Prowesses need fixing

Building Prowess from Grounds of Valor is by far one of the most frustrating new pastimes in this update. There are 11 Prowess effects that are randomly chosen from, as as far as we know, 9 levels of prowess. If you're doing pages in order to get more treasure casket prowess, you're stuck in the same area potentially for days, unable to leave so you won't lose having a chance at higher brown box drops (without, the drop rate for chests in GoV zones is rediculously low).

As far I can tell, there's no reason why keeping prowesses would be overpowered - keeping the buffs would not only be less frustrating for casket hunting, but would also enourage soloers to have more options for zones, picking whichever they have the most prowess in (for example - crafters looking to farm crystals will return to the zone they have the most crystal prowess)

Another solution could be that instead of making the prowesses randomly generated when the last mob is defeated, make the prowess you want to get/upgrade selectable when you return to the book. Some prowess buffs are completely wasted on jobs and having them randomly picked from 11 is annoying. Being able to pick if you want magic attack or cure potency would be considerably better than doing a page to get a prowess thats wasted on your job. This would make farming much better as well as making partying more fun - but the way things are now it would be like every time you went into Abyssea if you got random atma assigned to you.

I love the concept of GoV and hunting for new chest items, but spending 3 hours in Zerhun mines as a BLM with my highest prowesses as Weaponskill damage and attack/accuracy is annoying to no end. I thought it'd be an easy way to get skillups as well but grinding for several hours so you can have a better rate of it seems like no improvement at all.

I'll let you in on a little secret to getting caskets, experience points, and buffs exceedingly fast:

Team up with other soloers, notifying them that you won't touch their mob/chests and vice versa.

This will allow you and the other soloer/s to do pages faster, getting buffs faster, finding chests faster, all while killing at the exact same speed as if you were soloing. If other soloers don't want to team up, keep asking others. Eventually, they'll want to join so they too can get max casket finding ability quickly.

If there's no one doing pages within the zone to team up with, bring along some friends from your ls. It's a nice little diversion from idling in Port Jueno, and if your group is the first to find something extraordinary (like that skillup ring), you can monopolize the zone before it becomes Zeruhn Aery.

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Originally Posted by Svens

I'll let you in on a little secret to getting caskets, experience points, and buffs exceedingly fast:

Team up with other soloers, notifying them that you won't touch their mob/chests and vice versa.

This will allow you and the other soloer/s to do pages faster, getting buffs faster, finding chests faster, all while killing at the exact same speed as if you were soloing. If other soloers don't want to team up, keep asking others. Eventually, they'll want to join so they too can get max casket finding ability quickly.

If there's no one doing pages within the zone to team up with, bring along some friends from your ls. It's a nice little diversion from idling in Port Jueno, and if your group is the first to find something extraordinary (like that skillup ring), you can monopolize the zone before it becomes Zeruhn Aery.

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I actually did that for about 4 hours. - 2x blm and a bard in Zehrun and we 2 shotted everything. The speed of the kill had nothing to do with that - at the end of it i still had casket hunting level 2 which had almost no effect on caskets. The Bard and BLM both had level 5 and had allegedly been there for 3 days hunting the skillup ring. Our casket output was around 1 every half hour, sometimes one would pop up more frequently with the usual brown casket garbage (sheepskin, etc).

There dosn't seem to be much point in bestowing random buffs on jobs that dont need them and since the book functions as a GoV hub, I don't see why prowess can't work to bestow buffs you actually want on yourself instead of praying that you get the right one for your job/treasure hunting and if you leave it resets.

There are just too many options to make prowesses useful, especially since the cap is apparently level 9 prowess. I just think it would make GoV way more viable if you could select what you wanted at the end of page as a reward.

For casket hunting in Zerhun Mine, wait the kupower "Treasure Casket: Bastok", and the drop rate will increase a lot.

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Originally Posted by Yukichibi

For casket hunting in Zerhun Mine, wait the kupower "Treasure Casket: Bastok", and the drop rate will increase a lot.

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Yeah that's understandable for better casket drops but I just think that if you're going to have 11 buffs to choose from and upgrade that dissapear when you leave, that should be left up to the player. It seems silly and nonsensical to have to hope you get the right one depending on what you're doing - the books should be a new method of getting things done (crystal farming, skillups, low man exp farming) and accellerate the ease of those by allowing each player to pick which buffs best suit their job and the reason they came to do GoV in the first place.

The prowess system looked great at first glance. Then I experienced it...
Really, it wouldn't hurt things to let people choose their bonus. It will take at minimum 9 page completions to max out any one category. In Zeruhn Mines, that's 63 monsters (consisting of 18 easily found crabs/worms/leeches and 45 highly contested monsters... colliery bats? more like coronary heart-attack bats with all the stress related to claiming them...)

7monsters x9 bonus increases: it takes at least 5minutes to kill the monsters plus running back and forth to the Grounds Tome. (45min per buff maxed, minimum time)

Now, you look at the potential benefits gained by the buffs and some buffs are the REASON people are doing Grounds Tomes at all, instead of going some place else. If they go into a Grounds Tome area as a Monk to get higher skillup rates and all they get are Cure Potency, Magic Attack/Accuracy, Crystal Drop Rate, Treasure Hunter, and Killer Effects bonus... and any of those double up, that's 25min wasted plus double ups wasting 5min at a time. That can add up to hours wasted on unwanted buffs that do nothing toward the goal the person is aiming for. (Concept point: How does gaining cure potency at all make sense for a WAR/Dnc training for hours trying to get wide variety of weapons skills capped?)

Grounds Tomes have another horrible downside... if you leave... you lose all the progress you've made. I'd be OK with the random bonuses if I knew I could leave and come back later to try to keep improving what I want. Sure it might take a few extra hours, but then I'd have an area to go to to benefit from that bonus whenever I want to focus on that particular goal.

The whole idea of "benefiting from extended training" concept is kept in tact in both "fix suggestions" described above, without the downsides you have added.

Edit: I just found out another point, but haven't confirmed it personally... you can only get 2 prowess increases per game day? I have noticed that occasionally completing a regime did not increase any of my prowesses. That substantially slows progress down, especially if you're aiming for a specific bonus. (and it's not capped at 9... I've reached 11 personally, ... so increase those numbers even higher!)

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Originally Posted by Yukichibi

For casket hunting in Zerhun Mine, wait the kupower "Treasure Casket: Bastok", and the drop rate will increase a lot.

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Isn't it currently the adventurer appreciation campaign right now? The one where we get every kupower?

When i wrote those lines it was not yet in effect.
But, yes, now all kupowers are on.