Suggestions to improve Ambuscade

[OmnysValefor]

Stompa, I agree wholeheartedly with the points about key item and disagree about the armors. Since the armors (as well as some dyes) are part of total hallmarks, they aren't doing you any harm by being present and aren't affecting the prices of what you choose to spend points on.

I'm extremely grateful for most of these sets in both their capability to help returning players and capability to fill weaker slots on other jobs, like Megha... being a great -pdt set for thf/dnc/bst etc lacking pdt gear.

Any event where you spend more time acquiring the entry requirement/fee than actually participating in the event is a bad design.

And they really really need to improve the cape trading... 50 (60 with dyes, right?) trades for a cape is an awful waste of time.

[Olor]

It's not just STR +10... it is STR +10 on a cape with a whole lot of other nice stats on it tho.

[Diavolo]

So I know that there are other things on the cape - I already solo farmed them, and it took me a whole month to do so. A month of zoning hundreds of times, and killing like thousands of mobs that other people may have wanted to xp on, and zoning every ten mobs, queueing in Mhuara, calling trusts, battle, zoning, killing ten mobs, repeat. For a whole month. For a cape.

We've done more for less in this beautiful time sink of a game, though I must ask, why not party up and turn those 30 days of grinding into 2 or 3?

My point is that the grind is unreasonable for my new JSE cape that is only slightly better than my old JSE cape which took an hour to farm and augment.

Wait a couple more years to farm your Ambuscade capes and they'll surely be just as easy then as Adoulin JSE capes are now. They also took far more than an hour to farm up and later augment when they were introduced.

[Diavolo]

Really though, I was farming reives in 2013 because I quite enjoyed them, and getting capes all the time for free. It wasn't difficult. And the crystals were always easy to get too.

As for teaming up, nobody on my LS wants to do Ambuscade, because they don't need the Armour Sets, and the cape grind is excessive just for a cape. I think Ambuscade is totally worth grinding if you want the 119 Armour sets, then it totally makes sense to throw yourself into it. It just feels silly doing all that work for +10 STR on a cape.

I work odd hours, don't really have a normal log-in time, the server is usually quiet. For me it is just more convenient to solo, or duo, rather than try to organise my real life around steady group content.

So I wasn't really saying that soloing is the problem, its just that I found the amount of zoning and killing empty mobs and repeating it, was actually making me feel sadface.

I'm more excited about the upcoming Sunbreeze Festival than I am about further Ambuscade cape grinds. Maybe its just me, Lol.

Well, I personally far preferred Adoulin JSE cape farming to Ambuscade cape farming for the simple fact that it was open world content that could be done in a number of different zones. I loathe the idea of funneling the entire server into a town with a small number of available battlfields and forcing them to bounce back and forth between zones in a game poorly equipped to handle it - losing private/party/linkshell chat lines every time I or someone I'm talking to has to zone drives me a bit crazy. Still, I think it's unfair to compare how quickly you farmed up Adoulin capes with their Ambuscade counterparts, especially if you're choosing to go at this content alone. I made the case for server merges plenty of times, even now that I'm on Asura, so if you're going to tell me one of the reasons you're stuck going that route is because the server is quiet you probably know what I'm going to say.

That said, I joined the group of players that stopped taking part in Ambuscade a couple of months ago, and not for a lack of incentives. I still have plenty of gear/capes I'd like to obtain, I just won't keep throwing myself at that content this way every month. I'd far prefer it if the monthly time limit could be removed with the choice to work towards whichever set of gear we wanted and allowed us to reset the Hallmarks/Gallantry/gear set when we were ready. Maybe something to consider now that we've gone through all the gear sets at least once.

[Vanfrano]

It's not just STR +10... it is STR +10 on a cape with a whole lot of other nice stats on it tho.

I agree with the fact that the capes are nice but they require way too much work, especially with the added dyes and fourth bracket. You need 4000 hallmarks for 5 dyes, that is HQ Feet + HQ Hands, if you take into consideration the stats these two pieces give you, it is really unbalanced that you only get STR+5 with dyes for all this work. Add on top of this the 5 other monthly dyes that you get by totalling 20000 hallmarks, that means the whole HQ set is worth less than STR+5.
Even taking into account a fully augmented cape, the armors are for several jobs, the capes are for one job and you often want to have several capes for one job.

I gave up on Ambuscade a while ago and the cape I solo'd is sitting at three brackets too, I'd rather enjoy the rest of the game than having to go through the zoning, killing 10 mobs, queueing and doing the same boring thing monthly.

Stompa if you ever want to complete your cape though, look me up, unless you would rather solo.

[Olor]

I agree with the fact that the capes are nice but they require way too much work, especially with the added dyes and fourth bracket. You need 4000 hallmarks for 5 dyes, that is HQ Feet + HQ Hands, if you take into consideration the stats these two pieces give you, it is really unbalanced that you only get STR+5 with dyes for all this work. Add on top of this the 5 other monthly dyes that you get by totalling 20000 hallmarks, that means the whole HQ set is worth less than STR+5.
Even taking into account a fully augmented cape, the armors are for several jobs, the capes are for one job and you often want to have several capes for one job.

I gave up on Ambuscade a while ago and the cape I solo'd is sitting at three brackets too, I'd rather enjoy the rest of the game than having to go through the zoning, killing 10 mobs, queueing and doing the same boring thing monthly.

I agree the cape is grindy but that is just why I don't worry about finishing it in a big hurry. The dyes are bad, I agree, but it gives me something to work on over time.

Honestly they should increase the hallmarks across the board for fights though, or even just give a single daily bonus 500 hallmarks via quest. That way you could get HQ set and a completed cape by logging in once a day every month and doing one successful battle.

I also solo most of the time and it can be a bit painful. I have done some groups but it is really hard to know what a group is capable of. I've often found it *harder* to do the fights with other people than soloing because of uneven gear and skills so, unless I have a lot of time I am hesitant to go that route. My gear is not good enough for VD, and when I do random pickups it is unusual for the group as a whole to have the gear/skills to be good enough for anything harder than normal (which I can often solo, depending on the gimmicks).

I never thought I'd say this but a proper gear check number would help a lot, right now there is just such wide variation in 119 armors and I don't know enough about every job to be able to quickly eyeball someone's sets to see what they can do. Augments also further complicate things. Huge difference between well augmented skirmish gear and badly augmented skirmish gear.

There never used to be such a massive massive difference between decent and good and great gear sets. It mattered but, not like today. It makes it a lot harder to make pick up groups.