Dev Tracker - Discussion

Last upgrade will be a +2 earring of every job to keep the Sortie endgame grind going for years

So chapter 11 is the last chapter of TVR. Should have known with their "11" fetish. Ending in May for the anniversary.

Well, they should have relaxed the entry timer in my humble opinion which would have fixed the queing system and the inability to play their game.

If only. My 90k potpourri would love that.

Phuabo mount, so cool

Which also kinda means that this supposedly new event that's gonna be tied to Prime Weapons will be released in May or soon after?

That's a bit earlier than I was expecting, it's good news.
Hope once the new content is released we're gonna see some small tweaks and adjustments to Odyssey.

Not sure what they could or should do but at this point anything is gonna be good I guess.

An adjustment to Odyssey is very needed. I don't mean for Gaol that can be stay like that. I mean segment farming (especially for solo players) and KI storage. They should leave this FFXIV habit where they gate contents behind a timer. Who still plays XI doesn't leave it because runs out of things to do, who still plays XI likes to grind over and over and over but allow us to do it atleast xD.

Take away the AoE nerf, bump the segment reward at the end of A and B to 50%. Remove the timer for entry.

Keep the challenge in Gaol as is.

A and B need higher cp/ex/seg but everything else is as it should be. AoE is always a razors edge, it has to be nerfed. Otherwise there's zero reason to do anything but pull the whole floor and aoe every time.

(more items should take wings and way less should take hides too...) B and C nm distribution is asinine.

Calling for a removal of AoE nerf in Sheol A/B tell me that you have never done those events in earnest. Being able to AoE those mobs would be absolutely busted. And a 50% increase to segments earned on top of that? The paradigm would shift and nobody would do Sheol C anymore. The sheer amount of additional mobs you could kill would net you easily 2mil gil+ per run plus Scales/Hides (though those would rapidly deflate in price to the same ~20k/stack we see Wings at). When we did A daily, we would get about 5500 segments total (although the priority was gil, not segments, so we did not pop NMs nor specifically target Halos). I'd estimate that with those changes you could see upwards of 10/11k per run of A.

I don't understand how veteran players have Segment issues unless they are using all of them to sell RP. But I'm on board with changes to Sheol to help new players/returnees. Small, incremental changes would be best instead of sweeping changes that would skew the balance the other way. Either way I don't trust SE to do the right thing so what can you do?

Oh I’ve done tons of Segment farming. MM40.

I just think after years segments are a chore. Everyone does C over and over. It’s boring as ***. Super buff and hit WS macro for 30 minutes in order to do Gaol which is pretty decent content.

I agree 100%. Gaol is grindy but challenging and interesting. Segment farming not at all. Odyssey is a content released by the usual lazy SE. AoE nerf is correct probably but things like geomancy go over my understanding.

Geo is overpowered so i nerf it totally in a content? I don't know, imho is ridicolous.

The last content i really appreciated 100% is Delve. Imho the best content released by SE in 20 years of the game. People can disagree of course.

***my Xzomit might get relegated to #2.....

I think they should do something to make A/B more worthwhile for doing different setups, maybe make one weaker to magic and stronger to physical, another weaker to ranged etc. I don't see a reason to remove segment farming or make it easier. This is the game where we used to spend weeks building popsets for a boss. I think people just really forget what we all went thru and complain like old grandmas. Odyssey could use stacking of KI, but really don't see a problem outside of that.

Delve was great content and challenging, but I think they made the same mistake then. They gave away the gear too easily and people completed it too fast. Same exact thing happened to Odyssey. You need to keep people chasing that carrot or they quit and complain a storm on their way out. They don't know what they want and need to be hand held by the devs.

I really dont want to beat that "retail sux cuz gatekeeping, it was never like this" dead horse again. All content had some form of gatekeeping up until Delve.

So July, then.

I take less issue with the repetitive nature of segment farms than I do other content because it is so short. It takes 30 minutes, you get gil from it, and you usually net enough segments to do at least 2 Gaol runs w/ an amp. It's also an interesting showcase for certain jobs. The time spent to rewards are reasonable IMO and it has chilled out considerably in the last year or so, but it is hard on newer players.

I think at best we'll see a campaign for segments at some point, of course you'll never be able to get in to actually do it, but I think that's the best we can hope for as far as buffing segment farms. The most annoying part of segfarming for me is the queue, which got a lot lighter after Sortie, but just prior to that, it was getting ridiculous.

I would like to see them tweak Gaol to be less punishing and to facilitate more participation though and I think they can do it without changing segment farms at all. Make it so people can help without losing segments (no segments, no rewards) and offer a rotating MPII every x hours so people can dip their toe in the water without fumbling with segment farms. Right now there is this sortof chicken and egg problem where you need segments for clears/RP to join segfarms, but you need to do segfarms to earn that. I've observed some players just don't bother with Odyssey because it feels too tedious to earn segments, get all the clears, and get help from people with experience in the fights, all so they can join PUG segfarms. Give them a slow drip to participate and catch up and I think it would help without being an overwhelming boon.

They aren't going to change any of this soon though, because of the congestion issues I mentioned before and because keeping people feeling obligated to log in every couple of days to keep up is what keeps people playing. If they were going to adjust it, I would have thought they would do it after seeing the JP community complain so much, so I doubt any changes are coming anytime soon.

At the very least, addressing concerns with A/B so that they're similarly rewarding to give parties more choice as to what to tackle, i think, would be ideal.

partly also to address the lack of hides/scales compared to wings without punishing people w/ less segments or "wasting" their KI for these mats as opposed to farming segments.

Atm A/B offer way too small Segments for way too much effort, with the result that nobody wants to bother with them (rightfully so).

I already made a suggestion on how to fix them.
Increase the bonus that you get at the end.
You get ~25% on Sheol C.
Make it ~50% for B and ~75% for A.

I think in the end it would still be less efficient to farm A/B compared to C of course, but the gap would be smaller, you would put lotsa Hides and Scales on the market, you would reduce the number of Wings (lowering cost of the first two, raising the cost of the latter) and you would be able to consider A/B as relaxing variations, even if less efficient but still viable, compared to C.

Everybody wins that way, right? But noooooo, SE can't be bothered to even acknowledge the fact that A/B suck completely atm lulz.

My opinion is not a complaint just a consideration.

You're right, gatekeeping was present in any era of the game but can we agree that gatekeeping einerjhar or dynamis when 18 or more people were needed is not that harsh than gatekeeping a content like odyssey where you're allowed to grind solo or in a few people?

I repeat what i said earlier, i don't think that nowadays those left playing this game leave it because they aquire gear because there's always a new job to gear up, new things to complete etc etc.

Also not changing Gaol but just segment farming rewards and KI storage doesn't mean that the grind is not there or that you can complete rank 30 in a heartbeat.

Odyssey is 3 years old this year, i think they have to make it easier for new players, solo players and casual ones. Easier to enjoy not easier to grind for the best gear.

This is true and false at the same time though.
3 years ago was the release of Sheol A if I recall, which is just a small component of Odyssey.
Gaol was added like, what, close to 1 year after that?
And Odyssey has been "completed" only like 2+ months ago?

We've already seen several adjustments to Odyssey.
More, better gear, indirectly making previous content easier.
The bonus to Segments added at the end of runs.
The Mog amplifier
And, last but not least, the amount of RP you can get from V25 stuff that, in conjunction with Mog Amplifier and/or tri-runs, can make RP farming quite efficient.

Of course there's the thing about unlocking those upgrades.
V25 T3 and Bumba are no joke. V25 T2 also require a modest amount of coordination and decent players. V25 T1 are quite meh if you ask me.

I think given how recent V25 is, it's good for things to stay like that.
I still believe they need to do something to ease up the previous Odyssey tiers in general though. V20 T3 and T4 are no joke, but I'm not sure how they could make it "more accessible".
Would they need to slightly nerf the strength of those NMs?
Or ease up the plentiful limitations?
I'm not sure how they could address it, but I think they shouldn't touch the difficulty of V25 at least for a little more time. By the end of the year though, yeah, I'd love to see some small tweaks to that as well.

Not a lack in terms of not being able to find them on the market (at least on Asura).
More a lack in terms of a stack of wings being sold for 20k, vs a stack of scales or hides being sold for 700k.
Furtherly exacerbated by the fact that there's way more items that use scales/hides compared to the number of items that use wings.

I'm not even saying each Lustreless item should cost the same, but having wings slightly more expensive and scales/hides cheaper would be better for everyone I think.

Just increasing segment rewards for A/B would fix a lot of the balancing issues around hides/scales and upgrade items.

I don't see it changing though. SE likes the slow grind daily stuff, and this fits that to a T. Omen is kinda the same though you can do 3 runs, not 2.

All the newer content, Odyssey/Sortie, defaults to 2 for an even finer grind. If you do it daily it adds up little by little but yeah.. only if you actually do it daily.

Got super burned out doing Omen daily back then. It's nice for a while, but need a break after a week or so.

The good part about Omen is that it can adapt to your needs.
Want to do daily quick runs?
You can.
Want to do 3 runs in a row twice a week because you're busy and can't login every day?
You can.

Take Segments or Sortie now, nope, you can't. Granted that the secondary KI system they developed for Sortie is quite neat. Not as good as Omen but still nice.


I think that behind all of this there is a precise choice.
For some reason, probably business reason, they want to force people to login every day, even if just for short sessions, and they want to discourage people who login like twice a week, maybe for long sessions.
They won't deny you the chance do that, but they certainly don't want to offer incentives to play that way.

I think it's this core thing that's behind many of the choices they made these past years.

The KIs also stack up even if you don't login and grab one. You can always do 3 runs twice a week even if you didn't already have a KI on you.

Odyssey you need to remember to login to grab a KI or you "lose" a run. Same with Sortie. More incentives to login, but it ends up just being an annoyance to the players.

If you look at the HP:segment gain ratio in A and B, something feels really wrong. Sheol C F1 mob has something like....60k HP? (If I remember correctly that is) and each kill gives the player 25 segments.

But killing Sheol A F1 mobs only gives the player 5 seg per kill, therefore the correct Sheol A F1 HP would be 12000(60000/5=12000). In reality it's more like 30000 HP per mob in A on Floor 1.

This creates the situation that if I WS for 30000 dmg, I need 1 WS to kill an A mob but only 2 WS to kill a C mob. But I gain 5 times more seg in C per kill.

It's very clear that C has more efficient seg gain than A.Which means there are no incentive to do A for seg because of the way it is.

If A is designed for undergeared returning player with weaker output, who generally needs seg because they are new, then Sheol A and B's seg gain efficiency needs to improve. Either by nerfing HP or increase seg gain by 100% so they are more equal. Or else new/returning player will choose to do C anyways, because it is legitimately more efficient this way.

This also solves the problem of new players always wanting to join C farm with veterans and make everybody unhappy.


Veteran's situation does not matter in this case. It's mostly about people who still struggle to get enough seg for progression, in that case they will choose C no matter how undergeared they are, only because HP:seg ratio is totally broken. Which defies the purpose of separating Sheol into 3 different zones with different stats to begin with.