Ideas For New Content

Interesting fanfic, I applaud your creativity. I won't bother going into my whole history but suffice to say I've done plenty of soloing, I've always played plenty of non-BRD jobs, and I've two-boxed for decades; I'm not reliant on having a party, nor am I reliant on parties needing BRD for my character(s) to be relevant.

I'm not advocating for anything either way, I'm just pointing out that people's views of the current and past eras are really distorted and they're either misremembering or extremely confused about how things are and how things used to be.

It was enjoyable to write. I hope you're not too offended by the utter silliness in this extremely serious thread that will definitely get the attention of Fujito and transform FFXI as we know it into a new gaming utopia.

They said that numerous times. "no more content after Reisenjima, it is over forever"

Not a lot of love for the content that released since then. POdyssey is coinflip at best. People hated Shinryu. Sortie didn't fare much better. Do we really want more?

If you're still paying a sub, then yeah. Why would you want nothing new for paying money?

Aside from Dead Game is Dead lul.

Concept: Combine our current endgame grind/rewards with the old world.

Monthly or seasonal rotating events
HNM 'Surged' - Add the equivalent Unity/Escha NM drops to the table and possibly a 119 version of their items. Ready to buy more Savory Shanks for Defending Ring +1 -- pls gib 119 Black Belt quest

ZNM 'Surged' - Same as above. I don't really see anyone spending zeni to get a Gelatinous Ring +1, but maybe an Aurum Armet +1, whatever that would be.

Dreamland 'Surged' - We won't get new Divergence areas, but raising the levels and giving us a ~i140 Dynamis Lord would be pretty nifty. -- even just adding shards / expensive relic upgrade mats (Cyan Orb) to the pool could reinvigorate these zones.

Sky 'surged' - during the event, gods are spawned as their Escha versions -- does not count towards Aeonic progress

You get the picture, Limbus 'surged', Salvage 'surged', yadayada on to the fun stuff.

Sheol-Nyzul - Floor 100 Bumba babyyyy.
Given the stress fun that Nyzul isle is, I think the format could provide an alternate route to RP your ody gear. subjob locked, ***time limit, please-kill-me lamp order--but hey, no (or very minimal) segment farming and unlimited entries.

Alternatively, these could feature only the R0 bosses and JUST provide segments, similar to nyzul tokens. The boss clears would unlock the gear, but no RPing in Sheol-Nyzul. This still gives us a slow, but not time-gated segment option. Also if segments are rewarded, now there's a low-commitment reward (albeit a small one) to helping someone with their R0 clears.

I second whoever suggested Sinister Reign 2.

Abyssea/VNM/WoE/Delve/Meeble are in the awkward position that they're lv 99 content but still wildly out of date. I vote new Abyssea enemies as a new exemplar point camp -- if you're going to afk bot for 5 days, maybe your key bot runs out of keys and your time expires instead, idk. I'm not sure any of these are good candidates for alternative gallimaufry, but something definitely should be.

I definitely have more ideas and feel cut short but I need to get back to work lol

Value is subjective. If you enjoy playing the game then value isn't the issue. If you don't enjoy playing the game, don't wait for something 'new'. Find something else.

Keep coping thinking a Sky2 will ever happen.

Escha - Ru'aun is about is close as it was ever going to get.

Even if it isn't as much (per unit of time) as traditional methods, simply adding some rewards to existing content could breathe new life into some things that don't even need much in the way of new programming.

Look at how many people show up to Besieged just because they want that Silver Voucher.

Expeditionary Force, Garrison, Monstrosity, Pankration, Besieged, Campaign, ANNMs, ENMs, ISNMs.

Raise a few monster levels, add some crap like Alexandrite or H-P Bayld or something into the drop pool, and give people some variety in their grind. It'd be nice if they gave us the Monstrosity stuff they were working on. They don't even have to give us "more", they could just bump up the variety and I think it'd have the same effect.

They are married to the idea that you farm currency from the event said currency is native to. When they do adjust content to reward currency, it's never an efficient alternative. Ambuscade is the exception.

Go to Campaign battle and register for a union. Note how long it takes before you receive relic currency and how much you get. Run old dynamis for the same amount of time and ask yourself why you bothered with Campaign.

Chocobo digging and voidwatch, ect.

Skirmish is still the best choice really.

Isn't Sortie just Ra'kaznar skirmish with tweaks for empyrean?

No one stated that all this content had to be released in a single update or at the speed at which you snap your fingers. Also, there was no mention of a "Remake" of the battles.

I suggested a "Revamp" with a difficulty level similar to Heroic in WoW, not Mythic. In FFXI, you are playing at a level close to Mythic. If I were to release the content in my "way," I would do it like this:

FFXI maintenance mode plan

Sky & Nyzul (2025)

Artifact +4, along with a revamp of items from the Sky Gods, Kirin, Nyzul, NM-kings RELICS R20 "Soloable" and R25 "Not Soloable"

Spharai-R20 "DMG type Blunt & Piercing" (Level 119 IV)

(Hand-to-Hand) All races
DMG:+236 Delay:+72 attack+60, accuracy +30
Hand-to-Hand +281
Guarding Skill +281
Magic Accuracy skill + 240
Enhances "Counter" Effect VI
"Final Heaven"
Aftermath 1000 TP duration 6 minutes (No AM effects 2k/3k TP)
"Critical hit Rate +12%"
Chance of double damage +50%, can proc (Both hands,Multi-rounds, Kick attacks included)
"Kick attacks" +25
"Kicks attacks damage" +50
Final Heaven damage +90% (Total) First hit only
Afterglow

Cost Base R-20 version:

10,000 Byne Bill x3
Plutons 10,000
12 Stacks Crystal of Swart Astral Detritus.
Use Final Heaven X50 times on Apex-Yagudos on Castle of Oztroja.
Use Final Heaven X50 times on Apex-Mamools on Mamook
Use Final Heaven x50 times on Apex-Orcs on Vunkerl Inlet (S)
Use Final Heaven x50 times on Apex-Rocs on Abyssea-Altepa
Use Final Heaven x50 times on Apex-Craklaw on Foret de Hennetiel
Use Final Heaven x50 times on Apex-Ignoble Skeleton

R-25 version:

Bosses can drop between 1-2 items ala "Abyssea"
Neo-Genbu Shells x25
Neo-Suzaku Feather x25
Neo-Seryu Wing x25
Neo-Byakko Fang x25
Neo-Kirin Hair x25
Nyzul-weapon-voucher x25
Neo-King Behemoth hide x25
Neo-Nidhogg scale x25
Neo-Aspidochelone shell x25


Sea, Salvage, Relics +4 Mythics R20-R25 (2026)
Abyssea, Voidwatch, Empy Armor +4, Empy-weps R20-25 (2027)
etc

I want to clarify that as these are "Revamps" and not "Remakes," the cost wouldn't be as high.

As if they'd invalidate their Primes immediately while most players dont have one yet

Well it wouldn't technically be "new" content if it's just an il119 version of existing content.

1 piece a day makes a full set in 5.
40-5=35
60-40=20
35>20

Is it ludicrous? Outside of ergons I'd say you could farm Relic, Mythic or Empy the intended way within about more or less of a month. Aeonics can be done in one day if you have the points and SU5 are instant REMAs if you have the gil.

Two months for one prime, with odyssey meta in mind which kind of demands 3 main jobs there is already incentive to aim for 3 primes and suddenly your busy for 6 months and 2 months for 1 prime doesn't appear that outlandish anymore.

There were multiple reasons why people quit at that time and no more beeing bottlenecked by 17 competing looters probably wasn't ranking very high. If something about abyssea rubbed people the wrong way then it was primarily the temporary switch from horizontal to vertical progression which devalued peoples time investment.

coincidence ≠ causality

While it was more convenient to bring triggers to abyssea the drop rates without them are no where near as bad that it could drag out for 8 days to complete a single piece.

Both of these games have party finders and no matter how bad their implementation may be, nothing is worse than standing in town yelling for a hour just to disband without ever setting a foot in a dungeon.

The way party building is "solved" in FFXI is the very definition of "We don't give a damn, we never gave a damn and we aren't going to give a single damn, ever."

You're right, brew aside, ukonvasara and twashtar path were not solo friendly. However at cap 95 and 99 carabosse, cirein-croin and Isgebind became lowman and solo friendly so did briareus, sobek and apademak if I'm not mistaken.

Slightly on topic, saw a post about Spharai and I just remembered when H2H got their entire weaponskill damage line overhauled, people asked why they didn't fix Final Heaven. If I remember correctly, they said something to the effect of "we would fix final heaven if we overhauled ALL relic WS, not just this one". People took this as a future plan to correct so Relic WS mods. Turns out they just never did anything with Relic WS and introduced Primes instead. SE ain't about to give their players nothing in FFXI for free without a grind bring involved.

What do you mean by "the intended way" for Relic weapons? The intended way, before the Relic was obsolete with the level cap raise, was to get a Relic once every 3 years by running the Dynamis with 36 people.

Relic became faster to make at the time when the level 75 version of it became obsolete.

It's Vagary obviously

If you compare to hours instead of days, then it becomes a very different story. At 1hr/day, it takes ~17 days to get the beads for an aeonic. Otherwise sure they're fast. If you're farming all your own currency, dynamis is about 40 hours, plus trials. Mythics are much, much, much longer than that. Empy you'd spend dozens of hours on the trials alone and hundreds of hours farming plates/rifts.

Finally on this point, I would argue that the newest, best REMAP weapons shouldn't take the same amount of time as ones released 20 years ago.


I'm not trying to imply that people quit BECAUSE solo content was released (though some have) but rather trying to find this golden age of solo'ing you're referring to. There have been very few, if any, eras of FFXI where a solo player received a "reasonable" amount of rewards compared to a party/alliance. Please provide a time when a solo player could get similar rewards to a party, because I don't remember this time at all.


At 1hour/day, how long do you think it would take a BST at level 85 to farm 10 body seals and 9 cards of ardor? I would say significantly more than 8 days, but you let me know what you think.


I think you're trying to imply that SE is intentionally increasing the gap between solo and party play to try to encourage people to party up, and has ramped up this effort? I don't see this at all...they've made solo play easier and easier as time has gone on, so I have no idea what world you live in where they're trying to squeeze solo players together by giving parties better rewards. Every piece of endgame content SE has ever released for FFXI was released with the intent that it would be done with a party. The only exceptions I can think of are recent (Ambu, UNM, Sortie, maybe Ody) and all of those are more efficient/give better rewards with a party.

So once again, please explain the progression you're seeing of SE making solo rewards worse over time. I think we're in the golden age of solo play, where players can do the largest variety of content solo and their rewards are (relative to the past) massively more efficient than they've ever been before.

I mean by farming the now intended way as in farming the currencies in their respective events by yourself and from ambuscade instead of buying.

I agree, that's why I doubled the time frame I estimated a REM would take today without the money shortcut.

I can only speak for myself and to me there must be a balance between time investment and reward and there is also a hard cap where extra time investment will not lead to a higher sence of achievment, even if the reward is so OP that it would split the game disk in half at the push of a button.
The time it would currently take to solo a Prime far exceeds this cap.

But maybe I'm in the minority and most people here think the more time they invest into their FFXI goals the more rewarding it feels at the end as long as the reward is at least situationally BiS.

Most people farm DI anyway for the wyrm ash money so they often are at capped points anyway. People who do sortie can't work on one goal while piling up points for the other cause both prime and empy armor soak up your gali.

I also think you can't compare time investment with forced lockouts 1:1 with time investment that you can schedule yourself. To me it's a lot more valuable if I can spend as many hours when I feel like spending them instead of beeing dictated to show up everyday at a specific time.
For the later I prefer to get pay payed.

I said there was a trend towards more solo play and I gave you plenty of examples, If you insist to keep reading selectively you'll not find them.
If your understanding of a "golden era for solo play" is everything has to be soloable then you of course will not find it, it's a MMO.

I'm not asking for the same amount of rewards independant of going solo or with a party, although there are occasions where this is happens, RDM solo HTBF odin comes to mind.
I even said above it can be a valid tool to incentivise party play if dosed correctly, but it shouldn't be the only incentive for party play.

As already mentioned you can't compare time spent with fixed scheduls to time spent at your leisure with a 1:1 ratio.
I only experienced abyssea at 99 cap. Obviously you'd have a harder time soloing at cap 85 but afaik the majority of abyssea era didn't take place at cap 85.

Well, I'm glad you found it.

I won't bother continuing to clog up this thread with more replies, clearly we have different opinions and nobody's changing theirs, talking about this though:


Level 80 cap: 6/2010
Level 85 cap: 9/2010
Level 90 cap: 12/2010
Level 95 cap: 9/2011
Level 99 cap: 12/2011

Vision of Abyssea (first 3 zones): 6/2010
Scars of Abyssea (middle 3 zones): 8/2010
Heroes of Abyssea (final 3 zones): 10/2010

So...all Abyssea zones were introduced while players were limited to level 85. Eventually 90, 95, and 99 came, but speaking contemporaneously, it was designed for 85 and (since you never experienced it) I'm here to tell you, it was not solo-able. You could do various smaller NMs and farm exp, sure, but you were absolutely not solo'ing any significant progress (or most probably none at all) on empyrean weapons and would struggle greatly to solo empy+2 armor.

By that, you could still duo. MNK and a WHM with almost a pulse.

Yep it was full alliance content for a good bit, especially the upper tier NMs.

Our shell farmed the first (as far as we knew at the time) Emp lvl85 and we had our entire shell burning Carabosse and Cirein-croin.

Anyone remember Chloris at 80-85 cap lol?

That's how I remember it, as well. A wild time for sure and kinda weird knowing the cap was going to continually be raised, but some of the empyrean armor items were non-trivial to obtain and difficult solo, others were easier IIRC. People were still wrapped up in lower tier content like Nyzul, Dyna, Salvage, etc and it was harder to pull groups together to do the weapon NMs too because they weren't done in an organized LS fashion the way the other content was, at least from what I recall.

It was also when I remember mercing shouts really starting to pick up, they appeared to find some success mercing these items for people.

It was certainly possible to solo or duo most of the NMs for the seals to upgrade empyrean, but without a yellow proc, which required at LEAST 2 characters to reliably get, ideally 3 or 4, your drops are extremely limited. 0-1 seals most drops, maybe 2 if you had TH and were really lucky. Oh, and they might've not been for the job you're after. And with no TH, it would take a while to get another pop item, or maybe that NM is on a 15 minute respawn, or worse.

Coins, Stones, etc. were extremely difficult NMs and dropped 1-2 of those items, so you're talking about fighting those guys upwards of 5 times per piece.

Sorry, I know this has kind of derailed again, but people who say that FFXI "suddenly" became grindy or something has not been playing FFXI very long.

I mean, it's possible to solo or duo Sortie, too... but good luck making a Prime in under two years if you try.

I know we talk about Primes being a 200 hour grind, but that's a best case scenario. Many groups are going to be looking at 300 or even 400 hours to finish, and solo/duo players are 500+. It's just excessive no matter how you look at it.

If you could grind out a prime in 200 hours of solo play and substantially less(~50) with a BiS static, there'd be a lot more people still subbed and doing Sortie. It would lead to less congestion, too, as the better your group, the less time you'd need to spend in Sortie over the six months needed to get your psyches.

I think SE should change Odyssey to give a daily 'Moglophone A' 'Moglophone B' and 'Moglophone C' so you can do each daily. Will let you get a bit more segs but also raise Moogle Mastery faster and bring hide prices down.

The price of mats really isn't a factor if you're going after moogle mastery. Unless you play and equip every job/role, you'll easily cover mats for the items you need to upgrade just getting your moogle mastery up.

In Sortie you're supposed to upgrade your armor first, then work on prime weapon. In Ody you upgrade your unity items, then move on to RP. You're not forced to do so, but it's the way it was meant to work. I can't see them changing the event to go against that idea.