Continued Prime Weapon NA Review

Like have most of the people here not been here for the beginnings of REMA cycles? This grind is always bad.

The game is 20 years old and run by ghosts. Why do you think they are going to modernize to fit current gaming culture expectations?

Why is playing an hour a day, hopefully with friends, not what you want to do? You're literally paying a sub to be here. You know you like this game or else you would've moved on and you certainly wouldn't be here, on a forum that isn't even the official one, complaining about it.

There is no cheese here, only whine.

___

Thank you to the people who are further ahead in the process that are willing to share information. It's super cool of you.

Man...

I miss the times when I was grinding empy weapon items in abyssa or Mythic ***before our LS Aeonic clears or Dyna D Runs happens. After Events id go right back to grinding...

Such a simple but fun time to gear and progress your accounts with not just 6 people but an alliance of friends. You got Gil, Gear, Items, Points, and Clears to power yourself up.

Then they promised an amazing anniversary, cool new Missions, fantastic events, and Super duper weapons that would be fun to grind...

Now that we are here all I gotta say is I hate *** liars...

I hear you, but what you're saying is a little too simple as the thread has shown. FFXi players are here for a lot of reasons, and have many different playstyles and time constraints. An hour a day might be oh I just got home from work, I have one hour where nobody knew I would be online and can I do sortie for 50k galli? Not likely.

What I do is not worry about ML or Ody or Prime and just go about my own business and solo 7k galli or whatever until I get sufficient Empy +3. Taken slowly and with fun, its not so bad.

Also, I think we are over expecting the weaponskills to be badass. Yes they will be best for highest tier content (lots of acc) but SE missed the boat by not putting the mogbonanza weaponskills on the primes which would have been bonkers!


This, a thousand percent. We're all on the same boat and there have always been players showing the way.

Most my statics are weekly affairs. Sortie once a week, Sheol once/twice a week at most.

Be lucky to fit in something else around those events. So 250 runs of sortie for a prime, once a week, 5 years for completion assuming can fit in extra runs for Empy upgrades.

Will stick to literally any other rema, thanks.

ANY Information on the sword? havent played alot of sorties for a while am at 120k how good is it even the first stage in sortie? is it worth it for RDM is it better than savage blade yes / no?

As long as you don't have more than 5 friends, of course.
Content isn't fun or social enough to be daily.

- Open it up to 18
- Make it a bi-weekly affair
- Normalize galla to still require 6 months under perfect execution, 1yr max at casual (1 run a week)

Do that and baby you got a stew going.

Real linkshells come back, gear / execution requirements rollback to fit the casual state of the community.

Its exactly the opposite. Amount of running around lets you freely socialize a lot.

Nothing yet. There is only small test on staff by Mischief and my estimation of Oshala's wsc/ftp and there is video of one guy doing 5-7k WSs with dagger on fomor in H, but he had no buffs and all WSs were done at 1250-1370 TP with unknown gear, so it tells us almost nothing.

If having a chat while you're doing your chores is social to you, then cool. I don't think most people would agree.

Oh so by "content isn't social" you meant it's hard to fit between social stuff in RL? That wasn't clear enough.

It's definitely hard to fit, but it depends on your pov. My pov from Europe is big alliance events in linkshells are usually based on NA time and start midnight+ for me, which is even worse than 1h every day.

EDIT: and for me Sortie is definitely part of the social, because I do it with 5 other people I really like, talking on discord about everything (since like I said there is time for that while running around). It has even educational aspect for me, because it's the only time I can practice my poor english vocabulary and speech :)

While many of us lament the "death" of alliance content in the game, clearly SE has strong reasons for wanting to shift us from 18 man content to 6man, and my guess is their Japanese feedback is very similar to us in The States- their playerbase is now older with more adult commitments than adolescent, that more people are interested in short bursts of content with more frequency than long-term commitments twice a week.

Its not what a lot of us want, mostly because we miss the scale of alliance content, and no matter what SE does or how well-designed, 6man content can't compete with the scale aspect. They clearly succeeded in many of our minds regarding Odyssey's unique challenges and ability to scale difficulty (to a point, then it did just become "how to make a fight hard via frustration not challenge")....either the intent with Sortie was never to go beyond something that fills time, or they simply aren't capable of more, be it due to finances, talent, or desire.

I think that sounds like a wonderful time if they actually make any more content past the upcoming master trials. And just to clarify, I'm saying I'd like them to make the next content they release be the 'easier' route to making Prime Weapons AND have other non-Empy armor rewards so it's not a waste to those that did Sortie.

I can also understand the idea of changing Sortie in the future to being the future 'fix' like you're saying. It's just those fixes don't come for 1~2 years at best and I want to be done with Sortie in 2 years instead of doing it bi weekly and it be even more watered down.

Edit: done with my first weapon and deciding if I want more

Here's my problem with making everything alliance content: there is a balance struggle between 6 players and 18. You need to make the content give the same/similar rewards to a party of 6 as it gives to a full tryhard alliance of 18.

I say this because otherwise, you're actively punishing people who don't have 17 friends to put together an alliance, in a 20 year old MMO with some extremely dead servers.

So let's say you make it so you can get 50k muffins with 6 or can get 50k muffins with 18. Now you've got 2 options for those last 12 slots, either they don't scale the difficulty, so you've got merc'ing or standing around doing nothing and getting carried through their weapons. I personally think both or those are awful. Alternatively, the enemies could scale with # of players, in which case you end up with the meta, and people are still being excluded because they don't play meta jobs.

I also think it's way harder than anyone thinks to allow these bosses to freely scale to 18-man content. It's much easier to sac a tank to Setting the Stage or Vivisection when you have 18 people. MB strats are much more difficult to pull off when you have 18 people (because of burst wall). WS wall with 18 people makes melee strats a nightmare. Oh, let's remove the WS wall! Congrats, now every single boss is a savage blade spam, what fun and engaging content, congrats everybody!

IDK. Who wants to try their hand at solving all these problems, without introducing new ones? Are you going to change the way the temp items/muffins drop, or are you going to have to wait for all 18 people to get to the boss arena before you start the fight, and have 3 parties of people boltering across the area together as a giant blob so they can get to the next boss? How are you going to balance the trash with an 18-man alliance? Is their HP going to scale as well, or are there going to be groups full-clearing all the trash by having 2 parties cleave it all down while 1 does all the objectives?

It's a complete mess. Everyone says "just make it 18 man" as if that's like an afternoon's work for their single developer. Go ahead and try it and let me know how balanced your solution is.

You raise some pretty valid points, but the solution to that in my opinion is that ultimately it doesn't matter.

Even locking a content that could be allianceable to 6 people only is a "punishment" for groups who have lotsa people and can't fit them into the event.

18 people would be easier? Maybe, but there's cons and pros.
You have a wider degree of freedom in the jobs to bring, you can let returning or noobs "leech" no problem, but you have the headache of having to coordinate more people, getting online, waiting for people afk, finding a time slot suiting lotsa people is usually harder than suiting 6 and so on.
Would it be such a big deal if 18 men or 12 or 6 get the same amount of galli?

I mean if we were talking about official ranking, leaderboards, stuff like that akeen to e-sports etc I would be sorta skeptic about it, but here there's nothing like that.
Is it such a big deal if someone gets the same thing you're doing but with less effort?
I mean this is a 20+ years old, who the *** cares really?

Yes. I think it completely diminishes the sense of pride and accomplishment you feel for having completed a long and difficult process to obtain a powerful item for your character when someone did it on their mule coincidentally and was like "eh, I guess I'll grab one for him, might as well, it doesn't cost me anything"

It's a lot harder to be excited about the thing you busted your *** for when some jackass got one on a whim because he has auto-invite and his friends were running the event so they just dragged him along.

Am I an alien? Do you guys not feel this way? If Nyame R30 was turned into 18-man content but not scaled up, and everyone was carrying 12 players through it, would you feel the same pride about your R30 nyame?

Personally I feel there's a marked difference between Odyssey Gaol and Sortie in this regard.

Yes, it would be frustrating if Gaol were made into alliance content because the fights are meant to be rigorously challenging.

Sortie, however, is just a grind. A daily 1hr grind for 6 months. Sure, the basement bosses and Aminon present some degree of challenge you need to execute properly against, but it's nothing remotely close to the degree of Gaol.

The event really is mostly running around doing fluff objectives. There's absolutely skill involved in optimizing runs, but it's not the type of challenge content where I'd care if some people / alts got it more easily. It's much more comparable to Omen in my eyes.

I would disagree. I find doing all 8 bosses in one run as challenging let alone people trying to do 8 bosses and Aminon at once.

I feel you there, but not every event in game has to bring that divide between sense of accomplishment for an elite few outstanding players and the rest of commoners/buyers/morons/whatever.

There's Odyssey and R30 augs for that atm.
For a small amount of time there was Master Trials, with new coming that will allow a small number of people to take pride into defeating stuff that's completely out of reach for everybody else.

Would it be such a big deal for Prime Weapons? We don't even know how good/bad most of them will be in the end, and every single other Legendary weapon in this game can be easily obtained by any player, and has been like that for what, 7+ years already?


I undertstand you want difficult achievement to take pride with, that's perfectly understandable and I completely suppor that.
I'm just saying that it doesn't necessarily have to be something related to Sortie.
Even if some stupid moron is enabled to get way more gally than he would be able to get alone, you still have a cap per run above which you cannot get regardless of alliance or not, and you still have the 6 months minimum because of the Psyches.
Also even if he is able to get yet another rare weapon he won't be able to use to its full extent, what difference will it make, when that same player is packed with Mythics, Relics, Aeonics, Empys?

I mean I would've completely supported your point several years ago and I'd be one of those fighting first line for it, but nowadays in 2023 it seems completely anachronistic to still feel attached to that model when the game hasn't been like that not for a few months but for over 7 years.


tl;dr
rare accomplishments for elite players? Absolutely yes I support that.
Does it have to apply to every single bloody content in the game? Nope it doesn't.

Jm2c of course.

To me it's also a matter of "timings".
If some noob morons is able to complete the most difficult content in the game at the same time as the best players or shortly after, that would be greatly irritating.

But if, because of game adjustments, they are able to do that a long time after, would it be a big deal?
I wouldn't care in this case honestly.

I think there's a difference in the way you guys are interpreting pride and the way I see it.

If my character has 7 REMA for RNG, that makes me proud because I worked hard doing trials, farming items, gil, camping NMs, etc. to get all those. I know that my RNG is really powerful and can do all kinds of amazing things because of the work I put into the character. How many of those were ground-breaking, elite-only challenges that not every player can do? Basically 0. But that doesn't mean I can't be proud of the hundreds of hours of work I put into my RNG to make it really awesome.

Then there's the pride of master trials and high vengeance level odyssey, which is the pride of doing things other people can't do. This is also really great, because you can wear your awesome Nyame in your town gear and people will look on with awe that you were able to accomplish a difficult task they can't do. This is the elite type of pride.

I was referring to the first one. If you have 62 REMA, you can still be proud of your character's accomplishments because you put a lot of work into your character, not necessarily that you did something others can't do.

RE: Primes, if people are getting them handed out like Halloween candy, it cheapens the accomplishment of completing one. You get psyche basically for nothing, so the only real work you put into acquiring a prime is getting muffins and stones. Right now, if you have a prime weapon it's because you put in the work to get the muffins. If they made Sortie 18-man and allowed rewards to be collected from the entrance, people would AFK their mules or customers at the entrance and people would get a prime weapon for 0 work. This would, I think, rightfully make people who actually spent 150-200 hours farming their muffins feel their accomplishment was rather cheap when dealing with other players.

Have mentioned before, why shouldn't all progression based content be available for everyone. Progression is the whole point of a heavily gear progression based MMO and why rank unlocks exist in first place.

For challenging content just for a sense of accomplishment, see master trials. SE have even made multiple avenues available for unlocking gear progression that are more easily reached by a greater number of players, eg 100 kills for +3 relics, job point option for weapon augments, 50% dmg rather than outright kill on wave3 boss, Omen scales from non boss kills and so forth.

Does it upset people that got their augments with a kill that someone else did it without a kill? Why should it.

Does it still upset people that did Cop 6-4 in a level 60 cap that the limit was lifted? Don't see a reason for it.

For sure v25 kills will become more common as progression keeps going, is only natural.

Will there be other avenues to do it, who knows. Even if there are, it does not invalidate either the groups that did it without them or groups that came later that did it with them.

This would certainly be a consequence, but how much of a detriment is it really if less hardcore players get Primes in 6-8 months as opposed to 12-15? It's already "soloable."

Meanwhile there are plenty of us hardcore players who would gladly accept that consequence if it meant we could bring more friends along to content rather than restricting things to 6 people. It's already problematic that Aminon basically requires you run with a strict 6-man static with the way his KI entry works -- that just isn't realistic for most players, let alone daily for 6 months.

Odyssey runs are fast and breezy, with Gaol fights being 15min and segruns being 30. That's a big part of why I don't care if that's 6-man. But both Ody and Sortie? Well suddenly that's 1.5+hrs a night where I'm restricted to playing with 6 players, inevitably excluding friends.

Combined with the restrictive KI system for segs/Sortie, this also makes it harder to just... help people, for those of us who are so inclined. Perg mentioned it earlier, but it makes the game feel more selfish when I can't safely include newer players for said events. Would allowing that inevitably also allow for mercing? Unfortunately, probably. But that's irrelevant to the point.

Gredival?
Just because you're a loser doesn't mean the rest of us are gladly interested in suffering through this content. You are also buying all the mats for your crafting shield, does that diminish the pride and accomplishment you feel from that stupid grind?

Cap

Already covered it.
That post was moreso about scaling, but relevant as its all alliance content that didnt need 12+++ to clear.
We can include Delve, as it didnt take long for people to discover you didnt need 18 chars to win.

I'm as guilty as almost anyone in this regard, but if we view our accomplishments as diminished because it became easier for someone else, then the real motivation for that accomplishment must have been external and driven by others' reaction to our accomplishment.

I'll have to agree w/ the criticism, this is far too simple-minded categorically; I think games have evolved past this to some degree

based on that, I'd be a "socializer" in FFXI by wanting to help others; at the same time I'm not because the game I'm playing absolutely matters because I absolutely don't feel the same way about FFXIV. I'd rather avoid talking to strangers at all costs there.

The only one that matters, and even then, no one cares unless its a MASSIVE first. Who got the first Ebisu+1? Who got the first R15 Masamune? Who was the first group to 6man Tojil? I cant answer those, nor do I care to know. I do remember Apathy killed the first AV, because of how monumental that was.

Could you clarify what you mean when you call me a loser? I'm a loser because I enjoy Sortie, or because I don't have 17 friends I desperately need to fit into my Sortie group? What's the point here? I don't care if you don't like Sortie, don't do it if you're suffering so badly. If you have any actual feedback on how to improve it, I'd love to hear some of this armchair criticism rise to the level of game design. What's your proposal?


I've already addressed this and given my philosophy a thousand times, but for those who can't read or aren't keeping up:
-Strictly AH ***is worth basically 0 respect in my opinion, because a level 1 character with a credit card can have it
-The more actual work required to get an item, the more respect I have for it and the more proud I feel of it. Ranked ody gear, mythics, empyreans, JSE, all of it is proportional to the amount of work it proves that you have done in the game

Apply these to the escutcheon situation: The spheres are a big portion of the work required and I bought those (still farmed 10,000+ myself, but I bought many) so sure it's a little less work, but I still had to do RoEs, craftsmanship, customer requests, GP -> CP, and all the synthchains, plus leveling the crafts, getting torques, KIs and other GP items, leveling subcrafts. So yes, I have a lot of pride in my crafts and my shields, including the fact that I bought spheres (for gil).

As I said in the past, I have a ton of respect for anyone who has an escutcheon because it requires a ton of work no matter how you do it. You could have all the gil in the world and it would still require more effort than anything else in the game (possible exception for high-tier ody gear if you count all the clears).

Each item holds a certain level of prestige, whether you like it or not, because a player who knows the game well understands the level of effort you had to go through to get the item, and assigns an appropriate level of admiration to the person for having that thing. That's how online social video games work...People who have worked really hard on their character are proud of it because they put in the work and accomplished things.

There's no way I need to explain this to you again.