Matsui: "Don't Throw Away Your R/M/E Weapons Yet"

Lolwut? FFXI has always been a gear grind.

Literally always.

ask those people that are saying its becoming like WoW as if it wasnt a constant gear grind anyway.

A different kind of gear grind

What really pisses me off isn't just that my almace 90 that I worked hard on getting just got upstaged by AH gear with no WS attached, but my BLU that I use my almace with is going to become useless when weapon damage scales up and up, and spell damage can't keep up with it. Spell damage is determined by blue magic skill (which isn't going up), the base damage of the spells (which hasn't gone up and we haven't gotten any bigger spells), and stats (STR and the like which isn't going up either). No gear exists except a few shitty evoliths to boost the direct attack rating of blue magic spells. That's like most BLUs hate voidwatch, we're stuck setting 4 sets of elemental spells that are useless in terms of damage, and if you've got almace, you can spam CDC while casting the procs needed. But with these new weapons boosting damage for melee so much, BLU can't rely on their physical spells to keep up with the damage of heavier DDs (we are already useless in situations of high evasion, high level NMs). Remember kiting Kirin? BLU had to just sub /THF and spam cannonballs with Chain affinity and sneak attack JUST to be useful in killing the mob.

In summary, BLU is becoming useless when you've got two-handed great weapons that have over 200 damage become widespread, and physical spells don't receive a boost. Not only do BLU lose almace, they lose CDC, since you need almace to use CDC, and who wants to use a 90 almace when you've got a 100+ damage sword that can only spamt the shitty merit WS Requiescat with an attack penalty and MND mod. Who's going to want to do that? What am I going to do with my DEX gear that has no purpose if I get one of these stupid High damage weapons to even COMPETE with other people?

OK everyone knew your LV90 weapon was going to get outdated - stop acting surprised =[

The only way FFXI differs, is that getting a new piece of gear, didn't usually make another piece useless.

In WoW, and games that copy it (and there have been plenty who did xerox WoW), getting a new piece of gear usually means throwing away the piece you used before.

For the people that continued to play the game, it was a likable model. NIN getting SH didn't invalidate the effort they put into getting a haubergeon, af body +1, arhat's, etc.

Yes, that's precisely the difference between lateral and vertical, but the point is that people who play this game, and come back from other games to this game, liked the lateral gear grind.

Here we were walking slightly uphill all our lives and now we have to climb this ladder.

Yeah, but the specific quote we're referring to was "I don't want a gear treadmill," not "I don't want a different kind of gear treadmill." So yes, there was somebody making an argument that FFXI was not a gear grind before, but that it's becoming this way.

gear grind as in constantly on a more consistent basis out dating what we already have with better ***on a wide-scale.

imo SE figures the way to keep it's money-cow mmo alive, it will need to follow the ways of the most successful mmo around, WoW. imo the problem is ffxi wasnt designed for that, nor is that what the long time player base has been accustomed to.

so it's like the ffxi dev team is forcing this style on a game that wasnt designed for it. one of two things will happen, either it will succeed and they will make that money, or ppl will quit and a chunk of those people will go to 14, win win for SE.

And don't forget that 15/22 jobs that will inevitably be undesirable for any given rung on the ladder!

MNK SAM DRK WAR BRD SCH COR?

(no DNC and PUP for you!)

I'm lolDRG, lolSMN, and lolPUP, so I feel it. I FEEL IT. :(

gear grind != gear treadmill

Care to explain the difference? Not being a smart-***; I really wanna know.

We werent accustomed to getting max cap within the same week you unlocked the job, but now we are. Besides, maybe SE is listening to its playerbase now...and in usual SE fashion, they did it a bit too much.

It's a shame that Sabishii started the post they way they did, because most people stopped riding at "90".

This person makes a good, but known, point.

Didn't the use of physical spells die when CDC became available? Not sure how that point is relevant to this update.

BLU spells wont be able to touch the 10K WS's we'll be able to do at some point :<

That is, if SE hasnt already "fixed" them.

He's basically say BLU magic isn't (at least thus far stated by SE) gaining a similar boost to it's powerlevel as melee jobs will w/ a 200+ dmg weapon. Which does highlight yet another issue with just tossing a massive increase to melee weapons' base damage.

Edit: Unless you mean that gear grind = the time sink of obtaining gear, and gear treadmill = the need to constantly keep obtaining the better and better gear that outperforms what you're currently wearing. So if that's what you mean, FFXI was already both of those things anyway. They generally do it so that a lot of it overlaps with old gear, so it's not an absolute overhaul of every single piece you own. And it's mostly that way in this update too. All of the weapons got outdone in one fell swoop, yes, and they stick out like a sore thumb, but for all the other equipment slots, it's pretty standard fare (meaning, there's no way to create the optimal gear sets without using a combination of both new and old gear).

It's 90, it's irrelevant. Your BLU spells don't do near enough damage outside of abyssea regardless. Get 99 if you like BLU that much. BLU isn't competing with a DD job that's equally geared.

Gear grind - "I constantly have some reason to work for new gear"

Gear treadmill - "I need to grind out this gear in order to be able to grind out gear from this other event that will be already be replaced by the time I get to it"

This whole "content levels" thing is what has left people scratching their heads with some of the Neo-Salvage and Meebles gear etc

SE likely had the gear within the current "content level" set up like this

AF3 ----> Low and Mid VW and Lower Tier NNI ---> ( High VW (with NNI set slightly higher) ---> Provenance ) ---> Dropped Legion + Neo Einherjar ---> Hexed - 1

The bolded arrow was too hard for many players to cross so they had to do two things (Matsui has directly cited both of these as things he plans to do for adjusting content)

1) Adjust NNI directly by lowering the difficulty
2) Introducing intermediate content to help bridge the gap

They did (2) with a portion of Salvage 2 and Meebles

So while people are sitting here going eww that gear is GROSS what did they do just tack haste on it as a joke to see how many people would TP in it *** this ***I HATE SIDEGRADES -- what they were actually reacting negatively to were the addition of new rungs on the ladder -- passive adjustments to the difficulty of higher content by creating an intermediate level

I understand his complaint just saying that the addition of a high-damage sword doesn't change the fact that physical spell use has been unfavorable since BLU's sword damage became the job's main source of damage years ago. Would be cool if they re-scaled BLU spells so they're more useful in terms of damage, but mainly what I got from his post was that he doesn't want to use Resquiscat.

Well, yeah, there's a treadmill in this game as well, but it's structured differently. What they're aiming for is a lot more like WoW, and I left that game in part because the structure of its treadmill sucked.

Edit after finishing reading: And yes, I wouldn't call XI's gear grind a treadmill, really, I suppose. WoW is a treadmill because you never actually get anywhere. You're just getting up to par with the new tier of content. In XI, it was more about building sets for a variety of situations, etc., instead of just getting ready for the next tier of content.

Does that make any sense?

They shat on Skirmish - one of the advertised events - a month after release and turned it into some intermediate training wheels event

It's not like it was just some side event that they had around! It was advertised as a focus of the expansion and BOOM self-destruct everything you know is a lie there is delve and nothing but delve and you will delve into it and like it

There is one good thing for BLUs...you dont have to make a fire shamshir anymore :<

SRS
Can't say I'm going to miss this

Too lazy to quote your last two posts, Sylow, but I'll give you that. They make sense enough to me. I feel like Skirmish, though, was a way for them to give people weapons that will allow people without R/M/E 99 to be able to participate in Delve. Not that Skirmish weapons were intended to stick around and they just introduced Delve because "*** it." We don't really need another "R/M/E DDs only please" sort of situation; we create enough of those already, even for things where it's not even necessary.

Skirmish parts could stand to be a bit more common if that was their intent. The entire event just seems pointless now.

If that was their intent, Skirmish parts being incredibly rare sounds like true Matsui style, lol.