Prime WS Information, Testing, Discussion

Well, there really is nothing left to find and test. Never should be entire threads for it specifically anyway.

You do the ws 10 times and you get the numbers, 30 pages aren't necessary.

Did an Oddy C with an ML50 Drk with lv4 Scythe against my ML50 war...

Now I am in therapy

Yes there is, someone get me fimbulvetr ftp/mod numbers already so I can choose a prime. I didn't put myself behind a month doing shield first so I could guess GS or GA.

See how "useful" the thread is? There's a dozen Gswords and no numbers.

Great points. The Prime Grind wouldn't have been out of place in a 2005 FFXI mindset. But that's not the game FFXI has been for well over a decade now, and it appears to me that the vast majority of players do not want to return to such old (archaic?) design philosophies.

In large part, it's obviously a function of the management team wanting to put time sinks in front of players since there is no other new content. But I also think it may be somewhat of a miscalculation due to the directors in recent years looking at things like WoW Classic or the handful of FFXI players interested in punishing "OG" FFXI private server experiences like Horizon and thinking there is enough player demand (or at least tolerance) out there for a a return to brutal grinds. I think that's a miscalculation.

Odyssey: endless grind with time-limited tags
Omen: endless grind with time-limited tags
Dynamis [D]: endless grind with time-limited tags

Sortie: endless grind with time-limited tags

Everyone: HOLY ***SE WHAT MADE YOU THINK WE WANTED ENDLESS GRINDS WITH TIME-LIMITED TAGS BRO?!

...To be clear, with RoV they took away the time-limited tags from Salvage, Assault, original dynamis, etc. because that content was no longer relevant, challenging, or end-game, so there was no reason to restrict people from going into it anymore. This is just my opinion, not a stated fact by the devs, but like...they kept adding new grinds with restrictions on how often you can do it so...it doesn't seem like they reversed course on the design philosophy of the game so much as adjusted old content.

Dyna-D: endless grind with time gated entry to 2x/week.

Omen: grind with daily entry, but capable of saving up to 4 entries to be used back-to-back, so essentially 2x/week.

Odyssey: endless grind for segs with daily tag, not as good as omen as only can save up to 2 at once. But that's only half of Odyssey, as the real rewards can be spammed.

Sortie: endless grind with a daily KI that cannot be stacked, and unused ones only give fractional returns for a "bonus" entry.

The first one limited us to twice a week in a longer event, again with other content in its prime happening around it.

The second two allow the player some flexibility without feeling like they have "fallen behind", with Omen being without question the preferred format for such a KI.


...and Sortie allows no flexibility in schedule for the player unless they choose to fall behind the max potential. We're almost all adults now, most with jobs and many with families. For many having 2 days a week of 2+ hours of playtime is easier than 7x/week of having 1 hour-for others the reverse is true. And SE removed that flexibility from the player to be equally successful in both scenarios.

Both players would do the same number of runs in the same total months, just in different frequency as it fit their lives. SE removing that equality shows a lot of disrespect to the playerbase in my mind.

In addition to what's already been said, doing 6 months of segment farming earns you almost enough segments to never need to segfarm again. It is if you cap out at r25, it's about 2/3rds what you need to cap out at r30 assuming you only cap out armor and the important weapons. Along the way you get incremental, steady improvements to armor, along with earning gil and the content is shorter.

It feels rewarding and less empty, you see steady improvement. You could say the same of Dyna-D and Omen, both of which have reasonable feeling end goals. It feels reachable and you have things you earn along the way.

In contrast, doing Sortie for a Prime is like trying to fill a bucket with drops of water. It's slow, tedious, and unrewarding. Sure, all the other content is grindy, that's the nature of the game, but people don't want to spend 6 months of 1hr nightly content (realistically it's 8+, people quote 6 but it's really going to be much more for most) with no rewards along the way solely to unlock one weapon. It feels empty and repetitive.

So should they nerf content because the player base is older and have all the things that come along with that? Yes, they should. You need to know your audience. 15 years ago you could dangle a carrot out like Relics and Mythics, people would and did do it, even if it meant a slow crawl and having to find 18 other people to help you get there and treat it like a second job. People with 2 hours or less to do something at the end of the day are more likely to spend that time doing things that feel meaningful, impactful, or that they enjoy doing. Chipping away at something doing an empty, dull grind for 6-12 months solely for one weapon isn't something that falls into that category for most. If you want to retain your audience, you need to understand what they are willing to do.

It doesn't mean it has to be easy. I actually wouldn't mind an enraged basement if they gave considerably higher rewards in compensation, difficult content isn't the issue. Odyssey kept people engaged for a while, it's the idea of repeatedly doing the same thing for months on end with the sole reward being one item. Most just don't have the willingness to commit that time to the game for something so minor.

And recall that Omen did start out with a 1 canteen + 1 in reserve system similar to current Sortie, which was updated in relatively short order to the current version where you can stock up to 4 entries. That fairly quick change seems to imply that the devs made a conscious admission that the original system was a mistake and actually did need improvements (and changing it WAS an improvement). Then they threw that knowledge right out the window when they designed Sortie with the exact same issue they already encountered and corrected with the original Omen.

And even the original Omen system was more player-friendly, with a straight 20hour KI replenishment to hold a second entry in reserve instead of this fractional BS where your "bonus" entry only comes after several days.

Of course, it's understantable. I empathize with them.
I still think there are better compromises than the ones they offered though.
It's not like we only have two options with one being the current situation and the other being getting a Prime in 2 weeks.

Anyway, we've been talking about this for months now, we all know things are not gonna change at least not for quite some time.
I'm still holding hopes for small QoL fixes like, I dunno, a trade back for Sapphires/Starstones/Drites. If not a tradeback for Gally, then at least a tradeback for Empy+2/Empy+3 then.
Would be a small cookie and better than nothing.

Fixed your post for you, you're welcome!

Well as you're salty enough to complain, seems like you care

What did the parse look like?

Stop with the shitposts and irrelevant ***and give me fimbultevr numbers!

Read the thread title!

Because your War so good?

Also, just make the GA and the GS, not a big deal.

Dude, lol. Block him man. That's way less effort than strike through/adding fake dialogue to someone whose opinion nobody cares about (your words)

It looks like they made the 2handers about the same from what info has been shared. No one knows for sure yet but most likely you're really comparing the additional properties on the weapon, which jobs can use them, and what WSs in addition they have access to that are useful/flexible.

Do you want the 10 DA on the Great Axe to build a better niche WAR TP or WS set to allow more flexibilty while still hitting 100% DA? 10 Store TP on the GS is just generically good and the delay is lower so you're probably going to have an easier time turning over WSs in a pinch.

DRK, RUN, and PLD can 3 step dark with GS and also 2 step light, while WAR can't. GA lets you armor break without a weapon swap and basically make any SC combo you want, but that's not significantly different than Chango other than the potency of your dark skillchains.

Stage 5 can completely turn this all on it's head, but stage 4 2handers are all just strong and that won't be invalidated unless they supercharge 1 handers. Unlikely

As someone out of the loop on Primes, do the WSs have the same animation as the original relic ones, or are they at least recolored or otherwise modified?

The animations are the same, some colours and effects are different.

Mumei should have been recolored dark instead of light

It was their only option.

How else do you keep your customers playing a dying game, after you fire (sorry transfer) most of your development team?

ENDLESS GRIND.

They no longer have the manpower to make significant and/or new content. Tweaks and cosmetics is all that's left until the servers go down.

There is a point where excessive grind:reward ratio is just too much and drives players away. I could see a lot of people who might be willing to grind out a stage 4 Prime but then refuse to do it again (or go to Stage 5). Whereas if they eased up a bit on the requirements (and I’m not saying make it trivial), a significant number people would be more willing to make multiple Prime weapons, play more total hours of Sortie, and actually result in longer term engagement with the content if it was a bit less heavy handed.

apologies for totally off topic post BUT

It wasn't their ONLY option. There're other ways to introduce long term RNG in a way to make the grind feel ever so slightly more interesting without killing the dev team...

For example

Sortie NNI (so each playthrough is different enough to force a bit more adaptation, feeling of accomplishment from a high climbing run)

Skokkr talked his old mate dvali jonah into opening up the ruins in the name of soul harvesting. galli in place of tokens.

could go the extra mile and replace the lamps with transposers/purple hues etc, or could not, it would still work. objective like kill all flans/kill a particular naak. roaming nms pop up once in a while and drop ??? items that can appraise to earrings/upgrade mats, or just red chests like they do in sortie.

every 20th floor there's a boss, that you can kill or skip, once you get higher its the basement bosses. floor 100 is a more fast paced version of aminon since you need to get up there in time to have a chance.

astrariums can be traded for old cases, upper tier ones for +1s

would open up another way to farm galli, and reduce the burnout of the exact same run through each time.

It was the lowest effort option. So they took it.

And it'll work long enough with no consequences.

People with nothing left to do in game are going to quit eventually. It's expensive, tedious, and time consuming to keep veteran, high level/geared players engaged with the game. The question, if you care about retaining them, is how you keep them engaged as long as possible.

With the current content structure, their choice was to try and drag this out as long as possible and assume that these players will be enticed enough to do it for year(s) to come until they get bored. The other choice was to make it a shorter term goal, hoping players would do a few of them before quitting. The end result is the same, no new content and the veteran players quitting and moving on because it's too repetitive or they've done everything. It's just a matter of how long it takes and how you drag it out.

Their plan with the basement bosses showed that their target for stage 5 was higher skill/level/gear players for full completion and they wanted to force players through this phase or lock them into a single stage4 weapon if they couldn't do the basement. What I don't think they anticipated was that people would see the galli requirements alone and decide they didn't want to mess with it, then the reveal of the basement difficulty in July just nailed the coffin shut. IMO what they should've done was make the entire basement difficulty selectable and give considerably increased rewards for bosses, enough to reduce the time to complete for high level groups to 2mo and casuals for 3mo. That feels more obtainable and I think people would have stuck around longer to play with new toys, but either way it's a gamble and I don't think they are in touch enough to have made the right decision. I also think they vastly overestimate how many people enjoy doing Sortie every night, which likely contributed to it.

Either way they went, I doubt it was enough to retain the people quitting now more than 12 months, so the end result is the same, just slightly sooner.

They can release HTBFs of Sinister Reign whenever they want since they want to keep redoing adoulin mobs. I'll take +1 versions of the previous gear with more Acc, m.eva, mdb, and pdt/dt, with the occasional thunder for jobs that need a boost.

Make them 25 merits a pieces so you can only do 3 in a row...

Drop rate can be abysmal. Nothing will have changed from the original.


I don't see a reason to dwell Sortie so much that they make another piece of content to support how crap it is. Grind your armor. Work on a weapon. Pretend you'll get a +2 earring for your jobs. Get over it eventually.

I want them to put out new low effort content with nice rewards and terrible drop rates so they can add more pieces to my laundry lists. That's the best case scenario I can pretend could happen.

And no more Master Trials. No one cares

I'm almost convinced to just slowly make a prime great katana but the 10% DA on it just seems wasted. Maybe I'm wrong? What's the current spread between masa and prime, and does the power increase even matter?

I'm also convinced that Prime 4 let alone 5 is outside the realm of a casual player, so maybe just best to ignore.

I have been very happy with my choice, I am currently using a stage 3.

Mumei has been a gain of ~20-30k DPS per ws for me.
Where my fudo do ~62-68k with masa the prime gk will do ~72-92k
But this is with dia 3 3 minuet max songs a +7 Cor chaos roll
No nyame in my ws set just normal wsd pieces from af and such I am using the pdl feet over my nyame feet from my fudo set and saw a 10k increase in damage for mumei

If it was store tp on the gk we would be gods
The Great sword gains tp incredibly fast

I would say it's on par with R15 masa at 1k TP but with TP overflow the stage 4 prime GK pull ahead quite a lot (70k fudo vs 95k mumei at 3k tp), especially if you are at attack cap. The attack cap is higher with prime AM so i'm not sure if just having a BRD or COR on difficult content will get SAM to attack cap.

Abysmal can only go so far before people will reject it. A lot of people have accepted that getting their visible Crepuscular stuff will have to come from trove. It has nothing to do with how easy or difficult the fight is, its just abysmal non-existant drop rates.

The VD Selbina fights drop rates were "ok"ish. They werent the HTMB Campaign applicable drop rates (VD being 100% drop 1, ~50% drop 2 with TH3+), but they also werent bad (Lilith not withstanding with her gimmick to open up drop slots). They werent an insulting drop rate to the point people felt attainment was unreachable. But slapping a 0.1% drop rate for Shin visibles, and then having all 5 share the same slot is ***. That window where the Brew exploit became public knowledge and everyone burned ALL their cruor on it just to get nothing was the proverbial dagger.