Endgame Rewards and Situational Gear

[Fridell]

All I take from this thread:

If you aren't having fun or don't like the game, quit. Square doesn't need you here bitching and I don't need you here making fun of other people's choice in gear or relic weapons.

If you are having fun, then good for you. Welcome to the club of people who have learned how to have a good time.

Seriously people, did you not see the post about how advanced is turning to shit?

Just like to point out that some ppl have fun with other similar minded ppl, in some cases, these ppl like to play and have fun like hardcore players does in FFXI. Have big or small teams of friends, having fun to obtain the greated gear, try to maximize their performance, skill and gear wise, etc.

[Shinsei]

There is a distinct difference in not attempting to be decent, and not attempting to be perfect

Out of everything that has been said in this thread, this statement pretty much sums up my thoughts about the matter.

I never knocked anyone for not "white boxing" every piece of gear for every job they play. People will prioritize certain things depending on what their mains are or how often they use the job for certain aspects of the game. For me what's important is that the person should be gearing correctly or is at least continuing on that right path.

Personally, certain "HQ" equipment I personally think should be standard for certain jobs due to how relatively easy it is to come by. As such, I wouldn't even consider them to be "HQ" as I see them as items that should be again, standard. Examples of this is HQ Staves for your mage jobs. They provide a very nice bonus to your performance and are really easy to afford with just a tad bit of effort.

Players that willingly choose to not at least take a few hours to get items like these I simply just think that's absolute laziness. I don't expect everyone to be sporting Hecatomb +1s, or E.bodies, etc, but ffs, rocking NQ staves or sporting Lv36 NQ rings at 75 is just a sad pathetic joke. Which brings me back to the quote, there really is a difference between not attempting to be decent, and not attempting to be perfect.

[Therin]

The only thing I agree with this guy on is about the gil he's spent on his jobs to basically own everything. I'm much the same way. NQ city lol (i'm funding a bloody relic so dusk +1, sniper's+1 etc can wait) You don't need the best shit to be kick ass at your jobs. My nq war beats 90% of the people I do events with because I know how to gear it properly even if the gear is NQ.

To be fair you outparse most others because you're well merited and you have a Ridill. I don't know how easy you got your Ridill, but most people spend hundreds of hours camping Fafnir before they see theirs - those several hundred hours spent farming would equal the amount of gil required to buy all the HQ gear you can use.

[Rikus]

I don't think this forum is for you.

If you're not trying to do your best, what's the fucking point?

this from the guy who upgraded a relic club..... classic

[Izzy]

this from the guy who upgraded a relic club..... classic

hurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

[Yugl]

Some of the rewards are not that bad, it's just that the item you receive is too random to make the effort worth your time. Personally, I would like to see SE start putting "Counters" as players take certain actions. For example, killing a NM and not receiving a drop puts a counter on the items that did not drop. Each time you kill the NM (Hell this could apply to any event/regular mob as well) and do not receive a drop, another counter builds. Each counter would act as a TH, which substantially increases the drop rate of said item. They could compensate THFs by allowing their TH to multiply the effects of said counters. I don't know anything about computer programming, so I'm unsure of how they could manage to do this, but I personally think it's a good idea. At least it would solve a lot of these "OMG 0/500" drop rate problems on EG NMs.

[isladar]

this from the guy who upgraded a relic club..... classic

Try that again.

[Klain]

All I take from this thread:

If you aren't having fun or don't like the game, quit. Square doesn't need you here bitching and I don't need you here making fun of other people's choice in gear or relic weapons.

If you are having fun, then good for you. Welcome to the club of people who have learned how to have a good time.

Seriously people, did you not see the post about how advanced is turning to shit?

Agreed 100%. This is getting ridiculous

[ryskar]

Maybe i'm in the minority, but I really enjoyed RoZ and CoP storylines. The CoP ending cs was one of my favorite of all time.

Then again i've escorted over a dozen friends who don't do endgame through these missions. I guess gear isn't what we're all after, as you said.

So far I've enjoyed the WotG Windurst path story more than most offline games I've played, so I'm the same way. It'll be hard-pressed to beat .hack games though, I really enjoyed those...

[Cantih]

"Counters"

Problem with that, there are hundreds of NMs in the game, let alone normal mobs. Trying to keep that many counters for each character in the game, would probably eat a ton of storage space SE would rather not have to bust for.

WoW has implemented a system like this, but afaik, it's only for farm quests. You only get the counter until you finish the quest, and it's only good for the item you need. I guess SE do do something where you sign up to "track" a NM, and you'd be limited in how many you could do at once. But I'd doubt they'd include various BCNM/Arena fights or HNMs in that kind of system.



My own idea was to attach a kind of ZNM system to every NM and rare item dropping mob in the game (like Devil Mantas, etc).
For any rare drop mob that doesn't drop something 100%, you add a new guaranteed drop beastman seal kind of item. You can still luck out and get the item, but if you don't, at least you have the seal for the time and effort you spent getting the mob.
Build up enough seals, and you can trade them in to get the item you want. That way, if you don't ever get lucky, at least dedicated work will pay of.

As a compromise between NM unique seals (worthless if you get the luck drop), and a universal seal (I got my ebody by farming a hundred JEJ's!), I figure it would be necessary to tier the seals by some combination of NM difficulty, pop frequency, and/or possibly group them by area (maybe 2-3 regions per group). But to make the system work, SE couldn't bitch out and exclude items. Get enough King seals, and you're gonna have to be able to get a D-Ring, or Ninurta's for Sea, w/e.


And, this wouldn't work for SE, too late to implement for legacy items I think. But if you want to throw elitists a bone, make any item that drops the "proper" way (pure luck) be "shiny" (or gold box, something). That way people can still have their status symbol, but it doesn't translate into a mechanical advantage.

[arus2001]

"Learning" to have fun in the game seems like an awkward concept to me. Learning the rules, yes. The norms of jobs, subs, and gear, okay. However, there's no "learning" to how frustratingly random some shit gets. Rather, it's more like some condone a tolerance to being violated at almost every possible step along the way and if you don't like it the only choice is to jump ship to WoW or something regardless of what you might actually like of FFXI. Too often I see people blowing off that expression of discontent as wanting an EZ Mode, but to many, that's really not the case.

I dunno, just seems likes sometimes there's too much of a gap between the haves and have-nots where a lack of skill isn't the cause of discrepancy. Trace it back to the early days of JP monopolies, maybe someone struck it rich during inflation, or maybe you were lucky enough to get in that shell with the bitching bot. They're really just extensions of luck, being in the right place at the right time, or whatever you wanna call it. And when you never have "that luck" then it's pretty easy to get pissed off. Worse if you have the complete opposite and are always having synths with behemoth hides and such blowing up on you.

[ringthree]

I don't know, for Salvage persistence will inevitably overcome randomness. Especially after the last update.

I do agree though that I would like to see the game move more toward a combination of drops and tokens like in Limbus and Einherjar.

I think a good way to deal with some of the fear that it would replace "legacy" gear (which has already basically been done to all but two items) is to just make the rewards from tokens sidegrades to marginal improvements. Some of the Einherjar gear is already like this.

I know the player base generally doesn't like sidegrades but the token rewards shouldn't replace the normal drops from an event, so the token items would be considered more of an median reward until the normal drops.

[Whaleporn]

Most of my posting is specialized trolling and I fully admit that. However I follow advanced as a forum for discussions like this one so here goes: The topic at hand isn't just a balance issue but a look at what makes FFXI tick, that being the cycle of challenge, reward. Almost every game you play has this cycle built in, and it's something that's inherent in good game design.

FFXI can be very fun when you know your effort is going to be rewarded. It's part of the reasons that LSes as they develop tend to form some sort of point system: it hedges against the randomness of the game itself.

FFXI is very tedious when you have no idea when your going to receive some sort of benefit for your effort, or you get the sense that your wasting your time for marginal rewards.

In terms of balance, I think sky had the best ratio of work to rewards: There was ALOT of gear from sky. Not all of it was great or even good, but it was nice knowing that if you felt blue your ls could round up some nms in a few hours and pop some gods next week. Here you go, have some A.legs. They look like green jogging pants, yes. They cost way too much to actually make, yes. But hey, maybe you'll get w.legs or an osode next time you pop kirin. Hey look, your LS got some money items! Bank that shit!

Sea and Znms have problems, some of which are the same. Znms is slightly better then sea in terms of drop rates for the gear your seeking, but both are capped by a nigh insurmountable boss with a large pool of desirable gear. In sea's case, many of the add-ons it offers are outside it's NM system. In Znms case, your giving your pandy pops to a guy bleeding money who wants a mythic. Both are still good places for LSes who can produce numbers to cut their teeth on some interesting and tough fights.

Next up is HNMs. And guess what? I can't tell you much about them. My LS tried camping a bit for black belt items a while ago. It's long, boring, and we'd lose claim even on non-king pops to small groups. We claimed sandworm a few times when they added the inner BCs, and that's fun but a tremendous amount of man-power used. It's agreed that some of the best gear in the game is found in the steaming entrails of the land kings and other 24 hour NMs, so it's personal preference there... oh wait: Most of the people that do this event say it's broken and needs an overhaul. Correct me if I'm wrong on that last point: I might just be seeing what I want to see as a person who avoids them.

Finally, Salvage, Dynamis, and Einharjar. Salvage and dynamis are similar in that they both represent grueling long slogs against the RNG. Einharjar is a test of how many applications your LS can O.K so you have 36 people for every zone, then once more rolling the RNG's dice. Square was at least nice enough to put some token rewards on it so you're not totally wasting your time when you fail over and over. Also, it lets you at that kings gear, assuming you have enough well equipped and skilled players to actually get there. I think my LS has been trying to get the same two clears for weeks and weeks now to try odin again, crippled every time by numbers.

I honestly think Limbus, Nyzul, and Stronghold NMs are close to correct in terms of difficulty to reward. There's some big bad items up in those events, and they are do-able in small chunks.

Right now I call my shell endgame-casual. We can farm Dynamis-Xarc in LS but not clear it, we've seen Odin but have yet to fight him again or win, We've never had a relic holder in our shell but our currency is stacking up. We don't camp kings because we agreed that the best way to have a fighting chance there is to bot and spend a huge amount of time at those camps, and we don't want to do either.

I personally only play about 6 hours to 8 hours a week, and all that time goes into events (hence my pathetic 2 75's). I really like FFXI, but it's a struggle to get more people into a shell where you've tapped out on sky but can't really attack the absolute best gear. I like FFXI, but I'm at the point where I think my own gear is good enough. I'm not yet ready to start burning massive amounts of time every night in salvage for spotty rewards. The only notable current goal I have is to start a dynamis group for mid-week city currency farming, with the long term goal of getting my shell a few relics in a year or two.

I think square needs to do more to recognize super achievements to be honest, as well as develop more 'farm with 6-12, clear with 18, and one pop-able boss you want 24 or so' areas. Adding an area where you can farm specific augments with sky-like rates would be nifty. Improve relics and mythics or reduce their cost and add additional stages for the hardcore. Better yet, do both, and tie them to events that have the same reward structure as dynamis (hardcore players are farming mcguffins to finish their uber weapon, they help less hardcore players get some nifty gear as they do this.)-but instanced and perhaps an hour to two long. I'd like to see more stuff that's as awesome as salvage, but perhaps with the nyzul benefit of sometimes throwing you off-job lowbie gear to keep it interesting.

Most of all, events should have a fair shot at giving every person who shows up something to show for it. An example: I'd love if dynamis had 10 pieces that dropped at 10x the rate of hundreds instead of all those big rare coins. It would let the middle ground in that event (didn't sponsor, but don't need gear) have a reason to show up.

Yeah, TL; DR. Don't worry. I'll go back to impersonating law enforcement and making fun of Destyine. Promise.

[Sephknight]

I do agree though that I would like to see the game move more toward a combination of drops and tokens like in Limbus and Einherjar.

I think a good way to deal with some of the fear that it would replace "legacy" gear (which has already basically been done to all but two items) is to just make the rewards from tokens sidegrades to marginal improvements. Some of the Einherjar gear is already like this.

I know the player base generally doesn't like sidegrades but the token rewards shouldn't replace the normal drops from an event, so the token items would be considered more of an median reward until the normal drops.

I definetly agree, another event like einherjar is limbus.
While u might not get the homan/nashira this run , always see ABC and af+1 items all around for everyone.

As for fun in the game ? as someone said before setting goals for yourself and my group is what keeps me going.
I always have more fun fighting the unkown as well, Even after playing this game for 6 years i still find new stuf, or thins i havent done.

To the OP again, i bet adjustments and more augmented items will come up soon, so thats more random gear/stats coming up to .

[Yugl]

The problem with Einherjar is that the real rewards rarely drop. Sure, you obtain ampoules every run, but that only keeps members going for a brief duration. Some members leave once they obtain the ampoules they need because it they realize it will take a while before they see any drops from Odin.

Having a counter on every mob may have been excessive, but maybe you could have a little chart of NMs/Regular mobs to obtain the counters on. For instance, make an additional section of the menu that says "Counter List". On that list you add up to X amount of monsters that you wish to receive counters for. SE has proven they can accomplish results when they aren't intentionally lazy. It's all a matter of whether they'll pursue such an addition.

[Kenji]

What all these posts get at, is that there is TOO much gear out there that is situational, or a macro piece. Some is fine, but we've long passed the acceptable point. I hate 3rd party programs with a passion, but I'm approaching the point of really thinking about windower for it's expanded macros.

What we do need, is new gear that replaces 2 or more situational pieces, but is naturally more challenging to get. As people have said, like an obi that combines all 8 obis into one. Or the BLM, mythic, which should be the effect of all 8 HQ staves. A melee neck piece that's the equal of a TP and WS piece in one.

These new gears wouldn't be better than the old, just allow you to free up inven and macro space. In return, make the old gear a bit easier to get in some cases. You'd still have some macro pieces, but they shouldn't exceed the macro lines.

Meanwhile, Augmenting is a decent idea, and can be a step in this direction. If you can add 1 or 2 extra things to a piece of gear, you can make it multi-purpose. But I suppose you could also make it better in a specific role. So I'd suggest, if a piece of gear has that stat, you would be unable to add more of it.

Along the lines of what people have said here, add job-specific augments. That way, a BST could take any piece of gear, and add Pet: stats to it. Perhaps all SAM to add WS accuracy, and DRK to add acc to specific gear. But only a couple pieces of gear at a time can have that augment. You'd have to toss that piece, or trade it back to get the augment removed, in order to put it on something else.

[Midnightjade]

Stuff

I read all of that post and thought it was well put together and insightful. I think a lot of people are at that point in their FFXI careers, myself included.

Thread seems to be going in an interesting direction now that all the yelling and bitching has subsided.

[Jakson]

Problem with that, there are hundreds of NMs in the game, let alone normal mobs. Trying to keep that many counters for each character in the game, would probably eat a ton of storage space SE would rather not have to bust for.

WoW has implemented a system like this, but afaik, it's only for farm quests. You only get the counter until you finish the quest, and it's only good for the item you need. I guess SE do do something where you sign up to "track" a NM, and you'd be limited in how many you could do at once. But I'd doubt they'd include various BCNM/Arena fights or HNMs in that kind of system.



My own idea was to attach a kind of ZNM system to every NM and rare item dropping mob in the game (like Devil Mantas, etc).
For any rare drop mob that doesn't drop something 100%, you add a new guaranteed drop beastman seal kind of item. You can still luck out and get the item, but if you don't, at least you have the seal for the time and effort you spent getting the mob.
Build up enough seals, and you can trade them in to get the item you want. That way, if you don't ever get lucky, at least dedicated work will pay of.

As a compromise between NM unique seals (worthless if you get the luck drop), and a universal seal (I got my ebody by farming a hundred JEJ's!), I figure it would be necessary to tier the seals by some combination of NM difficulty, pop frequency, and/or possibly group them by area (maybe 2-3 regions per group). But to make the system work, SE couldn't bitch out and exclude items. Get enough King seals, and you're gonna have to be able to get a D-Ring, or Ninurta's for Sea, w/e.


And, this wouldn't work for SE, too late to implement for legacy items I think. But if you want to throw elitists a bone, make any item that drops the "proper" way (pure luck) be "shiny" (or gold box, something). That way people can still have their status symbol, but it doesn't translate into a mechanical advantage.

I'd like to see this, but make any NM drop a key item (so that everyone gets one) that has to be turned into an NPC that will show and allow you to choose the drops from the NM only after you've been to see the NPC enough times to trade in a seal. One Fafnir seal might get you a dragon talon, 5 Nidhogg seals gets you an e.body, etc. etc.

[Cantih]

I do kinda like that idea, everyone getting a key item.
It would cause a radical game change however. Rather than competition, you'd have NM hunters parting/allying up. Everyone getting credit would also cause a sharp rise in the number of items being released, you'd (or SE would) have to counter that by putting a grindingly high seal cost on items.
With an item, you keep the rate largely the same, maybe hnm could drop a few extra to balance out the ally needed. And the game holds to how it behaves now, you just iron out random screwovers.

I still don't like mob specific identifiers though, the resource cost of so many different items/key items (and the npc tallying said) would be prohibitive when scaled to the thousands. You need to keep it to maybe two dozen types of seals, max.

[Jakson]

I do kinda like that idea, everyone getting a key item.
It would cause a radical game change however. Rather than competition, you'd have NM hunters parting/allying up. Everyone getting credit would also cause a sharp rise in the number of items being released, you'd (or SE would) have to counter that by putting a grindingly high seal cost on items.
With an item, you keep the rate largely the same, maybe hnm could drop a few extra to balance out the ally needed. And the game holds to how it behaves now, you just iron out random screwovers.

I still don't like mob specific identifiers though, the resource cost of so many different items/key items (and the npc tallying said) would be prohibitive when scaled to the thousands. You need to keep it to maybe two dozen types of seals, max.

That's true. Maybe keep it to Mob families. X number of Wyrm Seals gets you Ridill or E.Body, but you'd need like 20 of them or something.