The Odyssey - || Strategy And Discussion ||

There's a huge difference between 1 KI V25 T3 and multi-KI T3 though...

For even a 2 KI fight you need to find people with very specific jobs, 6 times over, that align perfectly so that everyone can do 2 roles including ones which need to 2h on each KI, etc.

It would have been much fairer if they made Mboze, Arebati, and Ongo weaker so they could be 1 KId as easily as Ngai, Xevioso, and Kalunga. It would still allow 2+3 KI runs for those who needed them (as some people do for the ones easier to 1-KI kill).

Depends on the boss, Kalunga / Xevioso / Ngai are 100% skill based fights, even double attack down auras won't end the fight, though it'll make the final 40% push really tight. Ongo, Arribati and Mboze have RNG aspects in that if you get a bad auras life gets really hard. Ongo with MACC down 2nd aura, Arribati with attack down second aura and Mboze with attack down sub 40% are all likely to be losses without a 2nd set of SPs.

Bumba is 100% RNG once the strategy is mastered, which honestly is by far the easiest one of them all. If you don't get a 2nd set of SPs, you lose, end of story, just warp out, reset and retry.

Bull ***. It's easy to say the content isn't too hard once you've already cleared it. Even with the best equipment V20 and especially 25 fights are too much for most players to handle. That's why so few players actually have the highest tier clears. It doesn't help that once people get the clears there's very little reason to go back to redo the fights. I've gone back to help a few friends clear V25's, but only close friends, and only because they already had a solid core of capable people ready to tackle the fights. Trying to drag people who aren't intimately familiar with the fights and geared to the teeth through V25 is an effort in futility.

It took me a month and a half to get my first Arebati V25 clear, and the group nearly broke along the way from frustration. It took almost three months to clear V25 bumba because his randomness is ridiculous. The random aura just F-ing over some fights and instantly losing you the attempt because you got a crappy aura (Magic attack down on Ongo anyone? Magic evasion down on Arebati?), the insane DPS checks on lion and tree, the instant KO's from the shark and bee, the Lahar spam on the shark... it's not only the highest tier content in the game but it's absurdly frustrating to lose to over and over. All it takes is one kill to get the clear, and once you've got the clear it feels trivial, but all the fights leading up to that are not particularly fun.

Odyssey is not easy. Even experienced groups can take a handful of attempts to kill a V25 they've done before. Killing them for the first time is a chore. Compare it to sortie where a good group can just casually talk about football and sports and news over discord while casually knocking out 9 boss with a HQ aminon if they need mesos and there's really no comparison. V25 Oddy is stupid. Even if it is beatable, saying it's easy is not doing it justice.

They may or may not be difficult for the masses but that's irrelevant.

The train stops before the battles are even attempted. They are more annoying to get to/into than they are to do. That's a problem.

More people are halted by entry, than failure.

Dodik isnt necessarily wrong though, atleast from the part two people cherty picked to quote. Once you clear it, you dont need to clear it again. You can cheese with Amps and get significantly more RP per entry than you would for actually winning the fight. This removes the incentive to actually win the fight as you are not punished for losing.

Sorry to cherrypick a bit, but IMO this:

Combined with this:

Is the real problem. I think most players who got the v15, v20 clears on their own, understand the mechanics/jobs, and are doing ok in Sortie regularly can pull together a group that will do these fights and eventually win after making some tweaks and improvements here and there over the course of weeks or months trying the fights. If you aren't an *** and an idiot, you can generally figure it out and get better even if you aren't there immediately.

The problem is keeping 6 good players engaged long enough to not burn out or have life get in the way and the group split up while you all figure the fight (and each other) out. I'd say at least half the statics I know of that started trying to clear v25 broke after a month or two, but that number is probably a lot higher. When you consider just general life circumstances going on for people our age combined with having to keep six people together for several months, all navigating these things, combined with the burnout rate - it's really hard to keep a group together.

It's not just XI either. I used to have a night riding group we did a regular mtb night ride every week for about six months. The group slowly fizzled out due to various reasons, with many people quitting riding entirely, all due to various changes in life, jobs, children, etc. I could list out a number of other activities - it's all the same, that's just life for people our age. Keeping a group of people in their late 30s and 40s together to do anything consistently regularly, much less a few hours in the evenings on a regular basis, is really hard. When you combine it with doing something that is as frustrating as v25 is, that just compounds it even more because it's exhausting and easy to burn out

I'm not saying the content isn't difficult, it absolutely is, but the real challenge in my observation is keeping a group together long enough to do it.

Would you say the challenge is practice as a group or Rng luck?

Both.

The RNG doesn't matter if your group can't function cohesively, isn't geared, or doesn't understand their job and some game mechanics. Sometimes one person needs to tweak their gear for one reason or another, you lose that fight, they fix it, then try again. Then you find another hole that needs fixed, so on. That process eventually gets you to a point where your group is doing everything right. The extent to which this is required, and what is required, differs from fight to fight.

That's when the RNG comes in and I don't think aura is the only random factor. Using Kalunga as an example, I've had runs where he just spammed Lahar over and over for the last 40% push and others where he rarely used it. Same with most of the annoying TP moves for the T3s (and even some T2s real early on like Gigalorum). Maybe you figure out how to adapt to this, then it doesn't happen again and some other circumstance happens you have to prepare for (e.g. the adds full dispel the entire backline). Ngai same thing, sometimes he spams Tidal Guillotine over and over until someone dies, other times Puncture and hate resets all over the map, and others he uses less consequential moves. Eventually you all get to a point you can gel and work through these things, but when you lose a party member for whatever reason (burnout, etc), you start the process over again or filling the role becomes too difficult and the group splits. It's less of an issue of not being able to figure these things out as a group, more that you have a lot to figure out as a group and keeping that together between burnout and life is really difficult.

The flip side of this is I'm not sure that allowing "free" practice runs in would really change much. It'd be real *** annoying to win one of these "free" runs and not register clear because you rolled the right auras, resets, TP moves, and everyone did everything right, but it didn't count, then to try again with consequence for the win and lose. That and getting segments these days isn't really that hard, the segment cost mainly punishes new players, anyone with a half geared job can get 10k runs easily and fill up on segments fairly fast. It's not this tedious, super aggro meta like it was years ago. For people doing these fights, I don't know that the segment penalty is really holding them back, but maybe I'm wrong on that, just an observation

Eh...I just checked my win for Mboze and we had Attack aura for the sub-40%, a 3 WC, and finished with ~2:30 left on the clock. Ongo with single KI you're probably ***, but on 3 KI I think there's lots of room for bad luck/auras. I believe (would have to check with a friend) that one of our first couple Ongo wins was with macc or matk, IDR which.

Luck can help you win and it can make it more challenging for you to win, but it is not the deciding factor 99% of the time, IMO.

This is all excluding Bumba, which is, with the current strategy, dependent on luck to win.

Luck is what people who aren't very good or whose strategies aren't very good use as an excuse for why they're losing.

A bad group will never beat a V25 T3 solely on "good luck" alone. Conversely, a very good group can still win despite "bad luck". OK, that was slightly cheesy, but it's super true with these fights at V25.

I really hate to resort to the ol' "back in my day", but the real reason why most groups fail at V25s? They read a guide posted on the forums and then try to copy/paste it, but have absolutely zero clue how these fights operate. Skipping straight to V25 and not understanding what the hell a Summoner is supposed to do, what a Gokotai is, or why you shouldn't blow ALL of your JAs and then wonder why you can never get Rayke back as RUN (and so many other examples I could ramble off) is the most guaranteed way to lose hope in clearing these fights. They don't understand how fragile these strategies are to execute, and if you aren't buttoned up as a player, it's going to be a whole lot of finger pointing going around about why yall lost.

Do you know how many WHMs are STILL curing in Kaykaus +1 set while a Cracklaw is eating them for breakfast? "I can't heal because im being attacked" HAVE YOU TRIED USING AQUAVEIL WITH GEAR? Wait, do you have a PDT cure set? Make one dude...

I can't tell you how many times I have asked a BRD or WHM "did you Elegy/Slow the add?" --"no, why would I?" -- BECAUSE IT SLOWS IT DOWN FROM BEATING YOUR *** TO DEATH SO WE CAN GET CURED???

Do you have any idea what a WS wall is, and why you shouldn't have 2-3 of the same WS firing off at the same time?

You don't know what Tomahawk does?

Why don't your gear sets have max DT across them?

I could go on

You absolutely cannot "throw together" a couple of jobs and macros on the fly and think it's going to go well. Players need to stop being lazy and fine-tune EVERY aspect of their jobs so they can give their groups the best chance of winning at higher veng. These fights at V25 are so fragile, any misstep will cause a fail. They made it so you HAVE to play multiple jobs, so take some pride in it and get it together before wasting everyone's time. You need to plan out WELL before jumping into a 1KI Ongo EVERY aspect of your strategy, talk through gear, meds, buffs, positioning, timing on JAs, boss abilities etc. What you will do if someone dies. A Second SC for Ongo if strats are down etc. If you can't beat V25, drop the difficulty down and learn the fights on V20 or V15.

The whole "bad luck" thing is a major cop out for the T3 V25s. (For Bumba, it's probably justified to say, because that fight is classic BS using the current strategy we know.)


done the /oldmanrant

But in the pug shout it only said Bard for songs, debuffing wasn't in the contract

They break because the V25 fights are about as fun as getting kicked in the nuts with steel toed boots. And while there are people out there who genuinely enjoy that, willing to pay a professional for it even, the majority of the population would avoid it if at all possible.

And that is the thing, the carrot for those fights is the ability to upgrade gear and that upgrade is enough to justify letting SE kick you in the nuts with steel toed boots. Of course once you get that upgrade, why on earth would you continue to allow them to kick you the nuts? You wouldn't, and thus you move on the next nut kicking fight until you've collected all the carrots and chose to avoid getting kicked in the nuts anymore.

What's your % of clear rate for the T3 V25s?

I realize this is a broad, and possibly silly, question and I agree with most of the items you identify. I've had those problems repeatedly with groups, but they are pretty egregious and blatant issues. The problem is there are still plenty of failure cases that occur due to just bad luck. That was a thing at v20 (pre-v25 anyway) even and is even more of a thing at v25.

Is it a cop out for a group who can't pull their ***together, identify what is going wrong, and clear after trying some of them over and over again? I'd probably agree with that against most of them, but I'd also argue that they are random enough that most people will experience a lot of failures before they get one success, at which point they will probably only revisit the fight for clearing purposes a handful of times. At v20, a good strategy could you get a win unless you were unlucky, but it seems to me v25 is reversed and more luck is required than not to win. That doesn't mean they can't be won, of course, but that luck is still a major element.

When these fights first came out (after the WS wall was fixed), people were consistently complaining about how you had to keep trying until you got lucky, now it feels like that's being a bit revised by people who have gotten the clears. I generally agree with you with egregious errors like those you mention, but think it's worth considering how many failures to successes there are on some of these with experienced players, especially the harder ones, before ruling every failure to win due to RNG elements a cop out. It's not difficult to have a multitude of runs fail due to bad luck of one kind or another.

I've beaten every fight multiple times, some on accident (not joking here). The skill aspect is almost entirely about preparation, having a plan and keeping cool under pressure. The luck aspect applies to four fights and no amount of skill will save you from SE deciding you fail. Nothing breaks groups more then having flawless execution and SE just saying "No you lose".

No amount of skill is going to overcome a COR rolling a 2 on Bumba, or having a bad aura in the second phase on the later fights.

Probably as bad as yours or anyone elses. Still remember doing 15 Arebati V25 runs in one night 2 KI method. Slept on it as a group, came back next day with the strat ironed out, and cleared it within 2 fights. Came back a week later with same team but swapping one person out and got the V25 2KI clear in 2 kills again.

I am not saying luck is not a factor in the ability to win any of these fights; Luck may, in fact, help you, and may, in fact, screw you. But having a well ironed-out strategy, a lot of practice and prep work and understanding how the fight is supposed to flow, and everyone pulling their weight is going to be what gets you the clear, not "good luck". Sure you can roll a super lucky WC 3 times in a row, but if you didn't have a good strategy to begin with, you wouldn't even have much of a chance to win. Like I said as well, having "bad luck" doesn't spell out certain doom for the group. It can happen, I get it and I have experienced the worst of it (to date, I am the only person on record to d/c at 1% V20 Arebati as the RNG, causing the whole group to hate me). But you're not incapable of winning these fights because you can't get lucky (bumba aside). The cop out comes when people claim they fight isn't winnable without luck, which is absolutely not true. Bumba V25 aside, again

I feel like we should have some kind of Odyssey group therapy thread for us all to list out our mega shitty luck with some of the fights over the years. That one would definitely be high up on the list though, damn.

Also remember taking V25 Arebati to 49% on KI1 using the softening team. It was delicious and a guaranteed win for sure. Absolutely ZERO way to fk this up. I started celebrating early and feeling myself. In classic Buukki fashion I told the group "We shouldn't need Dirge since we're not DPSing a full 100% fight, we won't rip hate!" (technically RNG doesn't need Dirge nor benefit from it due to Hover Shot, which is what prompted my suggestion). So we used another Etude or Prelude. Me as RNG did NOT pull hate, but the COR did somewhere around 25%. Adds went wild, he died, I died, and everyone screamed at me for suggesting the song change. Took another few tries to finally get the clear, but that was just me being dumb rather than unlucky.

I probably qualify for some kind of compensation from how abused I am from all of these fights.

Umm .. you kinda just admitted .. with all those losses, that it's luck. I'm assuming you and your team are decently competent and capable of learning so you must of picked up the strat within a few attempts. All the rest were just SE screwing with you.

What you really want to do is have your patience and resolve that had you and your team keep trying and trying until you got lucky be acknowledged.

Why do people feel like acknowledging ridiculous luck requirements somehow takes away from the patience and determination required to keep trying until the game doesn't give you craps. Both can be true people.

So here is the Arribati V25 we beat "accidentally". We were on a RP farm night, having already long since gotten all the V25 clears and some of our alts needed RP. We had decided on sliming Bumba, then double Arribati because several people still needed points and including some mules. What we do it keep ourselves entertained is to try to see how low we can get the bosses HP because they rage and obliterate us. First Arribati round is WAR (me) DNC THF SMN RDM WHM, get it to 75%, pig spawns and starts murdering everyone not me, I ended up being last down at like 71%. 2nd round is usual PLD RUN (me) RNG COR (alt) GEO (alt) BRD. We go in and do our thing, joking about how long until someone dies and surprising we actually burn it down with no bad auras and a SP reset.

We did not go into that fight intending to win but instead just to earn as much RP as we could. We got lucky, if either aura has been atk down or we didn't get the SP reset we likely wouldn't of own with the alt COR (our A team COR logged in a secondary account).

BTW any Gandiva RNG's out there, the Empy head is a freaking god send.

https://www.bg-wiki.com/ffxi/Amini_Gapette_%2B1

54~58% enmity reduction that is multiplied with everything else lets you really let loose and blow huge holes in the lions head during double shot. T3 Empy procs with double shots and crits is just nuts.

Luck can force a loss, sure.

You readily admit the first 3 can be won regardless of luck (I don't know if I'd go that far, but still 90%+). MT claims to have cleared mboze with att down second aura and no WC, and I don't see any reason to doubt him based on my experience. That leaves your only personal claims of auto-lose as MAB- on ongo and attack- on arebati as second aura.. which again can be mitigated by a 1hr reset. So, you have what, a 20% chance of an unwinnable fight and this is supposed to make them luck-based..?

On anything besides Bumba, a group with the skill to clear the fight that happened to hit that bad luck chance will reset their one hours and win the next time. An extremely unlucky group might have to do 3 or 4 tries. This is only a few hours, for a fight that only has to be cleared once. If you have a group of people who have the skill and fight knowledge to win, and you are able to meet for 2 hours and do 3 attempts a week, you'll have everything done in a couple months. If you can meet for 2 hours a day, you'll probably be done in 10 days.

With that in mind, I don't get why you're trying to paint this as a luck based encounter. The only people for whom T3s are 'luck based' are the ones that cannot consistantly execute the strategy. If the group can do the strategy correctly, they will win in relatively few attempts. If they're losing more than 2 or 3 times in a row, luck is almost certainly not the primary contributor.

Bumba absolutely has a greater degree of luck, and takes longer per attempt. But, again, you only need to win once. If your group can execute the strategy correctly and you meet with any frequency you'll get through it and get the clear. If your group has a 50% chance someone will screw up a vital task, that multiplies with the luck check and it gets dismal pretty quickly.

The R30 T3~4 rewards are meh to be honest, not worth the pain and struggle to achieve. R25 is more than enough for any FFXI conten.

And many people decided they don't want to be masochists to SE anymore.

multiple times at <5% with time on the clock

It was clearly payback for me Capering your MNK on Henwen.

NO
Stats are stats. Just do it!

Biggest issue is people go awol after doing V25, they just don’t want to do them again as stated multiple times here, difference is minimal in stats as you won’t really differentiate yourself from a R25, folks leave the game soon after clearing it, and if you want to do them good luck as only tight group can go thru it and not PUG as stated many times. It’s too bad as odyssey is such an amazing content

I'm not sure how much of this conversation is attempting to be ironic but um...are we really advocating for all content being so easy that it's PUGable without voice comms?

Like, you really want the absolute hardest content in the entire game to be beatable with people you've never met, without speaking to them, and with completely unknown gear quality?

I, for one, do not want that to be true. I prefer content that is difficult enough that you need to have a strategy going in, make adjustments as things change or depending on random factors (RD didn't reset Rayke, etc.). It keeps things interesting and pushes you to the limits, it makes you think and tests your ability to execute. It's not braindead content you can be watching YouTube while you do it and that's (IMO) a good thing.

It does suck that there's (little) incentive to do it again. I think it would be cool if there were an incentive to get clears for others, like the Dynamis [D] free items. Some gil incentive for getting someone a clear, or double RP, or something.

I agree and I don't think anyone is advocating for this, but I also think there is a middle point between "PUGable by everyone" and "takes skilled groups a month and a half to beat one boss, nearly driving them to the breaking point".

I agree, but I think if you're taking a month and a half to beat a boss, you're not that skilled or you're making some mistake and not noticing it.

Evidence: I've failed to kill many of these bosses for months, and it was always because of some poor execution, problem with our strategy, or other issue on OUR PART. Once we resolved them, we won the fights within a week, and have won them repeatedly since then.

With my current group, we've won 5/6 T3 bosses in the last 2 months. Some of them multiple times. The 6th one we haven't attempted (yet, with this group). We do bosses roughly 2-4 days/week, and have taken many, many, many days/weeks off for RL stuff.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it really, really comes down to having the jobs, gear, plan, and then executing it properly. If you're failing a fight for 1.5 months it's because you're failing, not because you randomly got bad luck for 50 attempts in a row.

I guess there's an argument that the fights should be easier so that it doesn't take top X% skill to beat them, and that's fine I guess, but IDK, I think they're fine the way they are.

Side note: I think one of the biggest problems with a lot of groups (from reading these conversations) is that people don't have experience with a lot of the jobs. This becomes a problem when the person playing that job (say WHM or BRD) makes is making some mistake or a statement about how they can/can't do something in the fight and there's nobody in the group that can challenge them or make suggestions on how to improve their gameplay, they will continue making that mistake.

When you have 3-6 people who can discuss strategy and come up with ideas to improve upon what you're doing or find mistakes in your plan/execution, it helps a lot. When you have 1 person who's responsible for their entire role and nobody questions their actions, you can really have some problems.

Meanwhile, everyone assumes they're good players and deserve the win and are shocked why it's taking 2 months to get the clear and blame it on the aura...

For about the thousandth time, this is only Bumba, and only if you are getting 2 attempts a week.

If you need more than 3 or 4 attempts to beat any T3, there are considerable errors in your strategy or execution.

You can debate about whether it should be easier, but the idea that it is luck only goes so far as 'with good luck, a group making significant amount of mistakes can still win'. The complaint isn't about luck, if you entirely removed the luck element but aimed to keep the same winrates, a lot of groups that have won due to luck would be completely unable to ever win. Variance works in your favor, not against you, if you are in a less than perfect group.

Your group is the best, I wish you guys posted all your achivements on youtube with your insane well thought out strategies, cause all of us are eager to learn from your greatness. All Hail Maletaru.

Maletaru does post his content on youtube, I believe. He mentioned editing his strategies into the comment a page or 2 ago. He also definitely shares in-depth writeups. If you ask him any questions, he is happy to help others. Pretty sure he'd even look at it if you recorded your own failures and tell you some things you're doing wrong.

With that in mind, watching a youtube video can be helpful, but it doesn't give the depth of understanding that reading and applying concepts does. Unless the video goes very in-depth about everything happening (which would require slow-motion, pausing, and a ton of work), you're limited to what you observe as important. If you aren't already extremely skilled, you probably cannot readily tell which parts of their behavior are the most crucial and which are adaptations to that current fight.

This just goes back to the same concept. If you're claiming luck is holding you back and you've gotten a few attempts in, you're just making excuses to avoid improving. People who have the wins can repeat them with relatively good consistancy (no, not 100% winrate). If you cannot, obviously you are not performing as well.