Random Question Thread (FFXI Related)

Also something I overlooked for some reason when discussing annoying materials, but you can use kits for this. It would be trivial to keep a stack of kit 15 (recruit/initiate) and kit 35 (Novice/Apprentice) to hit those goals when they pop up. Theres likely a steady supply of kit 64/65 available for purchase for the Journeyman/Craftsman tier as its a requirement for the shield to turn 20 in.

I have very little experience with Sheol A, how LOW is the rate of Aurum Coffers to appear? It clearly seems it's much different from Sheol C.
I'm talking about Izzat, not Keys.

I'm at 20 Coffers opened, none of them popped an aurum (last 6 have been opened on floor 7 in the vain hope that the higher the floor the higher the chance, the others have been opened on floor 1-3)

It's been a long time since I farmed Aurums in Sheols, but it was not any different across zones from what I recall. It was always like 5% chance to upgrade a box using Keys, and like a 30~90% (totally eyeballed) chance to upgrade a box using Izzat, depending on the box quality. Just my own observation (and you can go back and find my notes on this in the original Odyssey thread way back), but I firmly believe there is a reduced upgrade rate going from Coffer -> Aurum vs Chest -> Coffer (which would make sense because it's a higher quality box). I even had trouble getting Aurums to pop when I used to Scale Farm Sheol A; I would kill everything on A1, then use Izzat to go Chest > Coffer > Aurum. I only saw an Aurum Chest about a third to half of the time. Even in Sheol C when Izzat is high and I burn it on Coffers, I don't see an Aurum every time either, but when I burn Izzat on Chests I almost always see a Coffer. So I think the rate to get a Coffer is very high, and the rate to get an Aurum is about 1/3 or so.

I agree with a chunk of that however I think you're moving goal posts at the end (of the long post), also wrt your 2nd post if you're doing that you're serializing it (which takes longer) I actually raised the shield skill and did crafter points in tandem. (they tended to finish close together, although I'd make some of the mats for the kits when I got the guild rank recipies, and tended to ignore the 5+ mats ones) I think the stage 3 ones I tried harder to hit due to the negative impacts of not doing it.

I did have a spread sheet of the various synths up and the mats and objectives they fulfilled. I probably hit closer to 80-90% (when I wanted to) but I don't remember, I took my time too, so I'd buy some stuff from guild merchants and when they raised the price I'd wait for it to fall again. I'd snipe some rarer mats off AH if I saw them to do some of the higher tier synths. I think at max I had stuff to do 1 of 15 snyths, but that was really inv. intensive. (some of them fulfilled the RoE stuff) typically I had about 3~5 cheap/easy/dual purpose synths to do. I didn't not keep any copious records though so its all anecdotal and I did morph stuff a bit as I went.

Raising a shield is not cheap, quick or easy in any case (to your point).

Would anyone be willing to break down how I could or should work towards all the missing guild points items and KI? I am 110 Cloth, 110 Fishing, 80 Synergy, 70 the rest. I think Cloth GP is done and now working on fishing.
Tried to read up some on how to achieve this but little lost. Seems I would need to take each craft to veteran to get all the items KI then jump to next. Once done I would need to either re-level Cloth or new guild if I decide not to redo cloth. Am I right or missing key info? Is there a proper game plan to try and achieve this? Thank you.

Allright, thanks for the input.
Because on Sheol C I always had the impression the Coffer > Aurum rate is higher on floor 4 than floor 1, but maybe that's a lie.
Either way it's not THAT rare to my experience.

0 out of 20 seems a bit low buuuut I'll keep going!

Do explain? Was it the part about removing the time based goals from the overall tally?

This was you, you said its ignore worthy.

I dont think its moving the goalposts. I cant imagine most humans doing this consciously will pump the brakes on their craftsmanship session because a time based bonus popped up.

How many people here, if they were doing this right now, would wait because "craft on Firesday" popped up? Heres how far firesday is at the time of this post:


You checking back in 5 hrs and 45 minutes? If I spent 10 minutes loading up my inventory for this session, I'm not pumping the brakes and dumping everything on mules / selling everything back to NPC, I'm ignoring it and waiting for the next bonus to pop up.

If its a day/night one, that depends on what time it is. If "Craft between 18:00 and 5:59" pops up and its 17:00, sure, I can go refill my drink or take a leak or whatever, its two minutes. If its 7:00, I'm not pumping the brakes for 15 minutes, I'm ignoring it.

I highly doubt the discount bonus affects your box spawn rate, but it could be possible. Check the moogle and see where you're at. I'm capped on boxes in Sheol A but not in other zones, and I don't notice any observable difference (less rate) when I open Coffers with izzat for Aurum chance in the other Sheols, so it really can't be related. It's for sure lower than Coffer upgrades from chest, but 0/20 is super unlucky (assuming all 20 of those were purely from Izzat and not from keys).

You just uncap the next subcraft you want to level, take it to 98, and do guild points until you have all the KI/items you want.

You need a lot of guild points, which can be done at any level. In my experience, capping and uncapping at level 70 is the best way to consistently get decent guild point items on a daily basis. This can be done at any time.

Then, start collecting synthesis materials for the crafts you want to take to 98, and go crazy when there is a crafting skill-up campaign (they've been more frequent in the past year or so). Consider farming up a Shaper's Shawl if you haven't already.

You only need 98 if you care about the KI, the furnishings only require level 88. But if you're going to 88, might as well take it 10 more levels.

Just because we agree its not worth doing doesn't mean you magically get to take it out of the denominator (i mean if that were true I'd just state I do 100% of the tasks). Also if I have something else I could do and am resigned to losing the inventory for an extended period of time I could choose to come back later. (in fact I think it i did a couple times (not always), i'd go farm silica or w/e (needed for glass for aquariums for deliveries for woodworkers). Point is a human will use some level of judgment. I definitely see 2 types of players "no, I want it now" vs. "no, i'll wait for xx to help me out", I'm probably in the latter more often than not.

Does Squeenix add unobtainable items to the game months in advance often? It has been like 9 months since the Beseiged rings got added but still no way to get right? Who can send an angry email in Japanese for me (also request smn nerf plz)

Lacertilian Ring, Jotnar Ring, etc

I didn't notice a difference in aurum coffer spawn rate between the sheols.

That said, I always saved up points until top floor and opened everything there. That's to save the most izzat and get at least one try for aurum per run.

You will have runs with no aurum but it was pretty high spawn rate. 30% or so, finger in the air.

This is happening for 3 months+ now and the amount of wyrm ash on ah never really changed. its around 130-150.

So they buy all the < 1.5m then cover the list

Constant gain. Youd have to watch much closer. It may hover at 120 but its new ones being added and cheap ones being taken.

When you have infinite gil you can manipulate up or down at will. Just depends what your goal is. hoard or sales

I don't understand, using this example.

If you're cutting Arrowwood Logs for craftsmanship they cost 12g and the lumber sells for half as much. This is...expensive?

Say you wanna do Lightning Crystals, that's maple log, 45g.

OK, Earth crystals, grab some fletchings and arrowheads and make arrows, <50g

Use lots of materials: I would probably skip, but you can do 3+ and 5+ with Mandarin for ~100g

So...it's insanely cheap. Like...almost break-even.

It's not easy...um...what's the "hard" part of gathering incredibly cheap materials off of vendors with infinite stock, and then synthesizing them? Am I missing the challenging part?

It's not "quick"? Well, I never said the word quick, that's some *** Nynja made up, so...I guess I agree with you, let's beat the strawman of Maletaru together! I said it doesn't take that long which, frankly, is true. For a "stage 3" shield, it doesn't take that long. It takes longer than making a cup of tea, but relative to other FFXI projects it's not at all a big deal.

That's not all of a shield though, you also need to do the CP! Well, let's keep going with WW then. Set 74 requires about 5k of vendor mats. Looking at my CP data, getting 52k CP took me 798 crystals, so let's say all of my breaks were total losses (not actually true), that puts us at about 4m gil. Which is a *** pittance. That's less than some +1 necks on my server, not including any crystals for RP.

OK, we also need to do the RoEs.
Set 65 x12 : (320g + 278g)*12 = 7,176
Rosenbogen x 20 : (320+2500+585+834)+5,000+80+96+556+1800 * 20 = 235,420
Pluto's Staff x 10 (assuming 30% HQ rate) : (15,000+2500)*35 = 612,500
Couse+1 x 5 (Assuming 30% HQ rate) : (236+8,000+30)*17 = 140,522
RoEs: 995,618

Oh, we forgot customer requests too!
Shigeto Bow x 40 : ((go *** farm it)+8,000+40+96+(200+675+1,000))*40 = 400,440
Arasy Lance x 12 : (20,000+35,000+10,000)*12 = 780,000
Aquariums x 40 : 2,000+6,000+4,000+(go *** farm it+14+270)+(12+4048+588+go *** farm it+go *** fish it)x40 = 677,280
Mahogany Lumber x 400 (assuming 50% HQ rate) : 2250 * 400 = 900,000
Customer requests: 2,757,720

So all-in for everything you're probably spending about 8m for a "stage 3" Woodworking shield. I have no concept of whether this is cheaper than the others (I suspect Cooking is the cheapest TBH), but it seems about the same as any others.

Maybe this is just my wealth speaking, but I wouldn't call 8m gil expensive. You can make that back in probably about 3-4 hours of sphere farming, and then print gil for the rest of your life with it.

The hard/grindy/expensive part of a shield is the final stage. The first few stages are a complete joke with very little cost, no challenge, and the grind really isn't that bad. You can chip away at it slowly over whatever period of time you want, it will cost you next to nothing, and you can do it while 99% AFK watching Netflix. If you consider it a herculean task, you should uninstall FFXI right now.

Maletaru used Gaslight.
It was ineffective.

We can agree to disagree then, but I question the logic of someone whos gonna pump the breaks on something because its daytime and the bonus is craft at night when this could happen:
14:05:40The bonus condition for increasing the Craftsmanship has changed to Craft between 18:00 and 5:59!
14:13:52The bonus condition for increasing the Craftsmanship has changed to Craft between 6:00 and 17:59!

I'm not sure what the ingame time on those two were but based on the craftsmanship gained on the subsequent synths (0.05 HQ1 and 0.10 HQ1), it was daytime throughout that 8 minute RL window.

Going down further:
14:30:35The bonus condition for increasing the Craftsmanship has changed to Craft between 18:00 and 5:59!
14:30:57Craftsmanship has increased by 0.05%! (HQ1)
14:39:45The bonus condition for increasing the Craftsmanship has changed to Craft between 6:00 and 17:59!
14:40:06Craftsmanship has increased by 0.03%! (NQ)

I got the nighttime bonus during daytime, 9 minutes later I got the daytime bonus but it was during nighttime. So you'd be pumping the brakes for ~9 minutes because hitting the bonus is paramount, then once nighttime hit you'd have to pump the breaks for another 20 minutes because you got the daytime bonus. Seems pretty inefficient if you ask me.

The definition of what is efficiency changes from user to user. If you bot then the most efficient (or way of least resistance) is to spend as few manual labor on the task as possible because you care less about bot time and your resources aren't as limited.

If you craft manually you might appreciate the opportunity to take a break to do something else because the process is tiring and you get more bang for your buck a few minutes later. Your time is more limited and it's more efficient to spend it when you get the most out of it, kind of like mini campaigns if you want.

Of course not every objective is worth going for it even when crafting manually.

Short of running the numbers for everything is there any 'rule of thumb' when it comes to WS gear in terms of attack vs ability modifiers?

Nowadays armor has both high mods, and mid/high atk, and wsd(nyame/emp+3/af/relic+4)

Generally speaking if its a front loaded ws; wsd. If its a multi-hit; MA. If a piece has neither then can be worth looking at mods.

Maybe minor exception would be something like sroda ring since that with trusts can get up to +50 atk in the ring slot which is pretty strong

Crafting shield posts recommend doing:
Tier 1 -> Tier 1 -> Tier 2 -> Tier 3

However, card desynths are 70% T1, 20% T2, 10% T3, with 2 cards sharing the same Tier 2 and 4 sharing the same Tier 3. If I successfully desynthed 10 of each card, I'd expect to get:
7 of each of the 8 Tier 1s
4 of each of the 4 Tier 2s
4 of each of the 2 Tier 3s

Then you could do 4x T1 -> T1 -> T2 -> T3 chains and you'd have 3 of each Tier 1 left over. It seems like it would be better to do T1 -> T1 -> T1 -> T2 -> T3 most of the time, but
I assume that means slapping on another T1 isn't possible? Do people just burn their extra T1s on 6-point chains?

If you've been doing besieged, you can desynth from the new cards that have a T2 NQ/HQ1 result.

Hmm afaik Mboze takes 0 SC dmg, and there's just no way you can cap attack (specially with SAM) vs Mboze25 with BRD buffs only.
No idea why you'd use Aria in that situation or why mentioning 4-5 step specifically

I don't remember if it's 100% guaranteed to Ooze mboze with Rayke unda x3 alone, cause for KI 1 or RP (unless going with 1 TP reset job and 1 DD SB job slowly chipping at it) I usually did Rayke+Geo.Languor to land it (since frazzle III is hard to land without stymie apparently). That also helps for the v25 kill, allowing ki1 to push beyond 75% to like 69% or lower (based on how many buffs you can give to that DD in order to counter regen from 75%)

Good tip and I'll look into it, but I don't think the supply is going to be there for me. I've been doing besieged twice a month for half a year and only have enough points for about 200 cards. If about 70% of those turn into spheres, that's still kind of peanuts against the scale of the problem.

I tried to validate BG's claim quoted above at the focuser and it seems like it's not true. I did ~8 Transfixion -> Compression reps without problem. However, it doesn't make sense to do it because Level 2 skillchains can be made with 2x T1 spheres (1 point + 5 points), while Level 1 skillchains also take 2x T1 spheres (1 point + 2 points). Even if you're continuing it indefinitely, you're averaging ~2 points per t1 orb while you'd average 3 points/T1 Sphere by just doing Level 2 skillchains over and over.

If there was some kind of bonus for having longer chains (like in real skillchains), then it might make sense, but AFAIK there isn't and the only possible bonus would be HQ rate. In fact, the point progression (1 -> 2 -> 5 -> 15 -> 15) means it's best to always make the shortest chain possible (1 -> 5 -> 15 -> 15) because any alternative path is actually less efficient per sphere tier. Alright, well now I understand the logic behind the advice I read everywhere.

It can work but it's not guaranteed at all. In my experience it has been extremely unreliable.
If you add Frazzle 3 (or you MB Ooze on an SC made by a SCH) then it has always worked 100% for me.

While this is true for speed, it's also WAY more expensive in gil, because those 15s are each 40k and use the most expensive spheres. It will add up quickly. If you only do this pattern and never break or HQ, you'd spend 111,000,000 in just t3 catalysts, plus 22m in t2 catalysts.

For reference, most of my shields i spent a little over 40m in total catalyst costs.

If you're getting the spheres for free you could consider those "free" or cheap, but there's no such thing as a free lunch, opportunity costs, etc.

Got money to burn, go for it, but do recognize it is an expensive path to take

Oh yeah, it doesn't necessarily make sense to use Tier 3 spheres (vs. selling them to cover costs) depending on your financial situation, but I just meant that you always want to make the highest level skillchain you can due to the point rewards.

I grant you there's nothing "hard" about crafting (its all easy). Perhaps "tedious" is a better word (but I that also equates to "not quick"). I don't think 8-10M is "cheap", but its not expensive either and it still takes time and probably easy to go past that depending on how careful one is.

I suppose the main opportunity cost is when I have a couple hrs./day to play do I want to spend most of it crafting when I could be doing something more interesting? (the days I play longer I typically do spend some time doing the more tedious tasks)

There are many things in this game you can fulfill multiple objectives at once (literally and figuratively) which is going to be more efficient (human time/gil) but probably take longer to do. Serializing them is going to be more effort/gil but generally will get them done quicker.

No I was opening ALL chests with Izzat. Need to be on THF main to use keys, no?

Anyway, wanna laugh? Opened the 21st coffer today and an Aurum finally popped! And I opened. Yai! 1/20 aurums
/slashwrists

As far as gear that has the, "Converts damage taken to TP +X."

Is it basically each instance of damage you take you get the listed, "TP+X?" Or do you get TP+X for each point of damage? How does it work?

More damage you take the more TP you get.


Wut. Mboze, the death tree, that gets procced by multi-step SCs? He takes reduced wind and earth dmg, that's it. Light SCs work fine as far as I remember - been a while.

You need 5% dmg not to kill it. SV brd buffs are enough. Idk if ageha lands but I did it anyway.

The reason you want to multi step is because v25s have WS wall and you need to rotate 4-5 WSs anyway. Might as well SC them.