Quote Originally Posted by Olor View Post
my view is the game is too old to exclude too many people - and right now too many people are too far behind to catch up - and the game does nothing to help people forward... even reading wikis etc doesn't always give enough info... Ambuscade is a good start right now but I worry even that will be ruined by punishing folks for soloing - we will see.
While you do need to do your missions, which SE has made much easier, catching up isn't so terribly hard.

* You can farm something for gil and buy ancient beastcoins to get your Loquacious and Brutal Earrings, so you don't even need to bother with Limbus. And honestly, you could probably get by without either of those and noone would notice.
* Related to the first point, many of the best accessories in the game are from previous expansions/add ons.
* Sparks/119 gear pretty much put you on part with a well atma'd 99, so farming needed things out of Abyssea, even if you can't get help, isn't that terrible.
* The JSE weapon augments very generous.
* There are entry-friendly jobs, like GEO but not just GEO.
* Wanted Dial / Abjuration dial is random but offers some benefit.
* Ambuscade. The armor from this looks really promising. I have a friend who just came back and because of Ambuscade, his PLD is able to -DT cap in relevant gear (meaning he has good amounts of defense, magic evasion, and base stats. His other job, DRK, is also loving the Ambuscade gear. Sulevia's is not tanking gear, but it's much better than trying to tank in abyssea area stuff. Anybody can do Ambuscade Dragon, even if they need to stick to E or VE at first.

SE has done quite a bit to make catching up easier. They could gone the alternate route and made this upgraded Salvage armor require doing Salvage. In a different era of the game, they probably would have.