September 2023 Version Update

There's a reason the acronym is KC. It stands for Kitty Club, and it occasionally meows once. Alternately there's the moogle rod, but a million cait calls is infinitely more satisfying than a million kupos.

New Locus Imps giving 700-820/kill around chain #22 with COR roll at ML37 sync. Pull with silence.

A lot of your points are ML0 to ML50 though, not ML30 to ML50.

ML0 to 30 is about 2.5 mil EP. Just to compare, 30 to 35 is about 1.9 mil. 0-45 is the same as 45-50.

No one here said that going beyond 30 is stupid pointless grind for nothing, just the ROI from the grind pales in comparison to the first 30/35 ML.

EP grind for 3 hours so phalanx absorbs one extra point of damage: ok
EP grind for 70 hours so phalanx absorbs another extra point of damage: hold up

The whole locus idea is still a blatant kick in the shins toward the player base. The old crawler's nest cleaves were so much better than anything the locus camps can offer. I know the whole point is that they wanted to force the grind on us but ffs it's still one of the most obnoxious nerfs in recent times. Disallowing AoE cleave because "reasons" was such an awful drop in QoL.

For Run/blu specifically, you don't get auto-refresh and magic fruit until, realistically, ML50 since that's when you get enough blue points to set all the spells you need.

Sucks, but it is what it is. Again for Run also won't be able to get another tier on phalanx before ML50, at least not without a lot of HP/def loss.

They only care about the numbers. More are complacent than are leaving. A lot of bluster and few actions.

Still stand by my original points:
-There's no content you're going to win as a RUN/BLU because you have 1mp/tic more auto-refresh
-You already have capped phalanx at ML9. Anything from 10-50 makes it so that you can take off more enhancing skill gear to put on more DT, but it's not a new damage reduction from phalanx

Maybe every 5 ML you get you can change a slot in your set, but once again that only applies in situations where you don't have someone else to cast phalanx on you, you are casting phalanx in combat, and even then...you're gaining at best 1 additional point of damage taken for 30 ML. Additionally, if you're trying to get a full potency phalanx you're already wearing 4 or 5 pieces of dogshit gear, so you're going to get your teeth kicked in by anything in the game. Putting on a dring instead of a Stikini isn't going to change your life. If you're not in combat, the ML do nothing.

It's just not that big of a deal. You will clear content if you play well and have the appropriate gear/jobs. You will not clear more content by having 50 more HP, 8 gsword skill, and 8 more macc by going from ML 42-50.

idk, man... I had -50 hp a lot more than I would want to bargain with and I always responded with "Thank you Merits"

the 2023 version is "Thank you ML 50"

What if that extra 50 hp you have caused you to stay above your whms curebot threshold, and without it you would have been cured sooner and never end up in that <50 hp situation?

Well, you guys have a little more insight, do you or the other RMT around here notice any decline in demand since the recent announcements?

Wish it was that simple. Theyve added nothing new to buy in literally 5 years. And they don't ban anyone. Supply is disgustingly oversaturated.

The people who buy, are still logging in, they just have nothing TO buy.
(Uninterested in buying another REMA etc)

Nope need another slot you can buy and upgrade like dynamis +2 necks so people can buy on all 22 jobs and spend billions upgrading them all

So what is the current RMT meta besides exp/cp/ep? Complete characters with odyssey and sortie already done?

I dunno ask Galkapryme

Pretty sure Master Levels were a direct response to all the people who begged for "XI Classic". SE doesn't have the old code repos needed to make that happen, so we got an old-school style grind instead.

And hey, it's been incredibly popular. Some players love ML so much they just grind EP all day, every day. Great success! /s

Unfortunately I don't think player retention and engagement matters at all right now. Put another way, it seems like Fujito's current focus is to make sure the game continues to exist no matter how many players quit. Maybe he'll look into easing the grind in a few years once the servers have been replaced and things have settled in. Maybe not.

Dyna clears and all the gear from omen and more gear from Trove shouts. You buy all the good usable Aeonics I guess lol

They have a REMA collection to finish. They are way past what they need. Ody made sure they had at least 3 collections to finish.

RMT are doing just fine.

Was anything actually mentioned about this around may/june?

Kind of baffling to me that there weren't any EP bonus KIs out of the later VR missions.

this is the most out of touch ***i've ever read.

what does master levels possibly have to do with "XI classic"?

Some people want the old exp/merit grind, supposedly. original cp
gain were akin to merits until they got given a ton of bonuses, now that's MLs and thus far they havent been given much in the way of boosts like cp did

They stopped it because you would have one or two parties in CN making it terrible for everyone else. As bad as the RMT are, they are slow and easily outpulled by normal players.

SE needed to keep the RMT/Merc population busy, so they invented another insane grind they can sell to the lazy/limited on time players, who then buy more gil from the same RMT to master level multiple other jobs. And because Master Level rewards are few, it's not destroying game balance. If the idea of Master Levels prioritized actual players, they would have made them far more rewarding. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

They're plenty rewarding. They're just frontloaded, like basically everything else. You have to put in considerably more effort for the last bit than the first bit.

The content design of ML is fine and true to XI roots, it's just not as appealing to people in their 30s and 40s as it was to people in their teens and early 20s with much more free time.

It doesn't help that the exp camps are just rehashes of old camps, though, especially the amount of them that are just groups of a single monster. It feels a little soulless. Having new areas and a little bit of variety would've made it more interesting IMO, most exp camps from 1-75 were not exclusively targeting a single monster that happened to be in a near-endless cluster of spawns.

They seem to feel that Adoulin camps are needed for something, but they're almost all abandoned. There are a lot of fresh areas that would've been great for ML camps in Adoulin. Unused corners of the outdoor zones, maybe.

About as fine as planning to place bouncy castles and play hit the pot, no pun, at a all over 80 birthday party.

Can you tell the main pillar of his income?

I post my thoughts based on my feelings about the game or content, not my income. I am happy to objectively defend them on their merits. You attack every single post I make out of a personal vendetta. It's tiring.

You can get ML20 in a single evening. That's worth:
+20 base stats
+20 combat and magic skill caps(which you'll probably keep capped if you're actually playing as you go)
+140 hp
+40 mp
+pet stats
+subjob abilities(varies)

You do not have to pay a merc to do this, you can make a party of 6 and do it anytime. Meanwhile, even if you pull out the credit card and drop $200 on gil, you're going to have a hard time buying comparable equipment progress in that amount of time. Gear upgrades are much more incremental, and most aren't used in all sets.

Objectively, that is a highly rewarding activity, with very few things comparing. The slope gets worse as you grind more of it, but the same is true of basically everything. You get massively more gain per minute spent from farming your base odyssey sets than you do from augmenting them. You get massively more gain per minute spent +2ing your empyrean armor than +3ing it. You get massively more gain per minute making your job's first RMEA weapon than others(excepting cases where you can wear multiple at once). Buying NQ items gets you massively more gain per gil than buying HQ items. Creating equip sets to utilize fast cast, snapshot, and varied items gets you massively more gain per minute than fully optimizing a gearswap file with 200 sub-variations.

This is how FFXI works. You can rapidly improve in a whole lot of areas, and each area slows as you approach perfection. Master levels fit perfectly into that theme, players just get hung up on the idea that if they aren't going to get 50 [immediately] they may as well not bother.

I'm kinda on the fence about MLs.

On one hand, you can reach 10-20 pretty easily without a lot of effort. You can go from 20-30 just doing normal content like segfarms and Sortie regularly. Even 30-40 isn't bad if you are doing ML farms. I think prior to 30, it's pretty balanced, getting to 40 is a bit of a slog, but it isn't a terribly unreasonable one if you can do the ML farms. That's most of the benefit of the ML grind being fairly reachable.

Getting from 40-50 is just bad. I doubt there are many, if any, players who have legitimately reached ML45 or higher. The amount of time required, EP given by mobs, and drop off in EP given for non-EP grinding content just puts this silly out of reach for anyone trying to do it legitimately. I would have much rather seen ML40-50 locked behind completing content like Ody/Sortie/MT and the scale of EP required drop significantly so people can actually reach it or see higher EP rewards from higher tier content. I think it's one thing to say that it should be a challenge, it's another to put it so far out there that no one is legitimately reaching it.

The other problem becomes how you manage this with multiple jobs. Only around half the jobs are going to be welcome in most segfarms regularly enough to hit 30, same with Sortie runs, so that means for some jobs you are just stuck doing ML farms. The non-ML farm content is also gated, so you pretty much have to pick one and stick with it unless you just want to form ML parties.

I don't mind that they are adding new mobs to the game to accommodate this, choice is good, but I think the overestimated how many people actually want that 75-cap leveling experience back. Even the people who constantly wax nostalgic for that era get bored of it really quickly and I've yet to have a real ML farm last more than 2 hours before people got bored or went to bed. Most of us at this point have played this game at least 10 years and killed enough bats/crawlers/flies/bees/imps/etc to be masters of pest control, there is just more interesting and engaging content to do with the limited time most players have now.

I haven't spent more than maybe 10 hours leveling post-99 among all my jobs and I'm currently ML15 BLU and nearly finished 10k on REMA aug. 99% of my CP and exemplar has been earned just playing the game, running events, and a lot of ambuscade. I understand that ML15 isn't all that impressive, I'm just reiterating that reaching ML50, similar to maxing RP or getting those last couple niche pieces for a niche set, is meant to be a horrible grind and it's not meant for every player to do. Being ML50 should feel like having a relic in the early 2000's. But I guess because everyone has a REMA now they feel like everyone should be ML50 too.

Thorny + Iamaman posts above have been my philosophy on ML in a nutshell.

0-30 is pretty easy to get. Spend a few hours doing EP, get some during Ambu, from ody seg farms, etc.

30-40 is a "nice to have" eventually get it while casually playing the game, maybe throw in an EP farm here or there if you feel like it.

40-50 is not gonna happen. This is a "maybe I'll get it before they shut down the servers" stuff.

The effort -> reward ratio for 0-30 is great, it gets worse as it goes on and anything above 35 or 40 is absolutely not worth the effort. ML parties are boring as hell and I have also never participated in one lasting more than about 2 hours.

People remember old school exp parties because pulling a mob to camp was challenging, setting up a skillchain was challenging, holding hate on a tank (or a DD trying to keep up shadows) was challenging, it was challenging to keep chain going while dealing with restrictive MP problems. ML parties have none of this, the mobs are complete jokes, you get TP in 2 seconds, MP problems are gone, there is no tank, there is no SATA, MB are optional and largely irrelevant. The game has moved on; for better or worse, killing enemies without punishing mechanics is boring as hell. All the old challenges have been removed.

Guess I'm in the minority here, as I like the idea of ML parties. But I also come from a headspace where a ML Party would be the only space I'd get the opportunity to push my damage to it's max Glass Canon style without care or regard for my HP/MP and not safely in my Hybrid sets.