Airships are Dead.
After almost 2 weeks worth of testing, with a very large sample size, I have come to the conclusion that airships are no longer a viable source of materia or relevant crafting materials.
This is coming from someone who used to love this system. I'm now spending more money on repair materials and ceruleum tanks than any actual profit or usable items they may bring back. I literally can't see any reason to continue sending them out on voyages with the crap they are returning with.
Need materia for those shiney new ironworks sets? Don't bother sending ships to sector 13 and 17 unless you want to bathe in silver ore and earth crystals. That best in slot airship build you spent months crafting and raising funds for; Sorry stats don't mean a thing anymore when the loot tables are so bad and that capped retrieval still results in less than x5 materia 90% of the time. Have crafting and gathering members in your large FC that need help with melds and can't afford materia? Tough luck, tell them to go spiritbond.
SE has nerfed this system to the ground without telling us, and has devalued all of the hard work FCs have put into leveling and customizing their airships. If you didn't capitalize on the high value items and materia before patch 3.3, sadly your SOL.
I almost wonder if this was done to discourage people from buying up additional housing just for airships? Been having some pretty poor loot myself. Getting a lot for tier 3 materia lately that I only make a profit off of because people keep putting it on the mb for less than vendor cost.
Or do Ixal dailies because the last few you open up now give tier 4 crafting/gathering materia. It's only a few per day, but you don't have to spirit bond.
If you think about it, those materias add up faster than what you get from airships, and you get a slight variety.
It's kind of unfortunate. :/
Suirieko Mizukoshi ofExcaliburLamia
Not true, I did quick check and some of the materials still sell for millions and many others just short of that. As long as you have invested the time and gil into having the ships capable of going to those sectors and retrieving them...then despite having RNG involved it doesn't cost much more by that stage to farm them and make a decent amount of profit. Just like leveling a retainer is not a worthless activity despite RNG involved and most of the stuff being less valuable. Some of the things they bring back will be and if put in time and effort to get to the stage where can farm them then it is worth doing.
If you were only doing it for materia then yes the value of them is less now because there are more ways to obtain T4's and now T5's are easier to gain...however T4 gathering and crafting materia is still worth farming and even the generic T4's can be converted into other more valuable T4's or some times T5.
Your coming at it from the wrong angle. Think more along the lines of gaining many more in addition to the amount gain from beastman tribes. You can gain 12 from beastman tribes a day, much more if combine that with airship voyages. It's is not one or the other, it is both together that is how should think about it. As far as I am concerned granting materia from beastman tribes benefited doing the tribes but it did not detract from airship gained ones. It just added to the amount can obtain which is a good thing, especially since I almost always convert T4's to T5's anyways so the more T4's I get then the better the chances of more T5's.
Last edited by Snugglebutt; 06-20-2016 at 08:48 AM.
Are you saying you can get 12 crafting/gathering T4 materia a day? How are you doing this from beast tribes? I see us only get 3 a day.
I do not know what other people are doing. But we just got our "frugal freighter" airship back from its THIRD 60 hour trip to sector 19. It has not opened up sector 20 in these three trips. And teh last voyage. Above average yield....SEVENTEEN, that's right. 17 HQ Gold Sand!!! The previous two trips, with average yields. Brought back CRAP! What is even worse. Is our second airship, which is nothing but bronco parts. Are bringing back more variety of loot from teh lower sectors than this "beast" of a ship.
I never said got 12 DoH/DoL ones from beastman tribes. I collect as many T4's of 'all types' as possible including from airships and beastman tribes plus fish deysnths then convert them all north of black bush station into quite often DoH/DoL T4's and sometimes T5's. The fact can gain additional T4's from airships is a good thing in my opinion alongside those from beastman tribes and those from gathering/deysnths plus soulbind conversions.
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