FINAL FANTASY XI Digest Q&A February 2021

[Akihiko_Matsui]

This special episode of the FINAL FANTASY XI Digest covers players’ questions that were gathered in December 2020.
Check out the video and let us know what you think in this thread!

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[Alhanelem]

Mostly a nice episode. That said, I think everyone would prefer it if you stuck to questions you can actually answer in some way (i.e. the story question where you basically said "we can't say anything".)

[Laruni]

Thank you for doing this special Q&A, it makes me excited for future content! I hope there are more in the future!!

[Tsukihika]

It does feel like these questions were "cherry picked" to get the promised and demanded Q&A Digest out of way with the least amount of effort. Many of the questions us western players were especially looking forward to, seem to have been outright ignored and never answered. Especially those of technical nature and regarding connectivity issues. This is great shame.

Secret recipes like the omelette recipe mentioned are great addition. Should definitely consider adding more of such recipes for players to discover together.

[Tsukihika]

Job adjustments so far have been quite random from player perspective and some jobs have been totally skipped or gotten adjustments that make no sense, which irritates naturally some players. It will be great indeed to get adjustment for all jobs simultaneously instead. As a big fan of the Bard job personally, please consider the possibility of adding ability for bard, that does the opposite of Pianissimo ability and turns single target song like Finale and Elegy into area of effect for one cast! Casting these spells one by one on each target when your party is battling multiple monsters at once can be arduous task.

[Tsukihika]

Also. In regard to the large amount of questions received from western players as mentioned the Q&A video. Please communicate more with western players! Perhaps the developers are not aware that large majority of western players are under such impression, that FFXI developers only react to Japanese players? And completely ignore their western playerbase. Leaving the many questions from western players out of this Q&A video further works to enforce such impression.

[Jezey]

War great axe needs to be buffed. I am a really good player with war and I notice war shines really well with all other weapons that is possible but the great axe. It lacks the proper weapon skill damage that a great axe is supposed to put out. UKKO's FURRY REALLY REALLY needs to be un nerfed or readjusted more. Other Main jobs like DRK and defiantly MNK's main weapon is producing high numbers but war's great axe weapon skill damage is trash. PLEASE for the love of god ! Buff great axe weapon skill damage or weapon skill properties in some way shape or form thank you !

[Leny]

Really, how many years you going to dangle the empyrean bait for?

Elemental magic needs that fix now, not 2 years from now.

[Dekusuta]

Thanks for the Q&A. Looking forward to the Job adjustments, Empyrean armor and additional storage.

[Onimaru]

Ok, Wayyyyy better. Loved this episode. Finally feels like you're reaching out.

[Zegreiart]

Great video. Thank you for sharing some insight with us. I'm looking forward to learning more about the job updates and am hopeful that the job changes herald in a new dawn for XI.

[Pixela]

Thank you for taking the time to answer some questions for us!

[Jmr]

As much as secret recipes excite me. And they do. You've 'somehow' managed to not answer a single relevant question, if any question at all. With the exception maybe of revealing that all jobs will be 'updated' in a single patch.

Here I was looking forward to hearing how you were going to (re)balance the game because currently magic, skillchains and ranged attacks are seemingly irrelevant when you consider that every job that can equip Naegling can top any parse by just spamming savage blade with it. The game is in dire need of slowing down melee TP gain by a lot, there are other games that do the spam 1 skill to kill more or less everything much better and it would be a waste to keep FFXI in its current state trying to compete with those.

[Alhanelem]

It does feel like these questions were "cherry picked" to get the promised and demanded Q&A Digest I mean, they made that pretty clear in the first couple of questiones where they basically said they lumped a bunch of questions together into one. There isn't anything wrong with this. I'd rather them pick out questions they can give a meaningful answer to. Which they mostly did, except for the story question where they basically only said "we can't talk about that."



As much as secret recipes excite me. And they do. You've 'somehow' managed to not answer a single relevant question, if any question at all. With the exception maybe of revealing that all jobs will be 'updated' in a single patch. I kind of dispute this. they did discuss how they have specific plans to release the reforged empyrean gear, and it's tied into the full spectrum job adjustments. Which alsos means that the empyrean upgrades probably will be modifying whatever things that get changed or added for each job when that happens. It's kind of a wishy-washy answer, yeah, but it's not meaningless.

Frankly I'd argue that this Q &A is better than most of the ones they've ever done, even if that isn't saying a whole lot.

[Darcain]

Darn my question wasn't one of the 6 they answered. Maybe I'd have better luck winning the Bonanza.

[Keagan]

lol "This year or later" so "Between now and never"

[Keagan]

As much as secret recipes excite me. And they do. You've 'somehow' managed to not answer a single relevant question, if any question at all. With the exception maybe of revealing that all jobs will be 'updated' in a single patch.

Here I was looking forward to hearing how you were going to (re)balance the game because currently magic, skillchains and ranged attacks are seemingly irrelevant when you consider that every job that can equip Naegling can top any parse by just spamming savage blade with it. The game is in dire need of slowing down melee TP gain by a lot, there are other games that do the spam 1 skill to kill more or less everything much better and it would be a waste to keep FFXI in its current state trying to compete with those.

The real problem, IMO, is the solution for every hard fight is "AF/AC" and the fact that so few people know how to SC anyhow. i am a big fan of Leaden > Mordant > Torcleaver > Leaden > Wildfire personally.
however, the job overhaul is exciting

[Whitney]

I fully agree with this. As a Mastered WAR with +3 reforged AF and relic, Warrior beads +2 and an ReMA great axe, I find that the output in damage with our key weapon skills like Upheaval and Ukko’s Fury falls far short of even what I have seen from well geared DRG using Stardiver or SAM using Tachi: Fudo. Most of my gear is best-in-slot and yet, I found myself doing between 10,000 and 24,000 damage on average in the same fight as a Samurai spamming 30,000-40,000 damage weapon skills and the DRG doing 34,000 fairly consistently. I also occasionally break 30,000 and even 40,000 with some weapon skills but even with very high accuracy I have never been able to consistently do those higher end numbers with great axe no matter how much STR, VIT, attack, accuracy or weapon skill damage + I add.

For contrast, on my mastered COR I can, with only a Doomsday as my gun and Naegling in main hand, very consistently put out over 20,000 damage at 1,000 TP against anything not resistant to darkness, and my record on an Apex mob so far is a 57,000 damage Leaden Salute - this is with only trusts and no geomancer in my party. The fact that I can directly compete with my WAR’s great axe weapon skill damage on a hybrid support job like COR really reveals how much Great Axe weaponskills need a buff akin to what Savage Blade got.

True, having a 100% double attack build and a five hit setup means I can spam weaponskills every few seconds on WAR and create many self-light skill chains ...BUT so can literally any other 2H weapon user with a good TP set- my DRK, DRG and SAM are all 99 and all can self-skillchain easily, too. In fact, I can even create a powerful darkness self-skillchain on my COR and can only imagine what it can do when I finish my death penalty. My WAR still does more DPS, yes, but considering the numbers I can hit with other 2H weapons like Great Katana, Great Sword and Polearm, it is obvious that upheaval and Ukko’s Fury badly need to be placed on the level of other, better weaponskills.

Any great axe user knows this pain. We love our weapon but it really suffers from a lack of strong closing weaponskills.

While on the subject, I think it is also time to buff relic/empyrian/aeonic/mythic weaponskills for great axe - especially Metatron Torment, which could really use a buff (or at least make it more useful by allowing us to drain hp with the weapon skill instead of the regen effect, which in current endgame is pretty useless in keeping us alive) and of course Ukko’s Fury and the terrible upheaval- unless someone has an R15 Aeonic, even at 5/5 merits it is underwhelming without mighty strikes.

Nobody is asking that WAR be king of all damage dealers. We just want Great Axe weaponskills that are not so underwhelming compared to other options. As it stands, there is an imbalance between two-handed weapons and their weaponskills and great axe is suffering the most from that.


War great axe needs to be buffed. I am a really good player with war and I notice war shines really well with all other weapons that is possible but the great axe. It lacks the proper weapon skill damage that a great axe is supposed to put out. UKKO's FURRY REALLY REALLY needs to be un nerfed or readjusted more. Other Main jobs like DRK and defiantly MNK's main weapon is producing high numbers but war's great axe weapon skill damage is trash. PLEASE for the love of god ! Buff great axe weapon skill damage or weapon skill properties in some way shape or form thank you !

[Whitney]

As for job adjustments...BST is a shell of what it used to be in light of the existence of trusts and the nerf made to the distance at which you can use pet commands. I never use my BST anymore for this reason- anything I can do on BST I can do BETTER on another job. The damage output will never compete with the top DD’s. It cannot tank particularly well with jug pets. Charm is pointless in the most common endgame zones. It’s strength in the past was in using pets while standing back to avoid damaging AoE attacks, but when you made the command distance so small, you took that away, forcing us to run in close to use pet food or a move, which can often result in getting destroyed by an AoE on stronger enemies or caught with petrification or paralyze At exactly the wrong time.

So, BST has no real place anymore. I can stay far away on SMN and still use pet commands. I can do more damage on many other jobs and trusts kind of make pets almost useless as tanks now. What’s the point in BST then? This is why you rarely see anyone playing as BST anymore.

And yes, again...please change the regen effect on metatron torment to a % based drain or something more useful. 15 hp every 3 seconds simply is not enough to help on anything higher level than 119. Maybe if you made it 50 hp/tick, but at 15, it does not increase survivability much at all. The weaponskill itself also needs a better damage modifier.

[Jdove]

The real problem, IMO, is the solution for every hard fight is "AF/AC" and the fact that so few people know how to SC anyhow. i am a big fan of Leaden > Mordant > Torcleaver > Leaden > Wildfire personally.
however, the job overhaul is exciting

The only thing people AF/AC are aeonic helms and they arent really hard, everything else is a huge Melee zerg, blood pacts got an un needed nerf and now you cant even apogee anything with out a 90% dmg penalty or play with other smn's ,yet its ok to melee zerg everything. If anything Cor and bard and naegling need nerfed and elemental magic needs buffed.

[Lockhart]

I'm glad to know you have plans for the future. I'm also extremely glad to know you know how big the desire is for more inventory/storage. Please keep it up and overcome COVID challenges. I love the game exactly how it is and I really enjoy playing it. Knowing changes are coming is very exciting, even if it is just being dangled in front of me for several years. I really like the idea of the job changes all at once, however, when you were adding more than just sparks/ambuscade updates monthly I couldn't stop being excited for the next month. I hope the team will continue to make minor job adjustments after this big 22 job update. Maybe even make a month long (update to update) event for a specific job, or two, for example this month warrior berserk is reduced to 3 minutes and can be used full time and Red Mage gets native dual wield at level 20, but only for this month! This might give people incentive to play jobs they haven't in a while, or at all, since its only temporary wouldn't change the whole game, also it might be good way to test permanent job changes.

[Tsukihika]

Maybe even make a month long (update to update) event for a specific job, or two, for example this month warrior berserk is reduced to 3 minutes and can be used full time and Red Mage gets native dual wield at level 20, but only for this month! This might give people incentive to play jobs they haven't in a while, or at all, since its only temporary wouldn't change the whole game, also it might be good way to test permanent job changes.

Warrior berserk ability can already be fulltimed by meriting the recast and using specific duration boosting armor pieces. Also adding/removing the dual wield trait would break player equipset macros after this period ends and require players to switch them back and forth every month potentially. Doing this for several jobs and their equipsets can get tedious fast and drain player motivation. Temporary "game changer" boons like this, in order to encourage bringing the less popular jobs out, do have some potential though. Perhaps something like new and unique, yet temporary, weapon skill while on specific job. Perhaps a staff WS for black mage only, that causes an unique "full break" effect, breaking not only enemy def, attack and evasion, but also magic defense. Temporary club WS for paladin that behaves similar to Moonlight WS, but instead of restoring mp to party members, reduces enmity of party members hit and potentially even transfers it all to paladin. And so on. There's certainly all kind of crazy possibilities and something like this would certainly encourage people to bring these rarely seen jobs into events more often.

[Lockhart]

Warrior berserk ability can already be fulltimed by meriting the recast and using specific duration boosting armor pieces. Also adding/removing the dual wield trait would break player equipset macros after this period ends and require players to switch them back and forth every month potentially. Doing this for several jobs and their equipsets can get tedious fast and drain player motivation. Temporary "game changer" boons like this, in order to encourage bringing the less popular jobs out, do have some potential though. Perhaps something like new and unique, yet temporary, weapon skill while on specific job. Perhaps a staff WS for black mage only, that causes an unique "full break" effect, breaking not only enemy def, attack and evasion, but also magic defense. Temporary club WS for paladin that behaves similar to Moonlight WS, but instead of restoring mp to party members, reduces enmity of party members hit and potentially even transfers it all to paladin. And so on. There's certainly all kind of crazy possibilities and something like this would certainly encourage people to bring these rarely seen jobs into events more often.

Cool, thanks for your input. I was more using that as a quick example. For the example of berserk, I was more leaning toward level 15-99 encouragement. I was suggesting one or two jobs a month, to try and hit all jobs once a year. I was just making a suggestion of an additional thing they could do that would hopefully not require a huge amount of testing and effort to change, that would add to monthly changes. When it only says sparks/unity/ambuscade swaps, it gets a bit boring.

[Teimoli]

Still nothing addressing or even acknowledging that the game is overrun with bots and hackers, or that the special task force is completely useless against this plague? Stop pumping all of the resources into the disaster that is FFXIV or the greed that is FF7: Remake and bring some support back here.

[Lockhart]

Still nothing addressing or even acknowledging that the game is overrun with bots and hackers, or that the special task force is completely useless against this plague? Stop pumping all of the resources into the disaster that is FFXIV or the greed that is FF7: Remake and bring some support back here.

Hello, just wanted to let you know that the information you seek is announced elsewhere. Please see:
http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/rule/specialtask.html

[Teimoli]

Thanks, but that's not much of a plan when 3+ new bots show up every week. Also, I can guarantee that at least some hackers aren't getting banned because I still see many of them that I witnessed first hand and reported still running around.

[kythra]

like Vagary- It would be wonderful if the new job adjustements made us useful again. That's honestly my request.

BTW. I am planning on having 6 accounts open soon.

I'm a high taxpayer to the company and already have 4 copies of the game- am just waiting to sub 2 more and then finally the next discount for the other 2.

just wanted to let you know that I contribute a lot so you'd consider making me a priority.

[Cyriack]

would it be feasable to put more storage chests in the mog garden to hold items until a better solution is found? i cant use any but 6 jobs per character with the high need for gear and some of that gear especially abjurations and stuff doesnt fit anywhere else.

[Immortal]

Please start caring more about your game, SE. You can turn such a profit from this old game if you actually invested into making the bare minimum for content... I think most players would be happy getting something with current assets that was challenging and fun. The rewards could be barely better than what we have, some very slight upgrades. We used to do content just for +1 STR over previous gear... The population for this game is not hard to please, yet you aren't even creating the bare minimum effort for content.. its insane. Create a new Delve, new Sinister Reign but for other era content. Do something... Most of my friends have quit because they got bored that we have the same content for 3 years+. Why does XIV get all the love when we are also paying a subscription price!?

[Cyriack]

are you going to do anything about the fact that a10 digging makes only 600k a day. i would like to see more money out of all the extremly hard work to get that far, even if it means intriguing some rmt, they are gonna mess with anything they can anyway.

[BST]

Maintenance for Silver Sea Remnants did not fix the issue and has started again, instantly.

[Deridjian]

Wow lots of salt in this thread. I can see why people want more, miss stuff, and are upset about details but I also think it's unnecessary to be mad. Thank you for this digest, especially for the English sub titles. It's great to see you're still thinking about further job balancing as a never ending process. I think the wardrobe issue becomes increasingly important the further you "make people want to play other jobs too" as you say it, although it's understandable that at this point it's something you have to coordinate with Marketing. I personally feel very disheartened to see that a game with a rather hefty monthly sub apparently falls behind the commonly adopted micro payment gambling model, so much so, that you are reluctant to provide adequate inventory space for your players by default. (In a game that's heavily focused on having tons of different equipment sets that is).

Please don't ask me to use FFXI video conference backgrounds in my family zoom calls though hahaha. Please keep translating these for us, it's very enjoyable to see you guys every once in a while talking about the development side of the game we all cherish so much. Way to go!

[Immortal]

You dont see why people are salty yet you are posting a complaint? That is exactly why people are salty, we are paying a high sub price in 2021 and not even getting the bare minimum from this company.

[Cyriack]

something ive noticed. the sell value of voodoo and all that has come down tremendously in value from like 350k a pop to 4M. which is terrible for crafters, and also the cost of materials to craft have gone majorly up, yes some are coming down more recently but not enough to actually turn a profit. its like putting a quarter in a machine and hoping to win 2 pennies, it just isnt happening. in the near future are there any plans to add better stuff to sell or upgrade stuff with crafting and synergy because i hate to see my favorite thing in the game die. not trying to complain just realized that something has to be done about it eventually.

[Tsukihika]

Gain exp + selling spark shields was such a huge profit maker for a lot of people. Particularly for soloers and low level players that are unable to run events like dynamis divergence or vagary in order to make gil. When SE nerfed sparks in order to combat RMTs or whatever, this immediately led to people having a lot less gil to spend and buy expensive gear. Which in turn led to there being a lot more unsold gear for sale in game, which in turn led to crafters not being able to buy materials for as much anymore, nor having a reason to buy materials since nothing is selling. Which in turn led to both crafting material sellers and crafters undercutting each other in order to ensure their stuff sells first since everything sells slow. Everything fell in price...

Same happened to REMA materials. People had less to spend thanks to sparks nerf. --> Markets gets heavily saturated by materials. --> prices crash.

Honestly SE should have placed time restriction on sparks that removes the purchase limit instead of outright hard capping it for every player. There plenty stuff in the game where your account must be x-days old before being able to participate. Setting something like 365 day active account limitation on sparks purchase limiter would be totally fine.

Although they did add gil reward to Odyssey, which basically prints free gil. We get nearly 1mil a run for every party member running it as 6-man party and just smashing all nostos on the way to exit... But not every player feels motivated to run Odyssey as team. Sparks at least could be soloed.

Remove the spark weekly limit for considerably old ffxi accounts SE! This limitation has no doubt led to several real players quitting since they have hard time making gil on their own now. You're literally throwing customers away with these half-baked decisions.

[Cyriack]

ok this is a tough thing to do but wondering if it is possible. is it possible to make it so u can login to multiple characters on your own account, and use multiple controllers and dual trio box etc. i know this would cut into people buying multiple accounts and you wouldnt want to lose money on that but it would in turn make it so people can solo ambuscades by themselves without having to ask people who obviously dont have a clue what they are doing half their life. it would also make it so you could monitor multiple ah at the same time to get things to sell faster, do multiple gardens at once, and fight omen bcnm and other things alot easier.

[Cyriack]

what about a waist you put on that holds crystals you select what ones you want and how many u need them take the waist off and put back on your gear.

[Alhanelem]

what about a waist you put on that holds crystals you select what ones you want and how many u need them take the waist off and put back on your gear.
Don't think th is is possible the way usable items are designed. The best method right now is just to craft near one of the guilds, where you'll find the crystal storage moogle, who already does the things you describe.

[Alhanelem]

ok this is a tough thing to do but wondering if it is possible. is it possible to make it so u can login to multiple characters on your own account, and use multiple controllers and dual trio box etc. i know this would cut into people buying multiple accounts and you wouldnt want to lose money on that but it would in turn make it so people can solo ambuscades by themselves without having to ask people who obviously dont have a clue what they are doing half their life. it would also make it so you could monitor multiple ah at the same time to get things to sell faster, do multiple gardens at once, and fight omen bcnm and other things alot easier.
You can already solo ambuscade with trusts and good gear The closest th ing they could really come to a concept like this though, might be making a Trust that is based upon a selected alternate character. But it wouldn't be able to be equally powerful otherwise there would be no reason to interact with other players ever, which is a bad thing.

[Tsukihika]

They would indeed lose far too much money by removing the need to maintain another account. Not to mention the insane amount of stress this would cause on their servers with nearly every player logging more characters in. Mules/additional characters would have to be a lot more expensive than they are right now. Or add option to mules which allows you to specify them as secondary characters, which costs more than standard mule (worth additional account), and allows you to have this particular mule online alongside main character. This would however be no different from simply using another account. In fact, using another account may be preferable as you can pass that account to friend when necessary.

The game does already have a "trust" that they could very easily build into highly modifiable companion. Namely the adventuring fellow system. By overhauling this seemingly abandoned game content and updating it to modern standard of ffxi, they could very easily create special companion whose entire jobs and AI behavior can be easily set by player as needed. Leveling this companion up to player level, getting them armors and weapons, as well as interacting with them in order to change their job and behavior is also far more interesting than the current trust system. Players do also very often complain, that their trusts are using wrong spells and abilities (and getting them into all sorts of trouble by doing so), and would like to disable these and modify trust behavior themselves to suit their needs, similar to FF12 Gambit system.

[Teraniku]

They would indeed lose far too much money by removing the need to maintain another account. Not to mention the insane amount of stress this would cause on their servers with nearly every player logging more characters in. Mules/additional characters would have to be a lot more expensive than they are right now. Or add option to mules which allows you to specify them as secondary characters, which costs more than standard mule (worth additional account), and allows you to have this particular mule online alongside main character. This would however be no different from simply using another account. In fact, using another account may be preferable as you can pass that account to friend when necessary.

The game does already have a "trust" that they could very easily build into highly modifiable companion. Namely the adventuring fellow system. By overhauling this seemingly abandoned game content and updating it to modern standard of ffxi, they could very easily create special companion whose entire jobs and AI behavior can be easily set by player as needed. Leveling this companion up to player level, getting them armors and weapons, as well as interacting with them in order to change their job and behavior is also far more interesting than the current trust system. Players do also very often complain, that their trusts are using wrong spells and abilities (and getting them into all sorts of trouble by doing so), and would like to disable these and modify trust behavior themselves to suit their needs, similar to FF12 Gambit system.

I'd like to see the Adventuring Fellow get a modified Automaton Interface for Equipping in game gear. Even if they can only be set in one of the 6 original jobs it would make them a lot more useful than trusts.