Dev Tracker - Discussion

All of these have a value but zero are 5m+ in value

A famous slightly altered quote, There's no such thing as bad gear, only bad prices of said gear.

OK so...I disagree but, these pieces are BiS for everything I listed. How do you put a value on the best piece you can use in a slot for a spell/JA/WS? I would argue that a piece of gear for 5m is a smash deal.

Sure, it's been (repeatedly) compared to Ody gear, how about we take a look at a different perspective?

5m is a hell of a lot cheaper than:
JSE+2 necks
Any REMA
All Su3+1 gear
Most Abjuration+1 gear
Anything you can "buy" from trove
Any Unity gear that requires Hides/Scales
Osash/epa ring
Tons of other crafted gear (Stikini, Moonlight stuff, etc)

So...yeah, I think it's pretty reasonable to get +3 AF gear, relative to what other endgame gear costs. Frankly, it's a pretty incredible deal.

Why shoud they have to sell their swarts to pay for upgrades to nearly decade old gear, instead of using them to upgrade weapons or fund more meaningful purchases? The gear shouldn't cost that much to upgrade in the first place.

Especially when we're talking about mostly super-situational stuff like Maletaru's overly bloated list. Certainly not gonna pick through all that item by item, but when I just glance through and see stuff like you saying it's really valuable and you're talking about THF Evisceration gear (zero of which is even BiS, for a niche WS), NIN Daken hands that nobody in their right mind should be using ever, BST AF body when the Relic body does the same thing better and cheaper... Yeah, great items dawg. You make your attempted point weaker by diluting your list with garbage.


Oh, that post where you say "I'm not against making it easier, but [list of reasons why any suggested change to make it easier is unacceptable to you]". Gotcha.

This is mostly outdated gear. It might become a lot more relevant if they bump it up to add augments or +4 versions or something. In that case, I think it would make sense to streamline the process of getting to the current level so maybe people can have a more enjoyable time participating in Limbus.

But nope, you're gonna have a reason to complain about every suggestion.


Oh my gosh, one of RNG's threefour 18% movement speed options (5 if you count ring) costs a lot less than a REMA. That must make them a bargain, actually!

Wow you guys are bored. Lots of patch stuff needing to be discussed.

OK, if you don't think it's good then don't make it. Then you don't need to spend the 5m. If you think it's good, then you spend the 5m on it.

How are you gonna complain that this gear is ***and then in the same breath complain that it's too expensive? If it's not good there's a pretty simple solution: don't make the gear. If it's good, which I think in many cases it is, then it's worth the TINY investment in your character.

In the grand scheme of things, you'll be spending billions of gil on your character to get a job or two geared up. Spending 6m on a best-in-slot piece of gear is not something to get your panties in a twist about.

I'm just making fun of you putting RNG feet on your long know-it-all list of SUPER VALUABLE ITEMS in your dismissive response ("what are you guys smoking?") to someone else who said AF3 is expensive relative to its value.

If its "nearly decades old gear" then it must be ***, so dont upgrade it.

I am really struggling to understand why age of a piece of gear is a factor here. If it's useful, it is useful.

Some older pieces of gear are "if only" useful, as in they have some really important stat (fast cast, high hp, sird...) but lack stuff like meva or dt that is ubiquitous today. But that's not always the case, and has little to do with age. Adamantite Armor is the most recent item we got, and is too an "if only" piece despite being super new.

Everything devalues as it ages. AF+3 cannot. It goes against the laws of economics.

It's not an appreciable asset. The longer it's out, the more common it is, the cheaper it gets. Square *** up the system and set the price as static in perpetuity.

New events should've started dropping the materials, to lower the price. But they can't because they broke the rules and made the items too valuable in synthesis.

You should only make a piece of JSE if it's useful. Price is totally irrelevant. I just bought the shards for RNG hands+3 and went to upgrade them, but because macuil platings are 700k/piece for the +3 and the piece itself is terrible to begin with,I refused to upgrade them. Didn't even think they were worth the 100k in shard fees, but the price of stingers and platings instantly made me say nope. Unless you're upgrading just for completions sake. Some JSE are so bad it's completely unreasonable to dump any money into it while others do offer something that could be "worthwhile". Ymmv.

I find myself in the unusual position of siding with Eiryl over MT. With the amount of other gear available now, AF+3 is a poor deal. There's no reason it should require the amount of gil-only NPC mats that it does in 2025. The macro argument is fine for players who are already maxed out and doing a new job, they aren't going to cry over a few million.

The consideration is different for a starting or returning player. When you can get a whole Nyame or Sakpata set for a fraction of the cost, counting the merc, it's hard to justify buying AF+3 to gain an extra second or two on an ability. Even the movement boots argument is weak; Fajin and Jute+1 are from easier content and much faster to get.

On the other hand, it's still not that big a deal for people who want it. I'd rather SE not waste their one monthly task on reworking the upgrade mats. But, if it were changed, I think it'd be perfectly justifiable.

So don't change the reequirements but just make all the mats more common to drive price down. Make the weekly kill give 2-3 items instead of 1.

To make Maletaru rage: All they have to do is change the value from 1 to 2 and it would be done.

I assume this was covered earlier, but NPC mats are the main part of the cost and it'd be a bad idea to reduce those. They're one of the biggest gil sinks in the game, and we need gil sinks to offset Odyssey. So, a good solution would likely involve changing the materials rather than making the existing ones more common.

In a perfect world where dev time was free, I'd just introduce a second set of materials that can be subbed in and have them drop from Odyssey NMs at any vengeance [maybe multiple at higher]. There'd be a trickle to market and if they had no uses other than upgrades they'd have to remain cheaper than the NPC options. But, again, don't think it's worth their time.

Have alternate requirements where people can use their scores of excess Ra'Kaznar Sapphires and Starstones for AF/Relic respectively, maybe. Takes more game progression to get to the point where that'd be an option.

AF+2/3 also already have the fast/cheap differences in bead costs, but maybe at this point making two tiers for fewer cards/same NPC mats and current cards/cheap or no mats could balance it too.

It all boils down to the same thing.

If you remove the mats, crafters (not me) lose something to craft for profit/skillups/whatever.

If you lower the mat cost, you explode the price of dozens of crafted items.

This is why I said it's difficult to come up with a solution, and pointed out these problems when these ideas were suggested earlier.

I don't have any skin in the game, IDGAF if they reduce this stuff from my personal perspective, I'm just pointing out the flaws in these galaxy-brained ideas.

Then just dont upgrade the piece? If its so bad and so useless, just dont spend the 6 mil on it.

A brand new player who just finished RoV cant upgrade anything to +3 even if they bought their gil. Depending what piece it is, its still gonna be two weeks minimum of Omen (unless its Omen Card campaign) to get the cards needed to upgrade the item.

It would be nice to have the gear as a stepping stone option, since Omen is highly soloable. When it costs enough that you could buy your way to the top of the ladder, it can't serve as that. I don't think it's the biggest problem facing FFXI today. It's just priced a little high for what it is.

Did you read the post where I laid out how someone will actually make gil farming their cards needed to upgrade their "stepping stone" armor?

Farming the cards they need (a step they can not avoid, they can not expedite on their own accord) should result in a net gain of gil. You can not speed the card farming process up, other than Omen Card campaigns, which is at SE's discretion.

You just said a handful of posts ago that the high cost of the materials is a necessary evil to remove gil from the economy, so that has to stay. Your suggestion was "introduce new items that are farmable", however those "new items" will remove needing to go through the necessary evil that removes gil from the economy.

Additionally, you provided this argument:
You could stop at the +2 version?

Has anyone in the history of this game ever permanently stopped at an upgrade path—especially one provided by an NPC?

Saying "just don't do it" isn't a valid argument. The real issue here is that SE has limited development resources, leaving us with no real choice but to go along with it... or simply accept it and move on.

You either adapt—or face the reality that your time in the game is running out.

Have you kept up with this convo at all, or did you just jump in offended at the concept of "just stop at +2"? A broke new player who doesnt have 5 million gil to spare for a paltry 1-2 extra seconds on their buff or a paltry 1 STR isnt doing anything for them. Theres no content they're doing where them being in AF 119+2 will lead to failure but being in AF 119+3 will lead to success. At that point of their characters stage (this is a very important point), that gil can be better invested elsewhere.

Anyways, to answer your question, my Nirvana's stopped at the first 119 upgrade. Upgrading to 119 III at the low low cost of 56 million gil worth of Beitetsu would give zero gain to my Nirvana how its used. I would then need to drop another 51 million gil in Swarts to give my avatar 30 accuracy. I can assure you, nothing I do with my chars on SMN would benefit from an extra 30 accuracy. So theres one person.

"Established FFXI players are quitting in droves because the new players cant afford their AF 119+3 upgrade on day one."

*** lmao.

Not sure how lowering the cost of the inputs explodes the cost of the outputs (do you mean the profits?) since we have a competitive world unless only 1 person is making them on the server, the cost will come down, and if someone checks AH history and sees player X making tons of gil by being the only supplier of an item smart bet is others will level the craft (and then prices will come down), but its still limited anyways because people need to farm cards and want the item. (and yes some of the mats go into other stuff but also those markets have limits)

If SE thinks X% of the player base should have AF+3 and we're below that the solution is simple: lower the requirements to get it. It does not have to be done all at once, drop the price of the NPC by 10% add the item with a .1% drop to some existing content. See how that affects things (likely go from ~6M/piece to ~5M/piece, not sure that is reflective of the value so maybe not change much) But this was implemented before limits were placed on NPCing Sparks stuff. Does gil need to come out of the economy? absolutely. Making items that are prohibitively expensive relative to their value probably isn't the best way to achieve that aim. Its conceivable significantly lowering the price could put more out of the economy because more people will do it (of course in this scenario maybe you just lower the npc price and make it the sole source)

Of course if the reverse is true (SE thinks too many people have +3) then they should rightly change nothing.

My argument is simply that most of these pieces are simply not worth the cost (let alone other effort) to get them. Of course there's always a balance of creating content that stops getting done because because its too easy and everyone blows through it quickly to get what they want and content that simply creates more trouble than its worth.

Unfortunately when SE makes adjustments (boons or nerfs) they seem to very rarely do so subtlety, in the game where numbers are everything tweaking them slightly every couple months and monitoring the results doesn't seem so hard.

Like gobbie box?


I just went to look at prices for these items on the AH. Why the *** is Cyan Coral selling for 1.5 million gil on Bahamut's AH???

one schmuck spends every day price fixing all of the guild materials and hopefully making 300k profit here and there. you can almost always buy any of them for 1.2m but enough sales and he'll reset the history again. gotta be automated, he's very thorough.

What? No. More like: "Established players will have no one to play with if everyone sets arbitrary limits on the gear they choose to upgrade."

You play on Asura where ML50 and R30 Nyame is a requirement to join a segrun PuG goin on about arbitrary gear limits for a 2-6 week old character, sit down.

The first thing they need to do, is stop with the ilevel 109 first stage of this gear. That is one of the dumbest things I've seen in a video game.

You should never reward people who do work with significantly worse gear than the sparks gear they have on, it's a straight up new player trap. Make it 119 at the first stage. New players will make this gear and then try to do something and get destroyed, without knowing why.

Progression is currently "Broken" or non-linear or "some form of a zigzag. I think that Limbus may be more side grades or middle-gear to help bridge the gap you're describe. Like it or not, SE's gotta keep the FFXI hedonic treadmill running indefinitely, for both established players and new characters alike.

If SE makes AF1+3 easier to obtain or lowers the total cost of ownership, it'll be because you need the +2 or +3 AF to make +4. This helps newbies catch up, and increases the co-mingl of players.

Maybe SE should rotate Sheol A, B, C as a kind of Bonus Zone, for earning segments. The lower levels of A and B might help newer players get acclimated. But yes, I can see some smooth brain folks, insistant that they earn maximum segs (R30, etc) even in this situation. :|

Argument “AF+3 is too expensive compared to better alternatives”
Rebuttal “So dont make it and go for the cheaper better stuff”
Argument “but players need it as a bridge”
Rebuttal “so go to the cheaper +2 at 1/6th the cost as the bridge”
Argument “no they need +3 or bust, no ones gonna stop at +2”
Rebuttal “then make the +3 if its so good and necessary”
Argument “they cant because” >>go back to step 1

Pretty sure gobbie box is much less than that, that would means there's 1000 items (with even distribution) that can come from gobbiebox. if it can come from gobbiebox its probably < .01% which means maybe 1 every 10 days per server shows up? (assuming 1k people do gobbie box every day, and I'd guess its much less than this but I have no idea).

Not sure how often people do Omen bosses or HTB, guessing a couple hundred per day (I could be way off, I really have no clue here) so a rate of .1% there upto 1% might put 1-dozen of a given item extra on the server depending on the exact rate, which would drive the price down a bit, but I'd suspect not hugely.

I'm sure there's a small % of the player base that spams certain events and a much larger one that does them rarely to not at all. So i'm making wild guesses, without much basis in anything beyond spidey sense.