Any chance we can have HP Bayld become more available?

[dasva]

Why one farm 20m bayld to begin with is what I am most curious about o.O Premonition? I don't remember anything to justify the extreme bayld farming before ergon weapons...

I doubt anyone did it on purpose but at one point it looked like balyd might be useful for more than just temporary weapons and for awhile you had to do reives a decent amount to keep up bivouacs so some people actually did there part there and then just keeping up with tags/getting legend gets you a lot if you don't spend it. Trying to get that one caped you wanted before they allowed trade ins. I got to like 3 mil doing just that minus the reiving outside of wkr and that's with buying a bit of gear with balyd

[Stompa]

Besides being overly critical of your HPB numbers (TBH, they remind me of the numbers a botter on my server quoted me he got from botting reives overnight) being realistic, you seem to be missing Jadey's point. HMPs do drop from VW, whether they drop to you or not, that's a whole nother story. Fact is, they're added to the market, and you can usually buy them cheap right there on the spot.

The fact that you don't want to pay for them has no real barring on it. In a perfect world, I would of preferred to not pay for the HPBs for Idris, either. But guess what? I did, because like you, I didn't want to spend thousands of hours grinding reives. Buck up, pay up, and get'er done, ya know? Or keep whining and hope you get a pouch or two on that next Uptala. Either works in the long run I suppose.

Well I'm not botter, I have got trolled on this very forum for saying that "gil-buying and botting are just cheats for people who don't want to accept the game challenge on a standard setting."

Bayld-wise, I was 0 / 100~ on the Hurkan Cap, and capping bayld every time to try and get the cap. I also farmed all the other WKR intensively for the items I wanted.

When my office is busy, I don't log in to FFxi all day, and will just stay up at night playing (mostly solo content). But on quiet work days I can boot FFxi in the office and just grind rieves on semi-afk mode. When I warp back to town I will see 5~25 HP in my bag depending on luck. The point is you can farm HP solo and be sure you will make some *small* progress every day.

To contrast HMP. I have gone 50x VW pops without seeing a plate. Sometimes I get pouches or singles. But sometimes I will not see a single plate for 50 pops and that is with max lights and alignment KIs. And of course the whole alliance /sh and /form business every time. So there are days and even weeks when I will not obtain a single plate from farming VW.

And my point was just that I *personally* would far prefer to grind solo HP on my own timeframe - assured of small progress every hour - than grind out vw alliances where I might not make any weapon progress for days and days ET.

I'm surprised that there are any people in the universe who find the VW drop rate sucks statement to be contentious. Also surprised you can't see how soloing EP content for bayld isnt easier than the whole vw alliance "That's too bad." circus.

[Jadey]

Yes, the VW drop rate is bad. But comparatively, the (solo) HPB grind is much, much, much worse. I'll explain.

If you wanted to farm all of the bayld necessary to get an Ergon solo, that's 130,990,000 bayld (actually closer to 129,600,000 if you consider Runje kicksbacks, but whatever.) To farm that solo at 60,000 bayld/hour, assuming no competition at reives driving your hourly rate down, that would take you 2,183 hours. We'll round that down to an even 2,000 since you're bound to get HPB drops and maybe take time off to do your assignments in the 80 days or so you're going to be grinding reives.

Let's also assume that a typical Uptala x12 run takes about two hours to pick up members, gather, trade, kill, clear chests, re-up stones and the like. FFXIDB pegs the HMPouch drop rate at 6%, so in the same amount of time it takes you to farm that bayld solo, you get to kill 12,000 Uptalas. On average, someone doing this many would expect about 720 pouches to drop from those 12,000 kills. At an average of 9 plates per pouch, you now have 6,480 plates - enough to finish four empyrean weapon stages and sell the rest at 150k to get the rift* needed to 99 at least one. Or if you sold them all at 150k instead you'd have 972 million gil - pretty good compared to the bayld grinder who ended up with less than 400 million worth of HPB at the going 30k/each rate on many servers.

Given the averages, it should take just under 2800 Uptalas to finish your plates without buying any, or almost five times faster than a solo Ergon. Even if you bump up the Uptala gather time to 3 hours per run, you would still finish over three times faster than a solo bayld grinder. You may not see progress every day! That's how random chest drops work! And always remember that the average pouch you get has the same value as over seven hours of nonstop bayld farming.

Think of it this way - there are plenty of instances where linkshells have taken the time to run mass Voidwatch farms to gear up a LS BRD with a 99 harp. Without buying anything a dedicated shell can finish plates for harp in ~2 weeks running 3 hours of Uptala events a day. That same shell having each member farm bayld at an optimal 60k/hr (which would be all but impossible in the field due to the lack of quality farm spots that provide that number) for the same amount of time would get less than 35% of the necessary bayld.

The math and the averages say that despite runs where you brick on pouches, you will finish far, far faster than someone attempting an ergon. There's a reason Malithar's club took nearly two months from the introduction of the weapon to get his, during a period where you had hundreds of people running WKR right as they popped to get Paragons for their 115 gear and HPB was at its highest supply. It took me nearly three months. I don't think there's another Ergon on Quetz right now, and I'd be shocked if there were more than 50 across the entire server population. Those that have finished have done so because of donations from friends and shell members, aggressive buying of the massively supply constrained market, and farming to fill out the rest because of the lack of supply. As Malithar said, we'd love it if we didn't need to buy HPB from other people, or farm Salvage or Dynamis or Delve or Skirmish or Voidwatch (yes! I sold plates to buy HPB!) and could get some of the highest-tier items in the game at a casual pace and short timeframe. But that's not how the game works, or frankly has ever worked. The opportunity cost of getting any of these items yourself is intentionally high to pull you away from one singular method of gilmaking.

As an aside - I'd love to do a second Ergon someday. If your HPB farm is that effective, server transfer to Quetz and I'll set up a plate-for-HPB trade/buy up your HPB stock and we can both get what we're looking for!

Edit2: Since the dev team has taken a look at this thread - any chance of a method to Afterglow Ergons?

[Stompa]

Let's also assume that a typical Uptala x12 run takes about two hours to pick up members, gather, trade, kill, clear chests, re-up stones and the like. FFXIDB pegs the HMPouch drop rate at 6%, so in the same amount of time it takes you to farm that bayld solo, you get to kill 12,000 Uptalas. On average, someone doing this many would expect about 720 pouches to drop from those 12,000 kills. At an average of 9 plates per pouch, you now have 6,480 plates - enough to finish four empyrean weapon stages and sell the rest at 150k to get the rift* needed to 99 at least one. Or if you sold them all at 150k instead you'd have 972 million gil - pretty good compared to the bayld grinder who ended up with less than 400 million worth of HPB at the going 30k/each rate on many servers.

Well OK. I just did 48 Uptala in the last 8~ days, three entire 12 pop runs there was no plates for me. 4th run I got a pouch which gave me 4 plates. Thats 4 plates in 48 alliance battles.
Other people got more pouches, and put the stuff on sale. But I resent buying items that drop in the event I'm in - when I'm on WAR and doing like seven weapon swapouts to try and get all the procs, ie. working hard, and then I'm supposed to buy plates from somebody else just because the loot box randomly loaded to them and not me?
Your online average drop rate misses the whole point - that VW is flawed because of the average-defying randomness and ppl who put in loads of effort but go home with logs and fish and potions. VW loot system is the most flawed system in FFXI. I personally love the NMs in VW and its a cool battlefield idea, but the drop system is the worst implemented thing in the game bar none.

And I solo'd my 175 Aby boss drops on War/thf for my empys. I can solo relic in dynamis. I can solo mythic pretty much too. And for sure I can solo HP bayld for ergon. But for Empy, the soloing stops abruptly after the Aby stage, and then you are hanging round a near-empty VW shell, trying to form alliance, joining shouts, and dealing with the log drops factor over and over.

I put my gil into levelling crafts, like clothcraft 80+ etc. I don't want to buy drops from events I can farm. That is the point I'm making is that Empy path is the only one you can't make solo progress on, and even alliance farming doesn't guarantee you progress every time you do it - unlike farming HP bayld, dyna currencies or alexs. If you went off to farm HP bayld, OBPs shells bills, alexs - and you knew before you started that you might not get a single one - would you think it was a fair system?

I'm really happy that RUN and GEO got these weapons, I hope you all have a lot of fun using the finished weapons. And I think you are lucky you got a system where you can chip away at the total H-P on your own casual solo timeframe (if that is what you wanted to do). My point was just that I wish I could farm solo on my own timeframe for empy, the same way I could have for ergon/relic/mythic.

[Jadey]

Well OK. I just did 48 Uptala in the last 8~ days, three entire 12 pop runs there was no plates for me. 4th run I got a pouch which gave me 4 plates. Thats 4 plates in 48 alliance battles.

While that's disheartening, consulting the math and the low sample size that's standard variance. You not getting a pouch in those 36 Uptalas should happen about 11% of the time (10.8% of the time, if we want to be pedantic.) The point is that averages will contain outliers, but over the long run the numbers balance out. You can say with a very large degree of confidence that you'll get pouches from the T3 Zilart VW mobs 6% of the time because we have nearly 70000 logged chests on Uptala and over 150000 logged chests on Qilin. And they math out to a 6% drop rate almost on the dot.

Other people got more pouches, and put the stuff on sale. But I resent buying items that drop in the event I'm in - when I'm on WAR and doing like seven weapon swapouts to try and get all the procs, ie. working hard, and then I'm supposed to buy plates from somebody else just because the loot box randomly loaded to them and not me?
Your online average drop rate misses the whole point - that VW is flawed because of the average-defying randomness and ppl who put in loads of effort but go home with logs and fish and potions. VW loot system is the most flawed system in FFXI. I personally love the NMs in VW and its a cool battlefield idea, but the drop system is the worst implemented thing in the game bar none.

It's 'unfair' in the same way that drops from Skrimish are 'unfair' and can lead to you getting two NQ Wailing, 2 Dullahan Armor, a Ghastly +1, and a Phil. Stone while someone's mule that sits at the zone-in and does nothing gets slotted four Wailing +2. It's 'unfair' in the same way that a pickup Delve run can have a DD that tops the parse by miles and a SCH that stuns everything lose out on the /random for the 1m+ boss drop and the Airlixir +2 to the WHM who didn't know where to stand for Marine Mayhem and the BRD who sang everything with Terpander and no +duration gear. It's 'unfair' that I've spent over 10 million gil on Wailing Stone +2s to augment my Hagondes +1 gear and have yet to see any augments that aren't enhancements for pets. There's a randomization factor to the game that will always exist and will occasionally not reward effort. The systems that provide reward for little to no risk are balanced to not provide as dramatic a reward for the effort (Mog Garden) or to take a much longer amount of raw time to achieve (Ergon). Using Emp weapons as an example, you need a minimum of 38 NM kills to get the 75 items needed for a level 90 Emp, with an average of 50 if we assume you have an equal chance to get either 1 or 2. Would you accept a system that moved the possible drops from the min1-max2 they are now to a min0-max5 drop rate, assuming all possibilities were weighted equally? The math would average out to a lower number of kills, but you would run the risk of hitting a higher than average no-drop rate and skew to the unlucky end.

I put my gil into levelling crafts, like clothcraft 80+ etc. I don't want to buy drops from events I can farm. That is the point I'm making is that Empy path is the only one you can't make solo progress on, and even alliance farming doesn't guarantee you progress every time you do it - unlike farming HP bayld, dyna currencies or alexs. If you went off to farm HP bayld, OBPs shells bills, alexs - and you knew before you started that you might not get a single one - would you think it was a fair system?

Yes! In fact, crafting itself is exactly that system - the whole point of durable crafts is to make bank on the high-quality synths. You spend tons of gil with no promise that your synths will skill you up. You spend hundreds of thousands of guild points on furniture to increase your skill to break caps, eat food to boost HQ rates, use whatever magical direction/timeframe/lockstyle gear you think is lucky, press the button, and let the RNG decide if that effort is going to be a gain or a loss. Somebody else might go 1/1 on a T0 synth that you spent the time and gil and energy to crack the T1 barrier and still go 0/130, losing tens of millions of gil in the process. Is that fair? Every time I synth an Exalted Log, I risk 150k for a chance at 230k-920k on a super lucky T3 HQ.

On the flip side, I could turn ~40000 in Sushi ingredients into ~50000 in Sushi with 12 synths. It's low risk, but it's also low reward. It's the same with HPB vs. Plates. One is low risk, low reward. One is higher risk, higher reward.

I find the "I don't buy what I can farm" stance confusing. Do/did you buy Abyssea pop items to save time soloing? If you're making a relic and are on, let's say, the final Goldpiece stage, would you exclusively farm Sandy for bronzepieces (dealing with the more annoying mobs and the lower daily total) or would you go to a Dreamlands zone, cycle through all 3 currency types, sell the bynes and the whiteshells and buy bronzepieces with the gil you made?

The reason plates have stayed at a fairly consistent price over the last few years while Dyna currency and Alex are cratering across servers is because of the risk/reward dynamic in farming them. No, you aren't guaranteed to walk away with anything of value from 12 Uptalas. That's what makes them valuable.

[Malithar]

And I solo'd my 175 Aby boss drops on War/thf for my empys. I can solo relic in dynamis. I can solo mythic pretty much too. And for sure I can solo HP bayld for ergon. But for Empy, the soloing stops abruptly after the Aby stage, and then you are hanging round a near-empty VW shell, trying to form alliance, joining shouts, and dealing with the log drops factor over and over.

Welcome to MMOs, where you may have to rely on your fellow players for supply/support when doing things. You really should move past this whole "I won't pay for what I can farm" stance when by your own admission, you can't easily solo farm it. Do other events, make money, buy plates, I really don't understand the issue, specially when you wasted money getting CC to 80+. What's that going to get you without more investment? Or are you solo farming all the mats to skill up that as well?

I'm not saying there is no issue with HMPs or Cinders, but what I am saying is it's plenty doable as is, if you get past this self imposed barrier you've set on yourself.

As much as you say you'd prefer to do HPBs in place of HMPs, I'd just as quickly do the opposite. At least then I could go to a VW and know that I'd get a pouch or 5 simply because I'd be willing to buy them. I did the exact same thing at WKRs, 50-100 people at some of them right after augmenting was added. You have any idea how many people felt it was worth 50k+ per HPB, or didn't read shouts, didn't know what it was for, and dropped it, or simply didn't want to waste the time trading or bazaaring it at that moment? And the sickening bit of it was that you KNEW every single person in there got at least one. In VW, it's pretty easy to see who got a pouch, tell the party you're buying, etc.

HPBs, the supply isn't exactly there to buy. The bayld is, but you'd have better luck moving mountains than convincing people to sell off their stock of bayld with any ease. And your supposed drop rate for HPBs and farming Bayld with ease and no effort is an extreme outlier or stretch of the truth compared to any other experience I've heard or had. Could just as easily list that one time I went 7/12 on pouches at Qilin, was a hell of a pay day. Does that mean that's the realistic side of the grind?

[SNK]

Ok that's that then I guess. See you in about 3 years when my Stage 3 requirement is done then I guess.

Meanwhile I'll enjoy seeing everyone else wrapping up their Mythics (many of which are significantly more "powerful" than RUN/GEO) getting completed in about 2 months time because Alex is in pretty much everyone's bazaars for rock bottom prices (dipped to around 6-7k on my server vs. 30-40k per HP Bayld)

Considering these two jobs are barely ever asked to join in endgame activities, giving them the absolutely hardest weapon quests in the game, seems kind of insulting to me.

I think SE needs clarify what they mean, when they use the term "balance."

And yet more and more of these have been appearing within months of their release. Those weapons arn't meant for casuals. The game can't be all too easy or some people would get bored. Also it's painfully easy to obtain bayld in this game. I'm sitting on close to 4 million right now just from spamming coalition assignments.

Also let's be real here bro. A Mythic takes waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more time and dedication to finish then an Ergon weapon. 30,000 Alex vs 1500 HP Bayld.

Not to mention having to do every single assault vs getting Legend in all 6 Coaltions which in turn funnels more bayld to you which you can convert into HP Bayld, Along with Col/Wildkeeper Reives which also funnel more Bayld into you along with doing certain Coalition assignments which pay out close to 12,000 Bayld for easy completions.

It's easy enough getting HP Bayld already. There's no reason to dumb it down any further.


If anything I wish the mythic system was this easy. It's still stupidly crazy how many hoops you have to jump thru to even finish one.

[Afania]

Also let's be real here bro. A Mythic takes waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more time and dedication to finish then an Ergon weapon. 30,000 Alex vs 1500 HP Bayld.

You didn't read the thread don't you?

[Jadey]

You've got the calculation wrong. It's not 1500 HP Bayld, it's 13,099. You've got 4 million bayld? Great! You're 3% of the way there. And if you want to take time spent into consideration, let's take someone starting from zero progress and see how long it would take to get a Mythic or an Ergon.

Mythic timeframe:

Captain rank - 50 days
Nyzul floor 100 - 10 days (assuming 10 floors per tag - at i119 you should probably be getting 20+ floors per tag but we'll go with this
ToAU missions - Done during the 60 days of Assault
Salvage/Beastman King titles - Done during the 60 days of Assault
Odin v1 - Done during the 60 days of Assault
100000 Ichor - 56 days (T1 -> T2 -> T3 -> Odin, never buying any wing/tear/soul items from AH) - can be done concurrently with other objectives
Assault memories - 50 days
Nyzul tokens - 15 days (assuming 10000 tokens/tag)
3 chariot kills for L95 Mythic - 3 days
ZNM trophies - Can be done concurrently with other objectives
Alexandrite - 30,000 x 7500 gil (average price, Sylph server) = 225 million gil, can be bought/farmed concurrently with other objectives
Scoria - 3 x 10,000,000 gil = 30,000,000 gil (appx.)
Beitetsu - 300 x 8,000 gil = 2,400,000 gil (appx.)

Total time from zero progress to i119 Mythic - 128 days and ~260 million gil. Subsequent mythics can be done in ~68 days assuming gil is not a factor.

Ergon timeframe:

Coalition Legend rank x6 = 205 days (You need 840 imprimaturs to reach Legend in all 6 coalitions on an optimal rankup path. 612 of those will be on a 6 hour repop, and the last 228 will be on a 5.5 hour repop assuming you've done what's needed for the time reduction KI.)

All of the following can be done alongside the assignments:

Ghastly/Verdigris/Wailing stones - Trivial if you use Copper Vouchers
Delve T1/T2 boss items - 5,500,000 gil (appx.)
Pristine Yggrete Crystal - 2.5 million plasm (~36 T1 Delve wins, or ~24 T2 Delve wins)
High-Purity Bayld - 13099 x 30000 gil = ~392,970,000 gil

Total time from zero progress to Ergon - 205 days and ~398 million gil. The other Ergon can be done immediately assuming gil/plasm/vouchers/supply are not factors.

In any practical sense, an Ergon takes longer and costs more even if you assume there are unlimited amounts of both Alex and HPB available for purchase. The only Mythic snag is the 6 man requirement for Ein and the need for 3+ people to make Nyzul farming worthwhile - but the same can be said for Ergon, since you aren't going to be farming that 2.5 million plasm very quickly without grouping up.

And if you want to make a simple comparison, 13099 HPB vs 30000 Alex, you only need ~43% of the raw Alex amounts to finish Ergon. You can solo a Salvage run in an hour or less and expect to walk away with an average of ~110 Alex if you full clear F5/F6 and get an average Linen from F7. 110 Alex is basically equal to 48 HPB in that calculation. Go out this week and tell me how long it takes you to farm 480,000 bayld.

[SNK]

You didn't read the thread don't you?

I read it but I was replying to Tim's post. Also I was indeed off about the cost of HP Bayld so I'll knock that off to having a "derp" moment but it still doesn't change that the idea that people want these weapons to be easier to obtain is silly. Like I said before, those things arn't meant for casual players and that's how it should be.

@Jadey,
In considering how easy it is to obtain bayld and getting Legend status in Coalitions vs having to spam all the assaults again not to mention some of them you're going to need help with, I still feel Mythics are way more time consuming compared to the ergon weapons. That of course is spending time also building up Zeni pops by taking stupid pictures over and over and over as well to finish pops for that stuff as well. Time is money so to speak and finishing a lot of coatlion assignments take minutes at most while a lot of assaults can take 15 to 30 minutes if you're lucky. Not to mention having to save tags for Nyzul Isle to get Tokens and as well as farming the crap out of Einherjar I'd say Mythics have the game won still in terms of time spend building them.

Also, Alex is obviously cheaper then HP Bayld but that's just supply & demand more then anything. Eventually it'll hit a low point like any other item in the game once everyone stops buying them so much.

I'll probably take you up on it and farm 480,000 Bayld just for shits n giggles.

Right now if anything I'd say finishing an Emp weapon to 119 from nothing would probably be the most costly since the plates and riftdross have dried up a lot due to not many people doing VW like it was when it was popular.