Ochain

Ok so I get that this great shield should be hard to come by, I really do, but what I don't understand is why it is so horribly difficult to get. Now hear me out before you write this off as pure pissing and moaning.

Four of my ls mates and I went out to farm Iron Plates yesterday, and again today in Aby Ulegureand, and spent about three and a half hours each day farming them, and ended up with a total of 13 Iron plates over the 7 hour period involved involved. The problem wasn't the nm, with the terror, and stun, invincible and his other moves it was actually a fun fight, the problems came from the horrible drop rate on helical gears, which was followed by an equally terrible drop rate on bevel gears and gear fluid. Why does SE do this kind of crap to us?

While we were farming Iron plate we were also camping Chione in the hopes of upgrading our colorful demuline abyssites, (against another group that was trying to do the same thing), for one of our members who is working on stage two of his Daurdabla. In that 7 hours we got Chione 4 times, and of those 4 times we got exactly 0 of our abyssites to upgrade, and we only saw the other party fight Ogopogo 1 time, 1 time in 7 hours. Wtf is that? It wouldn't be so bad I geuss, except there are only 3 mobs in the entire game that drop colorless souls, and they are all camped around the clock, which would be fine if people could actually get what they need and move on, but the drop rates on pop items, and colorless souls upgrades is just... Wow.

Believe me, I don't want anything just handed to me in this game, but I would like my efforts to be rewarded, and 13 iron plate coupled with 0 upgrades is definitely not what I would consider a reward for 7 hours of mindless farming. I don't find it appealing, I find it boring and a complete waste of my precious time, and it becomes even more discouraging when I think of all the people who will be fighting over a drop that only comes from one nm in the whole game after they actually get their colorless souls.

It's like everything else in the game I guess, it's either so time consuming you don't really feel like doing it, or it's so easy you only want to do it once. I would much rather have a challenging fight with good rewards, than all these boring time sinks SE seems to love to create.

So how about it SE, what would be wrong with improving the drop rates on pop items for mobs that drop Iron Plates, increasing the upgrade rate on colorless demuline abyssites, and actually giving us more mobs to fight to get colorless souls, or just getting rid of the need for vwnms for colorless souls and making them drop off the avatar mobs you have in every zone in abyssea? And while you're at it give us more than one mob to get Apademak's horn from, I mean you could rename it to Khimaira horn easy enough and then put a Khimaira nm in multiple zones in Abyssea.

Enough with the time sinks already let us do things and move on because quite frankly I'm finding it harder and harder to even log in anymore, and it's becoming more and more difficult for me to justify even paying to play a game that bores me so badly.

Edited to make it readable lol, the post had so many grammatical errors I got confused when I tried to read it, and I am the only one who knew what I wanted to say

Never had that much trouble with any drops related to one of the Heroes of Abyssea ironclads, and with nearly a full pt you definitely should have pulled in more than 2 plates/hr. Were you using a THF at all, or what?

As for T2 VNMs, you really have to focus more on those if you want to get claims. 4 claims in 7 hours is low, and if that was because your competition was too fierce, you should have either tried another zone or another time. If that was because your attention was diverted to ironclad killing, well...

Also, people who made empy -1s were knowingly settling for lower quality weapons and not necessarily easier trials either when considering how much more difficult and tedious WoE was back before it got all its nerfs (aka, pretty dumb move overall imo). I'm not sure why they should expect an update. I would be thankful lv99 WoE weapons will at least be usable for unlocking empy WS.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/th...037#post442037

I'll give you my rough LoEs that it took to farm each of these components @95.

Plates : 2days @ 4hrs each, Aby-Altep/Graub(Recommended)
Souls : 6weeks(on and off) @ 2-4hrs/day, Aby-Altep/Graub.
Horns : 4weeks(on and off) @ 2-4hrs/day, Aby-Graub

Now, I initially started this with friends that also wanted to create shields, so we all farmed at the same time. We only had one mule holding pops and a group of six of us. We made it a point to blast through the plates, as they were the easiest part of the quest. We finished these in a week, all three of us. After plates, it was soul focus for the next individual. It was their job to continue the push and the friends would be there to support. I was last because I had the lowest play time. When I was on running the NMs, they were there to support. After completing the souls, we moved on to brewing the dragon. This was done in batches. We made sure we had at least 4 pops before brewing. At this point, having friends to hold KIs is key, otherwise, you'll be in for a long haul.

This is purely out of experience. And my philosophy is, if you cant wait for the items completion, it's probably best you dont work on it. Nothing good ever came without a little work.

I know some hardcore players that have completed these in a two week span but I disregard those people since they dont have much of a life. lol After all this is just a game and should be played at your leisure, not as a job. :)

Hope my experience help yours.

Ok, OP, I guess you didn't take a thf?

Personally, I have Ochain, and Duardabla. Only took me 2 actual days to farm all 100 plates for both. Thf + Whm (2box).

First of all, thf should've been obvious, if you didn't bring one, huge fault on your part. If you had one, and you still couldn't get drops, then my bad. But in all 100 plates I did, I got the drop in less than 5 Acroliths (aka 10 seconds per robot). (results may vary).

Can easily buy helical gears for probably 1k? There's usually a supply of them. Or buy the gear from the NM for maybe 20k?

If you're complaining about how hard the iron plates were, good luck with the souls, or the HMP or cinders.

Iron plates by and large the easiest things to obtain for empyreans.

I made Daurdabla a few months ago.

I farmed Plates while farming Ogopogo. When I finished plates, I switched to farming Apademaks between Ogopogos. When I finished Ogopogo, I started buying Apademak sets and just ground it out. It took me probably something like two days worth of play times (48 hours) spread out over a few weeks to get this done, but I feel it was the most efficient strategy.

I also cannot corroborate those low drops. I've had some really bad runs with Chione where it would take me hours to get a single upgrade, then the very next day I got 8 Colorless souls inside a 60min effort from scratch, so it evened out to a somewhat decent rate. Overall it seemed very doable, all 2-boxed THF+WHM.

As for Iron Plates, I farmed most of them in Altepa usually helping friends with Rani popsets (it was somewhat early into Abyssea), but the drop rates are the same for all Iron Giant ingredients across the three zones, and we farmed them faster than we could farm the Chariots which repopped in 10-15min, so that suggests around 7 plates per hour. I remember finishing them before most people got their seals off of it. So I'm not sure how you're gettinig such low numbers, unless that was just a rare occurrence.

Yeah one of the people farming with us is a geared thf, like I said I don't want SE to just hand the thing to me, I'm not after plates dropping in sacks, or from login campaigns or anything like that, but it would be nice if the popsets fell more often, and there was a wider variety of mobs that dropped souls and horns

a geared for dps thf or a max th geared thf? Any thf worth his salt with have gear sets macro'd to maximize both dps and th and know how to use their ja to enhance both. With a good thf I have never gotten less than 1 plate per kill. 4 chiones in 7 hrs seems like a fail on your part as well. She is not that hard to get, even competing with other groups you should be able to snatch her often enough and 0/4 isn't bad, we have gone a lot more than that when it comes to upgrading. Try doing this path a couple years ago when you were competing against 3+ other groups lol realistically you should have been able to 50/50 plates in 7 hrs

Outside of that this is a horrid path for a weapon, think of the poor brds, at least pld can duo box most this path.

If you think this part is bad just find a different job now, cause the 75 souls is going to make you rage

It always drops one plate so gettin less than 1 should be impossible. I finished the plates portion for ochain. it was me and a mule and sometimes a friend. In my first 10 kills in grauberg i was told the altep guy drops two more often so i went there. I was thf pretty much every kill, except a couple to see if my ninja killed it faster. I did NOT get 2 until my 15th kill or so, so i went back to the easier grauberg iGiant. after about 30 plates of almost all 1 plate droppers i said fuckit and i went ninja just to speed up the process. i think in total i had 5-7 kills drop 2 plates.

I am not complaining of course, i can just confirm that they seem to drop 1 more often than 2 plates. At least compared to most empy item droppers the 1 to 2 ratio was a bit lower. For other empy's i went ninja + mule just for the all but one red proccing ability and faster kills, cause the 2 item drops rate wasn't really that bad.