Niche FFXI Tips, Tricks And Other Oddities...

but only if you open facing south on full moon, right?

Since Snatch Morsel is also Fire-based, Barfire/Barfira also helps more if you have a WHM or RDM/WHM or SCH/ with rdm or whm sub

It's North during New Moon, everyone knows that.

What I "discovered" approx. 2 years ago:

Chiggoes aggro differently, and can be completely avoided. To that end, Deodorize has utility. I believe it is known that despite how a mob aggroes, it tracks by scent. But given the time it takes to get out of normal aggro range and cast Deodorize, the spell doesn't find much utility. I found out by accident that the chiggoes in Caedarva Mire, specifically, aggro scent (they are not true site/true sound). Finding this out, I now cast Deo., Sneak, and Invis. whenever I'm in a chiggo area.

Deodorize doesn't do anything preemptively, just need sneak and invisible for chigoes.

You can steal HTBF shinryus "Mighty Guard" buff with voracious trunk. It's just a mediocure regain effect that lasts like 50 seconds at best though.
Osmosis and larceny probably work too and I assume it also works vs chaos.

Can also Steal Odin's attack buff he gains from Yggr but it's a pain to get it off between all the intimidations, has very short duration and I'm not sure if it's not overwritten by nature's meditation, maybe more interesting for SMN and deconstruction so the whole party benefits.

Did you ever notice you don't have acess to all game terms and items in the translate <TAB>.
If you want to have for example: Morgelai in translate, you need to go to AH and point out the item in the list of weapon or if you got one on you, have to open your item menu and scroll to it.

Next, type /party or /say then directly use <TAB>, it will open the translate menu then go down, i think its last choice "Item", open the item menu translate and scroll into it.

Close the translate menu and try typing Morge<TAB>, should be Morgelai in translate avaible now.

You can also temporarily add it to your auto-translate dictionary using via text commands using (e.g.):
`/translate "Beryllium Mace" ee`
(where e=english. j/d/f probably work for other languages)
Then it'll be in the tab auto-translate menu, even though it won't auto-complete from something half-typed. Open with tab and scroll up from the bottom to get to the list of items, sorted alphabetically

the dictionaries for german and french were removed as far as I know, when they ended support for the game in those languages.

For Empy VNM outside abyssea, having a friend or second char with a Colorful Abyssite pop and warp before the mob is killed guarantees the KI will never upgrade.

Friends don't make friends re-farm colorfuls.

Three niche/confusing things that can throw off new players.

If you ever want to grab a single mob amongst a group of them and aggroing one would cause the others to link, just use an avatar. If you send the avatar in, the linking mobs will attack the avatar instead. Then, if you move far enough away and retreat the avatar to you, as soon as you unsummon the avatar, the other mobs will lose aggro and you'll only get the single mob you initially attacked. This is a bit tricky though, because if you just unsummon or the avatar dies without the initial pull back first, the other mobs will then link on the original mob and all come after you.

Avatar's Favor is weird. If you are aiming for the lowest amount of BP delay, you'd think that would mean that you need the highest favor tier on all the time. This isn't the case, because avatar's favor ticks up even if you don't have the SMN skill currently equipt to get the benefit, meaning that if you switch to the required skill level directly before BPing, the favor level will snap to that level if enough time has passed and you will get all the benefits of the higher favor tier without having to idle in it.

Speaking of idling, Avatar's Favor has another oddity. Any summoner will know that perp cost is important to keep as low as possible, and Avatar's Favor adds an extra 25% floored on top of whatever perp cost you already have. However, this occurs AFTER subtracting your existing -perp gear. If you have on enough enough -perp gear that you are already at or below 4, Avatar's Favor is free and has no downsides. So always have Avatar's Favor up, it's free buffs.

There is also a hate losing mechanic that's been mentioned befor on the forums but I think it fits here.
If you draw any kind of aggro (sight/sound/blood) from more than 1 mob and you happen to have the trust tank Valaineral out you can engage one and Val will do a AoE WS pretty much instantly and grab hate of the adds.

That way you only have have to finish that one mob you've engaged on and the rest of the adds will lose aggro as soon as Valaineral dies. Please keep in mind to not do any AoE healing or buffs targeting trusts while doing this as any spells or abilities that directly benefit trusts that are on the mobs hate list will also add you permanently on that list.
For that reason adds sometimes don't go idle immediately after Val dies because other trusts cured and buffed him so the adds will also hunt those trusts down till they die.

You can also type "/retr all" without the " to make all trusts disappear and mobs loosing hate.


I found this particularly usefull in odyssey when accidentally drawing aggro from one of the halo beastmen. Simply pull a bit away and engage a regular mob, just make sure beastmen are close enough so all get hit since casters like to keep their distance. Vals AoE will also "Tag" the halo mobs and lose interest once Val disappears so you can warp to next floor without having to destroy the halo and risking extra adds.

A neat trick you can do on PUP is removing yourself completely from the hate list, for example if your trusts dies you can do this to try and get them up again.

Basically if you deactivate your automaton, resummon it and not letting it get any hate, Ventriloquy, all your hate is now on the automaton and you in turn have 0 hate since it has not been registered on the hate list yet. And thus you have no hate and you can summon trusts again. This of course is per mob, so not viable on a group. Some fights also passively gets you on the hate list for existing which it won't work on.

From what I understand this is different than BSTs Snarl, which will transfer 99% hate and not a true swap.

Also before when maneuvers had an animation you could time to change gear to blink to cancel it. It was kinda necessary or else you spent so much time animation locked.

Yup, pressing tab in the chat window actually stores the last 200 items you've looked at.
(I also use the /translate command to add an item to this list, but as you said AH lookup works too)

Party pooper post:

I would assume the unity warp thing is probably intentional and not a bug.

I thought the smallest increment of time you can put into macros is 1 second?

You can put as small of an amount as you want, but anything <1 second will still only be processed every 1 second.

FWIW I've never gotten this trick to work when playing vanilla, with macros, with *, or any other method. It's either an addon/Ja0Wait thing, I've been really unlucky, or I'm missing some essential skill.

Either way though, VWNM are not a big deal. The trick about using someone else's colorless is the only one you need to know for anything outside Abyssea and the ones in abyssea spawn so slowly that you have plenty of time to farm a new KI between spawns. This just lets you AFK (or do some other abyssea activity) between pops.

When Lustress chest farming on THF in Sheols, you can make this macro to speed up your lock picking:

/item “Living Key” <t>
/item “Living Key” <t>
/item “Living Key” <t>
/item “Living Key” <t>
/item “Living Key” <t>
/item “Living Key” <t>

You can replace Living Key with whatever else you’re using. You will forcefully trade 6 keys to the chest instantly (unless a mimic spawns or you open it). This method requires less macro presses and you can open chests faster. Is not an addon feature; vanilla players can use this just the same.

This is an old one.

But you can force something similar to JA0Wait in vanilla, by gear swapping during an ability/spell/ws. This will let you move when you "blink"

It was pretty useful for kiting or weapon-skilling kited monsters back in the day.

The abyssea thing, sure, probably punishable. The unity warp, 100% intentional just uncommon knowledge (to me, at least).

Waits <1 second are a Windower thing. If using Windower it works fine, no addons needed. Although not for EVERYTHING mind you, because server ticks are 1/3 of a second I believe so some things can only happen that fast.

If you are bound, you can change gear to blink and you can move in the moment you blinked, helpful if trying to avoid a nasty AOE you are just in range for or just out of range for hitting.

Also, if you were hit by gravity you can lock onto a target and run side to side at full speed, this can help you run away or get back to the mob quicker.

I would assume everyone knows those, but you never know.

That's awesome. Is there no forced delay when trading keys there, or are you just bypassing the delay by doing them all at once?

This hasn't been my experience. If I put /ma haste <me> <wait .1> then and /equipset on the next line, it won't equip for a full second, with windower and no addons

Trading items in ffxi is an instant action (/item), unlike job abilities. Because of the way macros work, it reads each line one at a time, but because there’s no wait, it runs every line instantly. What you get is six instant trades to the chest off of one macro press. If any of those individual trades produce a result (either chest open or mimic), it just ends the macro (since there’s no more chest to use a key on). Good for opening chests between packs of monsters as quickly as possible.

The macro is also very useful for farming empyrean weapons. When you are on particular pop set, can just make a macro to trade the items. Only the right one will work and the others will just fail.

For Helm of Briareus, the 3 sub NMs can be pop with the following commands. Just put them on a macro and run around.
/item "Trophy Shield" <t>
/item "Oversized Sock" <t>
/item "Massive Armband" <t>

I wanted to go test the /wait discussion from earlier, it seems I'm not totally crazy. Here are my results, and the macro I used to try to test it. Anyone LMK if I made some mistake, but I'm fairly certain this shows that waits under 1 second take a full second.

You are right, ingame waits lower than 1s get rounded to 1s. I suspect all fractional values get rounded to full-second values, but I'm not sure.

People are conflating windower's own //wait commmand, that lets you do stuff like //somecommand;wait 1;someothercommand, with the game's own wait. Windower's wait, to use in aliases and binds and scripts, does indeed support fractional values down to the millisecond. Game's own wait command and pronoun, does not.