FINAL FANTASY XI Digest Q&A February 2021

[Whitney]

I fully agree with this. As a Mastered WAR with +3 reforged AF and relic, Warrior beads +2 and an ReMA great axe, I find that the output in damage with our key weapon skills like Upheaval and Ukko’s Fury falls far short of even what I have seen from well geared DRG using Stardiver or SAM using Tachi: Fudo. Most of my gear is best-in-slot and yet, I found myself doing between 10,000 and 24,000 damage on average in the same fight as a Samurai spamming 30,000-40,000 damage weapon skills and the DRG doing 34,000 fairly consistently. I also occasionally break 30,000 and even 40,000 with some weapon skills but even with very high accuracy I have never been able to consistently do those higher end numbers with great axe no matter how much STR, VIT, attack, accuracy or weapon skill damage + I add.

For contrast, on my mastered COR I can, with only a Doomsday as my gun and Naegling in main hand, very consistently put out over 20,000 damage at 1,000 TP against anything not resistant to darkness, and my record on an Apex mob so far is a 57,000 damage Leaden Salute - this is with only trusts and no geomancer in my party. The fact that I can directly compete with my WAR’s great axe weapon skill damage on a hybrid support job like COR really reveals how much Great Axe weaponskills need a buff akin to what Savage Blade got.

True, having a 100% double attack build and a five hit setup means I can spam weaponskills every few seconds on WAR and create many self-light skill chains ...BUT so can literally any other 2H weapon user with a good TP set- my DRK, DRG and SAM are all 99 and all can self-skillchain easily, too. In fact, I can even create a powerful darkness self-skillchain on my COR and can only imagine what it can do when I finish my death penalty. My WAR still does more DPS, yes, but considering the numbers I can hit with other 2H weapons like Great Katana, Great Sword and Polearm, it is obvious that upheaval and Ukko’s Fury badly need to be placed on the level of other, better weaponskills.

Any great axe user knows this pain. We love our weapon but it really suffers from a lack of strong closing weaponskills.

While on the subject, I think it is also time to buff relic/empyrian/aeonic/mythic weaponskills for great axe - especially Metatron Torment, which could really use a buff (or at least make it more useful by allowing us to drain hp with the weapon skill instead of the regen effect, which in current endgame is pretty useless in keeping us alive) and of course Ukko’s Fury and the terrible upheaval- unless someone has an R15 Aeonic, even at 5/5 merits it is underwhelming without mighty strikes.

Nobody is asking that WAR be king of all damage dealers. We just want Great Axe weaponskills that are not so underwhelming compared to other options. As it stands, there is an imbalance between two-handed weapons and their weaponskills and great axe is suffering the most from that.

War great axe needs to be buffed. I am a really good player with war and I notice war shines really well with all other weapons that is possible but the great axe. It lacks the proper weapon skill damage that a great axe is supposed to put out. UKKO's FURRY REALLY REALLY needs to be un nerfed or readjusted more. Other Main jobs like DRK and defiantly MNK's main weapon is producing high numbers but war's great axe weapon skill damage is trash. PLEASE for the love of god ! Buff great axe weapon skill damage or weapon skill properties in some way shape or form thank you !

[Whitney]

As for job adjustments...BST is a shell of what it used to be in light of the existence of trusts and the nerf made to the distance at which you can use pet commands. I never use my BST anymore for this reason- anything I can do on BST I can do BETTER on another job. The damage output will never compete with the top DD’s. It cannot tank particularly well with jug pets. Charm is pointless in the most common endgame zones. It’s strength in the past was in using pets while standing back to avoid damaging AoE attacks, but when you made the command distance so small, you took that away, forcing us to run in close to use pet food or a move, which can often result in getting destroyed by an AoE on stronger enemies or caught with petrification or paralyze At exactly the wrong time.

So, BST has no real place anymore. I can stay far away on SMN and still use pet commands. I can do more damage on many other jobs and trusts kind of make pets almost useless as tanks now. What’s the point in BST then? This is why you rarely see anyone playing as BST anymore.

And yes, again...please change the regen effect on metatron torment to a % based drain or something more useful. 15 hp every 3 seconds simply is not enough to help on anything higher level than 119. Maybe if you made it 50 hp/tick, but at 15, it does not increase survivability much at all. The weaponskill itself also needs a better damage modifier.

[Lockhart]

I'm glad to know you have plans for the future. I'm also extremely glad to know you know how big the desire is for more inventory/storage. Please keep it up and overcome COVID challenges. I love the game exactly how it is and I really enjoy playing it. Knowing changes are coming is very exciting, even if it is just being dangled in front of me for several years. I really like the idea of the job changes all at once, however, when you were adding more than just sparks/ambuscade updates monthly I couldn't stop being excited for the next month. I hope the team will continue to make minor job adjustments after this big 22 job update. Maybe even make a month long (update to update) event for a specific job, or two, for example this month warrior berserk is reduced to 3 minutes and can be used full time and Red Mage gets native dual wield at level 20, but only for this month! This might give people incentive to play jobs they haven't in a while, or at all, since its only temporary wouldn't change the whole game, also it might be good way to test permanent job changes.

[Tsukihika]

Maybe even make a month long (update to update) event for a specific job, or two, for example this month warrior berserk is reduced to 3 minutes and can be used full time and Red Mage gets native dual wield at level 20, but only for this month! This might give people incentive to play jobs they haven't in a while, or at all, since its only temporary wouldn't change the whole game, also it might be good way to test permanent job changes.

Warrior berserk ability can already be fulltimed by meriting the recast and using specific duration boosting armor pieces. Also adding/removing the dual wield trait would break player equipset macros after this period ends and require players to switch them back and forth every month potentially. Doing this for several jobs and their equipsets can get tedious fast and drain player motivation. Temporary "game changer" boons like this, in order to encourage bringing the less popular jobs out, do have some potential though. Perhaps something like new and unique, yet temporary, weapon skill while on specific job. Perhaps a staff WS for black mage only, that causes an unique "full break" effect, breaking not only enemy def, attack and evasion, but also magic defense. Temporary club WS for paladin that behaves similar to Moonlight WS, but instead of restoring mp to party members, reduces enmity of party members hit and potentially even transfers it all to paladin. And so on. There's certainly all kind of crazy possibilities and something like this would certainly encourage people to bring these rarely seen jobs into events more often.

[Lockhart]

Warrior berserk ability can already be fulltimed by meriting the recast and using specific duration boosting armor pieces. Also adding/removing the dual wield trait would break player equipset macros after this period ends and require players to switch them back and forth every month potentially. Doing this for several jobs and their equipsets can get tedious fast and drain player motivation. Temporary "game changer" boons like this, in order to encourage bringing the less popular jobs out, do have some potential though. Perhaps something like new and unique, yet temporary, weapon skill while on specific job. Perhaps a staff WS for black mage only, that causes an unique "full break" effect, breaking not only enemy def, attack and evasion, but also magic defense. Temporary club WS for paladin that behaves similar to Moonlight WS, but instead of restoring mp to party members, reduces enmity of party members hit and potentially even transfers it all to paladin. And so on. There's certainly all kind of crazy possibilities and something like this would certainly encourage people to bring these rarely seen jobs into events more often.

Cool, thanks for your input. I was more using that as a quick example. For the example of berserk, I was more leaning toward level 15-99 encouragement. I was suggesting one or two jobs a month, to try and hit all jobs once a year. I was just making a suggestion of an additional thing they could do that would hopefully not require a huge amount of testing and effort to change, that would add to monthly changes. When it only says sparks/unity/ambuscade swaps, it gets a bit boring.

[Teimoli]

Still nothing addressing or even acknowledging that the game is overrun with bots and hackers, or that the special task force is completely useless against this plague? Stop pumping all of the resources into the disaster that is FFXIV or the greed that is FF7: Remake and bring some support back here.

[Lockhart]

Still nothing addressing or even acknowledging that the game is overrun with bots and hackers, or that the special task force is completely useless against this plague? Stop pumping all of the resources into the disaster that is FFXIV or the greed that is FF7: Remake and bring some support back here.

Hello, just wanted to let you know that the information you seek is announced elsewhere. Please see:
http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/rule/specialtask.html

[Teimoli]

Thanks, but that's not much of a plan when 3+ new bots show up every week. Also, I can guarantee that at least some hackers aren't getting banned because I still see many of them that I witnessed first hand and reported still running around.

[Immortal]

Please start caring more about your game, SE. You can turn such a profit from this old game if you actually invested into making the bare minimum for content... I think most players would be happy getting something with current assets that was challenging and fun. The rewards could be barely better than what we have, some very slight upgrades. We used to do content just for +1 STR over previous gear... The population for this game is not hard to please, yet you aren't even creating the bare minimum effort for content.. its insane. Create a new Delve, new Sinister Reign but for other era content. Do something... Most of my friends have quit because they got bored that we have the same content for 3 years+. Why does XIV get all the love when we are also paying a subscription price!?

[Cyriack]

are you going to do anything about the fact that a10 digging makes only 600k a day. i would like to see more money out of all the extremly hard work to get that far, even if it means intriguing some rmt, they are gonna mess with anything they can anyway.