Level 99 Relic, Mythic, Empyrean, and WoE Weapons

[FenrirCandlejack]

The problem is that there's only so far that this can go. At some point, the monsters have to have more hit points, more defense, hit harder, etc., otherwise, you end up with content that's nothing more than sidegrades, which describes XI pre-Abyssea.

When Abyssea started, the game started to be progressive again, with stronger gear, stronger players, and consequently stronger enemies. Seekers of Adoulin is just a step above this. If this is going to be a progressive, old gear will, eventually have to be obsolete, including RMECs. It's an age old problem that just about all MMO's face. Purple and orange gear that raiders farmed for months on end get replaced by blues and greens when a new expansion comes out.

Most of the player base acting like spoiled brats doesn't help much, and simply raising the damage on the RMECs only kicks the can down the road a little.

If you have any good ideas, I'm sure the dev team is all ears, because this problem is as old as MMO's themselves.

I can see the Relic weapons being obsolete with as long as they've been around, the Mythics too, potentially. But the Empyreans haven't even been out more than three years. That being said, your suggestion is good up to a point, and that point is claiming emps should be worthless before year 4 of their content lifecycle. If anything, Matsui's team should look into increasing the damage on the Empies if nothing else. Yet knowing Matsui and his team, they won't. Instead, they'll go on completely alienating their paying customers and you'll probably see FFXI dead before the end of June.

[Hoofy]

If SE wants to drop 250mil+ in my dbox for the two years of blood, sweat and tears of making my relic back when it was actually an accomplishment, along with every other relic holders dbox (for theirs), I'm sure we all just might consider the possibility of being outdone by new content. Giving SE the benefit of the doubt, I will say they had no idea when this game started it would still be going on as strong as it is today. But that does not change the fact RME were intended to be the best of the best, and they should stay that way.

[Vold]

That's the reason you make RME in the first place. Now, why is it a problem when SE offers these weapons to everyone else too?

The root problem to this is the steep requirement to aquire RME. People spend too much time, even years to work on these weapons. It is understandable for them to rage when all their efforts were in vain. I feel sorry for those who just completed their RME. However, the idea of some specials weapons stay on top year after year, expansion after expansion, from the start to then end of game's life is silly.

It's a problem because I spent 200 million gil on my 99 mandau and a lot of time getting it to boot. And I spent that on mandau, and never really thought about mercy stroke except that I knew it was good. I just wanted mandau. Twashtar looked like crap, Vajra was out of the question, so I wanted a Mandau. Did joe blow spend time getting a mandau? No he didn't. Why should he suddenly get a superior weapon with a fraction of the effort? Thanks for showing up, here's a super weapon! Kind of like how emps went down except SE corrected those by introducing insane 95-100 requirements, but they still don't carry any real lore or quests behind them. They were fricking magian weapons.

Also, yes I expect these weapons to stay on top year after year because IT IS LORE. They are there to be the very best weapons obtained through a quest, used by legendary warriors of Vana'diels past. Yes you read right, the game has lore. Imagine that for a MMORPG.

So I have to ask, at what point in the past 10 years have we ever indicated that we might be okay with easy to obtain super weapons to replace our insane RME99 weapon requirements? I'm just wondering I would be very happy to have an answer on that question FYI just let me know soon. Is the current FFXI team all rookies to the FFXI brand? Are they even aware of the purpose of relics and mythics? The lore behind them? What it takes to get them? Do they care? Was there not a single soul there that could have said, um boss, I been working here for ten years, and those RMEs are alittle too complicated to be replacing them. The players won't like this...

WHY CAN'T WE JUST GET A MASSIVE BOOST TO BASE DAMAGE ON RME!??? I don't understand why this is so hard for the SE FFXI dev team to stomach. What is so hard about it? You improve the base damage and call it a day. Why must you go and decide to try to make the weaponskills a quested ordeal when simply adjusting the base damage would be infinitely easier.

You know, I'm not against new weapons being #1. I am not against the idea of that whatsoever, ever. But new bestest weapons ever better take more effort than RMEs, and are of equal value meaning stories behind them and aftermaths and all that good stuff, and not be casual quickie weapons that exist just so the casual gamer can help defeat delve. That's just crazy.

I can't stress it enough. I'm fine with newer weapons being better than older weapons as long as they are meaningful to obtain. But these new weapons, I can only associate them with one image that comes to mind, and it's the image of a middle finger. I was pretty sure what they were doing with all this, typical move to make us want to spend time farming new stuff, then going back to adjust things so they don't piss people off into quitting but wow, I missed the mark on this one by a mile. I was close but I never would have imagined they would be so against the idea of simply increasing stats. I just don't understand why it's so unacceptable to jump mandau up to 100 base damage, but creating a new easy to obtain weapon with 100 damage is okay. Just give the new weapon a relic WS and it makes everything okay. What?

I hate to say it, but I think the devs have given up on Final Fantasy. They're choosing the EQ/WoW route because it's easier on their small work force/limited PS2 MMO. That's not so bad until you replace RMEs with weapons from the local Weapons R Us store.



Also, Keyln, there is no law that states that the current status quo of weapons can't be used until the end of time. You are presuming that weapons must progress, too. That is simply not the case. FFXI alone proved this for 7 years at a 75 cap. It is a choice by a developer, nothing more. Harder hitting NMs can always be countered with correct gear progression in hit points and magic points/mana/whatever. To go beyond that is overthinking and overdoing things. Kings and Gods had high defense. No one on the older FFXI teams felt compelled to progress weapons just to defeat sky gods. You are excusing the decision at best because you forget or don't know just what made FFXI different from the EQ recipe of end game. And like I said I'm okay with moving away from SE's recipe, but not at the cost of saying goodbye to elements of the game that made FFXI what it is. I may as well play EQ or a clone if I'm to do that style of gameplay. EQ wrote the book on it. I'm better off there than in a game going through a mid life identity crisis.

BTW FFXI suffers greatly with players who just want to zerg everything and not return to the standard end game style of MMORPGS which is having a main tank around.

They made a bad decision here. Plain and simple. If they rather depend on super weapons to conquer end game and not super armor because somehow super armor would bring a disturbance to the force while super weapons won't, so be it. But players will never be able to enjoy FFXI for as long as they are so easily killed because their HP progression is shit compared to everything else. God forbid Galkas running around zilart areas of the game with 5k base HP. That would REALLY ruin the game, let me tell you.

I understand the problem here. You need to deliver new content. You've done the whole sidegrade thing to death. You don't want to make low level stuff and former 75 content even more trivial. But it's either that or more event based stuff that you've already done to death where temp items and buffs come into play. Older content being made trivial is part of MMO life. FFXI has evaded that fate but there comes a time when you run out of sidegrades for your end game activities. It's time they let us be powerful to the common EP monster folk of Vana'diel. But I don't know if I can stomach wasting 200 million gil on essentially a weapon skill that's only useful when stacked with sneak attack. That irks the hell out of me.

[Falseliberty]

the tears.... the tears everywhere! bring back tanaka! I need my NMs that are botted and cheese sandwiches back!

aww man this is awesome! I can't wait to do SA rudra storm with 100 base damage dagger fawking epic, to hell with a the haters!
But on a real note, isn't it golden week or some nonsense? people over reacting and should wait a few till they get back into the offices

[Kit_Katz]

Mr. Matsui I am sorry to inform you that the idea you have put forth is horrible. There are a great many people who will never be able to get their RMEC weapons to 99 due to prohibitive cost in addition to the already steep price tag on the base weapon. By simply allowing the weaponskill to be used by newly released weapons you are not preserving value or our hard work, you are insulting it and making the RMEC that we worked so hard for useless (especially if a player is unable to get their weapon to 99). The only acceptable, and frankly quite simple solution would be to raise the base DMG values/stat enhancements of RMEC weapons to be as good as new content.

RMEC weapons are the equivalent of "epic quests" that take months to complete, by making not only dropped weapons but crafted weapons far surpass the game's only epic quest weapons you are just spitting in players eyes. I don't have a 99RMEC, nor will I ever have one (especially now, lol), but I am competent enough to see how making them obsolete is a very undesirable choice.

[Keyln]

Also, yes I expect these weapons to stay on top year after year because IT IS LORE. They are there to be the very best weapons obtained through a quest, used by legendary warriors of Vana'diels past. Yes you read right, the game has lore. Imagine that for a MMORPG.

Lore can change. Design ideas can change. A MMORPG is all about change. Because something can't happen because it's "lore" doesn't mean it won't. (Triple Negative Score Ho!)

Also, Keyln, there is no law that states that the current status quo of weapons can't be used until the end of time. You are presuming that weapons must progress, too. That is simply not the case. FFXI alone proved this for 7 years at a 75 cap. It is a choice by a developer, nothing more. Harder hitting NMs can always be countered with correct gear progression in hit points and magic points/mana/whatever. To go beyond that is overthinking and overdoing things. Kings and Gods had high defense. No one on the older FFXI teams felt compelled to progress weapons just to defeat sky gods. You are excusing the decision at best because you forget or don't know just what made FFXI different from the EQ recipe of end game. And like I said I'm okay with moving away from SE's recipe, but not at the cost of saying goodbye to elements of the game that made FFXI what it is. I may as well play EQ or a clone if I'm to do that style of gameplay. EQ wrote the book on it. I'm better off there than in a game going through a mid life identity crisis.

Should I point out that this game is more or less an Everquest Clone with the Final Fantasy skin pasted on and the ability to change jobs added in?

Should I also point out that the Sky Gods came with the Rise of Zilart expansion, which was one of the few times in FFXI there was vertical progression? Since then, it's been sidegrades and stagnation, especially between Treasures of Aht Urghan and Abyssea. We've seen vertical progression now with more powerful things since Abyssea, and Seekers of Adoulin is a part of that.

They made a bad decision here. Plain and simple. If they rather depend on super weapons to conquer end game and not super armor because somehow super armor would bring a disturbance to the force while super weapons won't, so be it. But players will never be able to enjoy FFXI for as long as they are so easily killed because their HP progression is shit compared to everything else.[B] God forbid Galkas running around zilart areas of the game with 5k base HP. That would REALLY ruin the game, let me tell you.

It isn't just about enemies that hit harder. It's also about enemies that need have more HP and more defense. Otherwise, how would a DD be challenged? I do agree that more armor and more HP is important, but so is more damage and more attack. Good progression needs both.

I understand the problem here. You need to deliver new content. You've done the whole sidegrade thing to death. You don't want to make low level stuff and former 75 content even more trivial. But it's either that or more event based stuff that you've already done to death where temp items and buffs come into play. Older content being made trivial is part of MMO life. FFXI has evaded that fate but there comes a time when you run out of sidegrades for your end game activities. It's time they let us be powerful to the common EP monster folk of Vana'diel. But I don't know if I can stomach wasting 200 million gil on essentially a weapon skill that's only useful when stacked with sneak attack. That irks the hell out of me.

And that's something that just about every MMO player on every living MMO that's expanded has said. I've heard these complaints before, about how people who spent months going through the same raid over and over again to get at that time the best armor and weapons in the game, only to be replaced by more common gear with better stats. While I can understand the sentiment, but it's a fact of almost all MMO's, and the sooner you learn to accept it, the better.

I can see the Relic weapons being obsolete with as long as they've been around, the Mythics too, potentially. But the Empyreans haven't even been out more than three years. That being said, your suggestion is good up to a point, and that point is claiming emps should be worthless before year 4 of their content lifecycle. If anything, Matsui's team should look into increasing the damage on the Empies if nothing else. Yet knowing Matsui and his team, they won't. Instead, they'll go on completely alienating their paying customers and you'll probably see FFXI dead before the end of June.

First, just upping the damage of the RMEC weapons isn't going to help things. All that does is kick the can down the road, and we'll be hearing the same thing a year or two down the line when they come up with even stronger weapons.

Second, people have been predicting the death of FFXI for YEARS for a variety of reasons. I fail to see what makes this so different.

[Landsoul]

A new WS would not make up for the twice as much damage compared to these new weapons. At best they might even the odds, but R/E/M lack the high weapon damage. If the dev team doesn't come with anything good of "fixing" R/E/M 99 I would unsubsribe permanently.

[Fermion]

This is what I think of the whole situation. I believe Matsui had no choice.

First and foremost, Matsui is a businessman. His primary function is to make as much money as possible for the shareholders. That being said, once the "pick-up" or casual paradigm switched to the R/E/M only mentality, those weapons were doomed. 99 R/E/M's are a tiny percentage of the total population. It may seem otherwise, but that's just do to continuous emotional posts (a lot by the same small group of people). Also, a simple understanding of economics and drop rates will make it glaringly obvious that 99 R/E/M's will be the minority for years and years to come, without astounding drop rate changes. There seems to be only so much to go around, even if every dynamis/VW/ADL was camped to the second 24/7. (Actually, I think I might do the math on that one, out of curiosity. It would be interesting to compare a perfect hypothetical economy to the real one.)

Look at it this way, the developers are privy to much more data about the playerbase than we are. Once this R/E/M mentality started to get out of hand, I'm sure that SE noticed (probably due to subs. dropping at a curious rate). The thing is, when casuals quit due to being shut out of content they're paying for, they usually just leave (and this is a big one, they probably tend to not come back), unnoticed to us. But en masse, SE's red flags start going off. Think about it from the casual's perspective. Without a R/E/M they are excluded from pretty much everything but Abyssea. But the golden days of Abyssea are in the past. (And be honest with yourself, you know you did a lot of your Abyssea trials by giving out +2s to LS members or randoms). So unless they leveled bst and farmed dynamis for months (/snore), they were stuck at that level.

Basically, what I'm saying is that the R/E/M holders did this to themselves. If you want to make a R/E/M only LS, that's great. Knock yourself out. But the problem is when that mentality crossed over to pick-up events. Matsui had to take action, his hands were tied. It's like a rich kid constantly showing off his money at a bar or something. Don't be surprised when you get robbed. You can't hoard your accomplishments (R/E/M only!) over the general public (casuals in this case) and not expect action to be taken.

And by the way, I respect Matsui for taking such bold action. Every person calling him an idiot or whatever has no idea how smart and ruthless you have to be to make it to his level in the business world. Call me a white knight or whatever you like, that doesn't make anything I've said any less true. Looking at this strictly as a business decision, I think he played the hand he was dealt (by us) about as well as he could.

TL;DR
Keep your elitist mentality (nothing wrong with being elitist btw) in your LS and out of public chat channels.

Finally, let me pose a question to all the Xbox 360 R/E/M holders. How would you feel if you suddenly started encountering "PC only" shouts (you know what I'm really talking about)? You can get a part time job and pay for a nice new PC in way less hours than it takes to build a 99 R/E/M. But be honest, how would you really feel about being excluded like that?

P.S. Please excuse the generous use of parentheses. I'm trying to speak in general terms, but at the same time speak to the most likely group of players reading this thread (R/E/M holders).

[Umichi]

AlL i have to say is everyone should be ashamed of themselves with the way they are behaving and handling about this aparant issues....

[Umichi]

This is what I think of the whole situation. I believe Matsui had no choice.

First and foremost, Matsui is a businessman. His primary function is to make as much money as possible for the shareholders. That being said, once the "pick-up" or casual paradigm switched to the R/E/M only mentality, those weapons were doomed. 99 R/E/M's are a tiny percentage of the total population. It may seem otherwise, but that's just do to continuous emotional posts (a lot by the same small group of people). Also, a simple understanding of economics and drop rates will make it glaringly obvious that 99 R/E/M's will be the minority for years and years to come, without astounding drop rate changes. There seems to be only so much to go around, even if every dynamis/VW/ADL was camped to the second 24/7. (Actually, I think I might do the math on that one, out of curiosity. It would be interesting to compare a perfect hypothetical economy to the real one.)

Look at it this way, the developers are privy to much more data about the playerbase than we are. Once this R/E/M mentality started to get out of hand, I'm sure that SE noticed (probably due to subs. dropping at a curious rate). The thing is, when casuals quit due to being shut out of content they're paying for, they usually just leave (and this is a big one, they probably tend to not come back), unnoticed to us. But en masse, SE's red flags start going off. Think about it from the casual's perspective. Without a R/E/M they are excluded from pretty much everything but Abyssea. But the golden days of Abyssea are in the past. (And be honest with yourself, you know you did a lot of your Abyssea trials by giving out +2s to LS members or randoms). So unless they leveled bst and farmed dynamis for months (/snore), they were stuck at that level.

Basically, what I'm saying is that the R/E/M holders did this to themselves. If you want to make a R/E/M only LS, that's great. Knock yourself out. But the problem is when that mentality crossed over to pick-up events. Matsui had to take action, his hands were tied. It's like a rich kid constantly showing off his money at a bar or something. Don't be surprised when you get robbed. You can't hoard your accomplishments (R/E/M only!) over the general public (casuals in this case) and not expect action to be taken.

And by the way, I respect Matsui for taking such bold action. Every person calling him an idiot or whatever has no idea how smart and ruthless you have to be to make it to his level in the business world. Call me a white knight or whatever you like, that doesn't make anything I've said any less true. Looking at this strictly as a business decision, I think he played the hand he was dealt (by us) about as well as he could.

TL;DR
Keep your elitist mentality (nothing wrong with being elitist btw) in your LS and out of public chat channels.

Finally, let me pose a question to all the Xbox 360 R/E/M holders. How would you feel if you suddenly started encountering "PC only" shouts (you know what I'm really talking about)? You can get a part time job and pay for a nice new PC in way less hours than it takes to build a 99 R/E/M. But be honest, how would you really feel about being excluded like that?

P.S. Please excuse the generous use of parentheses. I'm trying to speak in general terms, but at the same time speak to the most likely group of players reading this thread (R/E/M holders).

I am a returning player who left for this very same reason... i kept getting pigeonholed into needed certain items to even perform my job or to come as something else because everyone over analyzed everything SE gave to them as info and had this mentality that your either this job or GTFO because only numbers matter....