Lack of content and another level increase looming

[MarkovChain]

Level 85 added the first significant changes in equipment with 85 Emps, some AF3+2 and some accessories. Most of the people were in awe over the gear - but some threw a temper tantrum over not being the best anymore. And this is all before we knew how to obtain the upgrade items, how many were needed, and how difficult they were.

Don't be kidding. The first abyssea already gave the tempo on how easy to obtain the gear was. This time instead of having side grades to existing gear like in the first expansion, everyone saw that AF3+2 would be the new perle. This is why you saw many complaints. There is no balance, it's killing the game.

[Ravenmore]

Using it for WS sets, you actually don't come close. Perle is utter crap compared to N head, body, hands, legs, feet. For SAM, Shura is still better.

TP is closer, but again, not as good when you can get 1% more haste w/o the set than with it.

Any sam using shura was really a main mnk beening cheap or just a dumb. NQ hauby was better then shura and geuss what its was under 500k hell before the anouncement for level increase it was down to 200k for a long time, while hauby +1 was toping out at 3 mil for the longest time. Both so much better then shura. Before you pull the shura +1 if you had that kind of gil in the first place and didn't have mnk you would had been better servered by buying a hauby +1. Not saying shura is not better but its still not as easy to get hauby.

[Leonlionheart]

Any sam using shura was really a main mnk beening cheap or just a dumb. NQ hauby was better then shura and geuss what its was under 500k hell before the anouncement for level increase it was down to 200k for a long time, while hauby +1 was toping out at 3 mil for the longest time. Both so much better then shura. Before you pull the shura +1 if you had that kind of gil in the first place and didn't have mnk you would had been better servered by buying a hauby +1. Not saying shura is not better but its still not as easy to get hauby.

... Shura body? I'm talking Shura legs/head.

[Tsukino_Kaji]

Content is only for those people who don't spam enter during cutscenes.

[Selzak]

Perle set wasn't the best possible gear overall, but it was damn close and the only way you were going to beat is if you had acquired some very specific pieces for each slot depending on the job- even then it was close enough (not for gear swapping, but for TP). Considering this while understanding that a full set of Perle took about two hours to obtain and you'd easily have enough cruor from EXP'ing to 80 in the first place, it was the best thing you could wear unless you did some serious endgame stuff beforehand and even then it was nearly as good while also being basically given to you for free. That made people mad, I remember it.

Also, I called Empyrean Armor before it happened and I'm glad they introduced it. I'd rather the best gear for my job in most situations in at least some slots to be job specific stuff. All of that mismatching in a TP set is just ugly-looking and may benefit some jobs more than others. Personally, I hope the real 'ultimate' gear will remain within the Empyrean Armor sets, but require that they be +3'd through some real, genuine effort.

[Leonlionheart]

Content is only for those people who don't spam enter during cutscenes.

I think you have the wrong idea about MMO content.

Seriously though, it's nice that FFXI has that for people, but that's not why I, nor a very large amount of people I play with, play this game.

[Francisco]

Don't be kidding. The first abyssea already gave the tempo on how easy to obtain the gear was. This time instead of having side grades to existing gear like in the first expansion, everyone saw that AF3+2 would be the new perle. This is why you saw many complaints. There is no balance, it's killing the game.

Visions didn't really set much tempo for anything substantial. A chunk of the NMs didn't even appear until around the time Scars was released. A bunch of the VNMs had vague reports of difficulty (T3 VNM in La Theine does a TP move for 5000+, omg! Ovni gets like -95% PDT!) ...Glavoid, Briareus, Turul were all pretty hard, Iratham didn't show up forever, same with the Antlion... took people a long time to figure out how to pop Chloris...

Staggers were not figured out yet. There was no RR, SS, GH, or MM atma... Very few people had their abyssites... NMs were on long pop timers.

The only thing Visions set the tempo for was super fast XP. From the outset it did not offer any game changing equipment - just a few nice upgrades - and it didn't offer a large array of ease until the level cap was raised to 85 and people started getting atma, abyssites and more of a clue.

No one had any basis for complaining about the ease of item attainment, except "waaaaaah, my my full Usukane just got out-classed"...

[Ravenmore]

Sorry misread, still there was easy to get gear that was as good or only 1 str less then shura back at 75 too. Fourth Schoss was from a event that everyone was doing and was point based no gil needed. Wyvern helm is the same str as shura and it came off the AH. So that makes it worse when they don't use the options but its nothing to do with the player not doing endgame more of they don't use macros.

[laos278]

Well, they can't be expected to make every event perfect from the onset, but they should have had some foresight about voidwatch drop system. It being free isn't much defense for it when other events were practically free and used a point system for drops. If the main goal in the end will be emp upgrades where you need the lv90 already, it could very well become like relics where only a handful per server bother with it.

I don't really see the purpose of making all this effort in revamping old content like dynamis either. The reason many of us got excited and came back for things like lv99 and abyssea was they were...new. In that sense i do think the billing system change could not be coming at a worse time. There hasn't been much to really motivate the player base since december, and diminishing subscriptions next month won't bode well for changing that once lv99 is here.

I agree that raising the cap while at the same time not adding much new, worthwhile content would be regrettable. As far as the test server, well there should be fewer bugs on update days. Aside from that, i don't know that i see them adding to the roadmap, especially with things like abyssea scale add ons.

[MarkovChain]

Visions didn't really set much tempo for anything substantial. A chunk of the NMs didn't even appear until around the time Scars was released. A bunch of the VNMs had vague reports of difficulty (T3 VNM in La Theine does a TP move for 5000+, omg! Ovni gets like -95% PDT!) ...Glavoid, Briareus, Turul were all pretty hard, Iratham didn't show up forever, same with the Antlion... took people a long time to figure out how to pop Chloris...

Staggers were not figured out yet. There was no RR, SS, GH, or MM atma... Very few people had their abyssites... NMs were on long pop timers.

The only thing Visions set the tempo for was super fast XP. From the outset it did not offer any game changing equipment - just a few nice upgrades - and it didn't offer a large array of ease until the level cap was raised to 85 and people started getting atma, abyssites and more of a clue.

No one had any basis for complaining about the ease of item attainment, except "waaaaaah, my my full Usukane just got out-classed"...

The first week after abyssea the forums were fillled with "ez mode" so no. But hey it just seems that you don't have full usu and were happy to have a shot at the best gear ?