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If ML50 gave you a glowing Crown/halo unique lockstyle or Golden Shiny aura around your character, people would care about ML50. That way they can sit in town and show off to everyone their achievement*

+2 neck* for 40 mil is an infinite greater investment than ML30 for 30 mil.

*exceptions apply

I guess this is subjective, because it depends on your definition of "Reasonable". How does ML50 compare to other grinds in FFXI?

How long does it take to grind a Prime weapon beginning to end, maximizing your hour perfectly every single day and using Ruspix whenever it is available? Let's say the number is 5 months, so 150 hours. Add like 10 Ruspix, so 160 hours max to make a Stage 5. Can a player hit ML50 beginning to end in 160 hours (days) if they do at least one hour per day? And there's another component to consider: MLs can be grinded endlessly, something like Sortie is entirely time gated. But to the same end, do players consider Sortie's stage 5 requirements to be unreasonable? I know people who have multiple 5s, so clearly they thought the grind was worth it. Both can be done legit, but people will quickly identify which grind appears to be more worth it for their time and prefer that one.

Now would a normal player think that kind of grind was reasonable? Probably not.


It's all about perspective. I think SE intentionally put out a grind that was so far ahead so that players always have a goal to progress towards. The problem is twofold, though. 1) Players have more lives now than they did a decade or two ago, and the player base is old, so we don't have time or interest to mindlessly grind the same monsters over and over again night after night for an artificial number (but for some reason, we do with Sortie, >.>). 2) MLing in it's current form is extremely boring, and we have long since moved past that model, to the point that it's no longer appealing to players. People would much rather have a laundry list of things they can do every single day (Raids, UNM, Sortie, Omen, Dynamis, Ambuscade, Peach Power etc) that rewarded substantial exemplar points that they can repeat daily and earn similar progress towards ML, than sit there and hit a Colibri with Rudra's Storm for the 426757th time. SE just never updated their stereotypes for what they thought players would want to do with their time.

The other elephant in the room that people ignore about MLs is that they largely don't make a difference in your performance in the long run, but they're just another component in the "sum of all parts" equation. You don't need HQ2 necks. You don't need REMA weapons or Instruments, or Epeolatry or Idris or Yagrush. You don't need luas. You don't need 800 pieces of gear. You don't need 40 different toggles for every scenario. You don't need dozens of meds per character and addons to improve gameplay. You don't need Su5s. You don't need Prime weapons. You don't need R30 gear. But every single addition makes your character that much more powerful and players will always want to climb that ladder. SE understood that, so they made you work your *** off (bot) for it. In the end, it doesn't really matter, but to "you", it does.

Pretty sure I've seen 8% FC on gear.

Today was salad day, but if this keeps up, im gonna have to make a pitstop on my way home for a nice juicy spicy beefy burrito

There's odds and ends like fencer II for /war at i think sj 58, might be another utility spell in there but for the most part its nothing id call as important as foil or fruit. Can do everything without either but they're still very nice to have in the pocket so it sucks you have to go into the hell that is ML 35+ to get them

I'm a dog person, Panta.

But if you're gonna try to guilt me over animal consumption, then you go on the menu!

Does anyone know what's max fast cast dark matter augment for colada? I've seen 6%, not counting the 4% on the unaugmented weapon. Has anyone seen higher?

I think I could rationalize it better if content would actually get you there.

Doing oddessy and sortie on a main every day that bar is just not moving

If the content rewarded more perhaps there would be less complaints.

There should be alternatives.

0-33 is a very reasonable grind imo
what comes after is a sin

ML only really sucks for the people who want magic fruit or foil, everything else you can basically get at 25~30 which is where it aint much worse than CPing from 0-2100

You can say that about literally anything else in the game.

Why grind farming gil to buy HQ gear when NQ is 95% as good at 1/10th of the price.

Why grind farming R15 on any weapon when R10 is less than half the cost and gives you more than half the benefits.

Why RP Ody armor when even R0 is so good.

And so forth.

200% this! I've staryed typing something similar a few times and didn't wanna deal with that bag of worms. But truly ml are anything special or important. When I see people in ambu gear stressing ml I want to slep them. Nothing in the game requires them and gear is going to have a much larger impact than ml

Just implement some of the alluvion skirmish augment or Oseem augment code into more NMs. Seekers of Adoulin, CoP, ToAH, WOTG have no representation in this current system. I'm sure they probably forgot it existed, but I don't think it would be impossible to just release 30+ NMs across the world and enhance the augment pool, and increase the level of gear that can be augmented to 99. It's just forgotten content they never updated, but the potential (for players to spend literal years of time chasing ideal augments) is there. Insane they abandoned it so fast.

Other content they strangely abandoned instead of revamping/updating:

ToM weapons (people would grind 10,000 funguar kill shots if it meant an free extra stats)
Grounds of Valor - no idea why they never added locus/exemplar monsters to the list of regiment training, but a huge missed opportunity to repurpose am older system for exp.

They have said almost explicitly that it's really, really hard for them to access/change the older code, and they are as a result extremely hesitant to do so. It seems that the current developers have very little familiarity with how some of the more obscure stuff works, and are not allotted a lot of time to try and learn it. Most of the changes made in the last years have been very minor, even if they had a big impact - like adding old Limbus drops to Curio Vendor Moogles.

I think all the "it takes XYZ amount of time to hit ML50, isn't that a crazy grind?" posts are stupid and they make my eyes roll so far back in my head it causes me pain every time I see one.

ML50 is pointless. ML50 on 22 jobs is so far beyond pointless, it borders on insanity. You don't need ML50 on any job, for anything*. Stop obsessing over what ML your jobs are. You don't need to bot them to 20, 30, 40, 45, or 50. If you want to get 20 or 30 so you can feel better about yourself or unlock 2% more DA, or a tiny amount more PDL, attack, or STP, go for it. You can do it in a single night. If you want to get 40, 45, or 50 because you have OCD or something, then that's on you, not on SE.

I promise you, the reason you're losing isn't because you're missing 1% TA on your temper 2. I promise you, the reason you're winning isn't the 140 HP. It's not important. At all. Especially the ridiculously terrible ROI on the higher MLs.

Even if you did somehow convince yourself that you need ML45 to play FFXI, you absolutely aren't playing all 22 jobs. I'm sorry, virtually (or literally) nobody is doing that on a regular basis. If you're gonna sit here and tell me your 3rd string DD job needs to have ML50 because you like to *** around with it in ambu sometimes, I'm going to laugh in your face.

Stop seeing ML as a grind you need to do, or setting ML goals for yourself, and I swear to Altana your life will improve dramatically. You don't need to bot, or pay bots, to get you ML. You can just play the game and ignore ML almost entirely**.

*I haven't beaten all the master trials, maybe there's some deep MT strategy involving high ML, but i VERY, VERY much doubt it.

**I'm sure this advice doesn't apply to Asura, where you can't join a party without ML50. You don't need to tell me. That place is a cesspool and you deserve each other. You did this to yourselves.

They should allow the augments to "imprint" upon a stone of some sort that we can then synergy into any piece.

Let's use the content we already have?

A lot more fun grinding exp back then...

but maybe cos i was 20 years younger, and without the myraid of real life responsibilities I have now.

Maat's cap didn't require PUP, BLU, COR, DNC, SCH, RUN or GEO, so 15 jobs.

It's hard to make a direct comparison. Getting 1-75 back then (technically you only needed 70 iir) sure was a lot of grind. Number-wise it's obviously waaaaaay less than ML50, but back then XP/hr was very low and you had no bots. Well... they weren't common let's say.

So yeah, hard to compare I guess.

They need to greatly increase the EP earned during events.

When I stated Sortie on PLD I was about 400k into ML50. It took a full year to cap. They could increase the per mob or have RoE bonuses.

Stuff like segments/RP could be converted into EP or a EP item. There are endless ways to help with the grind while doing content.

The current system promotes botting and RMT. (maybe thats what they want)

45-50 is the apotheosis of ridiculousness, but it's not like 40-45 is "fine".
If you ask me 1-20 is super ok, 20-30 is grindy but OKAYSH. 30-40 is already pretty steep when you have multiple jobs (and when you unavoidably have to return to do EP from time to time because you die). It's way too much but it's not preposterous.
Anything beyond 40 is simply beyond sanity, it would've been considered grindy even in 2004 standards, and we all know how *** grindy MMOs were back then.

There's some pretty nice Haguns in that list.

My tops currently are;

New Episodes Weekly -
Dr Stone
DanDaDan
Gachiakuta
Clevatess
Kaiju No 8.

Rewatched Often -

Solo Leveling
Chainsaw Man
Frieren: Beyond Journey's End
Jujustsu Kasien
Mashle: Magic and Muscles
Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation
Berserk of Gluttony
AoT
Vinland Saga
Hell's Paradise

I rotate all these! Super fun watches.

The colibri got tired of you and reflected warp on you with hidden text cuz of battlemod :)

At 20 dollars and years of waiting, it could be the biggest indie game of all time.

I'd be kinda curious (not that I'm sure there's any way of actually knowing) but if I had to guess the number of "new accounts" is probably something like:

RMT accounts > people leveling a multiboxing mule > old players leveling a "new" account (banned/lost) > players returning on an inactive account of 5+ years > actual "new" players.

I'd hazard the number of people < 30 (on a 23 year old game) is pretty small and there's probably more people over 50, and I'd guess that of the people < 30, a significant portion are likely playing with their parents.

No one who has a family (ie people over 30) wants to spend countless hours doing mindlessly repetitive tasks, and beyond a mild novelty factor for some people doing content that is easy but time consuming isn't highly appealing.

All that to say most of the gate keeping is probably an annoyance to most "new" accounts. If I ever decided to multibox there's a stuff I would not want to do again (although buying KI from SE for a couple bucks is a potential revenue stream here to skip some content - although not sure I love that idea (cough cough mog wardrobes 3-8 cough cough))

WRT minimum party size if congestion is an issue they could make entry requirements dynamic. (say 0-1 instances consumed, solo players allowed, 2-3 consumed requires party of 2 or more, 4-5 consumed requires party of 3+ etc...)