May 2016 Version Update

If I have to think about a period of time where there was a lot of variations there are a lot I guess, most of which didn't last long, but one that comes to mind has got to be the early 75 era when endgame was Ground Kings, Sky, Sea. I could add even Limbus and Dynamis because early on they were often considered endgame or "LS-content".
I guess I could extend this period of time to the early ToAU era? I remember we used pretty varied setups to kill stuff like Khimaira and Cerberus.
Melees, support, debuff, healing, tanking, occasional SC and MB, stunning and so on.

At the same time there were content you could zerg, but not everything was zergable. Content leaning more towards mage setup (some Dynamis NMs, some Limbus zones etc) and content leaning more towards melee setup.
Most of the things were kinda a "mix of all things".

Guess it couldn't be any other way, it took quite a while to level a job back then and the majority of people only had one 75 job, mostly with just a bunch of merits.

I think it's just bad design honestly... as melee became more powerful, they became very good at pretty much doing one thing: Zerging. But if you were to haul a bunch of mages and tell them free nuke w/o any coordination I can guarantee you they'll run out of MP before the NM dies and be useless.

On the other hand a mage player's saving grace is in SC+MB setup, but then that means the melee have to hold back and time their WS together and lord knows how many people are actually quite bad at doing that... Meaning the melee players in question can't just zerg to their own delight.

Not mention the support spells necessary for each setup are different on both sides and don't benefit the other. Eh, just my two cents.

You're misunderstanding me if you think I don't agree with that or if you think I'm happy/satisfied with the current situation.
I mostly agree 100% with the complaints I hear and share those sentiments wholeheartedly.

What I don't understand (and agree with) is people pretending this is something "new" and not something that, with different actors, has been going on for the longest time in FFXI.

It's not so much that it is new, so much as that it is still happening.

But rewind time a bit back to when people weren't using sc+mb setup for everything. You'd hardly be reading the same amount of complaints as now


Maybe it has to do with the facts there are more melees than mages and/or that people overall like melee jobs more than mages, making their complaints more vocal ;-)

Anyone remember the days you were fighting beetles in quicksand caves or crawlers/flies in crawlers nest with melee doing skill chains and thieves pulling and setting up the SATA combo. Then the BLM would do some AM spell for MB.

/nostalgiatrip

I see the biggest problem in Sch's ability to create SCs. I dont have a problem with MBs being powerful. While I do think hat Helix spells are slightly over powered, even that I can live with. But the moment you make MBs so powerful AND give mages the ability to create their own SCs to MB on you necessarily make melees obsolete, even if comparable dmg could be achieved employing melees (aoe dmg and buffs and stuff). It is true that for a long while now there was an unbalance. It probably started with the increase of the level cap and Aby, which started a time where melees were heavily favored dmg wise. But at least mages were given side roles like procs and (maybe put War cleave in aby aside) certain things like aoe dmg were still in the magic domain.
But the Acc requirements for melees and the comparably easy way to circumvent that with MBs and even adding dmg on top of that makes mages naturally more attractive. If melees would still be required to setup SCs life for melees would be much easier as they would somehow be needed.
One way I see how this could be fixed is by weakening the effect of L1 SCs and L2 SCs on MBs, cause I know SE is never going to do the one thing that should be done, i.e. remove the SC ability from Schs repertoire. But that way it could be more interesting to setup L3 or L4 SCs.

I believe there are a number of factors in play here.

This is one of the least diverse metas XI has ever seen. You can throw SCHs and BLMs at damn near anything. They're sufficiently effective on anything that doesn't outright give the finger to magic damage that the primary reason to do otherwise is because you want to, not because it's noticeably better (if it is in fact better at all, which is not guaranteed). Years past have certainly had their issues as well, but rarely to this degree. The onset of Death bursting further exacerbated the issue because it reduced the number of relevant buffs/debuffs, limiting effective party composition when magic damage is employed. Said buffs/debuffs also have finite benefit due to the 99999 damage cap, emphasizing more potent/efficient sources (GEO/RUN/COR/SCH).

The intention was clearly to bring back the old SC/MB party playstyle, but that fell flat for three main reasons.

1) Immanence exists, and SCH skillchains are "good enough". SE failed to properly incentivize multistep and high level skillchains with regards to magic burst multipliers.
2) Stat inflation on high level content more heavily penalizes melee.
3) Effort. Efficiently coordinating melee skillchains is more work yet still results in less consistent timing, keeping DDs alive and functional in high level content is substantially more work when it's actually possible (hello amnesia, hello aoe spam, hello knockback, etc), and more diverse setups require more/more diverse buffs to maintain functionality.

Mob HP scaling also presents a potential issue if fleshing out a hybrid party setup requires more people, be they DDs or support.

Additionally, SCH/BLM SC/MB strats are very unengaging. The modus operandi for most of the group is to stand out of range if possible and infrequently press a small number of buttons in response to another party member's actions. There is very little need for most of the alliance to actively attend to monster behavior. AoE damage and debuffs are marginalized through a combination of distance, high uptime on defensive gear (brief, infrequent active periods mean that BLM can sit in DT when needed with little or no loss of efficiency), and strong defensive abilities (particularly Mana Wall).

I can see what SE was trying to go for, as the "throw SAMs at it and zerg" thing was getting a little out of hand, but I think they overcompensated way too hard.

I won't complain too much because I play GEO and that job gets plenty of love regardless, but I still find it ironic that all of this effort goes into making Aeonics with access to ultimate skillchains, and then those skillchains are practically never used in the fights needed to obtain more Aeonics.

How about a skill chain that heals mobs HP with magic burst !

I kind of agree with what you said, altough I don't think these are the main reasons why people are being more vocal and I stand by my previous opinion that there are simply more people liking melee over mages and that melee jobs as a whole are more liked (think this is reflected by the vana diel census they used to do in the past as well)
Regardless as I said, I think your points are quite valid but then again it was never my intention to say behind the lines "current situation is fine, you people need to stop whining" because it's not what I feel at all. I think I expressed more than extensively enough what is the source of my sarcasm in the previous posts.

Regardless, concerning this point in particular:

I think this is highly subjective, strategies for current NMs (despite all using SC+MB) are still quite elaborate compared to the "zerg" stuff, as it's showed by how difficult HELM NMs are and how more often than not a mistake at the wrong time means a wipe.
While the setup is mostly the same (with some due variations) those fights have a high degree of variation and if anything they feel more similar to WoW/FFXIV fights (with all due differences, of course) than typical FFXI fights.

I don't find "particularly engaging" setup like RNGburn setups (Divine Might II comes to mind) or zerging pretty much everything.
If anything I found those even more boring.

But, as it comes with all things, what really makes one or the other REALLY boring, is the overuse.
Any "fun" strategy becomes utterly boring when it's the only thing you do to get monsters down.


No, I disagree with this, sorry.
Not saying it's the other way around either, but "very little need" is quite ungrateful when I think about all those fights that require a lot of attention on dispelling asap, debuffing, getting out of range, breakga-ing in less than 8 seconds window, stunning specific moves and being on stun duty, having to handle crucial debuffs here and there, while also doing all the normal stuff you do (which by itself is already more elaborate than buffing for 3 minutes and then zerging in 50 seconds)

So no, sorry but I disagree. There is certainly quite a degree of what you said, but "very little need" is an exageration imho.

I'm actually a little impressed by the amount of variety in the mechanics for the T4 Reisenjima HELMs, so I agree with Sechs to some extent. The ideas my linkshells and others have come up with to successfully take them down have been quite innovative, but it still does not sit well with me that melee jobs are more or less locked out of participation for most of the high-tier fights.

BLM SCH

SAM WAR DRK DRG THF DNC PUP MNK RNG

Might have something to do with nine jobs being 'obsoleted' in favor of two.

Most of the alliance does not have to actively attend to the majority of what you just described. Dedicated stuns and CC are a thing. If you have two SCH for instance, the second can cover stuns while the first is on SC duty then vice versa. The BLMs don't (or shouldn't) have to worry about it. Relevant timeframes for Breakga are constrained and you don't need the whole alliance doing it, etc. Even in fights where the BLMs should pay attention (low HP Onychophora for instance), optimized strategies keep the need to do so to a minimum (controlling TP to reduce the risk of absorption - just have to watch out for spells, and that's during a time where they'd want to pay attention anyway).

The entire alliance is not dancing in and out of range constantly, the mages are standing at 20+ and moving further or repositioning when necessary in the small handfull of fights where you have to move at all (Teles, maybe Vinipata and Albumen depending on how wipes play out). For the most part they can stay in one place if you've set up initial positions correctly.

I'm willing to frame it as an objective statement. Comparing it to similarly unengaging strategies employed in the past does not make it any more or less engaging, it simply means that XI has often rewarded such strategies due to a long history of exploitable mechanics (PD/Embrava zergs are another, Wall of Justice, pinning, Voidwatch zerging with fanatic's/fool's and constant procs, Modus Veritas stacking very nearly fell into this category, etc).

I tank almost every single fight in the game on PUP. Lots of other groups also use PUP to tank Reisenjima T4s. It's also the only job other than SCH that can reliably make skillchains on level 145 content.

Not sure I'm getting your point.
How are things different in Zerg setups or RNG setups? If anything they're worse? You hardly have to think about buffs or anything, it's mostly a race against killing the mob before it kills you and 90% of buffing stuff is handled before you engage.

If most of the alliance isn't being active in the fight, then what is most of the alliance doing in your opinion?
Because I see in pretty much all fights everyone has to be very active.
The most boring fight is arguably Erynis and even there I hardly see people idle doing nothing (the WHM maybe :P)

I wasn't trying to say "everybody has to do everything", but there are several things to do and different people have different roles and different things to focus on on different fights.
It's not like you just engage and have a script doing SCs whenever Stratagems are up and another script doing MBs and everybody else afks.

Not sure if it's a matter of my group doing those fights with bigger than average normal but I can hardly see that aspect alone changing things this much.


I think it totally does, so agree to disagree? ;)
Sorry but I totally do not see something like HELM fights, their gimmicks and their difficulty the same level of "unengaging" of one of many (you name it) fights where you prebuff, engage and go all out hoping it does before you do.
I could say the same for the (few) fights where RNG strategies were abused, they were very boring or, as you said, unengaging.

I think because of the overuse of a setup (which, as I said in the premise, would kill even the most fun of things, at least for me) you're oversimplifying fights that are totally not easy to pull out and require a lot of effort, coordination and very good gear/players.
Totally not in the same league as 90% of the other stuff I mentioned.

Can you expand on the skillchains? Mine is more known for *** up skillchains than making them.

Then stop doing this:
I'm not defending those things at all. They're not even relevant to my point save as historical examples of other strategies that draw similar criticism. You're trying to attach a sliding scale to a discussion that neither needs nor wants for it. Stop.

That's not what I said at all, and spare me the hyperbole. Yes, members of the alliance have to pay attention. Some of them have to pay attention constantly. Many, realistically, do not.

Our most recent round of aeonic clears involved a full alliance on every Reisen T4, WoC, and Kirin. We're actually redoing a number of fights this week for people that missed clears or had to sit out due to having too many people.

*palms begin sweating profusely*

Do not forget the BLM macros telling people which WS to use and when to do so. Good times...


For one example, the forums were always buzzing when the 1-handed and 2-handed updates came to be.

*scripts begin sweating profusely*

*brb writing auto SC MB scripts and sell them to endgame LSs.*

already kind of a thing

Can you make some practical examples of what you mean? I'm still missing the point.

Let's wind back a second.
People were complaining as usual, kinda rightfully in a way, about part of the game's jobs being completely unusable in all of the current end game's fights.
I said I agreed with that, that the current situation is bad and that should be changed, but that I found it ironic how most people complained about it like it was something "new", whereas from my point of view it was the same exact situation as there's been for pretty much the majority of the game's life, just with different actors (currently the actors are mage jobs).
Me and someone else said this likely because people tend to be more vocal about melee jobs (which are more, and statistically more often levelled than mage ones)
You arrived and said that no, the current game fights are very unengaging because the strategies mostly involve jobs having to stand at range and in the majority of fights once stuff is positioned you hardly have to move.

And... can you please explain then what do you consider "engaging" in your opinion? What sort of fights? Because this sort of sentence is based on the premise that if the current fights are unengaging, then some others fights (presumably melee-based ones since that's what you were arguing against) were very engaging?

Maybe this has been answered but how to acquire Kupon A-ASYW or other kupons?

Thank you

Get the kupons from completing the new RoE quests, Tutorial > Intermediate

So has anyone else been getting food from the abj keys?

You get hobgoblin or goblin food instead of an abjuration if you already have the abjuration in your inventory.

I remember when MNK was the flavor of the month back during early Delve era like if you didn't have "OATS" you weren't getting invited, and how RNG was the flavor of the month just last year which if you didn't have their relic you weren't getting invited, now its blu and geo. *waits for DNC and DRK to be the flavor of the month but knows it will probably never be...*

I'd be mostly fine if it was just a flavor of the month deal. I mean, I've put up with that ***since DW Warrior was king.

It was a matter of "Well, I'd prefer x, but y is completely doable."

Now it's "I literally have to have x because y is completely un-viable."