How Could SE Realistically Improve Modern FFXI?

Introduce more activity that require grouping with other people and reward is that everyone free to choose what reward is of Gil, Gali or Segment, etc.

Play on asura you have it within an hour of starting. (if you have/borrow/bought 10m)

That's why you don't play on a server with a population of 5.

Can get a pulse weapon for free from Aman validator npc.

https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/A.M.A.N._Validator

https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Kupon_W-Pulse

No it's the perfect content for this demographic. Requires no gear, no skill, other people can do it for you, and it drops the loot directly into your inventory.

Meanwhile ive given away my last 3 pulse weapons from aman trove.

I thought the point was to make it easily obtainable so you wouldn't have to beg, borrow, steal, ect. I'm pretty sure everyone knows by now that Asura is the place to be if you want everything, but don't want to play the game yourself to get it.




Orbs are a finite resource and it still relies far too much on RNG. Giving everyone a Kupon for completing the ambuscade RoE quests is the best 'foot in the door' option here. Getting that first weapon early upgrades you from carry to contributor.

Let me be clear, I think an easy way to get 1 pulse weapon, that isn't locked by deeds or potpurri, would be great for new players. It gives them an option for a weapon that will be useful through endgame. That being said...


No it doesn't. Not in content that they realistically couldn't do solo. They would likely be lacking a 1k TP Bonus weapon and WSD gear. Sure it helps but 10k~20k Savage Blades at half frequency, at best, is not going add much to a group carrying them.

what if v0 Odyssey required no segments? of course they'd have to alter the function of mogphone2s somehow, but this would incentivize people to help those who need the base gear get a head start.

Then everyone buys v0 clear and mercs can enter nonstop

Does nothing for actual gear, just helps bots get the nyame gleti and mpaca r0

The only way you get people to attempt to rank their ***up is remove penalties. and/or lower entry. But not give free mogphone2.

No expended phone on loss (but then they have unlimited free rp by failing)
No ladder, you can just enter any mob any tier and veng
Cheaper but not free phone2
Or give the mobs drops (no!)

maybe, but even accounts only 45 days old have had time to do some Omen and Dynamis and even Sortie. they could probably solo a good number of v0 themselves (giving moogle mastery more importance if they spent time in A-C) and people with clears already might be more willing to help if it cost 0 segments, reducing the need for mercs. not a perfect solution, but an improvement over the current one where people pay mercs for v0 anyway.

If they gave a free entry but restricted it to once per day account wide it could so some good.

What you want is incentivize participation without unlimited selling.

If there wasn't RP cheesing, then you could just let them try without ki loss and all would be fine. (well, relatively, you could get the same group trying 600 times per day creating congestion)

absolutely. I didn't go into detail on how to change the mogphone2 for v0, but limiting it to at least the same 20hr cooldown as mogphone1 makes sense.

Your bar for contribution is much higher than mine.


The context here is fresh level 99 players. What content are those players participating in that they would need help with to gear up?

Ambu for the capes, armor, weapons and upgrade mats or money.
HTMB for pages to upgrade AF/Relic/Empy
Unity for various items their job(s) may need.
Entry level Odyssey to upgrade said Unity items and start on segs.
Omen for upgrades, gear and accessories.
Possibly DI, skirmishes, delve, incursion, SR, ect.


If a player is actively participating in any of these events and they're wearing at least ambuscade armor and a weapon, they're getting help and not being carried in my opinion.


Nobody is representing that gear would make up for the skill gap. That said, skilled players were doing Omen and Odyssey bosses solo in ambuscade gear. Certainly didn't have MLs at the time, but I also don't think they were mastered. I beat Onga V0 solo in ambuscade gear and I'd hardly call myself skilled.

I think this really depends on the attitude of the people 'helping'. If helper is aggroing the whole floor and aoeing while the other guy tries to get a single WS, it's hard to say anything other than carry. If the unity mob is dying in 3 WS from the helper while the other guy gets a single 5% damage WS, carry.

If the helper cares more about the gameplay experience than just getting it done asap, and brings a support job or something, then it's not so much a carry. A strong BRD or RDM can control any of those events, DPS as needed even /WHM, and still give the person being helped a feeling of impact. Going BLU and destroying everything yourself while offering them minimal buffs, not so much.

I'm not disagreeing with you, I just wanted to point out something I've observed at least on my server.

I think it's safe to say that at this point, most players have taken a break at some point. I personally did when ff14 was released, and I returned to full time status sometime in 2018. This is key: during that time, end game content was Omen, Dyna D, HTB's and ambuscade. There was a rush to get the gear associated with those events because at that time, it was undisputed as the best gear. There was still some niche gear from vagary, salvage and the like, but people blew past that gear is favor of the better shinier gear in those end game events. Now, we have Oddy and sortie thrown into that mix, and returning players just joining just see the shiny new gear and don't want to have to be bothered getting the gear that was "the best" 6 years ago.

It's the nature of the game when it's constantly growing and evolving. The carry issue is that those new players, sitting in all level 99 gear, are now a full 30-40 levels behind (up to 90 if you factor in master levels) Back when I returned, level 99 gear was bad, but still functional/passable for some content, but also, the skill cap was much lower then. so a 5k WS was a greater wedge of the pie then. A 5k ws now when people are regularly throwing out capped damage WS is nothing.

all of this is a long winded way to say that yes, people are being carried, and the game does a very bad job of encouraging players to put in the gradual work to improve their gear when they flash the "best" stuff in front of them. I see soo many returning players begging people to help them get bumba clears and nyami RP, meanwhile they don't even know if they have the mogphone 2's to enter. There's a lack of desire to put in the work, and that to me, is what identifies them as a carry. because even a poorly geared player, can find a way to be useful.

They should literally just take the existing Deeds pulse weapon and move it from 170 to 20.

Honestly, all four of the first rewards should be instantly useful to a fresh 99 but not something you really want care about botting. So that'd be like, make 10-40 the Pulse Kupon (currently at 170), the Deed Voucher (currently at 70, the one that gives a full set of i109 AF), the Deed Token (currently at 550?! for a full set of i109 Relic) and uh, the first Macrocosmic Orb? (currently 280). First hit's free and all that, but nothing anyone's creating alts for.

That'd both get new people sucked into deeds real quick and help them get geared up with a Naegling/Tauret/Shining One and a reasonable start to some gearsets.

Goes both ways.

Person with dd onry Nin saying "can I come with you to Omen" is not saying "I know how to do this content but I need support can you please help me" they are saying "I know nothing and don't want to learn mechanics carry me plsokthx".

When that is the ask I don't really blame the Blu for being a blu and destroying everything in 5sec and not explaining anything. The person wanted a carry, they got a carry.

I am sure some people do have the capacity and willingness to learn how to do the content themselves, plenty of resources from YT videos, bgwiki write ups etc, this is not new nor hard content in 2024. Yet, vast majority do not.

If the person gets an involved role in the content, they do need to learn the mechanics to succeed. So, they're asking for support *and* information, instead of just a carry. A run with a BRD or RDM supporting them and explaining things as they go would help both understand the content and clear a single run easier to establish that it's doable for them at their current level.

But, very few people are willing to offer support and information.. most want to go slaughter everything and show off how strong they are while not including the lesser player. I don't think the dd onry nin is completely innocent here, because many of us have worked our way up from the bottom. But, if you want new player retention, they need more than carries. Information might be freely available, but it's a hell of a lot more fun to learn as you do while talking with some friends than it is to watch a whole video and try to recruit help on the basis you know what you're doing despite never having done it.

They are involved about as much as a dd-onry nin can be. Fight normally on Kei, told that when the eyes are glowing person with hate needs to lose hate, fight normally on Gin, stack up on Kyou for the conal dmg otherwise fight normally.

The rest? Special strats that are explained about as much as you can do while on a run. This guy absorbs all buffs, can only have one dd. This guy doesn't take dmg unless it's from multiple SCs or after magic dmg. Typically it's just sam dd there so not much they can learn from it.

On Ou they're not doing much at all because Ou.

Does this teach them much? I don't think so, because there's not much a dd has to learn. The bigger stuff is song selection, bubble selection, what bar spells to use and when, meva sets for everyone close up, what rolls, when the Cor needs to close SC on certain bosses and so forth. None of which is particularly relevant to someone on Nin. They have to ask if they want that stuff explained to them.

Looking at my experience as a dd starting with Omen, I quickly learned that just being a melee dd doesn't work on all of them. Most of them, in fact. So started to expand job selection to be useful in those cases. Not seeing that at all from our dear dd onry hypothetical and not-so-hypothetical nin.

Have lost count of how many people have gone through all the strats and talked about everything. Yet, the same questions every time, "what do I do here". There's a point where repeating the same things gets a little old, especially when most the people all the strats have been explained to no longer play. Not that I begrudge them or anything, it is what it is.

Fight normally = watch the numbers roll by with absolutely no concept of how much hp the enemy has or how hard the fight would be without the person carrying you.

Having someone support you while you clear the content shows how your character stacks up against the enemies. It gives you a benchmark for the performance you can expect if you go without that person. If it doesn't go well with a solid support, it clearly paints out that you're undergeared and shouldn't try it alone yet.

You're talking about specific fight mechanics, but when the person tanking is wearing nyame/malignance/sakpata and invincible to everything spamming 50k+ WS.. you completely miss the scale/difficulty of the content relative to your own strength.

to be fair the caturae look pretty copy paste so even if you do remember a strategy you still might confuse it with a different one.

I see why repeating strategies over and over can get annoying though. Could probably be remedied with a addon.

No, I was talking about actually letting them do most of the dmg.

Most of the heavy dds stay out when they can stay out so the new players can learn about the fight more. It's not an over in 2min kind of thing, if they are new to it.

Again I don't think this teaches them much. The support is there, and they're doing the heavy lifting. Not once has someone new on a dd asked why we use dark carols or the bar spells we use. Just want to hit their ws macros and try and beat their previous "high score".

/shrug

I would never put someone new on tanking duties in Omen. One, that's too much pressure on them, two they need something less mechanically involved to do at first while they learn the fight.

If they want to tank they learn by watching how existing tanks do it and volunteering for it after a while.

The gear continues to grow and evolve, but the content doesn't. That basically makes gear redundant beyond a certain point and we passed that years ago.

Could a group of skilled players clear Sortie 8 boss in pre-Ody/Empy gear? Could they break 10k segs/run? V15 Ody bosses?

I learned how to tank via Omen and W1/2 Dyna-D RP farms. It went alright, my LS lead says I was one of the first tanks he saw that didn't eat ***to Dancing Fullers at least once, but I came into the game with significant tanking experience in other MMOs and a general knowledge and willingness to use Gearswap and stuff. Perhaps not the best scenarios to learn how to do that in, but realistically there's not much content below that where you'd actually need a dedicated tank now (and even in that content a WAR with sufficient DT gear can more than suffice if support/CC is up to snuff). The only other things that come to mind are Ambuscade and HTMBs. For HTMBs, pretty much everyone just solos them on a DD on Normal or Hard depending on their gear and month (any Trust campaigns, etc) because no one wants to split drops if at all possible even if solo farming might take longer or have meaner RNG. Some Ambuscade months are adequate for tanking, but Ambuscade has a unique enmity system and some months involve weird strategies that don't call for a real tank.

Only other content that would come to mind would be A or B Odyssey runs going at a slow/smooth pace, which might also be acceptable. Certainly getting thrown into the deep end of a C farm being your first actual tank experience would not be good!

Finally find one, there’s a YouTube video of someone 6Boxing V25 Ngai. I can’t even imagine how many times he tried. It’s super interesting to see that he does it with 5 min left on timer. Once again I don’t multi, don’t even have 1 mule, but those people brake barriers.

Kudo to him

https://youtu.be/LaJqUpDUXUw?feature=shared

Watched the video, must have taken a lot of hours to dial it in. I respect the work. But the only broken barrier here is the ToS.

I'm guessing it's WAR MNK BRD GEO RDM WHM with BRD RDM GEO meleeing TP to help with aura by using different WS to provide 4-5 ws if needed. The WHM stayed in range and just curagad through everything?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. One thing that would be nice is making HTMBs of the 3 add on scenarios final bosses. Two would to be allowed to cap some story missions. Three would be to expand Provenence zone. We have this super cool enviroment that is only used for an entrance to a few battlefields. It could be turned into a really cool endgame area where people can gain Master Levels and fight new high end monsters. Could even have a quest to get lvl 119 version of the master trial weapons that involves this new expanded area.