The Odyssey - || Strategy And Discussion ||

This is a very subjective topic. I don't think there is a "right" answer, just personal opinions.

Personally, I would be very sad or even angry if someone could get the same hard results I struggled for, in just a few days of work.
Well at least if that were to happen shortly after I did it.
If it happens like 1 or 2 years after I did it, if there's new "hard" content that replaced the previous, and if the "few days" mentioned above are actually a few more... well then in this scenario I honestly don't really care and I see no deevaluation at all compared to what I achieved when that content was in its prime.

As I said before, it's just my personal stance on the topic.

Odyssey came out in March 2020. I 100% agree clearing V20-25 should remain locked and limited as current content, but v0-v15 (or v10) could benefit from enhanced access or incentive.

Yes in fact, I've had R25 Nyame finished on my main since late March early April. Since then my original group disbanded/fell apart, helped form a new group that was with people that either barely had V15 Bumba cleared or hadn't touched Ody almost at all that are now done with Nyame. Gotten a handful of other linkshell mates V20 clears on Bumba to be able to R25 their Nyame. Gotten my brother who plays much more casually V20 Bumba clear and a handful of V15 clears to be able to upgrade stuff. Then I've helped people with a number of V15-V20 T1-3 fights for clears. When new or returning people in my linkshells start getting their segs up I'll do V15-19 fights for unlocks depending on their job availability. Or if they just need a ringer for a certain fight on a certain job I'll help out.

I think after our initial V20 Bumba clear it hasn't taken more than 5 tries at most to get a kill and even then that entire time people are popping amps and getting some good RP. Between higher master levels and Empy +3 gear your two biggest hold ups for hitting 2:30 are the GEO and BRDs dmg output. Getting people V15 Bumba access is kind of a joke as well and while it's not as efficient to RP Nyame all the way to 25 from V15 fights it's certainly doable.

Though it's not like I'm hand holding people all the way through the entire process. I'll help people out with strats, gearing, etc... But if people are doing the grind, get stuck and need help then yeah I'm gonna help. The more people on the server that are making progress the better. Especially if say I need to fill a role in my static cause somebody took a break or is out of town or w/e I at least know more than a handful of people I can ask to sub in that I actively helped gear and know they will be competent enough to help.

Out of curiosity- how? In my book V10 clears all the way to Bumba are pretty darn straightforward by this point, just gotta find 4-6 people willing to gear up new jobs to make your group work. I've reached the point where if the players who feel "excluded" from Odyssey aren't willing to be that fill-in position for a group and level jobs that are needed, its not up to the rest of us to get them the same results as those who were willing to do that.

r15 gear is honestly reachable for damn near anyone these days with pretty basic, yet smart, sets paired with solid strat and practice. If "enhanced access" means the armies of Savage Blade WARs who's never seen a greataxe in their life now get the same rewards as the career WAR with 5 weapon types and matching sets AND geared up that BST their group needed for Mboze or something, I'm not for enhanced access.

Odyssey in the form of Segment Farming and Unity upgrades came out in March 2020, but Gaol bosses didn't come out until almost a full year later in January 2021 IIRC, due to various bugs in the content. It also didn't have the best starting point the first few months due to that god awful 10-second latency.

There's still been at least a good year and a half of Odyssey Gaol bosses, so it could use an enhancement in the future at some point, but they are still updating it next version release, so it's still relatively new content, by at least SE's standards.

As I just mentioned, Gaol's been out long enough so you shouldn't be mad if you were sporting the gear as soon as you were able to and someone else got it recently. Nonetheless, it's inevitable in this kind of game that someone can waltz right in and enjoy instant rewards that you had to grind for. I think about all the people who grinded Dynamis Windy volte, only to have that gear replaced by base level Sakpata. And let's not forget people who did hundreds or thousands of Shinryu with only pebbles to show for it, and then some random got a cloak, dagger, knife or whatever from Trove and is sporting base level 119 gear. SE really doesn't care about devaluing the accomplishments of players much, they would rather give more people access to everything. Good for a video game's longevity, bad for your hardcore players.

the access enhancement is MLs boosting base stats and skills so that the loss of SJ isn't as much of a direct hit to those compared to release. Its also how piss-easy getting empy+2 is even for a soloer, making viable -DT sets that still produce respectable damage almost hard NOT to make. Hell, you can get 30% -DT in sets these days for almost any job without trying- and capped sets have a lot higher DPS ceiling than even just 6 months ago.

Gear isn’t the issue especially with ML and Sortie. 4-6 players that don’t roll their face on the key board is.

At the end of the day it’s up to SE but coming back after a year break has made it obvious to me there needs to be more incentive for lower tier Odyssey. Paying for clears may be the best bet but it’s not ideal.

You can't really incentivize any of it without enticing more mercs. And while they absolutely want as many mercs paying as many subs as possible, they at least want to pretend like they don't.

This is actually a salient point and I hadn't considered this might be SE's thinking, especially with releasing ML50 recently. In fact, I'm even more convinced that SE won't change much about Odyssey after reading this.

With both the sliding difficulty scale and Master level progression, SE probably feels the content is designed "a la carte" to an extent; you can gain MLs and progressively build up your character's strength on your own, and then pick your difficulty level in Odyssey based on where you can comfortably clear. Then increase the difficulty and challenge yourself higher. If you fail, you continue to gain progress towards improving your gear in the process, inevitably making you stronger each time. And the two sources of content (Master Levels and Gaol) go hand-in-hand: you do Odyssey (or even Sortie) to get better gear, you can do MLs to improve your main jobs, and as you progressively do both, Odyssey Gaol will get easier over time. For most people, this still sounds like a grind, but from SE's view, they likely don't want anyone finishing this content quickly, even with Amplifiers. So they made it this way so that it would last a very long time and reward you over that same period of time while making you stronger (and some gil to boot). That kind of sounds well designed in my opinion.

I never liked the idea that "they can't fix this without helping mercs". Mercs will always be around no matter what they decide to do.

Do nothing: Mercs sell
Make it easier: Mercs continue to sell (players benefit in the process)
Make it very hard or a very very very bad drop rate: Mercs continue to sell (players are harmed in the process)

It shouldn't even be considered anymore how something will or won't impact the merc market because they will exist regardless of what SE does.

Spoiler; They're not good at their jobs. It's never that IT can't be, it's that They can't.

Hard to believe, I'm sure, but true nevertheless.

You talkin about SE, or the legions of players who refuse to gear up support jobs?

Both are accurate. Refusal to do anything off meta and refusal to balance

Honestly, coming from someone like you who was at the top of the game for a significant period, this is a strange take. If you can't even assemble 4-6 people capable of making a real attempt at the content, why do you deserve to clear the content at all? FFXI definitely leans more toward handouts these days, but it's spent more of it's time as a game that had high-end content that rewarded strong players. Getting rid of that entirely would be strange.

Side note: If you don't have 4-6 people keeping you on your server, maybe try to talk to the few people you do have about moving to Asura or Bahamut?

At the base level you're paying to fix a problem either way lol.

You could pay $8 and get the clear, or $20 per person, and still lose. Break it out like that, choice is clear. (I don't know what a v20 clear would go for now, nor a v25 but it'll start at 500m lol)

I don't disagree at all. I personally had a great LS of endgame players for years supporting me. Now its PUG life and I see the flaws in systems, some of which I was very successful at in the past.

Odyssey is great static content, the segments farming is a bit tedious but the overall design I like. Its poor PUG content at this point due to points already made. I have billions of gil to buy the content. I am avoiding that best I can.

There's always been (at least) two versions of the game.

The pick up version is drastically different. Rarely does a person get to see both. Stuck in your bubble where you can't even imagine how vastly different the experience is.

Are you still on Cerberus? I was there for my first character, maybe a decade ago? It was a ghost town then, unless you had a group. Same in a lot of other places. PUGs in general are lower quality, however, on bigger servers like Asura you have a much larger pool of players to choose from, so you do tend to pick up better players more frequently than a dead server. So while I agree PUGs in general are not great for Odyssey, it just depends where you're at.

tldr; get off a dead server, that's the most frustrating thing about playing this game.

I think a fair "catch-up" mechanic for odyssey is allow Vengeance levels 1-10 to be available from the start. Your group has to kill a boss once to unlock v15(if you kill 10) and the only piece of the grind missing is 2 extra meaningless fights if you actually work on your group comp.

Once again the only people this change would effect are new people coming into the content, and would make it better and worse for them.

1) better because if we can emulate a comp for the kill we should be able to skip 2 meaningless fights.

2) worse because we're walking into a harder version of the fight from the outset without actually having seen the content at all thus more likely to waste segments on a fail because the group is unprepared for v10 when they would have struggled but won v5. (this would probably lead to more people saying the content is unfairly scaled.)

I don't think anyone could argue this change would adversely effect odyssey because anyone who gets v1 kill gets the same R15 Aug unlock as someone who cleared v14. This does allow people to cheese their RP easier for R15 since they'd have access to v10 without any harder kills so what might happen is the population who wants easier content kills v1, unlocks augments and then just spam V10 fails to get rp but atleast they would have to kill every boss atleast once.

The content was designed pretty fairly to challenge groups. V0 is basically free kills for every boss with Moogle Mastery even solo players or low man teams could do well, V5 is a nominal power increase all the way up to V15, then v20 there's a jump, and v25 there will be another jump.


It sounds like you're a good person to know on whatever server you're on for this. Can't wait to hear about your exploits getting people r30 Nyame once you've fought through all of the rest of V25. Not sarcasm, sounds like you're doing a nice thing for people. But like ive said, I'd love to know how many people in that situation just full stop odyssey at all once they have their r25 nyame and none of the other fights preceeding it(A3 v20's)? I don't foresee many going, yeah I wanna struggle through the system when most of the other sets don't offer power spikes like nyame(save for Agwu and Sakpata).

I remember when Ody first came out T1 and T2 V5-10-15s were all 6 boxable with Mrkrabs being the hardest out of the group that took like 3 tries in total because I didn't understand why sundering snip kept killing the RUN that was getting locked into midcast gear. The climb isn't really THAT hard you're looking at 2-3 weeks of medium seg farms to get up to T3 V15s. That's not all that long. It's along the lines of the same time gate it'd take to get a single job their Dyna-D relic clears, less than it takes to get cards for AF+3, and less than it'd take to get a single Empy +3 piece. And those are just the gates for a SINGLE JOB. Ody clears are one and done for the character as a whole the rest of the time commitment goes towards RP farms.

The only problem is that it requires to do daily or every other day seg farms to get there. But that's the time gate. That's what keeps it inline with everything else. You just have to do it more often than twice/week. But C farms are only 30 minutes and Gaol fights take a max of 15 min but the early fights can easily be <5 minutes including buffing.

At this point the gear itself should also be at the lowest potential price point to actually buy as well, that's technically a built in catchup mechanic that nobody thinks or talks about. Nyame started at what 7.5M/piece? T3 was 6M/piece. They are down to what 750k and 600k respectively? Like you can start buying full sets of the gear just in the gil you'd make just doing segment farms doing the climb now.

There's so much more information on mechanics now, we have refined strategies, better gear, more power creep from MLs. Like what more do you need to be able to do these fights. Is an extra 90,000 segments and ~4 hrs fighting V5 and V10 T1-T2 bosses the real deal breaker when it takes ~65k segs to get a single piece to R25 doing RP farms on V19/V20. That's ~325k segments to aug just 5/5 Nyame to 25 at the best (Pre V25) possible rate.

I completely agree with this entire last paragraph. My question has and will always be who is ACTUALLY complaining about this content? The people who want Bumba armor and RP without the roadblocks of the A3 NM's. That's who.

A1/A2 through v20 have been completed by friends of mine(on a lower pop server) without augs on any odyssey equipment. The problem is if you want the best stuff you have to work for it. And yes, those extra fights worth of segments mean little to nothing in the grand scheme of rp'ing gear and completing this content. However at no point is this content suitable to be nerfed, every other bit of power we receive, new battlefield content, empy+2/+3, master levels, all of this is already nerfing the content's difficulty level. Will any group be able to beat Ongo/bumba because of these upgrades? No. They still have to do the work and put together the comp but they have advantages that the rest of us who played it at launch did not have.

People just complain about everything, don't even attempt the content. There are so many ways to progress, never in any point of this games history has it been this diverse in progressing your character. With everyone 6 boxing, surely you can find one or two people to team up with. The game was never really about pug life, except during voidwatch era. It doesn't need to be made easier, People forget how unforgiving this game was. We need more gap closing content like Sortie was and there should be something harder to use all that gear for.

The guy has an Asura character linked lol. Odyssey isn't just "small server PUG only" problem because of reasons discussed million times.

Personally I enjoy doing pugs because of the entertainment aspect. I have 2.4M segs so doing perfect runs isn't a priority for me. But the entertainment of pugs? Priceless.

-brd that doesn't know how to sing
-brds that only sing, no dding
-dds that are getting out of song range and then complaining
-dds that get one shotted on the first pull
-bot whms
-tanks that can't get a single aoe hate spell off because they don't understand sird sets
-seeing people tako obnoxiously
-seeing cors and brds beat heavy dds in dps
-people popping hydra lol
-take a shot whenever you spot a anchor user or jazero user
-full wiping with no rr on anyone on the first floor

These are just off the top of my head. I love pugs. I'm guilty on a few of these things such as getting one shotted on the first group of mobs lol.

Ranking up the gear with RP is the 'gap closer'.



I agree that they don't need to adjust the difficulty, but that isn't the reason why Odyssey is unpopular. People don't like it because it's skewed toward static groups and requires heavy investment. Investment that isn't really paying off in any other content that isn't just more Odyssey. It doesn't need to be as restrictive as it is.

I always find it a bit odd to judge a DD by whether they lose to a cor or not, as opposed to doing way less damage than their gear/job allow them to do.

I meant if an average geared Nyame r20 war lose to a BiS r25 war, you don't see people make fun of the average geared war because they just accept their gear is worse thus doing less damage.

Like wise if a liberator drk lose to a KC naegling DRG, people just accept "KC naegling OP", instead of laughing at the losing DD for doing less damage with their builds.

But for some reason, losing to cor(as opposed to losing to equally or worse geared DD or COR) become some kind of laughing stock with Job being the only criteria.....

I guess it's one of these weird conventional beliefs that doesn't actually make sense....

That's why the only job I would go to pug would be BLU (self sufficient with most buffs and with possibility of emergency tactic by doing cruel joking) with Reraisers :)

Oddy Gaol should be nerfed to bring in more people - Best gear in the game shouldn't come from 6 man content. No reason - Zip, Zero - Nada. It's *** stupid that this is a thing and anyone who disagrees is a doo doo head.

I remember when a BRD trying to melee in a PT was frowned upon... they were expected to be back-up healers foe the WHM, lol.