Rant About Current End Game - ADL and Voidwatch = Old FFXI, No Thanks

[Kiyara]

Just been rather upset with certain updates the game has been presenting itself lately. Firstly was the introduction to Voidwatch. Great concept when you see it on paper. Then I experienced it in action and was like "ummm wtf". Felt like we were going back to hardcore ffxi status again in which you needed 18 people to do any end game content.

Voidwatch feels like a revised hardcore Abyssea. The atmacites are total jokes even at full power and having 3 fully equipped atmacites maybe make you 5-10% stronger at most. Drops being in the 5% or less area yet again back to the old school methods. I'm sure people wanna do 50-100 Pils just to MAYBE get 1 Toci's Harness...

Combined with having drops be totally chest dependent like Walk of Echoes (another good system but still fails in the long run, needs work). Abyssea was a great system that truely rewarded the player for their time and effort and you seemed to have stripped that from Voidwatch. The missions of voidwatch give you absolutely no reward whatsoever. Hell in Abyssea, doing the missions at least gave you unique atmas and other little things to benefit you. All the time I spent in Abyssea, I was rewarded for my time and it showed through all the work I did.

Also another element that was brought back in end game old school ffxi was the job biased tier system. So many jobs are completely useless in Voidwatch that you purposely have to use broken/effective jobs to beat any of the hard NMs. Being a career thf with a Mandau, I get sick and tired of people turning me down with the typical "lolthf no thanks, you got sam,drk,war,mnk job?" comment. People only want pld, whm, rdm, blm, brd, war, mnk, drk, sam, rng, smn and cor for their VW parties. Other jobs such as thf, drg, pup, bst, etc have nothing to bring to the table and are considered useless in voidwatch.

Then there's the trial for relic weapons for Lv 99 and Lv 99 Aura. The fact that Arch Dynamis Lord, being a tough SOB as he is and that only the top maybe 10% players in the game can actually beat him (don't kid yourself that a pick up group can beat this, definitely ain't happening). And the fact that in comparison to all the other trials, this trial is the more difficult than all the other trial progressions put together. I thought relic people were punished enough by scavenging 17000 single ancient currency to make the Lv 75 version on top of killing annoying NMs for the items.

Sadly I will never complete my 99 trial Mandau due to this stupid trial being overly hard and not possible when SE stated that "the majority of players can do this trial" which is a total lie. Maybe if the NM was just kill 5 ADLs then maybe, but needing 5 items that cost 20-40 mil each, no one is going to help you get those 5 for free. You can't force teamwork where you gain something and everyone else gains nothing from it. Maybe your friends will help you because they want to but 17 other random joe blows are definitely not going to help you.

Granted the Mythic weapon users with the insane trials in general from start to end is tough and the final trial is easy and the Empyreal weapon users final 2 trials which are totally stupid and overly expensive/unrealistic (seriously 1500 plates, what were you thinking?), those legendary weapons are punished just as bad. These weapons get punished unnecessarily one way or another on the course of the journey of completion.

End game should be more like abyssea where players are rewarded for their time and effort. Difficulty is one thing but putting in stupid factors like 1% drop rates, needing way too many people to beat something, and only certain jobs are acceptable to use in end game, then you have a completely different problem of bad game design.

I love this game so much but it seems that the creator/director wants to punish us more by throwing us back into the hardcore/no life/biased/elitist bandwagon to get anything we want done. Sorry but this isn't right.

[Natenn]

It all started with the decimation of HNM, people will constantly cry about others cheating regardless of if they have proof or not. So to "cure" the problem of botting, land king HNM were turned into pop items with abysmal drop rates effectively ruining it for everyone since its now way harder to get anything from them. Everything SE has added is grinding based content with atma/temp items so even the noobiest of players can kill the "end game" content, why? Because SE won't just give out and easy way to obtain things, original kings were designed to keep the flow of rare/sought after items low so that not everyone had them and the ppl who did have them felt good about it, to achieve that goal was reward in itself. Now since most servers had bitters monopolising claims SE had to rethink the system but maintain the idea of a limited flow of ghe good items. So we got kings in the form of pop items and we all know how fun they are now.

[Natenn]

VWNM also fed off this idea, don't make drops easy, don't make fights easy. Original HNM (21-24 48-72 etc) were not hard but lots of times they seemed that way due to the stress of worrying, about ig your gonna claim, if something goes wrong we'll wipe and lose claim to another PT, will we have enough ppl to kill it when it pops, will someone try to MPK us? things like that had ppl stressed out since claiming was rare and if you lost claim due to it going white or some one didn't do something right and you wiped it might be days/weeks before you got he chance to fight it again.

With VWNM all that stress from previous HNM was negated since you don't have to worry about claiming/When its gonna pop/if your gonna have enough/having claim taken by another LS. All that was left was worrying about the drop you wanted, so what happened next? SE gave most the VWNM 1 shot capabilities, high HP, debilitating AoEs, things of that sort that even the good players were'nt able to farm the NM effectivly.

[Natenn]

This is what refer to as luck based content; content that despite the calibur of skill/gear you have everyone bad/good has same chance to kill it since theres only one way to kill it = rely on staggers/atma/temp items or fail. Botulus Rex is a prime example, that thing has to be stagger locked most of the fight since all of its attacks are extremely nasty and will kill you in seconds, so even if you have the best gear/equip possible you will still get wrecked by NM if its not staggered most the time. ADL is another example, the only defensive against that thing is Perfect defense, no one can survive those AoEs at a lower % from all them clones going off at once. They need to give us the 20-40m fights like it use to be, i miss 30-45m Tiamats, 15-25m DI, 10-20m Cerb/khim. Now every fight has to end fast or AoE will kill you or get hit by death/charm and kill all your mages.

[MarkovChain]

You forgot to add that the hnm you were hunting had garbage drops and only idiots would go after them in the first place, hence why it took you so long to kill them.

[Natenn]

300M+ bank a month from SW/DI/Tia says you have no idea what you're talking about, sound mad like you couldn't claim.

[MarkovChain]

lolz, Mr Noob killing mobs with retarded drops bragging about their 300M split between 30 players. Priceless. 1 scorpion harness for every member !

[Lemoncloak]

So you start with this:

It all started with the decimation of HNM, people will constantly cry about others cheating regardless of if they have proof or not. So to "cure" the problem of botting, land king HNM were turned into pop items with abysmal drop rates effectively ruining it for everyone since its now way harder to get anything from them.

What did you describe this system as other than the "good-ole-days?" When I remember hnm camping.... gee I thought it was kind of:


LUCK BASED CONTENT

because.... it's ENTIRELY depended upon who was "lucky" and claimed the mob.


tl;dr? Claiming is still considered luck based unless you want to admit to 3rd party program use on the official ffxi forums.....

Are you certain you're not just unhappy that there's no 3rd party program that will put your shiny in your VW box and not mine?

[Natenn]

Claiming was luck based, not wiping took skill.

[Natenn]

lolz, Mr Noob killing mobs with retarded drops bragging about their 300M split between 30 players. Priceless. 1 scorpion harness for every member !

You're the only noob i see here, you clearly have no idea what you were talking about. We had a Maximum of maby 30 back then, usualy half that around the clock, $ was ditributed by attendance to everything we did. showing up to camp/scan/at the kill, hours spent farming sea, ect. Basically the LS did everything together. At the end of the month all the points were given a value based on bank which was usually at least 300M to 500M, the most casual of members made like 2-5M, id be pulling in 10-20M, if you think thats garbage for back then you are an idiot. Like i said before, people know who i am, who are you? a big mouth who brags about getting lucky on ADL, turns around and bashes others for braging. Pot calling the kettle black.

ANYWAY, sadly legion looks like more zerg content zzzz