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Author Topic: Let's Play Final Fantasy XI  (Read 34511 times)

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Norondor

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Re: Let's Play Final Fantasy XI
« Reply #400 on: March 17, 2011, 09:35:55 PM »

how about when the servers come up

i'll play :)
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Rosencrantz

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Re: Let's Play Final Fantasy XI
« Reply #401 on: March 18, 2011, 05:52:47 AM »

how about when the servers come up

That'd be nice, although the actual odds of me playing an MMO while in school and raising a baby are slim to none. I just like to dream...
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Friday

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Re: Let's Play Final Fantasy XI
« Reply #402 on: March 18, 2011, 06:57:22 AM »

My friend does it with WoW, but he only gets to play about 5-8 hours a week, tops. Luckily, that's all you need in order to progress in PvP gear.
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Pacobird

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Re: Let's Play Final Fantasy XI
« Reply #403 on: March 18, 2011, 07:02:44 AM »

Yeah, keep in mind that all this content is built around a forced limitation on playtime: it starts at a 30 minute limit every twenty hours, and even with a bunch of the time extending abyssites (3/3 Celerity, 4/6 Sojourn), I only get about 2 hours a day.  I wouldn't recommend most of the elemental Magian trials for someone with a limited play schedule (wind and lightning might be okay, because some zones have that shit all the time), but otherwise the content's designed to be bite-sized.

That said, your kid is obviously way more important.

EDIT: Apparently someone on the NEW OFFICIAL FORUMS HEYOOOO just posted that SE will be reevaluating the power situation on March 22nd to see if they should reactivate.  That's much sooner than I thought they would (after all, they've already comped everybody April so they don't stand to gain much financially by bringing servers up early except to keep people from just drifting away), but with the way FFXI revenue is carrying the company right now it makes sense they'd want to try to lose as few people as possible.

So, comping us a month for maybe 2 weeks of downtime, committing a 100 million yen donation to the relief effort, and letting XIV players convert crysta to red cross donations, despite having gotten slaughtered on the Nikkei since September; SE is a company I suddenly feel pretty good about supporting.
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Rosencrantz

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Re: Let's Play Final Fantasy XI
« Reply #404 on: March 18, 2011, 08:34:51 AM »

It's not so much about the free time as it's about my schedule being sort of random. My wife is actually fine with me playing an MMORPG, but the hard part is that if something ever suddenly comes up, I have to drop whatever I'm doing to help the kid. Being unable to pause is a problem. Actually, I was soloing in WoW for the first few weeks after Zach was born (because it's not a big deal if your character dies because you had to jump off the computer), but I had to quit due to school projects.

Aaaanyway, sometime after the servers are back up I'll give it a shot and see what I can do. I think my highest leveled job is around 37 (Ranger), with a few others (Corsair, Blue Mage, Red Mage) somewhere around 30. Is it possible to get any of those classes up to 70+ by soloing? I've also heard that Dancer is a great solo class.
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Pacobird

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Re: Let's Play Final Fantasy XI
« Reply #405 on: March 18, 2011, 08:50:15 AM »

NOTORIOUS MONSTER WEAKNESSES

Every Abyssea NM is weak to one physical WS, one elemental WS, and one spell/song, and triggering each weakness causes a "!!" to show up on the mob, seals some abilities for a short time and forces it to drop more loot.  Each weakness is randomly selected from a list of possible ones at the time the NM is claimed/spawned.  A detailed explanation, as well as the list of possible weaknesses, is located here.

The three types of weaknesses are as follows:

Red: Inflicts the Terror status, totally immobilizing the NM for 25 seconds.  Triggering the Red weakness forces the NM to drop all potential key items, including pop items (though only to the person who claimed it), Abyssites, and Atma.  Pops and Abyssites have a not inconsiderable chance to drop without Red triggers, but Red is the only way to get an Atma to drop.  It's triggered by one of 13 possible elemental weapon skills, the selection of which is totally random as far as anyone can tell.  Notably, however, a WAR and a NIN with properly-leveled combat skills and enough time can cover all 13 between the two of them.

Blue: Inflicts Amnesia for 25 seconds, preventing the use of any TP abilities.  Blue !! raises the possibility of the NM dropping any unique weapon or armor drops to around 80%; you'll usually go for it when hunting for a particular accessory or something.  It's probably the hardest to trigger, because it's triggered by a physical WS, of which there are 3 groups of 15 possible.  The particular group is determined by the time of day you pop/claim; 23:00 to 7:00 is Blunt, 7:00 to 14:00 is Piercing, and 14:00 to 23:00 is Slashing.  As you can see, you usually need a bunch of classes to land Blue, though notably one of the best things about the MNK + WHM duo is that they can hit all possible Blue triggers if they claim during Blunt time.

Yellow: Inflicts Silence for 25 seconds.  Yellow !! increases the number of class-specific upgrade items a given mob drops.  Without Yellow !!, for instance, Tier 1 NMs drop 0-2 seals; with Yellow, they drop 4-5.  It's triggered by spells; the specific spell will be determined from the list in my link based on the day of the week you pop/claim.  It will be either the element of that day, the day before, or the day after.  For instance, if you claim on Windsday, the Yellow trigger will be wind, water, or ice. 

The drop benefit is negated if you trigger the same weakness more than once on the same NM, but they don't, as far as anyone can tell, affect other weakness pops.  So if you want an Atma from an NM and don't care about anything else, you can chain Silence him by continuously proccing the Yellow weakness, though they do build resistance and the durations get shorter.

Basically, the idea here is to incentivize bringing more people so that you can trigger weaknesses and get more loot.  Though I personally can solo most tier 1 NMs, for instance, if I want seals, I'd consider it a waste of time to go farm them without a BLM or BLU in tow to help trigger Yellow; ideally I bring someone who wants different seals, but even if there's a conflict, the difference between proccing yellow and not proccing it is so big that I'm still ahead of where I would have been alone.
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Pacobird

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Re: Let's Play Final Fantasy XI
« Reply #406 on: March 18, 2011, 08:58:57 AM »

Also, my main is Dancer.  It's a wonderful solo class, and actually a top-tier damage-dealer in Abyssea because the existence of the Razed Ruins atma I linked means the whole thing heavily favors DDs with a strong crit weapon skill (Evisceration).  I have no real complaints about it, though I personally feel Ninja is overall stronger, definitely at BiS; NIN +2 feet, for instance, give Utsusemi another shadow.
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TA

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Re: Let's Play Final Fantasy XI
« Reply #407 on: March 18, 2011, 09:00:33 AM »

The drop benefit is negated if you trigger the same weakness more than once on the same NM, but they don't, as far as anyone can tell, affect other weakness pops.  So if you want an Atma from an NM and don't care about anything else, you can chain Silence him by continuously proccing the Yellow weakness, though they do build resistance and the durations get shorter.

Do you mean here that you only get the drop benefit for the first time that you trigger a Weakness?  Or do you mean that triggering the Weakness a second time negates the drop benefit from the first trigger?  Because one of those is okay but the other is really really bad.
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Pacobird

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Re: Let's Play Final Fantasy XI
« Reply #408 on: March 18, 2011, 09:17:09 AM »

On any given NM, you get the drop benefit of a particular weakness the first time you trigger that weakness; it is negated if you trigger it on the same NM a second time.  The weakness system is reset for every NM you fight, every time you fight it, if that's what you're asking.

Basically once you find a given weakness, you can choose between going for the drop and exploiting the actual weakness effect.  Most of the time you're going for the former, though some exceptions exist (smart people will try to find out what the red weakness is for really strong NMs that go completely apeshit at 20% and then wait until they're low to trigger Red and zerg it down).

EDIT: Each weakness trigger is randomized every time you claim an NM, if that helps explain.  If you fight Bukhis two times in a row, both times will have different weaknesses.  If you were to wipe to Bukhis and reclaim him before he despawned, he'd lose all his procced weaknesses and get new ones.
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Pacobird

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Re: Let's Play Final Fantasy XI
« Reply #409 on: March 18, 2011, 09:47:04 AM »

Also, Rangers have...problems.  Because ranged attack damage suffers horribly at melee range, they have huge problems soloing, and at max levels, they derive no benefit from Haste, which becomes the bread and butter of the game.

I know some people who play RNG and swear by it, but it's telling that they usually hop on their MNKs and WHMs for Serious Business.  Same as it ever was.
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Rosencrantz

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Re: Let's Play Final Fantasy XI
« Reply #410 on: March 18, 2011, 11:27:02 AM »

I only leveled Ranger because I was told it was the best subjob for Corsair by my old group. I hated every minute of it! Corsair was fun, but I wouldn't want to solo as that job.
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Pacobird

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Re: Let's Play Final Fantasy XI
« Reply #411 on: March 18, 2011, 11:34:28 AM »

Most melee jobs can solo pretty well in most situations thanks to /DNC to cover healing, though of the ones you listed I'd say BLU is overall the strongest right now.  Recent cap increases have introduced a few four-digit-damage spells, and Cocoon stays great for survivability the whole way up.  Really, the biggest disadvantage BLU has is that it's an MP job; in Abyssea, the only consequence of that is you need a Refresh atma so you're basically running two offensive atma while the DDs get 3.
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Pacobird

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Re: Let's Play Final Fantasy XI
« Reply #412 on: March 18, 2011, 12:07:07 PM »

PROGRESSION/STORYLINE

I guess the last thing to talk about is the quest structure.  Each zone has a bunch of repeatable quests, some of which have a chance to award a seal on completion; it's semi-viable to make +1 armor this way but it's not anywhere close to as fast (or as fun) as NM hunting.  There's a loose overarching story, too, that mostly functions to give you some feeling of progression.

All 9 zones have a boss target you need to kill to advance the story.  You can kill them in any order and you receive the quests for them automatically the first time you zone in to each area.  Each one you kill gets you a new Abyssite in a predetermined order; you can see them on the Abyssite page I linked.

Kill all nine and you're given a new quest to kill 6 NMs called caturae, who are big and nasty and can be pugstomped to death like everything else in Abyssea.  Do that, and you get access to the guy who was either behind it all or is like the harbinger of Abyssean doom or whatever, I am not totally clear on this point: [spoiler]Shinryu.[/spoiler]

SPOILERBOSS is actually hard, but has amazing loot, can be spammed (though each fight takes one of your stones), and grants you two Abyssite rewards the first time you win: one grants hints about the element/weapon type of a given weakness trigger when fighting an NM, and the other reduces the cost of Primeval Brew an Abyssea-only item that grants you a 3-minute godmode (we are talking invulnerability and 20k damage weapon skills) from 2 million cruor to 200,000.

After that point you've beaten Abyssea, so farm [spoiler]Shinryu[/spoiler] for loot (easily soloable with Brew, lol), farm cruor for more Brew, shit on everything, use the auto-reraise effect on [spoiler]Shinryu's[/spoiler] Atma to grief Germans, etc.

That about wraps up Abyssea talk.  As you can probably see, it might strike one as a little anticlimactic, but I would argue it makes sense and is really well-designed if considered a jumping-off point or training ground for bigger things to come.  Provided those things actually come, of course.
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Envy

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Re: Let's Play Final Fantasy XI
« Reply #413 on: March 18, 2011, 12:26:29 PM »

So is Mnk/Whm still pretty boss for soloing? I got to around 45 or so before I quit.
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Pacobird

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Re: Let's Play Final Fantasy XI
« Reply #414 on: March 18, 2011, 12:40:17 PM »

I'd prefer MNK/DNC, but with Fields of Valor buffs allowing you to take a one-hour 1 MP/tick Refresh, /WHM's fine.

Again, soloing is easy now.  It's as easy as it is in WoW.  The problem is jobs don't have specs, so soloing as, say, a WHM or a BRD goes about as well as you'd expect soloing leveling a Resto Druid or Holy Paladin to go.
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Shinra

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Re: Let's Play Final Fantasy XI
« Reply #415 on: March 18, 2011, 12:42:09 PM »

When do you start in Abyssea? How fast is the low level business now? Is soloing actually possible prior to high level content?
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Pacobird

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Re: Let's Play Final Fantasy XI
« Reply #416 on: March 18, 2011, 12:53:23 PM »

Soloing is easy; it's been easy since about 2005.  It's just a question of how fast you go.

Last month, the experience for an Even Match kill was bumped from 100 to 200.  Also the time restriction on Fields of Valor regimes (repeatable kill quests for XP) was lifted, so you can kill like 8 guys for a scaling-by-level amount of XP.  I tried soloing EPs in the mid-50s (target level: 47-49 vs. my 55-56) as a NIN and was getting about 7k an hour.  A level in the mid-50s is about 11k.

It's much faster than it used to be, but I'm honestly not the best person to ask; I tried it for maybe two hours and it still felt glacial to me so I went back to what I had been doing to level low jobs: abusing a particular Abyssea mechanic that may or may not be intentional for 20k an hour.  I'm probably spoiled, but this would be like the fifth time I've taken a job through the worst stretch of solo leveling in the game (mid-50s to mid-60s) and I'm pretty over it, let me tell you.  I know finding gear on the AH can sometimes be a problem, but ultimately all you really need are weapons and if you really need something crafted, everyone hangs out in Port Jeuno now so you can go there and shout.

Low level parties happen, though not especially often, as there just aren't enough people leveling anymore to support it regularly.  If you were following this thread initially you probably remember Norondor raving about level sync and it's a pretty jazzy idea, but the reality is its probably outlived its usefulness; with XP doubled, a level sync group levels out of its chosen camp in less time than it takes to put it together.

You can zone in to Abyssea at level 30, but the mobs aren't ever below 73 or so in even the lowest-level zones.  70-75 is about when you can expect to get Abyssea XP alliance invites, though I've started seeing them on my NIN at about 63 (people know I'll quickly get to a functional level shortly after joining at that point).
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Rosencrantz

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Re: Let's Play Final Fantasy XI
« Reply #417 on: March 18, 2011, 01:20:47 PM »

Oh yeah, I wanted to ask if there's a decent way to make money to afford weapons and armor. Right before I quit, I raised my crafting skills high enough to be able to craft bullets for my COR/RNG and also sell the extras for a small profit on the AH, but it took forever to raise the cash to even get my skill level that high in the first place.
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Rosencrantz

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Re: Let's Play Final Fantasy XI
« Reply #418 on: March 18, 2011, 01:54:46 PM »

Sounds good.

...You weren't kidding about most people not using ranged classes anymore. I just checked FFXIAH.com and it looks like nobody's buying bullets anymore. They were selling like hotcakes about three years ago when I needed them (until, of course, I learned to make and sell them myself, at which point the demand dropped). And DAMN, holy waters look like a great way to profit.
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Pacobird

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Re: Let's Play Final Fantasy XI
« Reply #419 on: March 18, 2011, 02:32:30 PM »

Some abyssea nmms use doom, which can be removed via HW or cursna, but isn't 100 percent, and cursna has a cool down.  Doom is use a third of a stack of holy waters or die. 

I mostly meant vendoring but they do sell.
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