New weapons with higher base damage then relics

[Kincard]

People making exhaustive arguments like "IT'S A GAME AND IT SHOULD ALWAYS ADVANCE" seem to have a really selective memory and don't seem to understand that most of the hardcore endgame playerbase will do little more than grumble a little bit and more often than not actually get excited when they get their armor outdated because it offers new builds and such (Though inventory complaints are always present and always justified) but only react the way they do in this thread when it comes to the prestige weapons, because weapons are not swapped situationally nearly as much as armor is, and more importantly, there's no piece of armor that takes months of consistent play in order to obtain.

There is nothing wrong with trying to close the gap between REMs and easier to get weapons. There is a problem with adding weapons that stomp on 99 REMs when they take a fraction of the effort to obtain.

[Luvbunny]

I agree that you need new things to have to keep you motivated and paying your monthly fees. But FFXI has always been good with keeping some of the older things relevant (or situational) and not completely trash all of them. They are mostly doing incremental upgrade overall in the past, or sidegrades. So the completionist will always want the new shiny things, the casuals can do without them, and everyone keep on trucking and getting more logs from those endgame events.

I do think they really did the impossible with SoA though. They created a new expansion that manage to draw so much annoyances from everyone playing it - even those people who used to put a positive spins on everything SE do. As usual, you can give SE a couple more months (end of Summer) or a year (for a decent amount of fixes and content). Or you can just unsubscribe and come back again when you deem the content is worth paying.

[Horadrim]

I'm still really positive about the game. I'm enjoying it even more now, actually. GEO was a class I've wanted for a long time and I like it more than I expected after seeing it was a buffing job instead of being like FFT GEO (granted, it is similar to FF3 GEO with buffs).

People making exhaustive arguments like "IT'S A GAME AND IT SHOULD ALWAYS ADVANCE" seem to have a really selective memory and don't seem to understand that most of the hardcore endgame playerbase will do little more than grumble a little bit and more often than not actually get excited when they get their armor outdated because it offers new builds and such (Though inventory complaints are always present and always justified) but only react the way they do in this thread when it comes to the prestige weapons, because weapons are not swapped situationally nearly as much as armor is, and more importantly, there's no piece of armor that takes months of consistent play in order to obtain.

And people who are being overly sensational about this whole thing seem to have selective memory when it comes to the fact that these are obviously NOT the end game weapons for SoA. Every expansion has released gear or weapons that have been significantly better than most that existed prior to it. The difference now is that SoA is the first 100% end game expansion because the game no longer has a "leveling" player base the way it used to -- so none of the gear has to cater to people below 99.

With them already citing memory issues across the board for the game, adding in a ton of limited, shitty weapons to tied people over until the inevitably epic end game weapons come out seems silly. Skirmish is this expansion's love letter to Assault -- which added tons of incredibly accessories that blew previous accessories out of the water. As missions and the actual end game event is added for SoA, I guarantee you that your truly godmode weapon will take a disgusting amount of time.

How do I know that? Where's my source? I don't need one -- SE wants to keep making money, so they need people to keep playing and in true SE form, that will very likely crop up as them forcing you to spend months and months and months grinding out some arbitrarily difficult event (an event they will balance against the Skirmish weapons, most likely so that R/M/E wielders can't just zerg-rush through it like they do with everything else.) Mythic and eventually Empyrean were designed the way they were because the was a community outcry against the difficulty of building Relics. Abyssea was designed the way it was specifically to handle the issue of leveling becoming an increasingly difficult task and to give a normalized, base end game gear goal for people since going back and coffer hunting/such is useless.

Now Empy +2 and R/M/E are treated as a base requirement for doing anything effectively -- even the new content seems to laugh at anything less than a lv.85 E/M/R (I'm using the 4th best sword for RUN right now as some of the best gear short of Thaumas for it, and can barely contribute at all in Reives the way R/M/E wielders can.) Even still, you have people with some of the best gear in the game getting completely wiped during Reives.

So I ask you, if that's how the best gear in the game is going to handle the INTRO TO ADOULIN course, what do you expect it to do against the actual end game Adoulin stuff that will come out towards the end of the story line?

Sure, they could have released something less dramatic, but honestly, I prefer they make it clear that we're moving into a whole new era of the game's life. And as we approach Year 11 of the games life -- I think its high time for that.

We can't keep spoon feeding people just because they finished old content. And I'm sorry, but Relics, Empy, and Mythics are decidingly old content.

[Crusader81]

Some Relic gear is still good, especially +2, so thats not entirely worthless without Relics.

Salvage II has some great gear for people to go after.

Emps are easier to make than the weapons that were just added.

VW has tons of gear worth getting, if the only reason you were doing it is for plates/cinder/dross then...

I got my VW gear long ago... except for the lol weapons (done qilin over 500 times) I seriously thought ppl were exaggerating when they said they did VW battles 500, 1000 times and still didn't' have weapon, but I was only doing Qilin for a few months and my stones went from 1000+ to 500..

Since then I've obtained all the pieces I needed, but the HMPs and Cinder was a great way for me to keep making money to play and buy new things.. without that.. why bother now?

I was farming dyna, salvage, and VW and making other weapons, and honestly it was the most fun I've had playing XI, because for the 1st time my work put in= great reliable results.
I did Dyna for years, and had very little to show, I never got some pieces because of the horrible LS lot systems. So spending 6+hrs a day when off to farm all the content and in 3-4 months actually make a Relic Weapon was one of the coolest things XI had to offer.
But it appears that's over now. So.. so is my commitment to this game, there's literally nothing left to interest me.

[Asymptotic]

Comparing weapons to accessories is a longshot at best and laughable at worst.

[Kincard]

I have no idea what you are talking about. People who have organized (Usually LSs with tons of REMs around) are crushing Reives under 10 minutes if they coordinate their efforts correctly. Obviously if you play the game like it's still Abyssea you're going to get wiped. REMs are handling the new content about as effectively as they do anywhere else.

They added a bunch of easy-to-get AH weapons that have relatively cheap materials for creation. That is the correct way of closing the gap between REMs and non-REMs. The incorrect way is to make an event that has difficulty on par with Meeble Burrows and hands out weapons competitive or better than REMs.

[Horadrim]

I have no idea what you are talking about. People who have organized (Usually LSs with tons of REMs around) are crushing Reives under 10 minutes if they coordinate their efforts correctly. Obviously if you play the game like it's still Abyssea you're going to get wiped. REMs are handling the new content about as effectively as they do anywhere else.

They added a bunch of easy-to-get AH weapons that have relatively cheap materials for creation. That is the correct way of closing the gap between REMs and non-REMs. The incorrect way is to make an event that has difficulty on par with Meeble Burrows and hands out weapons competitive or better than REMs.

I've seen plenty of people getting destroyed in Reives with solid gear -- not everyone runs around with a swarm of LS mates at ready beckon call. Especially not the droves of formerly retired players who came back primarily for the expansion like myself.

Meanwhile, I guess the point about these just being intro weapons for the content is an irrelevancy for people? Seriously -- if the aim is that there needs to be difficulty attached to the better weapons in the game I can guarantee you that the end game weapons for Seekers won't be so easily acquired -- but at the end of the day it has been a long time coming that SE would stop allowing R/M/E weapons to be the end-all-be-all of the game. What did you expect? For them to eventually allow the tool tips for the weapons to have mile-long bonus lists?

[Luvbunny]

Look - I don't mind with grindy content and repetitive tasks - as long as they are easy to get into, convenient, and very accessible and designed well. Abyssea is pretty much a grind fest, over and over, but it's fun, and it is not dead even as much as we would like and hope that it would just die. People still flocking there, to this day. Everything else is grindy as well, and people still do it. Dynamis, Voidwatch, Meeble, Neo Events, etc - all are about grind, but it goes on fast, you get decent rewards (some good, some are a bunch of logs), you get decent points, etc.

SoA however managed to create the most annoying grind ever and the worst activities that gives you very little incentive and rewards (especially after the adjustment). That is inexcusable. I have no problem for them to stretch SoA for 2-3 years, they always do this anyway, it is expected. But it's a problem when Reive manage to be the most unfun activities, despite having done Besieged, Campaign and Walk of Echoes (which is similar all you can whack battlefield).

So yeah, they better be quick with updates within a month or two, and a bunch of small updates. Lots of people start to see through the BS - and soon no one will singing praises when they figure out that you need 100k or more to enter Skirmish, and the drop are all 0.05% Random. You won't be too thrilled whacking roots for 50-70 times just to get 100k.

[Crusader81]

-- but at the end of the day it has been a long time coming that SE would stop allowing R/M/E weapons to be the end-all-be-all of the game. What did you expect? For them to eventually allow the tool tips for the weapons to have mile-long bonus lists?

Yeah, you know what? actually I did. I expected the game to get minor updates, and more content designed to keep it going longer, and eventually die out as the graphics get outdated and other games become more popular, until they finally cut service and R/E/M would be forever locked at the FFXI best weapons.

OR

I expected SE to finally drop PS2 support, completely overhaul the game, enhance the graphics, servers, and update the UI, get rid of the ridiculous PS2 memory limits, overhaul the battle specs, and aim for more accessible content to reflect the fact that the game is 10 years old, and feels it and even with these changes would still need to be very accessible.

Instead

They've adjusted the game back like it's 2004, made some things accesssible, other things ridiculous, written over the old content to keep the PS2 alive, broken some jobs, buffed others, left things broken for years, fixed things that weren't broken ASAP (useless twilight scythe) I mean REALLY? They did a fast fix to make sure you couldn't use the Scythe on the one thing It was decent on, but now they're going to kill R/E/M? with content you can do with 3-6 people in 30 mins?

[Karbuncle]

I wouldn't call the twilight Scythe fix ASAP, That was in the game for what, Over a year now?

I'd say something like Pets getting Samba bonuses an "ASAP" fix, fking fixed it before i knew it was a thing.