my opinion, TAU's storyline is just as compelling (actually, a bit more so, since they don't have to backsell revisionism to line up with already existing plotlines). It's just that since every bit of CoP storyline took either 20 minutes of travel or a couple hours of tedious level-capping to earn, you might as well enjoy that sh*t. The ease at which TAU's storyline is advanced makes people respect it less.

It is not entirely dissimilar to how, when I would get a total of 2-3 video games a year as a kid (birthday and xmas), I played the hell out of every one, no matter how garbage it was. Now that it's easy for me to obtain as many games as I could possibly want, anything but the most exceptional display of entertainment value results in immediate scorn.

[nekoshoonen]

. . .there will be someone who will be complaining "Where are my Black Mage changes?".

Yes where the hell are my goddamn BLM changes!!?? eh?

[Sonomaa]

SE rep likes this thread.

[Yutuyu]

I think the reason people liked CoP's story much better than ToAU's is it had a more epic scope and serious tone. A good portion of ToAU's cutscenes had little (if anything) to do with the over-reaching plot. There were some excellent cutscenes in there, but the plot was far removed from previously established story whereas CoP built upon and added to the previously established.

[Rocl]

SE rep likes this thread.

SE Rep hates Rocl.
More at Eleven.

[Lexa]

ToAU was awesome for merit pts. As a PLD75 onry, I wouldn't have been able to see chain 150+ pre-ToAU.

Assaults are made of win and God, even the stupid "capture the apkallu" one.

Einherjar can suck a donkey dick.

Salvage needs more balance for jobs. Most people are adamant on only taking MNKs and possibly NINs for melees. Even when asked if people would take my BRD, which I already am in the process of leveling, and find fun, when it reached 75, they tell me no. MNK onry. And preferrably only BB MNKs. And one told me maybe I could join on a different job if I got a relic, and then I got suggestions on what relics to upgrade once I did level the jobs they requested. I've decided to level MNK to 75, simply so I can do Salvage, but truth be told, it REALLY sucks, because I have no pleasure in leveling MNK. I'm only doing it to rectify the 30+ rejections I've gotten for Salvage. My sandy vagina, let me show you it.

ToAU HNMs I won't say too much about, I'll let the gazillion people in Aery each Fafhogg window speak for me.