Are drops nerfed for Magic in general or just -ga spells?

[Boofaceing]

Topic. I would like to know if I could run around 1 hit koing things for the same drops as a melee would get to take enough time to kill them one by one. Share your experiences/ideas if you could please.


I leveled a Black Mage to farm items that I needed because this game makes it impossible to earn money at times without spending 2-3 days hitting tab and enter, that was before I found out that Square Enix nerfed whats considered the number 1 way to farm smaller but rarer items in every MMO to date. I should have really readup on it.

So - Did they nerf drops from every spell kill or just from AoE farming with -ga spells?

[Feynman]

So my main is not BLM first, just so you know. Also I'm not sure what nerf you're talking about. Can you give a link to the article you read on this? Are you saying you don't get drops from -aga spells, or the drop rate does down with -aga spells?

I'd be surprised if they did this but like I said, I'm not a BLM and I haven't read anything about this so I don't really know what's up.

Not anything here to help you but you got me curious.

[TybudX]

AoE damage in general produces less drop rates from mobs, it could be from an -aga spell or an AoE WS, doesn't matter. I've never tested it myself but I seem to remember somebody saying that you can only get hate on eight mobs at once. If that's true I wouldn't doubt that it is only possible for eight mobs to have a chance at dropping items. Just conjecture.

[Yygdrasil]

I'm on the fence about this topic. I'm not entirely sure how long ago this "nerf" you speak of started... but back when people were abusing the crap out of Astral Burn parties in K. Tunnels... every "round" of kills was dropping 30-40 crystals. The other drops from bats/giants etc were less... but if there are 60ish mobs in a cluster and you wipe them all in an astral burn that nets you around 40 crystals... I don't see how 8mob hate is actually a thing... unless crystals are counted separately. If only 8 mobs drop anything.... 40 crystals would mean... 4+ crystals/mob.

But... then again... EVERY mob in one of those clusters was never killed simultaneously. They usually went down in clusters of 10-15 at a time. I suppose it could be a thing.

[FrankReynolds]

It was my understanding that if you use AOE spells, only the mob being target will drop items. I don't think this works the same for AOE WS. It has no effect on single target spells as far as I know.

They apparently did this to nerf RMT farming.

[Arcon]

I never bought into that and until I see some decent testing I won't believe it. You do get drops from AoE targets in the same killshot, both with WS and with magic. And you can get hate on all mobs in range, I believe it doesn't matter how many there are, even if they don't all fit on the screen.

[Boofaceing]

http://www.ffxionline.com/forums/race-job-type-q/72721-farming-jobs-options-thf-2.html

Read the second page. I have tested the same as the person doing Yaguda Necklaces have tested. I have killed them 1 by 1 with a fellow paladin on a monk/war, and then switched to blm/rdm and had him round up about 60 of them and used 2 AoE's to kill them all. We recieved 7 Yaguda Necklaces in total from the AoE farm. We recieved 55/60 Yaguda Necklaces by killing them 1 by 1. We have tried the same on Jellies in Korrolka Tunnel as well as the Sheep in Beadiuex for the skins.

The Sheep and Jellies drop rate were nerfed, so bad actually to the point where we recieved no oils or no skins. Usually we can get at least a 50% drop rate from 10-20. We recieved a 0% drop rate. We also did this quickly using warp and chocobos and outposts to make sure it was the same day/same moon cycle for those wondering about that.

Edit: We almost lagged out on the Yaguda part, is there an FPS cap to this game that only occurs at Maus/Extremely large groups of enemies?

Also: If I'm wrong about this, and you can test it and check it yourself and find another story, please let me know. I am not trying to come off like everyones wrong but I checked this post on that forum after looking up why I wasn't getting any drops and went to Giddeus as well and enlisted the help of my friend for it. We were both in a party, so drops would have been shared, and he was the one that aggro'd most of the zone for me.

[Feynman]

While I am not saying that the drop rate for AoE spells is not nerfed, I'd also say that with these types of low number statistics you can't be certain either. Same thing for the page that you linked to. People there are claiming things like 95% drop rate on Yag necklaces when killed one at a time, which is not right at all. But trying to do statistics with only a few trials just doesn't get you far. This is why one person can go 1/1 on a drop and the next person can spend a day and be 0/50.

Like I said, I don't mean to say anything certain about the drop rates but I haven't seen anything convincing to say they are nerfed yet either. SE may have done it (RMT someone mentioned above) but they are pretty good about telling us what they are doing even if we don't like their ideas. I never saw SE say they made this change, though there have been large chunks of time that I didn't play over the years.

[Boofaceing]

Just get a mage and go somewhere, you can even take /thf and then AoE kill a group of mobs and check your loot. Come back as War or Monk and kill them same mobs 1 by 1. I would have taken a sample of over 1000000 monsters like you said, but after you can type AoE Farming FFXI into google and all that shows up is that it doesn't work and the drops are nerfed across multiple forums from different people, you get the idea. I did my own testing just to make sure and 7 out of 60? Compared to 55 out of 60? Thats a 85% difference in drop rate? I would have did more but I logged due to being pissed.