Apex Colibri {Can I have it?}

[Ulth]

They just want something to do other than stand around in adoulin. No one is taking melee to anything content wise. Elemental magic only.

The problems with melee are quite apparent, this thread isn't the place to bring them up.

Yes, magic needs a large nerf, yes immanence needs to be removed, yes magic bursts need to be cut in half or lower, yes enmity for mages is non-existant, yes mobs are way to evasive, yes aoe damage is astronomical to dd, yes debuffs are far too numerous, yes tp move spam and regain is ABSURD. Eventually they'll fix all that (2017)

Well in the freshly picked they say that they are looking into the accuracy problem. I'm guessing dex and accuracy becomes one to one and combat skill stays at one to one for skill over 200.

But back to the topic that the thread is about, weak apex mobs is pretty much an oxymoron. Apex in this context meaning the pinnacle of those monster's strength. There are plenty of easier mobs already and there is scaling difficulty so there will always be a mob about your gear level for you to cp on. Is it slower to cp on weaker mobs, absolutely, but that is how it should be. Why would you do something harder if there was no benefit to it.

[OmnysValefor]

Machini I took no offense at your replies.

I do understand the mechanics of the game and that people love it when the grind is mindless and simple, which is why we kill crabs the way we do. If you could macro movement, you could macro your role in great apex parties. The Tank WS's mob, flashes next mob while partner ws's. The tank tries to keep things lined up so that /autotarget engages the next mob. The mages, accounting for their own fastcast, no when to start casting so that their big nukes land at the opportune time and are casting another in case of a resist/shell at a poor time.

I had a wall of text to reply to you, but I'll be honest: The Accuracy augments on JSE weapons, aside from being expensive if you are fresh/freshly returning and not sitting on a pile of r/b/p (it will probably go down in weeks/months) goes a long long way towards helping people reach apex-level accuracy. /eggonmyface in that regard, but I've already owned that.

If, as a dnc or war, your shiny new escha weapon lowers your accuracy so far that you can't hit the mobs, then you're just not ready to use it, and that's fine. That's not bad design. The problem lies in design of the target mobs so heavily favoring mages.

Haste is all over melee gear at all ilvls. It's hard not to haste cap and nearly every melee player has "good" haste. With Haste/Haste II and Haste/Regain buffs from support roles, everyone is TPing fast.

If I invite a very geared thf and a newbie war to a "bird party", I'll find an SC war can open because the thf will do better ws damage, so should close. This also gives the warrior a second/two lead to start re-getting TP while the thf times her ws. The THF may well tp so fast that she still beats the warrior back to 1000 but the gap won't be so bad that the party is greatly suffering for the war's presence but that's kind of where crabs have us because melee don't get geo bubbles in crab parties. In most crab parties melee get Haste 1 and indi-haste if they're smart enough to be close enough to the geo. They don't get Minuet or Madrigal but the reward for buffing melee is not as potent as the reward for buffing mages.

Copying a mob is also not a terribly difficult thing to do, which is why every mmo does it so much. It's why we're fighting most of the same mobs at 119+ we were fighting in Dunes. It requires tweaking of stats and testing, for sure, but it's not an overly complex process. None of us can say what SE actually goes through to copy a monster, but they do it plenty, they have it down to a science--literally.

[machini]

Honestly, I think a simple "fix" for mage enmity in re: magic damage would be "dealing large amounts of magic damage in a short period of time dramatically increases enmity generated by magic damage."

Of course, you'd have to separate "skillchain damage" from the general "magic damage" as, while I just woke up and spent five minutes searching for my glasses only to find I was wearing them, I seem to recall skillchain damage is magic damage.

It would force mages to not just go pew pew bang bang constantly and actually have to think about whether or not it's a good idea to cast a spell, although arguably it would just be an arbitrary "no mage damage over x dps", but everything is arbitrary, innit?

[machini]

[snippety snip]

I agree with more or less everything you said. I am particularly loved by some people in my linkshell because I am more than willing to take new/undergeared players to delve/hard mode fights/whatnot to help them gear. A lot of the content they find hard I find relatively easy. And my inquiry into your understanding of the mechanics was solely because I have found that a lot of the difficulty new/returning/undergeared players (which I was fairly sure you were not, but I figured I'd check anyway) have with content is not that they do not have the tools/gear available to do it, but simply that they don't realize they do and don't know how or when to do it. A lot of people (who are not uber leet end game people, which I don't consider myself, considering I'm not BiS geared on most anything) act as though /RUN doesn't exist at all, and have no idea how or what the JAs do, but after going into avatar fights a couple of times and seeing me get hit for 500~900 damage by stuff that hits them for 2000/+ damage can really help, as a lot of people don't view subjobs as situational, for just one example. Another would be not understanding the interaction between Haste and DW/MA. Telling people to throw on (and often helping them get) "simple" stuff like the delve DW earrings can be a pretty major DPS increase for them, and from my experience in helping gear people like this, they think that the 'old' gear is worthless, and then because they can't get the latest and greatest gear they get majorly discouraged, so showing them that there is gear in their grasp that they can get with a little help or a little perseverance helps, 'cause I've seen people get discouraged and quit because "there's so much to do to catch up" when it could be done relatively quickly, if they knew how.

I had a friend who wanted to play BLU give up and quit the game for several months because she felt completely useless (we had just started gearing her BLU), and she had no jobs that were 99 that weren't in spark gear. When she resubbed, in less than a week she was hitting ~1100 accuracy with <100 job points and feeling really silly over getting so discouraged and quitting (when I was telling her it wouldn't take long to get her up to speed and she didn't listen).

I'm sorry, I've completely forget what I was supposed to be talking about.

[Ketaru]

Right you are. Savage blade can be used effectively by pld, war, and rdm yet I never hear people complain about those jobs doing too much damage

Well yeah. People always want to see the job du jour nerfed, even if others must necessarily be pushed under the bus along with them.

[Hoshi]

I guess I'm a bit confused because we already have a melee friendly target with the apex erucas. My friends like to CP and our typical setup for an eruca party is 3 melee, whm, geo, blm. The blm does help the damage a bit but even just the 3 of us making the light skillchain does quite a bit of damage to the mob. If the blm forgets to burst for the whole thing we only have to make 2 skillchains to kill a mob.

[OmnysValefor]

Erucas simply don't get as good as CP (per kill or per hour) as crabs, but crabs are not designed for melee parties.

A great crab party can kill a crab in like 15 seconds. If the tank is smart, the next crab is already attacking him before the target is dead. Crabs are no danger to the tank, or even quasi-tank in good gear. The process is so streamlined that the crab never gets enough tp to consider casting shell.

I tanked blu 150-2100, and died once because someone somehow agroed 3 additional crabs and I honestly believe the blm was just too bored with the macroable-nature to pay attention and sleepga.

Even if Erucas are dying that fast, they're giving less CP and since they're lower level, I believe their chain breaks easier.

Flame breath can actually hurt as well.

And finally, my blu frequently had flash at 10s recast thanks to personal Haste II and Geo-Haste, along with fastcast gear. One flash is all that was generally needed to keep a mob on me til it was dead. The same formulas do not apply to melee. While damage-enmity does not outscale damage-taken enmity-loss (making it difficult for melee to tank without flash), melee damage does vastly outscale magic burst enmity. Flashing one mob for the 15 seconds it lives works with mages, but you'll see melee eating flame breaths.

Provoke? Provoke has a hard 30 second cooldown.

Do I want birds that, like crabs, die before they get to use a tp move? Not at all, but I want something melee players can do that is competitive to crabs so that the other jobs will be willing to come.

Crabs: Have MP, May cast Shell or Defense Boost (big deal about the defense boost)
Bats: Have No MP, can't be easily slept/dispelled with black sleeps. AoE attack Down, AoE acc down. In a melee party, bats require a lot lot of babysitting unless you have a yagrush whm.
Fish: Have no MP. Strangely large hitbox that makes them annoying to pull. Has potent evasion boost as a tp move which can be dispelled.
Ercuca: Have no MP. May use Cocoon (which sucks for melee oriented mob but can be dispelled). I can't recall, honestly, but doesn't sticky thread overwrite Haste, but not Haste II?

Colibri are just an ideal target for melee. That's why we lived in Thickets at 75.

Because of Feather Tickle, you would want either a PLD\RUN + 2-3 DD or a NIN + 1-3 DD leaving a spot for a support job and healer. I'd love it if they made a room filled with birds where you moved from mob to mob. That's bard's strength over geo: mobility and crowd control. Now you might say "If the bard heals, you can add one more DD", and that's true, but there almost isn't room for a another DD in that setup because everyone TPs so ridiculously fast these days. THFs accidentally making darkness for Rudraing too fast.

[Stompa]

As we all know, the optimum setup for an apex party is 1-2 tank/melee 2-4 BLM/SCH and a GEO. It's disgusting, but it's the winning solution.

All the shouts I hear for CP burns are for SCH/GEO just endlessly, it is so disheartening and boring to read it all the time. I probably spend too much time on Social-Media, but when I hear those /shouts I immediately think ; "Check Your Wizard Privilege!" XD

I think it is great that BLM SCH GEO have important roles, and I am happy for them. Its cool if they keep nuking those CAP mobs forever, that is fine by me. But it is so BORING when that becomes the only thing people want to do. And it is especially a problem with Jobpoints which are locked on your current job.

I did solo WAR Jobmaster, literally solo without a single party. I actually enjoyed it too, because I love playing WAR. But I feel sorry for other Melee people who are excluded from CP parties because of the trend in nuke parties. There are some really excellent highly-skilled Melee players out there, if you had them in your party it would be a both enjoyable and productive party experience.

I agree with the general points in this thread, about end-game accuracy issues and the importance of a plentiful supply of apex camps for traditional Melee parties. Those parties were the backbone of FFXI, and the traditional party format was what made FFXI so popular and fun to play.

[OmnysValefor]

All the shouts I hear for CP burns are for SCH/GEO just endlessly, it is so disheartening and boring to read it all the time. I probably spend too much time on Social-Media, but when I hear those /shouts I immediately think ; "Check Your Wizard Privilege!" XD

Valefor is lowlow-pop and terrible for it. I put together Apex /yell groups more than anyone currently and yeah, my first yell as a GEO looks like this.

{Capacity Points} {Do you need it?} {Flash} {Front line job} {Can I have it?} {Front line job} {Can I have it?} BLM SCH GEO {Can I have it?}.

That's right, 2-geo parties work exceptionally well if they're both capable nukers, or one is willing to heal.

If the prospects are dismal, I'll add in RDM and BRD/COR to shouts, but for as long as I've been shouting, I've yet to party with a single bard.

You are hurting your party by inviting a WHM or, very sorry to say this, Summoner or more than 2 melee.

I did solo WAR Jobmaster, literally solo without a single party. I actually enjoyed it too, because I love playing WAR. But I feel sorry for other Melee people who are excluded from CP parties because of the trend in nuke parties. There are some really excellent highly-skilled Melee players out there, if you had them in your party it would be a both enjoyable and productive party experience.

Did you do this with Fell Cleave? Probably. I earned spatterings of JP on blu by raining AOE, but it was more for merit farming than actually wanting JP. Some jobs have pretty terrible aoe options, or none at all.

Also, this snip reminded me of a thf I met the other day. He did everything I suggested and you know what he did when the BLMs/Me got hit? Collaborator! First thf I've seen do that in ages! I made note to thank him and point out how rare that is. But yeah, not a lot of people will ever play with his thf and see that he's good at his entire job, because he's competing for the same 1-2 party spots as every other melee on the server.

[Stompa]

Did you do this with Fell Cleave?

No, I always fight single mobs, unless a few of them aggro me. This is because of my own preference, that I don't want to dominate an area, if somebody else arrives there are mobs wandering around unclaimed, which they can fight. Also under TOS there is a monster domination clause, which while being somewhat vague, discourages players from mass-pulling mobs, especially on solo.

I did use Gaxe in the beginning, with Upheaval ws mostly. I like to use King's Justice too, because it makes me feel like I'm a righteous soldier of the Empire, lol.

That was for the first 1000~ Jobpoints, then the Savage Blade and Fencer stuff happened, so I used Sword for the next 1100 jobpoints. I find that I get 15k Savage Blades with 1000tp, while I seem to get 8k with Upheaval with the same base tp.

Also, this snip reminded me of a thf I met the other day. He did everything I suggested and you know what he did when the BLMs/Me got hit? Collaborator! First thf I've seen do that in ages! I made note to thank him and point out how rare that is. But yeah, not a lot of people will ever play with his thf and see that he's good at his entire job, because he's competing for the same 1-2 party spots as every other melee on the server.

I'm still talking about the THF we had in a Jungle party ten years ago, lol. She was a bionic super THF, running around dodging the goblins and pulling mandragoras back to the camp just in time for XP Chains. She was awesome, you could see the mad game-skills she had, she was just totally stellar even in that low-level basic party situation. Its funny how you remember those really skilled players for ten years lol.