Was Ambuscade too popular?

[Dale]

I'm assuming it was far too popular because I can see no other reason why the first month offered a set of monsters to fight and a solo monster fight yet this month offers 2 group monsters to fight. What's the point of having 2 tombs with 4 difficulty levels?

The first month the content was aimed at everyone, better geared players could do the more difficult fights for better rewards and everyone else could do the 2nd tomb on a fairly decent difficulty.

This month the "easy 2nd tomb" is 2 monsters, killing one makes the other monster enrage. The taur can use mortal ray and kill you or your pet/trust tank with a pretty good chance of success (cause cursna sucks) and they have party based aggro, so whether you hit the other or not it's going to go and kill your healer.

You really have to make your mind up what you want here, are you offering content for everyone or are you offering content where they have to be carried?

This feels like a bit of a bait and switch.

I would try stocking up on holy waters and spamming those. I had a lot better luck doing that than trying to rely on cursna (which sucks just as you say). I guess the spell requires a gear set to be effective at removing doom. And apparently a pretty good one - because my +15 to Cursna wasn't doing much.

[Ketaru]

yeah this is disappointing - gear with a pet job on it and ZERO pet stats for one thing - and replacing the only soloable event in the game with one designed to thwart soloers. Way to kill my desire to play SE.

Does it really? You keep saying things like this, but if I recall correctly, you were struggling with even the NORMAL dragon last month. Eventually, you're just going to have to admit your gear simply isn't good enough for current content- solo or not. Maybe Ambuscade just isn't what you should be doing right now.

EDIT: I just soloed the Demon duo on Very Easy playing an undergeared RNG. No bells and whistles like REM weapons. I literally just stood there, used ranged attacks, and used weaponskills at 1000 TP. Trusts were August, Gessho, Apururu, King of Hearts, and Cherukiki. To be fair, I would not have used Cherukiki if I had remembered she doesn't give a rat's hindquarters about status removal, there are others that do. Between three healing trusts, surely ONE of them will remove Doom.

So there, the very easiest mode is soloable by what has traditionally been considered one of those worst soloing jobs in the game. So the fight, is in fact, very soloable. Just maybe not on the difficulty you want to do it on.

[Pixela]

I would try stocking up on holy waters and spamming those. I had a lot better luck doing that than trying to rely on cursna (which sucks just as you say). I guess the spell requires a gear set to be effective at removing doom. And apparently a pretty good one - because my +15 to Cursna wasn't doing much.

Well the point was that it's been updated with a direct design decision to stop solo players more than anything else, you can't use holy waters on a trust tank or pet. They added Galantry, then they added a mob that can doom and as an added kick they put another mob in there.

I know you can turn or use holy waters, that wasn't the point I was making though. Point was that Square went 10x over what was needed to dissuade people from soloing and directly punish them instead now, probably because the content was more popular than they expected. Instead of just limiting how many times you can enter per day they decided to punish players for doing the content outside of groups. Considering the majority of content available to group players they are really not being very smart here.

Even Blizzard said the secret to their success was making content for everyone and not just the raiders or pvp players.

I guess the truth is the leadership of the game is changing so much they don't know what they want lately though.

[xiozen]

The problem is that they presented Ambuscade as content aimed at everyone, from soloers to top-geared players.

The Gallantry system is perfectly fine because, indeed, party play should be rewarded but we can't deny the fact that a lot of players are now playing solo in FFXI for different reasons, the dev team itself keeps adding ways to make soloing a possibility. I am not saying that the whole game should be soloable, it is not anyway but they should really be more careful with how they handle content, especially when they themselves say that a type of content is aimed at all players.

The choice of monsters for this month Ambuscade is clearly saying "we don't want you to solo" so they should either remove the possibility to enter solo altogether or change what they added. Gallantry was enough of an addition, if you party you get rewarded more, simple as that. Gallantry and the Tauri is more of : if you party you get rewarded more but if you solo you get punished.

Soloers are a non-negligible part of today's FFXI, whether we like it or not, they pay their fees just like everyone else and should be able to play the way they want to -again, especially when SE says "this content is for everyone"-. It takes 145 Volume 2 runs on Normal to get the whole set, that is work, it should be difficult and I don't think most soloers don't enjoy difficulty, on the contrary, but out of all the monsters in the game, chosing ones with mechanics such as Doom and Hundred Fists is punishing and it is clear it is not an innocent choice, even more so knowing how unreliable Cursna is.

Completely agree with this sentiment... luckily I'm in two linkshells and was able to party for this month's ambuscade; but last month I solo'd it... not everyone would be so fortunate. Perhaps some clearer definition of the intention behind this content should be presented instead of wrapping it in sparkly foil and claiming its cotton candy...

[Olor]

Does it really? You keep saying things like this, but if I recall correctly, you were struggling with even the NORMAL dragon last month. Eventually, you're just going to have to admit your gear simply isn't good enough for current content- solo or not. Maybe Ambuscade just isn't what you should be doing right now.

Right, which is why I needed ambuscade to be soloable - so I could get gear good enough to participate in solo and group content... HOW am I supposed to play if there is no gear ladder?

I have 119 skirmish one and 2 gear that I spent 10s of millions upgrading. I have a bunch of unity gear. I have some relic and AF (none of which, frankly, is better than my skirmish stuff) I can't get anything better solo - outside of ambuscade.

And I only had trouble on dragon on normal first time I tried. After doing it a few times solo on easy it was easy on normal. Hard I couldn't hit it enough to win, though if I could have worn the gear that dropped last month I bet I could have done it. Accuracy was my only issue. I was surviving just fine, but I couldn't hit it enough to take it down.

What content am I supposed to do? I'm not interested in spending 6 hours shouting, I have limited play time, I am willing to group up but the game makes it hard to find other players who want to do the same content.

Why does it bother you that I want to make my character better and play the game? Would you rather players like me just quit? Cause the game won't last long without our subs.

I am not the best player in the universe but what is holding me back is gear, not skill. I did endgame events fine in the past when everything wasn't so ridiculously stratified. Now if you're not caught up on gear you're left out. And because every new thing invalidates every older thing, no one who has better gear is willing to group up on the lower tier content. I could probably solo a lot of it with gear just an inch better than I have but right now I am totally stuck.

[detlef]

Pretty much you should be focusing on Escha gear. Especially with the extra drops campaign this month, that's probably something you should prioritize.

Question: do you have friends in-game? 2-3 people can get so much done.

[Olor]

Pretty much you should be focusing on Escha gear. Especially with the extra drops campaign this month, that's probably something you should prioritize.

Question: do you have friends in-game? 2-3 people can get so much done.

No, unfortunately everyone I used to play with has quit. They are either playing single player games or FFXIV. One friend will come back during the free play time to help me out with finding my way to a couple of homepoints but other than that I am on my own.

I used to have a half decent LS but I had to move and I came back to an empty linkshell.

Escha NMs are not soloable by someone in my gear, I don't feel comfortable leading on content I've never done (even after reading the wikis I am not even sure how to pop Escha NMs) and I don't have the playtime to sit in town for 3 hours shouting for a group, regardless.

Ambuscade was perfect. I could solo it. I could do a couple runs in the morning before work, and a couple before bed and make progress. The gear was actually good.

They didn't need to ruin it.

[detlef]

Aren't there supposed to be a lot of people on Asura? A lot of those T1s in Zi'tah drop very solid gear and the only real strat is nuke the right element and don't die. The triggers can be bought from Curio Moogles.

Edit: Kinda sidetracked but yeah this new Ambuscade is so much less appealing than last month's version. The fight is harder, the monthly rewards are worse, the KI farming is more annoying, and the new queuing system doesn't help matters. Also the quadav fight hasn't been figured out but is also super annoying.

[Olor]

Aren't there supposed to be a lot of people on Asura? A lot of those T1s in Zi'tah drop very solid gear and the only real strat is nuke the right element and don't die. The triggers can be bought from Curio Moogles.

Edit: Kinda sidetracked but yeah this new Ambuscade is so much less appealing than last month's version. The fight is harder, the monthly rewards are worse, the KI farming is more annoying, and the new queuing system doesn't help matters. Also the quadav fight hasn't been figured out but is also super annoying.

I don't have a nuking job. My BLU is not at all geared for nuking.

There are a lot of people but no one groups up with scrubs - at least not without 3 hours of shouting -.-

Thanks for letting me know I can get pop items from moogle. That's nice.

If I can find folks willing to do it I am up for it, I just don't want to spend limited time shouting. I'd rather just log off and breed pokemon or something.

The only bright side to them ruining ambuscade is that I can focus on doing other stuff this month, I guess. I only have pup of the jobs on this armor, and I don't play pup really so I can go without it, especially since there are no pet stats on it. I might do a few runs if I can find a group on Normal, but I am not going to sweat it.

Maybe I will take my level 70 DRG to 99 so I can at least enjoy last month's armor set.

[Dale]

Well the point was that it's been updated with a direct design decision to stop solo players more than anything else, you can't use holy waters on a trust tank or pet. They added Galantry, then they added a mob that can doom and as an added kick they put another mob in there.

I know you can turn or use holy waters, that wasn't the point I was making though. Point was that Square went 10x over what was needed to dissuade people from soloing and directly punish them instead now, probably because the content was more popular than they expected. Instead of just limiting how many times you can enter per day they decided to punish players for doing the content outside of groups. Considering the majority of content available to group players they are really not being very smart here.

Even Blizzard said the secret to their success was making content for everyone and not just the raiders or pvp players.

I guess the truth is the leadership of the game is changing so much they don't know what they want lately though.

That doom crap is a pain whether you are in a group or not. So I'm not sure why that mechanic punishes solo players in particular. It's just miserable to deal with all around. So it's likely to dissuade both soloists and groups alike.

I was just letting you know I had more success at getting the doom off by spamming holy waters instead of trying to get it off with that Cursna Spell, which I agreed sucks.

I'll try soloing it on normal later and see how difficult it is. Then I'll have a better idea as to how hard SE is making this new content for soloists using trusts. You may be right on all your points.

I'll add a comment to this thread once I try it out and see.