Duo leveling/questing vs Trust solo?

[Wincy]

Hi all,

I have just returned to FFXI after about 2 years away. I have played off and on for like 8 years, but I have always been a casual player, never got to level cap, never finished CoP, none of that. So I am focused on leveling, completing old content (mainly mission lines), and just having fun. I LOVE RoE and Trust NPCS. They make my goals possible even with limited playtime and no friends to play with.

Now my wife has seen me playing and she would like to make a character with me. Of course I am excited for her to enjoy the game with me, but I am also worried. Since Trust NPCs can't be used in a party, will we end up finding it significantly harder to level as a duo group? Will we be unable to duo certain quest chains where we could have Trust solo'd them otherwise? Does anyone have suggestions on the best way for us to do this? And finally, I know it was stated that Trust would be usable in parties "eventually." Has anything else been said about exactly when that might be?

Thanks for your thoughts.

Wincy

[Mirage]

It'll be slower, but not harder. They'll eventually change things so that you can use trust in a party, but there's been two version updates since they told us that, and it still hasn't happened.

There aren't really quest chains for exp, but if you're talking about missions, those can probably be easily done as a duo by just leveling like 5-10 levels (depending on which battle it is) past what the original level cap for the battlefield used to be.

[Wincy]

Thanks for the reply, and yes I did mean missions. It is definitely unfortunate that we are disadvantaged if we want to play together. What a crazy shift from where this game used to be!

[Alhanelem]

You're not disadvantaged from wanting to play together. You can always add one or two friends into the mix (You must have a few...) and be on even manpower, and there's also the fact that you have control over your actions, so you can burst harder or act more efficiecntly than AI-controlled NPCs, and your stats will be better than theirs, especially in item-level territory. While the AI is a lot better than I expected, if actual humans are avialable, they will generally perform better than the NPCs.

Also, as was mentioned previously, since missions no longer have level caps, you can always make up for not being able to use the NPCs by just gaining a few more levels first. You don't have to do a mission the instant you meet the requirements, and in fact most people don't.

[bungiefanNA]

Trust is still very new and there are a lot of areas it can't be used. They only allowed them in mission battlefields this month, and only for nation missions before Rank 6. Doing missions where you have to enter a battlefield, duo is going to be viable. You can't summon them at all in the Wings of the Goddess or Abyssea areas, or inside Assault areas in Aht Urhgan. They are gradually changing this, but it looks like they are going through expansions in order for making them compatible and making high level versions of their fights. So far, they have finished Zilart and started on Promathia, for level 100+ battlefields, and have started on the core game for Trust compatibility.

[Mirage]

You're not disadvantaged from wanting to play together. You can always add one or two friends into the mix (You must have a few...) and be on even manpower, and there's also the fact that you have control over your actions, so you can burst harder or act more efficiecntly than AI-controlled NPCs, and your stats will be better than theirs, especially in item-level territory. While the AI is a lot better than I expected, if actual humans are avialable, they will generally perform better than the NPCs.

Also, as was mentioned previously, since missions no longer have level caps, you can always make up for not being able to use the NPCs by just gaining a few more levels first. You don't have to do a mission the instant you meet the requirements, and in fact most people don't.

Two support and one melee trust will almost always be better for gaining exp than one single human accompanying you on the path from lv 5 to 75. After that, it's all alliance stuff until 99 anyway so it no longer matters.

Always having one or two marches plus haste is going to boost your dps immensely, much more than a single support human player can hope to boost you, and and the extra damage you alone deal will probably be around the same as another human DD would have supplied. Then there's still the small but not insignificant damage from one of your DD trusts.

Due to how exp is shared when you have more human players, making a bigger party than two players isn't really gonna help a lot either, as you'll just get less exp per kill. With trusts, you gain 100% of the exp all for yourself.

[Alhanelem]

Two support and one melee trust will almost always be better for gaining exp than one single human accompanying you on the path from lv 5 to 75

You can always add one or two friends into the mix

Let's not forget this is still an MMO and not a Massively Single Player game. Trust should be there for when you can't play with others, but it shouldn't be totally better than playing with others.

Due to how exp is shared when you have more human players, making a bigger party than two players isn't really gonna help a lot either, as you'll just get less exp per kill. With trusts, you gain 100% of the exp all for yourself.

Then this is a defect in the system. While Trust is helpful, it shouldn't be giving you more EXP than the same number of human beings would give for the same kill.

Always having one or two marches plus haste is going to boost your dps immensely, much more than a single support human player can hope to boost you

This part I don't understand. Are you saying that Ulima can cast marches before a player bard would be able to? Otherwise, I don't see how you can't get Marches and haste with human players just as well.

[Mirage]

Let's not forget this is still an MMO and not a Massively Single Player game. Trust should be there for when you can't play with others, but it shouldn't be totally better than playing with others.

Then this is a defect in the system. While Trust is helpful, it shouldn't be giving you more EXP than the same number of human beings would give for the same kill.

This part I don't understand. Are you saying that Ulima can cast marches before a player bard would be able to? Otherwise, I don't see how you can't get Marches and haste with human players just as well.

1. But game-mechanically, using trusts *is* better than playing with other humans, at least for the purpose of gaining experience. I'm not talking about what it *should* be like, I'm talking about what it actually *is* like in the current version of the game.

2. It is a defect, and SE has gone through two VUs without fixing it, and they've given us no update on when they actually plan to fix it. This is the game you have to play if you want to play. You could always just not play until they fix it, but who knows when that will be.

3. What i mean is good luck finding two humans who will *always* play bard and white/red mage/scholar *any time* you desire. Your friends might accept leveling these jobs once, but do you think they will be fine with constantly syncing down their 99 bards/mages whenever you want to level a new job? Or are you imagining that you'll be able to form a static with a new bard and a new mage every time you intend to level up a new job? This is completely unrealistic.

Realistically, you'll have either a bard or a white/red/whatever mage with you, but most of the time neither, unless you yourself play as one of those two jobs, but you'll still only level these from 5-75 once, additionally, these one or two players will steal a share of the exp given by the mobs, unlike trusts which do not do this.

As it stands right now, you either get superbuffed by trusts, or you get slightly-buffed by one human player while suffering an exp reduction. Telling people otherwise would 99% of the time be a total lie.

[Wincy]

You can always add one or two friends into the mix (You must have a few...)

Actually nope, it is just me and hopefully my wife soon. I still had an active shell when I resubbed and the people there are very nice. I might ask them for help here and there, but my schedule is sporadic enough that I'm more often than not just a burden on other people (like having to leave suddenly and randomly).

Due to how exp is shared when you have more human players, making a bigger party than two players isn't really gonna help a lot either, as you'll just get less exp per kill. With trusts, you gain 100% of the exp all for yourself.

Yea that is exactly what I was thinking. I logged on the other day and Trust solo'd my WAR from 40 to 50 in Crawler's Nest. I was earning like 30k xp/hr, which the last time I played was a good rate for alliance burns. Obviously I was pretty happy with this. Now if we duo, not only will we be 2 people short on killing power, we will also get less xp per kill. So overall it seems highly detrimental.

Let's not forget this is still an MMO and not a Massively Single Player game. Trust should be there for when you can't play with others, but it shouldn't be totally better than playing with others.

Then this is a defect in the system. While Trust is helpful, it shouldn't be giving you more EXP than the same number of human beings would give for the same kill.

I definitely understand what you are saying, but the fact remains this is how the system seems to be working currently. Unless I am missing something, which is totally possible because again I'm just returning..

[Mirage]

Actually, I don't find trust DDs to have more killing power than half of a proper human DD, so losing two trust DDs for one human DD is fine in terms of kill speed, but then there's the exp penalty in addition to that that ruins it all.

Personally, I roll with two support and one melee. Currently: Ulmia, Cherukiki and Naja Salaheem. This gives me 2x march, haste, heals for me and slow+para on the enemy. As a dnc with haste samba, it's like being in permanent hundred fists mode.