The Flame Geode Thread...... Again.

[RAIST]

200 flans, 250 Manticores. These were two of the trials I did for my STR sword the past couple weeks. You may wanna take a look at the level range of these mobs, and the zones they are in. Killing flans in Mount Z? Earth weather mainly, so even on firesdays very few flame geodes drop. Aby-Kons is the best place, but those mobs are higher, so you'll get a geode here and there, but mainly ifritites. Manticores? Cape Terrigan or Valley of Sorrows has fire weather on occasion, but again, level of the mobs means -tites, not geodes. Oh sure, you could wander Altepa sync'd looking for manticores. How smart is that? Not alot of manticores in a single camp, and fire weather is rare. Progress would be slower doing it this way.

As said, I did my STR kill trials recently. Thousand plus kills, 12 geodes, 14 ifritites. Can't work smarter when the system in place doesn't realisticaly allow it.

Also, the price of geodes is meaningless to me, I just buy the damn things and call it a day. Doesn't mean a flawed system isn't still flawed.

Might want to go back and read the post that this was about....the statement was about the total weapons paths, not just one or two trials in one path.

As for the mobs used....there are flans below 80 that could be used if one wanted to give them a shot by days or when fire was popping and such, in zones that can get fire weather. Same with the Manticores--a ton of them in the Cape in a perfect level range, and it was not uncommon for me to find others there slaughtering them that would team up when I made my weapons.

Also... keep in mind if earth/wind weather is popping a lot, you can still sell those and flip them to flame--they frequently hit 20k each on my server. Granted, it's not a perfect 1:1 exchange, but it's not a complete loss if you get a lot of soil/breeze.

[RAIST]

While I agree with you on this in a realistic standpoint, that only goes so far. If I am inside of a volcano, and standing near the center, and it erupts... Its going to be hot, very, hot. Now with this in mind, if nothing else Ifrit's weather should be fire in these moments, if not more often. I understand its a forest which gets rain fall, but the Volcano erupting while your inside of it or extremely close to it should take precedence.

That's the problem though... SE doesn't see that as WEATHER. That is molten lava spewing forth from the earth, not solar radiation from the sun. Just don't expect us to be able to win SE over on the issue with the Volcano approach, because it actually isn't a weather element per se.

[Gippo]

Alright, so let's assume they don't want to change the drop rates.

Let's think about why they wouldn't want to change it.
1. Lower drop rates means more playtime > more money every month for SE

2. Since the price is high, this means people will have to get money to buy the geodes > more playtime > more money for SE.

3. People are still actively needing geodes, so therefore its still a relevant issue, so therefore it needs to not be "fixed" until it no longer affects the estimated playtime of a large % of players. Kings were not "fixed" until their gear was 99% obsolete. Teleporting to sky was not fixed until that zone was dead. The scaling of CoP did not happen until the content was used up.

4. It does not negatively affect the gameplay of others. SE is very quick to adjust (nerf) jobs that are overpowered or bugged once it is known and understood. The Catastrophe nerf, Penta spam, the npc in Norg, The Ranger nerf, The Ukon nerf. Salvage bans. Why? Because this affects the balance of the game. It affects how fast people can make money, and what jobs are considered "useless". Which prevents players from quitting the game.

Bottom line - Low drop rates and time sinks make them money. The developers know this. It's better to adjust issues after they serve no purpose to appear to be making positive changes to the game, than to change current issues that only serve to affect their monthly revenue.
In my opinion it's why they are extremely careful not to adjust anything current that affects all players ability to enjoy the game. Legion for example sucks, because it is hard. However it is still active content. Hard content will take longer to clear than easy content. This is why they are willing to add music features, but not adjust difficulty.

I don't expect them to "fix" the geode drop rates. They know the drop rates are skewed in their favor.
Why give that up??

[Hashmalum]

Keep seeing this type of argument in these threads. Hot lava does not automatically mean hot weather---you can have active and errupting volcanoes in snow covered regions. Ifrits is in a tropical zone, so it kinda makes sense for it to have the high rainy weather.

But very hot objects such as volcanoes (and modern cities!) create their own microclimates. Besides, the weather game effect (which is what we really care about here) doesn't necessarily reflect any sort of real-world process or reasoning--maybe fire magic works better in a heat wave because of elemental imbalances in the ambient mana, or whatever. Who knows, it's magic. The weather causing rocks to appear? That's obviously supernatural right there. Just give us the weather effect and don't worry too much about the real life climate of volcanoes.

[Connavarr]

Might want to go back and read the post that this was about....the statement was about the total weapons paths, not just one or two trials in one path.

As for the mobs used....there are flans below 80 that could be used if one wanted to give them a shot by days or when fire was popping and such, in zones that can get fire weather. Same with the Manticores--a ton of them in the Cape in a perfect level range, and it was not uncommon for me to find others there slaughtering them that would team up when I made my weapons.

Also... keep in mind if earth/wind weather is popping a lot, you can still sell those and flip them to flame--they frequently hit 20k each on my server. Granted, it's not a perfect 1:1 exchange, but it's not a complete loss if you get a lot of soil/breeze.

You totally ignored the fact that in those zones, weather other then fire is not only more common, but lasts longer as well. Also, I just did the manticore trial last week. Not one person, 7ish PM EST, was there for the manticores. Know where they were? Aby, where the mobs spawn faster, and you can kill them easier. Since you cannot rely on weather for these trials, OR farming geodes.

That is the point, which you, and so many others, have missed.

[Hayward]

All I've been seeing here is a bunch of rationalizing in a cynical attempt to justify jacking up the price of geodes that are not nearly as common as they need to be. The argument that S-E will not change the drop rates as long as people keep playing only works for so long until players start quitting the game. Even gamblers eventually find out the games are rigged and stop putting ther money into a lost cause. S-E would do well to remember this, ignore the so-called "hardcore" blowhards on this forum and find ways to make the necessary adjustments to acquire Flame Geodes with less hassle.

One way I've mentioned before is allowing -storm spells to not only count towards kill quotas but force geode/Avatarite drops. Goldsmithers can pound sand as far as I'm concerned. The Magian trials need to take priority when it comes to accessing these items.

[RAIST]

You totally ignored the fact that in those zones, weather other then fire is not only more common, but lasts longer as well. Also, I just did the manticore trial last week. Not one person, 7ish PM EST, was there for the manticores. Know where they were? Aby, where the mobs spawn faster, and you can kill them easier. Since you cannot rely on weather for these trials, OR farming geodes.

That is the point, which you, and so many others, have missed.

And you completely ignored that we are talking about kills by day only, and that IF you get non-flame weather and wind up with popular geodes (soil/breeze) you can sell them steadily to gather gil to help buy some flames--granted it may be roughly a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio, but it's better than leaving with nothing useful. You can also apply this approach later when you get thr0ugh the monster trials---pick a zone with a lower level mob and spam it for geodes, or farm somethign else for the gil if you want.

It all comes down to choice. You don't HAVE to go to Aby for the trials if your goal was to get your geodes as you go along--otherwise, you may well be looking at having to farm gil to buy your flames if you are in a rush to complete the weapon. It has been documented that Avatarites also drop from 80+ mobs and you can't get an avatarite and geode in the same cooldown window--it's one or the other, then it resets the timer. The player(s) opted to trade an expected focused geode drop rate for an expected faster kill rate, at the expense of a potentially higher Avatarite drop rate.

As for your example of the manticorfes, there's easily a dozen or so manticores arranged fairly close together in the Cape--and they are on a 5 minute repop. You can basically run around in a small loop, killing a group in rotation and they are repopping before you get back to the start of the loop, even solo--more so if you use your NPC. They go down fast, so it really isn't that much different from doing them in abyssea (at least in my experience--just over two game days to complete my manticore stages in the cape), and you would be focused on only geodes, and (depending on the season and such) you might get the opportunity to catch some fire weather cycles while you're at it.

The actual point was, there were alternatives that could have focused the drops on Geodes that could have been used effectively (potentially more effectively for geodes if weather pops), but the player(s) chose otherwise, then complained about the disparity in the avatarite/geode rewards with the chosen target.

[RAIST]

But very hot objects such as volcanoes (and modern cities!) create their own microclimates. Besides, the weather game effect (which is what we really care about here) doesn't necessarily reflect any sort of real-world process or reasoning--maybe fire magic works better in a heat wave because of elemental imbalances in the ambient mana, or whatever. Who knows, it's magic. The weather causing rocks to appear? That's obviously supernatural right there. Just give us the weather effect and don't worry too much about the real life climate of volcanoes.

Yeah... but unfortunately SE just refuses to see things differently. No matter how much sense it seems to make to everyone else, they appear to be stuck on the whole atmospheric/meteorological approach to weather.

Until they change their stance on that, gonna have to come up with other angles to convince them to tweak things. Until then, best we can probably hope for is for them to do something to the actual drop rates when the ideal conditions exist for geodes to drop. For the life of me, I never understood why they have that stupid cool-down timer....can't help but think removal of that BS mechanic would have a profound impact on the supply.

[Mirage]

Keep seeing this type of argument in these threads. Hot lava does not automatically mean hot weather---you can have active and errupting volcanoes in snow covered regions. Ifrits is in a tropical zone, so it kinda makes sense for it to have the high rainy weather.

Yeah of course you can have volcanoes in snow covered regions, but there won't be much snow on the ground if you're so close that you can stare right into the lava (like you can in Ifrit's Cauldron). When you get that close to a volcano, it often gets unbearably hot.

IC is also in a region that is already (probably) very hot. It's a tropical jungle, so you can expect the temperatures to be 30 celsius or higher. If you have this temperature, and then wander all the way to the edge of an active volcano, close enough to stare right into the lava, you'll have a hard time convincing me that it wouldn't be above 50-60 degrees celsius there.

[RAIST]

Oh, btw...for those seeking actual fire weather cycles....the transition into it's peak cycle started today, so might want to start checking the forecasts. It was up a couple hours ago (5/23) and is up again for 5/27. It will gradually increase frequency over the next couple days towards it's peak and then start sloping off as it fizzles out in the fall cycle.