Random Question Thread (FFXI Related)

Or, you could just stop trying to be cute about it.

Everyone knows they're expected and your oboro augmented JSE isn't going to get you in.

They don't need an acronym, they dont need to be included, they're implied.

Usually when I use the acronym, I'm referring to the set of extremely expensive weapons (usually 70mil+) that define jobs in general, as their final "endgame" compositions

And some jobs have their Dynamis Divergence weapon as part of their endgame comp.

Right off the bat, Corsair's Rostam comes to mind, it's effectively a necessary item if you wanna be a properly geared Cor.

Whether its a Divergence weapon, Mythic, Empyrean, Aeonic, Ergon, or Prime, each category has *some* jobs that desire it.

Thus I like "RAMPED" personally, before prime weapons I used the acronym "DREAM"

For example, if I stated "Corsair has one of the easier sets of RAMPED weapons to get, for a support job" I think people can figure out what that sentence means.

Relics did fall off pretty hard. There's literally no reason to make 95% of them anymore, and the only reason people do is for the unique WS. SE said as much too, which is why you can't unlock the WS outside of the weapon, as nobody would make them. Relics desperately needs an update or overhaul to their modifiers. There's literally only 3 (4 if you count Apoc's unique utility or Excalibur's unlocking another WS wall option for PLD, meh) worth making today.

A lot of the 1 handers would be perfectly respectable imo if magian OH wasnt such an easy pick, though this requires them to be r15 still, i know they mentioned they wanted to boost them, and i assume that was done via primes, but if so that was a pretty poor path to take, should have at least bumped their base ftp/mods up further if they must keep to the 1k potency at all levels

For their price point / effort, Id say relics arent too bad where they are at.

If you put them side by side with Dyna D weapons (which are roughly the same cost), they look pretty good.

I'd expect they deserve another "tier" of upgrade to justify power creeping them up, to bring them in line with the cost/effort of the other ultimate weapons.

Prolly around a ~30m upgrade or so?

Really depends on your opinion of mercing, or ability to just get a group together, an aeonic is anywhere from 1~m in materials to about 15ish for a full merc iirc and its on par with a relic at r15 right there. Relic you have to go through the currency phase, the pluton phase, then getting a w3 clear and finally the swart phase, which tbf aeonic also shares but relics get the biggest return on r15.

Regardless just about any aeonic is similar or better to a relic in terms of general DPS potency, theres some niche utility in relics like scythe or gun but otherwise its a dmg stick vs a dmg stick

Dyna D weapons i wouldnt really compare to a rema outside of utility purposes as they fall short of most of them in that aspect

The one example of a DynaD weapon being great is a weapon not even used as a weapon. Its great because it maximizes everyone elses DPS by giving them more Attack+% and StoreTP.

Its not even that much more potent than a Regal Neck. Yes, once you start really min-maxing things, that extra PR+1 matters, but chances are you wont notice a difference from that extra PR+1 Rostam offers.

For all intents and purposes you are comparing the price tag of the relic weapon up til 119 III stage, vs all the work to make an aeonic.

So for a relic you can nearly just buy the entire thing, except for the few magian quests between. But most importantly the magian quests are easy to solo.

You can effectively get your relic weapon all the way up to 199 III stage solo, and the majority of the progress is just spending gil to buy currency/materials.

An aeonic on the other hand requires a dedicated crew of characters a fair bit of effort, as well as many hours spent farming beads.

So I'd say when you put the two side by side, the effort vs reward of a relic feels actually pretty balanced imo. Relics are the worst performing ultimate weapons, but in return they are quite a bit easier and cheaper to get. They can be soloed, take only a couple days tops of non-gil work (prolly could do it all in one sitting if you tried hard), and their gil portion is a fraction of the cost of a mythic.

Worth noting that while +1 PR isn't super game-changing, you still "need" a Lanun Knife for the duration, IMO. Unless you're going to *** up your merits (IMO) by putting too many into PR duration, you won't be able to full-time a Crooked roll without some kind of Su dagger and with my preferred merit setup it takes a Rostam to do it comfortably/without a break in rolls.

RE: Relics it's absurd to say 95% of them aren't useful anymore. There are only 16 of them...

Excalibur is used by PLD at least (Aminon) and also offers unique/promising Light SC options for RDM as well.
Apocalypse occupies a unique niche unless you have prime scythe which is no easy task and competes against all other primes you might want.
Kikoku is a strong option in some situations and at least competitive
Yoichi is extremely niche but not totally useless
Annihilator is incredible
Gjallarhorn is incredible
Aegis is essential

Depending how you count it that's anywhere between 5-7/16...nowhere remotely close to 95%.

The hours farming beads are the longest part and is the closest to a currency grind, and even those dont compare to any of the currency grinds of any of the other weapons, you can get 1k beads pretty reliably with a crit build, 50k to cap with a 15 min rotation and around 2~ mins to complete a wyrm. Math could be bad but just doing DI spam thats 16~ hrs.

A merc ideally is done within 2~3 hrs just depending on quality/how many people are being dragged around, so we'll say 20 hrs from start to finish. More or less time with an actual group depending on how experienced they are.

Honestly unless you've blown all your beads already on AF upgrades you probably already have a head start just by doing DI to get unique DI items or abj/other gear so you may not even be starting at 0. Still the time commitment for an aeonic is pretty minimal compared to the other remas


It's mainly just a blanket comparison of them via dmg, shield/horn are uncontested but from purely dmg they tend to be lackluster, and fall back onto either their sc potential or a particular niche to the weapon/skill i.e scythe/gun/bow. Wouldnt say any of them are useless, just that the investment would be better elsewhere if you dont already have a better weapon which is typically an aeonic or for more work a mythic/empyrean, and times just made the power gap between relic and the rest only get wider.

I think you might change your mind once you've caught up a bit more. Doing all 3 zones of NMs for an aeonic takes less time than doing all the magian trials for a relic (assuming you continue to 3box). Bead farming does make the overall process take longer assuming you buy all relic currencies, but I think 10k beads/hr isn't out of reach.

Yeah if you can get a few peeps and spam neak for example, you can get your beads pretty quickly, even just spamming behe can net you more than just doing the DI rotation. DI is just something anyone can solo and make steady progress

Thats the key difference.

You can do your relic magian trials solo half afk on an undergeared character.

Doing a full set of aeonics requires up to date gear and multiple characters (whether its one person multiboxing, a merc, or friends)

You cant just 1:1 compare the hours of time between the two when one of them requires way more characters involved. Thats not a freebie you can just toss in there :p

And the fact that gap exists compensates an aeonic for its different power level.

"You can just merc it in a few hours" yeah well I dont... *have to merc a relic*, thats the whole point lol, I could have zero friends and zero alts, 100% solo just go to the AH, buy my materials/currency, and then just go solo the magian trials with total garbage gear.

And thus that way way lower barrier of entry justifies relics being a bit lower power level.

And I'm 100% okay with their being an option for an easier but slightly lower power level ultimate weapon.

Effectively we have a very nice spread scale of "Effort vs Reward" of weapons.

1. Dynamis D weapons
2. Relic
3. Aeonic
4. Empyrean
5. Mythic/Ergon
6. Prime

In terms of a scale of "How much work/gil it requires" in return for "how much power does this item get you in return"

Rostam being the exception, it's reward is a bit skewed overall.

Duban Stage 2 also is weird, I'm not entirely sure why SE decided paladins could just have a strictly better ochain for the mere cost of 20k muffins, I feel like it should have only gained its "size" bonus at stage 3, no other prime weapons are ultra jacked the way duban is at only stage 2 afaik.

was just trying to make it relevant to your specific situation.

you've neglected the cost to rp dyna d weapons which is a big oversight, unless you are only counting base 119 versions which is very misleading.

Lotsa niche and one really laughable weapon.

No ones sayin “oh, your NIN has Kikoku, awesome! Its really useful now”

Well if the bar is:

Then I'm not sure "it's niche" is gonna cover it, bub.

You put Yoichi and Kikoku on the list to inflate the numbers.

Why not put Spharai on the list too as its a solid weapon for mnk tank?

You're not really one to judge, nor are you the arbiter (yet again)

I made a hyperbolic statement that was clearly meant to be read as "most aren't worth making". I didn't do the math on the exact percentage beforehand cuz....yknow what, nvm. Y'all got it.

Thorny's statement is accurate. Relics by and large are quite weak compared to the effort to make an ambuscade weapon or dynamis weapon (you can just buy those too). When the term REMA is used, it's generally a classification of high end, very strong weapons. We're just calling them REMA as a formality when we include Relics in the mix; nobody is seriously considering a DD job with a relic weapon on the same standard as practically any other endgame weapon. If you invited a "REMA" Monk to Ngai v25 and he showed up with Spharai, you'd immediately kick him from the group. If we're being truthful, it's really just horn and shield. Apoc DRK is probably just a solo or oshi toy. Gun is a requirement* simply due to the fixed enmity for a fight you can't afford to pull hate. Everything else from a damage perspective is trash. The weapon class isn't revered as an ultimate weapon as it once was

They're largely terrible weapons to invest in at this point in the Game, unless you really like the job. Then the investment cost is irrelevant.

Edit: just went back and saw Nynja said similar things.

The real offenders in terms of "power vs effort" breaking the curve lol.

I think REMA as a term is more useful if thought about as "a category of weapons that require significant investment"

In this perspective, relics are in the same category as the others and it's perfectly fitting. It takes gil, time, and effort, just like the E, M, and A. Primes require time and effort, but no gil, close enough (aeonics cost little to no gil if you're not on asura).

It's not all about damage anyway, see: shields, instruments, Musa, Rostam, etc. etc. Is Morgelai not a DREAM weapon because it doesn't do as much DPS as a lionheart?

A weapon is useful if it, stick with me here, has a use. That applies to at least all the stuff I listed, probably even more if you stretch the definition of use a little bit.

It's not such a striking statement if you say:
18.75% of relics are required to functionally play the job
18.75% of relics occupy a significant niche for their job
12.5% of relics have some use but aren't required for most people
50% of relics are useless

...or whatever your personal belief is. I think it's really short-sighted, in a game like ffxi, to say the vast majority of relics are bad when it's probably more like half.

By the way, while on this topic, most aeonics are pretty ***these days.
Staff: extremely niche to completely worthless.
Sword: worthless
Dagger: worthless
Great sword: very bad to totally pointless. Niche in perfect circumstances
Scythe: absolutely skippable and probably never wielded, if all options are available
Greataxe: OK, but easily skippable and can be replaced by about 7 other weapons.
Axe: totally useless
Bow: either an arrow distribution item, or totally worthless.
Gun: bullet distributor
Great katana: replaced by prime
Polearm: replaced by prime
Club: extremely niche or totally worthless.
H2H: probably the only true survivor of aeonics.
Katana: situationally very good, often eclipsed.
Shield: occupies the smallest niche of any Shield, except ochain
Instrument: the GOAT, why would anyone make any others or play any other jobs?

That train never stops if you want to go that route. Spharai has a use. I equip it and use it. Thus, it is useful.

The *** does this have to do with random questions

Pick one of the other thousand "lets argue about rema" threads

If this is an excuse for why a similar REMA weapon sucks, then the REMA weapon is still very useful.

So wait a minute. Earlier you said Relics like Kikoku and Yoichi occupy a use. But in this list you're showing weapons that are completely skippable, eclipsed, or replaced by prime. Why don't all of them have some niche use, based on your own definition and standard? Also, if the standard of a weapon is "replaced by prime", them why in your earlier Relic list you mentioned Apocalypse with the caveat "prime is a huge investment and competes with other options".

Trolling Grade: C+

Well, you might want to revise your 95% estimate then because:


It seems like the word useful isn't what you would apply to even half of relic weapons.

The keen observer will notice this sentence in my post:

primes do kinda necessitate their own evaluation, none of the others require access to a group spending months of time to complete. aeonics cannot be single boxed in entirety that I know of, but are commonly merced or grouped for and completed in a day. for that reason alone dismissing a weapon because the prime is better is troublesome.

It could also be argued that ignoring an entire category of weapons from the comparison because they're difficult to acquire could be troublesome but *shrug* i guess it depends how you want to approach evaluating REMA. If you're on a backwater server with no friends, should aeonics be excluded from your consideration? We'll ***, Kikoku is S-tier then.


Quoting my own post from yesterday is moving the goalposts? That's a very interesting opinion. I wonder why you think using the same words again is changing my view. Or is using math and the definitions of words moving goalposts now? I have no idea what you're talking about.

If given all the items in the game, you won't replace an annihilator with an Earp, or a yoichi with a Pinaka, or an Aegis with a Duban. You will absolutely replace a Doji with a Kusanagi and Trishula with Gae.