Another food update?

[Raxiaz]

I have over 1000 stones on both my characters. But then again I don't whore abyssea like everyone else. It's old content to me.

[Sparthos]

A few foods ive wanted to know the stats of since they're almost impossible to test are:

-Macarons
-Rusks
-Crepes

Mind giving us a little breakdown on these elusive stats? There are theories about what they do but solid evidence would be great.

[Kimikryo]

wow I hoped anything new would be in here, but no
Tried Saltena, happy skillupping till ~198-200 (best was till early 180s) with GAX
Rried Elshena and Saltena und different mobs between 200 and 225. No higher skillgains worth mentioning. 3 hours for 200-225.
Got a SINGLE 0.4 Parrying skillup, while using saltena. With Elshena nothing.
So while Saltena helps clearly with skillups, Elshena does (if anyhow) barely anything.

Tested Saltena on different Jobs and skillups were faster till 200 compared to without the food.

Now I am confused if the foods just work for certain Weapontypes (single, bi handed) or if it all just just a big "in your face" type of food that just has a placebo effect

[An0nym0us]

Whether or not Saltena and Martial can stack is irrelevant, I'm quite sure Saltena doesn't work if you're above 100% TP. I tested it a good bit on WAR and noticed my skillups were sporadic at best while holding TP for Waltzes, but when I switched to dumping TP, skillups radically increased. Very noticeable phenomenon, everyone I've told to try it has noticed the same thing.

Well this was disappointing. The pages for Saltena, Elshena, Montagna, and Maringna on both BG and Wiki have no verification or testing still and these forum posts are from 2011. It's theorized there are different skill caps or levels at which the food has a much higher effect (or takes effect): http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Skill_Gain_Rate

I also noticed what Tagrineth mentioned about TP needing to be below 100% to see the effect. I don't have any way to parse this to prove it but I hope someone does (and still has some uncapped skills like parrying or guard). Maybe SE did it this way to prevent people from gaining skills of .4/.5 on every other hit from stacking food+martial master? If anyone has done any testing or knows someone who parsed their skillup results and is able to help verify any of this please let us know. Thanks

[Septimus]

Well this was disappointing. The pages for Saltena, Elshena, Montagna, and Maringna on both BG and Wiki have no verification or testing still and these forum posts are from 2011. It's theorized there are different skill caps or levels at which the food has a much higher effect (or takes effect): http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Skill_Gain_Rate

I also noticed what Tagrineth mentioned about TP needing to be below 100% to see the effect. I don't have any way to parse this to prove it but I hope someone does (and still has some uncapped skills like parrying or guard). Maybe SE did it this way to prevent people from gaining skills of .4/.5 on every other hit from stacking food+martial master? If anyone has done any testing or knows someone who parsed their skillup results and is able to help verify any of this please let us know. Thanks

The general problem is that the nature of skill ups themselves make it nearly impossible to test things. In order to test how well skill up food works, we would have to have a baseline against which to compare. There are so many factors involved with skill gain, that it would be almost impossible to control for all of the confounding factors to be able to get to a confidence threshold. (Especially if we don't even know that certain confounding factors exist, like having over 100% TP.)

So basically, the only way we are going to get any confirmation on how skill ups work is either if Square tells up how it works, or someone decided to make their doctoral thesis on statistics on skill ups in FFXI. And really, I am not sure if anyone would actually take S-E's word at face value.

[Raksha]

If anyone was interested, you could test it on the test server by de-levelling to 1, then popping back up to 99 without setting your skills. Then you could attack fortalices for an hour, record your skillups, then go back to MH to do it all over again with food.

[Septimus]

If anyone was interested, you could test it on the test server by de-levelling to 1, then popping back up to 99 without setting your skills. Then you could attack fortalices for an hour, record your skillups, then go back to MH to do it all over again with food.

That is an interesting idea to remove a lot of the confounding factors, but I thought that raising your level automatically capped skills now.

[Raksha]

That is an interesting idea to remove a lot of the confounding factors, but I thought that raising your level automatically capped skills now.

It does?

lame

[Anapingofness]

I'd like for them to let us see food stats in game. Also, for the crafters of FFXI- specifically the cooks (since we are talking about food), SE really should introduce crafting bags. Crafting bags, as the name suggests, would be used to store materials of a particular craft or just crafting materials period.

The amount of inventory the ingredients for some of these recipes is just ridiculous not to mention stupidly time consuming. Anyone who has leveled cooking will tell you that I speak the truth. I routinely end up helping an ls mate every time she sets off to cook because of the inventory issue. =\

[Anapingofness]

Oh spare me. I am so tired of the whole "giving players information in game is easy-mode" attitude, really. Give me a break. Most food is rarely used. Crafting in general is fairly broken. There would be no downside to giving players this information.

But I guess the game is "harder" because no one makes half the food in the game because no one buys it because people don't even know what it does. That's not artificial difficulty at ALL.

I agree 100% with you.