The real imbalance with seal quests

[Felren]

Ever since AF+1 seals have been released and obtainable from quests, I've accepted that the drop rate is around the same for each quest, as well as which seal you get is random. This doesn't seem like a bad system, but it the real imbalance comes in the difficulty and time consumption in each individual quest itself.

Which is why when I saw this Q/A I became really confused....

Q: While helping out the embattled survivors of Abyssea is reward enough for this altruistic adventurer, those I assist never seem to reward me with the Empyrean upgrade seals I seek. Is it just me or is there an imbalance in the rate of yield?

A: We have confirmed that the yield rate of the seals in question is uniform, and this has been verified in subsequent testing. As is the nature of probability, however, some deviation may occur in the short-term. We ask for your understanding in this matter, and fervently hope that you never cease lending your aid to the needy folk of Abyssea.

Now earlier, a twitter message from FFIX_EN I saw this message

We've received a lot of feedback asking for a better balancing of the seal rewards for Abyssea quests

I'm wondering if the FFXI team misinterpreted what people were having a problem with, and that is the relation between quest difficulty and quest reward rate.

Let me give an example of the wide imbalance in quest time consumption and difficulty within abyssea:

1. Smoke over the Coast- For this quest, one may simply buy multiple stacks of galkan sausage on the auction house, and repeat the quest, taking around 2 minutes per turn in.

2. An Offer You Can't Refuse- For this quest, Obtain a Piece of Malachite and turn it in to the starting NPC. This can either be obtained through a) Finding one in a gold chest b) having one drop off one of five different NMs in the Abyssea- Attowha zone. The rate that you can find these from gold chests is rather low even if you do have the quest, and I have also only seen one Malachite drop from at least 10+ of the monsters that can drop them.... This quest would take probably at least half an hour or so per turn in at the least if you tried to spam it, and that is being generous. You would have to first farm amber lights to see gold chests drop at a decent rate, then get lucky enough to find one in a chest. And I'm noting that these Malachite are Rare/Ex, and npc for 5k gold


THIS is where the major imbalance in seal quests comes in. I don't see why each quest should have an equal seal drop rate if one quest may take a small fraction of the time to complete that another one does. There are several seal quests in abyssea that require a large amount of time and effort to spam, and it seems very unfair that if you want the seal that drops from this quest, you are set at a major disadvantage.

[Amarok]

I understand what you are saying, I was lucky enough to need 3 types of body seals from the Pursuer's Wing quest (MNK, PLD, DNC) and was able to solo farm up the wing between each completion pretty quick (and tag the OP quest at the same time for XP and another chance at a seal).

Do you realise though that currently you have to wait until next game day between completing a quest before you can repeat it for a seal? Otherwise you just get Cruor/Fame. So the sausage thing isn't quite 2 mins per repeat for a seal, although its easier to repeat if you want to stay outside the maw for 58 mins.

*edit* actually I might be wrong about the 1 seal per game day on quest since you have to zone, I know its like that for OPs though.

[GERM]

I would like to see this changed a little. A lot of people are going for multiple jobs and yet not every job. So by spending x amount of time procuring an item or items that are inside of abyssea and then the time to do the quest ect just to get 1 seal (or none at all at times) is very frustrating when you can just make a pt and maybe go farm seals (if your lucky enough to build a pt) I feel these quests should either A) Increase rate in which seals drop B) have job specific seal quests with a decent rate of obtaining seals or C) the option to pick which seal you want.

Another imbalance I've seen when it comes to NM seal questing is some NM's can't be low manned no matter how good your party is and depending on the seals that drop you may not find a party that would be able to kill the monster (even if you had 6-10 people) since you cant expect to get all proc jobs at one time or you cant find the healing because your going for a mob that drops DD seals or vice versa find a tank because a mob only drops mage seals..

Then you have the issue of pop conditions, you need 2-3 pop items for certain mobs and the AH price for these items (if there are any in stock) are drastic and then you kill the mob hit the proc and still only get 1 - 2 seals for something that no one wants. This is very discouraging also.. I cant expect my party to go buy 2 pop items @ 50k each to pop 1 mob each to get 0-4 seals that a person wants and people will shy away from those kind of pops due to the price or the complications involved in pop items... How to eliminate this problem? I don't know increase drop rate of pop items will cause a possible flood in the AH lowering the price of the items or reducing the conditions for spawning something that requires 2 or more NM pop items...

[lllen]

Hey Germ...you are right. My problem is that I can't get a party for Whm, Blm, Rdm, Blu seals (any part). When I am lucky enough to get a party together myself for seals, there is always one who needs one seal and leaves, needs ki and leaves, So party balance is messed up (always seems to be the tank). I do a lot Dominion runs, but since these areas started you can count on one hand how many seals that I can use have dropped. I have had days of pup pup pup pup pup...pld...pup pup pup thf. I don't mind that things are difficult, but this business of days on end of no seal that is usable is crazy.

[Kimara]

I agree that a lot of the seal quests are unbalanced despite what SE claims. I would be satisfied if they would at least eliminate the chance of getting absolutely nothing. It's one this to get a seal you don't need and another to go 20 times getting nothing. It doesn't make the game any harder it makes it a time sink and just plain not fun. An ability to be able to store your current seals would help too. Or pool the seals so others in your party can lot if you don't need it.

[Gwynplaine]

I don't think that quested or Ops seals should be tradeable or put into a shared pool etc. The way I see it the quests are just a random bonus. The main event is fighting the NMs, the real meat of the game. If you want to spam quests to get seals you accept the fact that it is random in exchange for it being easy to solo.

At the same time some of the quests are way too difficult to repeat. In particular the malachite quest. I'm a quest buff who has done nearly all but I still have never had one malachite drop. It might be nice if the most difficult quests were made slightly easier or the likelihood of receiving a seal was higher in relation.

[Tummie]

Makes sense:

If quest A takes 5 minutes average to complete and has a seal reward rate of 20%
then Quest B that takes 10 minutes average should have a 40% reward rate for seals.

[Effilil]

I have the same problem with seals, getting people to fight the right NMs for my seals has a difficulty rating near the impossible end of the scale....most people either just don't want to help or don't want the seals that do drop, or they want the same seals I do...many of the quests for my whm and smn seals are difficult or expensive to do easily, and while I can solo the NMs, smn can only proc yellow at certain times based on sj, and it's a slim chance usually of having the right spells...and without proc or th, soloing, I get a 50% chance of having nothing drop at all on the good days...the rest of the time, it's usually 1 of the wrong seal
they do say there will be new ways to get seals, but I'm sure we'll still have days where we get all the wrong seals

[Beans]

It wouldn't hurt my feelings if *quest* drop rate was balanced more towards what you could actually wear (like jobs that are 80+). I wouldn't adjust NMs. But nothing makes it feel like you've wasted the day questing when you have 8/8 seals for your PLD69, BLU53, and BRD19 and all you needed were 2 seals for your MNK90. Yes, I'm looking at you, Yurim >.>

[Kyrial]

The original poster said exactly what I was thinking when I saw that message on Twitter. I very rarely ever heard complaints from anyone that different seals from the same quest were obtained more or less than others. But what I heard over and over and over (and what I hated about them myself), was that some jobs can get seals from very easy quests, while other jobs' seals come from quests that are nigh impossible to repeat with any sort of frequency. That was the most unfair part of the quests, in my opinion.

[Shiz]

I drop 90% of the quested seals i get. Rebalancing seal drops so that a more uniform ratio of seals drop does not make it any easier for me to get af3+1.

If SE is so adamantly against limiting quested seal drops to ones the player can use, they should at least consider changing it so that it drops more seals for the jobs that are popular on that server. There's no reason seals should drop as frequently for a job that few people have over 50 as one that many people have at 90.

If seals are really meant to be useful to only 1 job, for 1 item slot, then they need to know that most of the seals we're getting are trash. Rebalancing the trash isn't making it easier players.

[katoplepa]

there are some quests that aren't hard to do, but only long and time wasting : I'm doin' "let there be light" in Uleguerand, I have only to travel from A to B to C point, then exit and re-entering... 10 minutes per run, with movement speed atma... and I don't see never the seals I need (body for nin, smn), I asked a Jp who is doin' the same quest and he spent 40 traversers stone to get 12 nin, 9 smn, 8 mnk, 4 others... 40 stones... /em shakes his head.

the solution maybe is : you do the quest, you have the same chance to obtain a seal you have now, but when you "win" the chance to get a seal, the NPC says "you win a seal: what seal you want?" so you choose between the seal you can get from that quest... in this way, maybe you have to repeat the quest many times (like now) but when it's the time you can have the seal, at least you can pick up the one you need... you will spend a lot of stones anyway, but at least you are sure you don't have to toss away useless seals and you don't waste your time...

[RAIST]

one thing that really bugged me was when I was running a quest on SMN for the last of my SMN seals while wearing the AF feet that was logged with the magian moogle and obviously needing the seals for that piece...I wouldn't get a seal for SMN, but something like BRD or BLU. Um...Hello... don't you see I'm on SMN and I'm wearing the @#$@#$ boots? /rage.

Raist

[Ceicel]

This is just an idea I was playing around with one day randomly but, (forgive me if I'm not entirely clear, I'm somewhat bad at getting my point across at times) considering how rare it is to attain a specific seal from a quest, along with the odds, and the imbalance in completing the quest's, what if there was a seal conversion npc possibly where:

You have 3 seals for Job A, so you trade them to the npc, and get 1 seal for job B of your choice, within the restrictions of it being the same slot (feet for feet, legs for legs, etc etc)

Also thought, if you had say possibly, 5 head seal's for job B, but already had the head, and wanted legs, you could then convert them into 1 leg seal for job B. Now this may be a tad too much, but its something I'd thought I'd toss out there.

Values for A to B were just slightly random number's I came up with to attempt to keep in line with the balancing of questing for seal's vs's killing NM's to maintain the balance of NM's still maintaining the fastest way to obtain the seal's for AF3+1.

Thoughts and criticism (negative as well) welcome, and again, I apologize if it is not entirely clear what I'm trying to get across.

[Effilil]

I like the idea of an NPC that can convert seals for you, and they could set it up so that it's like battle trophies for keeping it "in the job" (2 feet per head ect.) and having to trade multiple seals to get a different job seal in the same armor slot wouldn't really be all that bad a trade off, especially if you get to the point where you only need a few seals to complete the +1 (which most of mine are at currently)
there are alot of items that are ex that are tradable to NPCs (such as beastman/kindred seals) so it really wouldn't be gamebreaking and would be one way to make it easier to obtain the seals we want, even as we get the seals we don't

[svengalis]

I like the idea of an NPC that can convert seals for you, and they could set it up so that it's like battle trophies for keeping it "in the job" (2 feet per head ect.) and having to trade multiple seals to get a different job seal in the same armor slot wouldn't really be all that bad a trade off, especially if you get to the point where you only need a few seals to complete the +1 (which most of mine are at currently)
there are alot of items that are ex that are tradable to NPCs (such as beastman/kindred seals) so it really wouldn't be gamebreaking and would be one way to make it easier to obtain the seals we want, even as we get the seals we don't

What would make more sense if they would just give us quest for the specific seal that we want instead getting a bunch of random seals. But of course that would be to easy and SE doesn't want that.

[Luvbunny]

The easiest fastest solution would be SE to create a code where NPC will look at your 75 jobs and award the seals based on those jobs. So effectively you are getting seals you can use for your jobs at lvl 75+, the only downside is that if you already max the seals on that one particular jobs and keep getting the same seals over and over, but that is better than getting seals you cannot use :)