October 2022 Version Update

2 things- look at the game, they have relic +3, af +3, oddy gear, SU3/4/5, what kinds of gear do you think they plan to add to a game then keep saying they aren't further updating? mathematically, emp +3 is the last set of "end game gear" they are updating, so it's the end game of end game gear.

the Q&A talked about +3 being more difficult to obtain, they didn't specify how, and clearly we can only assume so much what they meant. the emp +2 was already on par with much of the oddy gear, and slightly better than relic and af +3, so from a stat standpoint, something with higher stats is unmatched. yes it's embellished, because people are frustrated the devs didn't do more to actually meet the player's expectations. they have spent quite some time hyping up the release of the emp +2 and +3 gear, and thus far, the +2 is easy to get, barring the earrings, which as most people can corroborate, are notoriously difficult to get a +2, let alone on your desired job. I believe many people were hoping the release of the additional sortie content might either increase the drop rates of +1 cases or possibly drop +2 cases with the chance of acquiring a +3 earring. that last part is entirely speculation based on the +2 gear having a +2 equivalent earring.

I don't think anyone here expected them to give us +3 earrings. And I'd be content if we get a guaranteed old case +1 in this new zone. We'll know soon enough, but my fingers are crossed.

I would sacrifice all the Tarutaru in Windurst to get even a single perfectly augmented +2 earring (or any at all). Even the notion of +3 earrings being implemented to add another layer of randomness on top of that is horrifying.

No need to sacrifice them. Just load up the star tree with cupcakes. With the black holes they have in their stomachs they'd probably gorge themselves to death. There's no guarantee you'll get your +2 earring of course, but it'd be funny to watch.

Only a few know that the reason the Yagudo attacked Windurst during the war was because they really, really wanted a pair of Byakko's Haidate.

Hope. That's where you went wrong. Anyone expecting Empyreans to kill every other piece of gear is delusional. It had to be competitive with others, especially AF & Relic, to ensure we still used those pieces.

Did they really not add the Vaquero Hat to a storage slip?

As much as hoping too much (hoping to begin with) was wrong at the start, in defense of those "hopers" I gotta say that

1) Some pieces (some sets too!) are indeed quite overwhelming
2) SE (or if not them, their official english translator) are partially at fault for delaying and hyping these reforged sets so much. As much as people are at fault for expecting too much, SE's vague but hyping statements are partially at fault as well, if you ask me.


They did a somewhat acceptable but confusing work in their attempt to standardize the increases, imho.

Their attempt to keep people engaged in sortie is also quite cheap and shows they learned very little through these years of different means they attempted to keep people engaged.
Unless they plan to do something about it in the future, the random augments on the random version of an earring from a random case that has a certain % to drop from various tasks is way too much relying on chances for people to be happy about it in the long run.
I could be wrong of course, that's just my theory on what will happen, time will tell what will truly happen I guess.

They are disappointing. It would have been a good way to do some minor job balancing. And that didn't really happen, nor do the stats on the armor feel unique or well thought out.

I am still hopeful getting earring gets better down line. But the idea of +3 is kinda laughable.


Before Ody came out what would you have said about gear and what was coming?
We have no idea, do I expect much from SE? No.
But it just come off like people expected +3 empy to be the only set to use/equip, and are now upset that is not the case.


Not sure how being more difficult then +2 to obtain would at all mean Unmatched in difficulty to acquire.

Which one is it? Which Q&A did they talk about this in? The most recent one we had was for the Reddit 20th Anniversary and Sortie was not mentioned there. It was stated that +2 was meant to be obtainable by solo players, and that for +3 you would want a party. Honestly, from what I am seeing, +3 is even soloable as well. It sounds to me like you are buying into hearsay from your Linkshell members and not from official sources. If you can provide a source for the argument that this gear was supposed to be difficult to acquire, please correct me with it.

It's not unreasonable at all to expect that something they supposedly spent years adjusting and balancing to at least be useful in one scenario of equip swapping. Instead they couldn't do the work of troubleshooting most players are capable of realizing what needs to be done with the stat distribution within under 30 seconds of looking at a set. it's clear that they just slapped things on wherever with almost no thought as to what the purpose of anything was. The usefulness of any piece is more dictated by what it had to offer during abyssea than any basic thought put into the gear.

This was your first mistake, actually believing it took them more than a couple of hours to drag and drop stats from spreadsheet one tab onto another spreadsheet tab and call it a day. A broken clock is right twice a day.

The got some pieces of gear right merely by chance, I don't believe for a second they "balanced and adjusted" anything besides just making sure they didn't add overlapping stats on the same pieces of gear (WSD on other AF/Relic pieces, FC on pieces that already had it, etc).

Based on the history of JSE gear I feel as if Empy+2/3 is going to be more useful then I would have guessed before knowing the stats.

Are there pieces I wish could have been a bit better or some stuff swapped around? Yes, but its overall better then I would have thought.

Just the simple fact that all Empy sets come with at least ~-30% DT means that even casuals who don't prioritize defensive sets will end up being more tanky purely by accident and won't be a liability in groups as much as if they went 5/5 ambuscade gear. I'm okay with the spread of stats on some of these pieces. Better players will prioritize the pieces that makes their sets even better and fill in the rest with other sets, and casual players get immediate benefit from 5/5 even if they never swap out.

They drew random affixes out of a hat and rolled dice to determine values. Like they do with any gear set they make. We stay true to our RPG roots...

New loging/cosmic items, "always" take a month after being added to get slipped, you should know the process by now.

Wasn't the item I thought it was, still probably next month though

so, "difficult" is in the eye of the beholder. perhaps that's where the conversation went wrong. for someone lacking relic/af/oddy gear, this would be extremely difficult.

Probably because we waited so long for it.

Bingo. Looks to me like this was clearly the main thought that went into these sets.

1) Main goal seemed to be to increase the stats to match current item level inflated power for the same purposes people used the original Abyssea piece for back at 90 cap. Throw some increasing amounts of attribute, acc/atk for melee, Macc/MAB for mages, and RDM lucks out to get both. Then bump the more special stats on each piece (multiattack, STP, Cure Potency, Zanshin, job-specific JA stats, etc). Across the board this feels largely true:
- NIN head or DNC body was a good melee piece at lv90? Toss more of the same melee stats on it (while utterly ignoring that the Dual Wield is now actually a penalty).
- NIN hands were for nukes, throw more magic stats on them (don’t bother fixing that the item text is either incorrect/misleading, or just broken if they really meant a % increase instead of a static amount of MAB)
- PUP legs were good for TP, add more of those stats while ignoring that the originals were good more due to lack of great options (and ignoring that base Odyssey gear is better now).
- COR feet were good for Quick Draw, let’s add more QD stats.
- THF feet and RNG hands enhanced TH and Bounty Shot, sure let’s add more of those stats.

2) Add three DT pieces, not necessarily thinking really hard about which slots they would be best added to. Maybe they luck out with those being on gear you’d want for TP/hybrid/idle pieces anyway, maybe not.

3) Add one WSD piece for DD jobs, using a different slot than they did for the WSD of those jobs’ AF/Relic +2/+3 gear.

Sometimes they lucked into great pieces anyway, despite not really being too thoughtful about it. SAM body, SCH feet, SMN head, DNC head, etc. But sometimes they just look like incoherent choices due to the OTHER gear currently available for the job.

I’m actually of the opinion that many of these pieces are fantastic. I never expected 5/5 sets to blow away existing gear, but did expect most jobs to get 2-3 really valuable pieces. Most did just that, some with even more situationally useful gear (I’m using 5/5 GEO +2 gear, 4/5 SAM +2 pieces, etc), a few jobs with more disappointments than others (sup, Puppetmaster). But when you look at whether the stats actually seem like insightful though actually went into the stats to make these pieces have a purpose relative to other existing options, you see some glaring examples showing that probably was not the case.


Edit - Bard tangent:
And for what it’s worth, that’s why BRD set is particularly disappointing to me. These pieces were always used to enhance specific songs, so they have remained useful. And so while better defensive stats are nice on gear you were already using, they didn’t even boost the main purpose of the gear! It’s not as if another +1 to these songs would be gamebreaking, and they’ve given out +2 songs in previous relatively recent iLevel gear with the Su3 set (admittedly, more niche songs for those pieces).

And FFS, they didn’t even get the DT- pieces right… they made one of those the Empy legs that you DON’T want to sing in for not-Ballad because they lack the song duration of Inyanga. At least just match the Inyanga duration if you’re gonna insist on making that slot a DT piece that you can sing in a little more safely. But of course they didn’t, because they didn’t think about the implications at all. Despite the letdown, I’ll still use every piece in the set… but that’s for the same reason I would have used it in Abyssea since song+ addresses BRD’s main reason for existing.

+3 AF3 was a huge disappointment imo.... such a missed opportunity, we didn't need any dmg increases but there was plenty of fun ideas they could have went with. Not to mention the content itself is a snooze fest. Who knows where we even go from here.

Reading back thru some OF posts, its sad how much more interaction it got before ROV, then that came with their "ending" major content and it dried up quick. I found this funny tho, at least they kept their word on something I guess

still shocking how the community here think something special will happen.

should we just die?

They keep fun ideas for Bonanza weapons. It's HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE.

Live, but kill the expectations and the entitlement?

Man I remember doing Salvage for 2 years to get a full set of blm gear that barely had any impact on my spells from when I didn't have it, or doing kings for 4 years to get a dalmy with 1 refresh or a haub with a few more acc and str. Back in they day you did all this content for cosmetics in all honestly, cause it sure wasn't for the stats very much.

I remember getting my relic (the hard way, where I had to sponsor runs) and it was barely better than the weapon I already had.

This is one of my biggest gripes with what they did with Abyssea, expectation bloat. I know that was the goal (to end the game on a high) but the damage is done now they decided to keep the game going.

I think they also kind of feed into this too, Ody gear was ridiculous.

Sponsoring runs was by no means the "hard way" to get a relic back then. Unless your group sucked, run sponsors typically came out with at least 5x their investment in currency. It was a ridiculous practice, which is why I abolished it when I ran a dynamis shell (sell/split instead).

Buying the currency out of bazaars was the "hard way" to get a relic.



Anyway, please everyone return to complaining that FFXI failed to produce a single, overpowered armor set that surpassed all other armor sets in all capacities instead of merely being usable and better in some situations. It was completely reasonable to expect that they would invalidate the rest of the game's content with no reasonable path to replacing it.

Well to be clear you still had to buy most of your coins, my shell had 3-4 people sponsoring runs and so you got one every few weeks.

I made the money from spamming brothers BCNM for hedgehog bombs, but mostly Sandworm and Dark Xion splits with my shell.

Point was, the boost was pretty small over the huge time and effort investment.