Future Sortie revamp suggestions/ideas

With Dynamis Divergence receiving a quality of life update 8 years after its introduction, I figured why not Sortie as well? While it may not be as urgently needed as Dynamis given how easy it is to unlock empyrean+3 armor solo vs Relic+3, it would be nice in a few years to freshen up the familiar purple hallways that start to blend in together after so many runs.

Sortie - Shared
-Accessible via Diaphanous Transposer #2
- You can enter the content once per Earth day, resetting at JP midnight
- Schedule is simply alternating between open and closed every hour.
- Can fight bosses as an alliance, however, exclusive to this version are the revival of the original hard mode versions for the basement NMs
- KIs from chests for completing objectives is rewarded to everyone on the same floor/basement area/NM area (same as current Sortie) or everyone in the party/alliance in the same area if the former is not possible
- NM KI chests can be spawned repeatedly for separate parties, but only rewarded once per instance to each party

Quality of Life adjustments in general (Both areas, NPCs related to Sortie)
-Aurum Coffer from Ground Floor/Basement reward a guaranteed sapphire/starstone respectively (Maybe even old case/old case+1 as well)
-Voracious Psyche obtained at double acquisition rate, reducing total months to obtain Prime Weapon from 6 to 3 since you can do Sortie twice as much theoretically
-Equipment drops added to all NMs (can just be accessories, anything really, maybe an updated Tartarus Platemail from Aminon?)
-Mercy system for earrings (trade X earrings for specific earring in the same tier, can be minimum augments to encourage farming for a better one if desired)
-Sortie Campaign (increases Gallimaufry rate, chance at sapphires/starstones/old case+1, upgrade Aminon kills to give old Case+2)
-Subjugate: Aminon RoE objective becomes repeatable weekly/monthly
-Ability to teleport between boss entrances and on Ground Floor and Diaphanous Devices

I don't expect any of this anytime soon, but hopefully in the future when we're all busy with Limbus/new jobs/expansions/content/etc., Sortie gets a second look to be a more enjoyable experience that people will want to look forward to doing. Would be a nice surprise for an anniversary or towards new content for Empyrean+4.

eh, I'd rather they just increase the party size limit to 18 and make the rewards zone-wide to everyone in alliance.
It'd increase the number of people doing it while also allowing for a wider array of jobs to come participate while still earning a good amount of galimaufry.

If they'd boost the rewards for HardMode Sortie with all boxes getting upgraded: box+1(C/UC) box+2(R/VR) & HM Aminon box+2(G) for doing a HardMode sortie instead of ONLY aminon being given the HM treatment I'm positive most groups would prefer that over only having a toggle for aminon with no boost to rewards aside from mesosiderite. Or they'd just toggle normal sortie on instead so they can more quickly farm galimaufry.

Not in favor of making it alliance content without increasing the difficulty. the content level / difficulty was designed for 6 people. Allowing alliances in 6 person content simply trivializes it.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

Not in favor of making it alliance content without increasing the difficulty. the content level / difficulty was designed for 6 people. Allowing alliances in 6 person content simply trivializes it.

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so was Omen, your point? that Omen is trivial now? after many years and vertical progression, okay. I'm good with that.

Also, I am advocating they bring back HM Sortie, just not force us to do it just because someone happens to have a stage 4 weapon, and also compensate us for it by improving the rewards somehow.

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so was Omen, your point? that Omen is trivial now? after many years and vertical progression, okay. I'm good with that.

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Content becoming irrelevant due to the expansion of progression systems is entirely different.

If they wanted to make the rewards more generous, I'd be down with that. But making it alliance content without changing anything else both makes it easier and effectively obligates people to fill up parties to generate more rewards. Just keep it the way it is and tweak the reward structure instead.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

Content becoming irrelevant due to the expansion of progression systems is entirely different.

If they wanted to make the rewards more generous, I'd be down with that. But making it alliance content without changing anything else both makes it easier and effectively obligates people to fill up parties to generate more rewards. Just keep it the way it is and tweak the reward structure instead.

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Could always introduce a new difficulty tier of Aminon in the shared version - 50%DT, immune to TP suppression/access to timed TP moves, intended for alliances, grants 100% meso, old case+2, chance at neo-Tartarus Platemail.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

Content becoming irrelevant due to the expansion of progression systems is entirely different.

If they wanted to make the rewards more generous, I'd be down with that. But making it alliance content without changing anything else both makes it easier and effectively obligates people to fill up parties to generate more rewards. Just keep it the way it is and tweak the reward structure instead.

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do you need me to spell out every detail of how SE could improve things?
How they do balancing to adjust the content so it's still able to be cleared by 6man groups while becoming accessible to 18 man ones is something I thought best to leave out since we didn't even know Limbus was the first content to have party size HP scaling for an incredibly long time. I have no idea what else SE may have also done with regard to party size scaling in the game since there's still so much we still haven't solved.

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Originally Posted by Voidstorm

do you need me to spell out every detail of how SE could improve things?
How they do balancing to adjust the content so it's still able to be cleared by 6man groups while becoming accessible to 18 man ones is something I thought best to leave out since we didn't even know Limbus was the first content to have party size HP scaling for an incredibly long time. I have no idea what else SE may have also done with regard to party size scaling in the game since there's still so much we still haven't solved.

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Well yes, you should spell out what you want. if you just say "make it alliance" without providing any other details, it just sounds like "I want to fill 5-10 slots of random ppl we don't actually need to clear the content."

Sortie is/was supposed to be higher end content. Which is why I said just allowing 18 people inside without making any other changes (you don't necessarily have to be specific, just say "balanced for alliances" or something) would be a bad thing.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

Well yes, you should spell out what you want. if you just say "make it alliance" without providing any other details, it just sounds like "I want to fill 5-10 slots of random ppl we don't actually need to clear the content."

Sortie is/was supposed to be higher end content. Which is why I said just allowing 18 people inside without making any other changes (you don't necessarily have to be specific, just say "balanced for alliances" or something) would be a bad thing.

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The big issue with that argument is it ignores the reality that in most cases “alliance” content really ends up being 7-8 people going at content without leaving someone out. Odyssey and Sortie both have the problem that to make decent progress you need exactly 6 people, any less and your performance drops like a rock and any more you gotta leave someone out. While limbus is in theory a bone thrown to alliance content it just isn’t fun, quite frankly it’s a slog, especially in Temenos, when you got narrow walkways with true aggro mobs right next to fairies, probably the most obnoxious combination possible for any setup. All 3 collectively rely too much on gotcha mechanics rather than actually being fun content.Dynamis Divergence imho was the last truly great alliance content and its flexibility balanced with difficulty is why it’s still popular linkshell content.

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The big issue with that argument is it ignores the reality that in most cases “alliance” content really ends up being 7-8 people

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Though this has certainly happened before its genreally been a simple result of new progression systems rearing their ugly head. In some cases it's simply because of players figuring out the content (i.e. the difficulty is erased after you download the lore- something FFXI is at least sometimes able to limit with semi-randomized factors)

I dont have a big issue with the content becoming easy enough to not need the full alliance because we conquered the content, figured it out, and got the gear from it. But I do have an issue with the idea of content that was never designed for alliances in the first place to be instantly trivialized (i.e. player knowledge/skill made not a factor or less of a factor) by just changing the maximum player count.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

Though this has certainly happened before its genreally been a simple result of new progression systems rearing their ugly head. In some cases it's simply because of players figuring out the content (i.e. the difficulty is erased after you download the lore- something FFXI is at least sometimes able to limit with semi-randomized factors)

I dont have a big issue with the content becoming easy enough to not need the full alliance because we conquered the content, figured it out, and got the gear from it. But I do have an issue with the idea of content that was never designed for alliances in the first place to be instantly trivialized (i.e. player knowledge/skill made not a factor or less of a factor) by just changing the maximum player count.

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Realistically sortie isn’t going to become trivialized by opening it up to alliances. In particular Aita Gartell and Aminon have pretty significant screw you mechanics that would make alliances significantly less manageable than a single party. It’s already becoming a thing where pugs are requiring bards to have aria outside of sortie which imho is making even fewer people bother to gear out the job. It’s already possible to have 5 fully complete primes, it isn’t new content any more and most players I see are either doing 7+ boss runs or are soloing for a pittance. Same problem has long plagued odyssey. Even ambuscade suffers from this, people pay 5mil+ for v1vd runs because they don’t want to spend an entire weekend spamming lower difficulty runs non stop and still need to find a pulse to make naegling. This also goes into the RMT problem as it can easily take months for a new player to get to an endgame capable state through legitimate means without multiboxing or getting a carry. This game is in dire need for something alliance oriented to compete with Omen and Dynamis D.

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Originally Posted by Tokimemofan

Realistically sortie isn’t going to become trivialized by opening it up to alliances. In particular Aita Gartell and Aminon have pretty significant screw you mechanics that would make alliances significantly less manageable than a single party. It’s already becoming a thing where pugs are requiring bards to have aria outside of sortie which imho is making even fewer people bother to gear out the job. It’s already possible to have 5 fully complete primes, it isn’t new content any more and most players I see are either doing 7+ boss runs or are soloing for a pittance. Same problem has long plagued odyssey. Even ambuscade suffers from this, people pay 5mil+ for v1vd runs because they don’t want to spend an entire weekend spamming lower difficulty runs non stop and still need to find a pulse to make naegling. This also goes into the RMT problem as it can easily take months for a new player to get to an endgame capable state through legitimate means without multiboxing or getting a carry. This game is in dire need for something alliance oriented to compete with Omen and Dynamis D.

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I can see your point about the bosses, but there's no denying that grinding out all the objectives for gallimuffins etc. will get way easier and way faster. And it just makes it clear that people just want to bring more people in for more rewards- not to make the conetnt more fun, tackle challenges, etc.; If that's what people want, they can just increase the amount of muffins or whatever, it would be a lot simpler and not impact the gameplay side of things.