September 2023 Version Update

Sure Brahmsz, that's all well and good...for like 30 minutes. After that, hitting the same 1-3 macros over and over for 5 hours straight is incredibly boring.

Maybe it doesn't help that I'm not typically the biggest fan of DPS jobs but like...what's the fun part? Maybe it's fun to watch a parsing program and look at the numbers go up or down? IDK, I have a really hard time getting excited about the task, it's incredibly rote and repetitive, there's no challenge at all, nothing changes, no decisions have to be made, it's just repeatedly pressing the same button over and over and watching the animations play.

Yeah, but this reality of the game meets the reality of the FFXI community that loves to demand this perfection, aka "veteran REMA only" mentality, even when some ambu weapons come pretty close or surpass them. Imho it's only a matter of time till people expect ML30-50 or bust and the pressure rises significantly faster with every character that dings ML50 in one of those bot parties.

I actually do agree with this. Finding out how silly you can get only gets you rewarded with faster CP. It's also rewarding to have jobs well geared enough that can carry most of the party's damage so that you can leech jobs that are less attractive to EP on.

I put together some Nitric Baselards for the jobs that don't have native defense down on them. You can get some solid mileage out of 18.75% defense down and it's pretty fun to see how the proc rates are very different on different mob types.

Getting a healthy buffer on a ML50 job is the same as taking a fresh sync target to ML15.

Shouldn't really matter if it 'looks disingenuous' or not, an intelligent discourse requires that you argue on the basis of what was said not how it made you feel.

You're thinking of Eiryl, who mentions it every other post. If you go through my history, I don't think I've mentioned it even once in the last year. I base my opinions on my perception of the game, and I am actually up to date on current endgame with characters that have no relation to my other activities. I've created and shared strategies for fights that others hadn't cleared yet. I write and maintain plugins and addons for Ashita(as well as things that have helped gamewide like the large address aware patcher, and occasionally helping windower team with questions or projects) that provide no monetary benefit to myself. I offer insight into game mechanics, and have been behind significant amounts of testing in the game's early days. However you feel about my other 'activities', I have quite a lot of knowledge about the game and they are not the defining factor in my opinions.

I'm not upset by friction. It's one thing to disagree on the merits of what I'm saying, it's another to always insert some stale jab of the same variety every time you see a post of mine that you don't like.

Listen I don't care if thorny is selling accounts till the son comes up, he has an opinion just like any of us.

I have 6 ML50 jobs, 1 48, and 3 40s - the grind is terrible - so terrible I don't even remember it

Making the Leveling process enjoyable shouldn't be an issue in a video game.

What other weird video games are you playing to make you craft a sentence that poorly? Is this a common phrase in a bootleg Ace Attorney?

What do you mean?
Honest question, not trying to provoke, I just want to understand better what you meant there.

Eh, I disagree that this grind is true to FFXI's roots. Yes, the amount of time required is similar, but the fact is, back in the day, you got to level 60 and began getting artifacts. You went on quests and explored the world in search of story and notorious monsters so you could look more like the job you love to play.

When you got to 75, you got merits, which could then enhance things further, on top of doing stuff like dynamis to get more job specific equipment, and other content that you had previously been locked out of. The grind was extremely rewarding. However, master levels give you some extra stats, a few new abilities from subjobs, but you don't get anything "new".

Now, if they added brand new abilities, a fourth line of reforged, on top of brand new quests for each job you master leveled? Now that's rewarding. To me, getting a few extra stats and access to more subjob abilities is barely rewarding. Only just enough for it be worth doing, although nobody is screaming at the top of their lungs... "OH MY GOD I JUST UNLOCKED MAGIC FRUIT GUYS, WOW!"

In that sense, master levels only real goal is to give players some kind of grind for minimal gains because the game needed something to keep those who love to mindlessly grind happy. And that's all there is to it. It's not even close to the original FFXI grind, which in itself was a lot of work, but also one hell of an adventure.

My interpretation is that leveling is a core part of playing the game, and a game is meant to be fun, so if you aren't enjoying leveling then there is a serious design flaw or the game isn't for you.

Totally agree with this, but I think it's more of a statement on the slow progress of the game in general than master levels specifically. When you stack up master levels against other recent goals, they are fine as rewards. When compared to past jumps and grinds, not so much. I wish things weren't that way, though.

The flaw to me has always been the gap between the addictive desire to complete things that almost all RPG/MMO players have to some extent, in direct challenge with their need for existing content.

You have batches of folk out there dumping either real life enjoyment or real money towards a goal that is empty. Prior leveling gains either allowed new gear, new abilities, or massive gains that were needed for existing content.

Yes, the progress is front-loaded, like all prior leveling experiences in FFXI. But all those front-loaded prior experiences compensated the slower gains at the end with either faster EXP/hour or RP/run potential:

-those who remember celebrating chain #5s at lv50, then were seeing chain #20s on either Bones parties or Deco parties at 75.
-Job Point Gifts became more spread out and required more JPs to upgrade categories as you progressed...but you also were getting gifts that increased your JP/kill value.

-RP levels increase as you rise, but the RP earned per run in Dyna-D should increase as you theoretically get stronger with more RP on necks/weapons...and higher RP needs in Odyssey are compensated with higher RP values given for kills and attempts at higher vengeance levels as you unlock them.

Master Levels are the exact opposite of these systems regarding the earning. Sure, they match in how the rewards are seen, but could not be more different in how they're earned.

In my case, I only grind EP during the Gain EXP hours. My main objective is the weekly gil, and ML is just a bonus to me.

Currently I am ML32 RDM. I understand that it takes 9 times more total EP to get from ML32 to ML50, but I can live with that. As others have said, getting 2% more TA is something nice to have, but not required in any sense. The fact that my character can still slowly but gradually grow is also not really a bad thing to me.

I understand that for most players, the frustration will multiply if they need MLs for multiple jobs. But I think if the goal is generally set at around ML35 instead of ML50, the grind is actually not that bad.

Not so similar to be fair, if you ask me.
First 30 levels, probably.
30-40? Arguably so.
40-50? Definitely much slower even than the golden era levelling speed.

Plus there's one incredibly important aspect. What was perfectly acceptable in the videogame world in 2003 doesn't necessarily mean it can be acceptable nowadays.
Maybe so, but don't take it for granted just because something was "normal" over 20 years ago.

Making something that is somewhat reminiscent of those days? Fantastic.
Making something that's even worse? Uh-uh, doubt it's gonna meet the majority of the players' consensus. And when that happens can we say we're surprised about it? Imho no.



Either way, I respectfully disagree Thorny's opinion. I understand it, he made his point clear and that's it.
I found the attempt to invalidate his opinion because of what he does in game to be very rude, sorry about that.
Wether you agree or not, Thorny is perfectly entitled his opinion just like everybody else on these boards. Especially when such opinion is well explained and polite.

Took me over a year to get my first 75, but I was on DRK, and wasn't trying hard every day. I reckon it would be similar to reach 50 on one job if you casually get in a party once a week or so. I mean, the comment wasn't meant to be taken 100% literally. Obviously, master levels take more work, but we have a lot more to work with now, than we did back in 2005. And there's less to do, in general, unless you're hardcore doing Ody/Sortie/Dynamis-D at every opportunity.

i think they changed ambu to no longer receive or lose EP on death.

To what Celebrindal said:
XP, merits, CP, even if the requirements go up, your pace per hour also goes up as you get stronger. Merits could also be done on your strongest job and dumped to your weakest.

With EP, as you get stronger, the requirements go up exponentially, but the pace per hour will go down at a certain point. Eventually your level is going to surpass the targets available and there is no workaround to maintain peak ep/hr other than finding a someone with a low ML job or forcing one of your friends to sync *** a job they dont care to level.


Im surprised they havent added a Mastery Ring, like Capacity Ring. Tie it to Sparks, and less gil gets funnelled into the economy every week. Guarantee people will save their sparks for that.

This one:

The 40+ ML grind and especially the last five levels are straight up ridiculous, but I don't think that needs to be changed. They're optional, and aside from (maybe)this brand new master trial you don't need ML40+ to do any content in the game.

That said, it would be 100% better if all lockout-based group content gave EP rewards the way Sheol does.

There's also the annoyance that something called "Master Levels" is achieved by the most basic spamming still around in the game.

Always felt that content should reward more exemplars/hour than going out to some basic *** camp and kill mobs that pose zero risk outside of bad play or afk botting.

I mean it was one thing when earning "Job Points" felt like work, but getting these certainly doesn't feel Masterful ;)

There should be much higher/better exemplar in events.

Unfortunately they opted for "something to do when there is no event" Because everything is a daily.

SE giving EP in lockout endgame events


I know its tied to mob level, but theres no reason they cant override and give fixed amounts. Skirmish gives fixed amounts, so the system and code base already exists.

The leveling process should be enjoyable. The fact I need 5 other people to make it bearable is one thing, the other thing is the game penalizes you hard after 40 to the point you need to sync. After 1 hour of Exping your mind is already turned into mush.

Soloing, While awesome for learning how to actually use abilities and to test things gets super boring quickly once that learning becomes purely grindy. (See above about brain turning into mush except you don't have friends to laugh and enjoy the time with.)

Double Mastery wouldn't really fix the problem, but it would help, along with increasing Mastery gains in Dynamis D, Sortie, Ambu, Omen, and other instance events.

Create other instance events? Hmm, I don't SE has the manpower to create new instance content or reuse older content like IDK maybe turning the Ark Angels fight into a Mastery Points event instead of cosmetics.

but hey we got Locus Imps, SE is clearly focused on the issue.

Took me over one year as well!
But it's hard to make a 1:1 comparison to those days.
Standards were different. You were expected to spend even like, what, 16 hours online a day if you wanted. Many games did that back then.
Running speed was like half of what it is now.
There were no warps other than the teleports and the campaign ops.
There were no Yells.
Sometimes it took even 40 mins to get to camp (only to have someone leave 10 mins later lulz, good times)
Some jobs were extremely undesirable in some level ranges.

And most of all, we were newbies and fresh and we were fooling around and wasting time doing a lot of diverse stuff.

The biggest complaint I have against ML is that it's clearly them doing the least amount of work to keep players and RMTs engaged.

They didn't add anything new. They just moved the goal post for sub jobs and threw stats at you. Part of me knows I'm spoiled after coming of 2+ years of job adjustments. But we didn't have to earn those, they just kinda happened. So on one hand, they will plop power adjustments in your lap and on the other, the incremental increase towards ML 50 just seem poorly designed for an audience you're supposed to be engaging.

Ok I see what you mean now.
The process of levelling is somewhat enjoyable if you ask me, I already said what I think the problems are:

1) The Penality is too punishing and, unlike the old days, you can't move to a "higher level camp" once you're out of the sweet window. I'm cool if they wanted to put the penalty in, but they should've set the threshold more lax.

2) There are not enough camps, most are packed full and it's annoying to find a good spot with enough stuff to pull without being stressed out (it seems they acknowledge this issue and are, slowly, doing something about it)

3) The effort:reward ratio gets bad very fast. Certainly past ML40 but honestly I could say past ML30. As much as it can be enjoyable at start, imagine doing it for so long, on multiple jobs. It simply stops being enjoyable no matter what.

4) There is no cap on the penalty for dying, and at higher ML it's insane how much you can lose with a single death.

5) The scaling of EP required to next level is too steep, should've been a gentler curve. This is furtherly made worse by the penalty, alas


These problems synergyze together and create the current situation, where almost nobody wants to bother with it and 90% of the people just resort to botting or RMTs.
And, again, I'm not entirely against that. If people wanna do that, whatever, I don't care. I just wish there were more realistic options for those who do not.


Oh yeah and there's that thing you mentioned, about current events giving such poor EP. (Sheol C is the best in that regard)
I feel like this is a byproduct of some of the other issues I mentioned, but yeah it's kinda a shame.

Like was pointed out earlier, the grind to 75 involved getting new things, new spells, new abilities, and some jobs reached pivotal points where they completely changed the way the job was played. You also had to be more careful, getting to some areas (Mount Zhayolm crawlers ugh) was dangerous, and the fights were more prolonged/interesting. Now it's just "smash key watch boom" more or less. I have no desire to return to 75-cap nonsense but leveling then was more engaging than it is now. It also had more meaningful changes along the way, sortof sub-goals on the way to 75, that made it more fulfilling.

There is enough endgame content they could give EP to that would encourage participation, actually learning the job, and make it more fun. Give decent EP for Omen bosses, v20+ Gaol bosses, bonuses at the end of segfarms, bonuses during Sortie, etc and it'd feel more enjoyable and obtainable.

It's busy work. Here shut up and get distracted by this so you forget you don't get ***else for a year.

^^ this. Hell, tie it to goals in whatever the content is. Objectives in Omen, Statues/Circles in Divergence, chests and boss kills in Sortie.

Giving players a tiny bump towards their next ML whenever they do content on that job is way better than a straight grind.

I have seen shouts on Asura asking for ML30 for content (both Ody V25 and Sortie) which I don't consider unreasonable. If anything it just filters people to using jobs they actually play and care about and not just have or used to play and have some outdated gear for. Asking for Mlevel 35/40/45/50 would be bs.