Building Empyrean Weapons
We all know building Empyrean Weapons is no fun. It takes ages, costs a fortune, relies far too heavily on luck, and ultimately provides far less of a return on that investment in comparison to Aeonic, Mythic, or even Relic weapons. However, at this stage of the game's life cycle, they're mandatory for several of the jobs that can equip them; Almace is the best offhand for dual-wielding RDMs and BLUs in nearly every situation, Armageddon dispenses the best general-use bullets in the game, a Paladin without Ochain struggles to survive against NMs that spam multi-hit attacks, a Bard that can't put up four songs before Clarion Call is unable to provide adequate support in current endgame content--the list goes on.
Unfortunately, there are many issues with the process that have gone unaddressed for years, leaving Empyrean Weapons far too difficult to obtain--and compelling many players to forego even bothering with jobs like Bard and Paladin, and to play jobs like Corsair and Red Mage at a fraction of their full potential. Building them is easily as much of a timesink as building Mythics--and with the exceptions of Daurdabla, Ochain, and the ranged weapons, they provide barely any utility outside of pure damage, putting them far closer to Aeonics or Relics in terms of overall benefit.
The most infamous problem with the process, of course, is the 1,500 Heavy Metal Plates required. Many jokes have been made about HMPs, and I'd like you all to remember your favorite and have a good chuckle before you continue reading. Considering that the required quantity was originally supposed to be far more reasonable--until Tanaka explicitly said to raise it because "I don't want people finishing these"--and that the drop rate for Heavy Metal plates and pouches is utterly abysmal even with maximum procs, reducing the quantity required to a few hundred is a pretty obvious suggestion, and would likely only raise complaints from players hustling them for easy gil. Increasing the drop rate from Voidwatch and/or the monthly cap from Ambuscade would also improve the situation considerably, whether the requirement was reduced or not.
However, notoriety and importance aren't one and the same. There's a far worse problem with the build process, and it rears its head far before Heavy Metal even becomes an issue. Starting an Empyrean Weapon immediately and inevitably puts the player in direct conflict with every other player planning to build that weapon, or any of the other weapons that require a particular target. This isn't immediately obvious for the early stages--"Defeat Notorious Monster x y times" is the kind of objective that players can and do team up to complete, saving themselves quite a lot of headache. However, once this shifts to turning in Exclusive items from Abyssea bosses, all bets are off. Collaborating on Abyssea NMs simply is not a practical option--they only drop 1~2 of the required item, and while "your pop, your drop"/"pop it, lock it" is a tried-and-true method of ensuring the fair distribution of such things, the Key Items used to pop the bosses who drop these items are only given to the person who first claimed the boss that yields the KI in question. Worse still, many of these pop KIs are only dropped by timed-spawn NMs--and this is where the aforementioned conflict comes to a head. If two players are in the same Abyssea zone and going after the same NM, they're forced to compete over spawns, with the loser--and the winner, as often as not--being forced to wait for the next spawn. This creates bad blood and runs contrary to the heavy focus on cooperation and teamwork that used to distinguish FFXI from other MMOs. Worse still, it creates a situation where any player who just feels like making other players' lives difficult can do so with little to no effort.
Therefore, I'm suggesting that the process of building Empyrean Weapons be streamlined heavily, to keep the effort-to-reward ratio comparable to that of Relics and Aeonics, to minimize bad blood between players, and, quite frankly, to reduce the amount of time we all have to waste in Abyssea instead of doing content that's actually fun.
Here are my proposed solutions to the latter problem. I'll go into detail on each one afterward.
- Remove the "Abyssea stretch" entirely.
- Replace "Collect x Abyssea boss drops" with a different objective.
- Change the timed spawns to something else.
- Provide alternate sources for Abyssea boss drops
- Make Abyssea boss drops salable.
- Sharply reduce the number of Abyssea boss drops required for each trial.
- Instance Abyssea.
Remove the "Abyssea stretch" entirely
A bit extreme, perhaps, but let's be honest--would you miss it? Aside from the occasional foray inside to fetch Empyrean Armor or an ever-dwindling number of macro pieces, Magian Trials are just about the only reason anyone ever sets foot in Abyssea as it is--and anyone upgrading a Relic or Mythic is already going to be spending far more time there than they'd ever want to simply by virtue of the rapidly-respawning trash mobs they can spam weapon skills against. The fact is, Abyssea content is in a persistent vegetative state, kept on life support by the Magian Moogles. Perhaps it's time to let it die.
Replace "Collect x Abyssea boss drops" with a different objective.
Two possibilities come to mind here. The first is "Perform weapon skill x against y monsters of the z family"--which would be in line with many other Magian Trials, including Relic and Mythic upgrades. Admittedly, you don't have access to the Empyrean WS through the weapon until lv85, but there's no reason the lv80 trial couldn't just be any weapon skill of the appropriate type. The second would be in line with the preceding trials--"Defeat Abyssea boss x y times"--but would only meaningfully serve to relieve congestion and streamline the process if the number of defeats required for each was also closer to the numbers in the preceding trials--perhaps 10, 10, and 12, for example.
Make Abyssea boss drops salable.
That's not a spelling error. It means the same thing as "sellable" but looks nicer. Anyway, this wouldn't relieve congestion, but it would allow players to bypass it. The spawn items for Dhorme Khimaira et. al. are already salable anyway--as I write this there are no fewer than 17 Sisyphus Fragments listed for sale on Bahamut's Auction House, selling for 350,000 apiece most days--so why not take it to its logical conclusion?
Provide alternate sources for Abyssea boss drops
You can get Heavy Metal as an Ambuscade reward now--why not add Apademak Horns and so forth to, for example, Domain Invasion rewards? Even just making these items a regular fixture of the monthly login campaigns would be a huge improvement--after all, how long ago was the last time they were available that way?
Sharply reduce the number of Abyssea boss drops required for each trial.
If you try to address overcrowding in prisons by building more prisons, what happens when those prisons fill up too? This is a half-baked, half-hearted, Band-Aid-on-a-bullet-wound solution--but, sadly, that's why, if anything gets done, it'll probably be this, simply because it would probably require the least time to implement. Time is money, after all, and I hear the CEO's being pretty stingy when it comes to FFXI. It wouldn't spare players from having to fight over spawn items, but it would allow them to do it less.
Instance Abyssea.
In direct contrast to the above, this would completely eliminate the need for players to compete over spawns--but require the most time to implement, not to mention adding further burden to the instancing system and probably breaking something in the process. This is like putting someone in a full-body cast for a stubbed toe--complete overkill--and even if the devs had infinite resources to throw at such a task, it wouldn't make any sense to.
Most likely, this will all fall on deaf ears, but I truly had nothing better to do at the moment than type this out, so that's what I did. Nevertheless, the nice thing about cynicism is that you're either right or pleasantly surprised--and I do love pleasant surprises.
PS: Yes, yes, "This subforum is just for website feedback!" I'm aware--but I'd like everyone to take a look at the forum list. There is no subforum for game suggestions. Besides, I was specifically told to post game suggestions to this subforum by GM Zeigunav.