November 2022 FINAL FANTASY XI Digest

[Alhanelem]

Certainly 40 to 50 isn't as bad as L1 to L75.

You're kidding right?

Exemplar point gains are relatively similar to EXP gains back in the day. And stuff like the old colibri camps and stuff were very fast kills.

It takes an order of magnitude more EXP to reach the max exemplar level on a single job, than it does for level 1-99 not just 1-75.
Total EXP level 1-99 : 2,051,350
Total EP Mlevel 0-50 : 29,590,127

(Based on the prior EXP cuve, I'd estimate the EXP total including 1-99 would probably be around 8-10 mil, so EP is still considerably longer if you use old fashioned EXP values, which are not far off from today's EP gains)

That's also not factoring in you have to master before you can proceed with Mlevel. 1200 job points doesn't take all that long anymore (if you're playing the right jobs or can get into a party with them) but it's not insignificant either.

Either healing or SC MBing. If you are just going without SCing or standing there then yeah it's a waste.

Buffing parties are the best ones I've had. Usually they don't want me to participate in the SCs (because they already have something set up). I'd love nothing more than to be doing those things. Also it seems like a lot of people don't know how BPs fit into SC but that's another issue.

If only trust didn't suck, because with Matsui, I can do something fun where he opens for me > Gate of Tartarus > Darkness > summon MB > Gate of Tartarus > Darkness x2 > Summon MB and its pretty solid. I certainly wish matsui would stick around because he doesn't give me #&$% for using GoT and I do some really good MBs off of it. But between SC the party of trusts is literally just collectively a tank.

I believe Velner has the right idea and sentiment. You just have trouble as a solo player without connections.

THis really isn't about connections. I can find parties. But really, it shouldn't be expected of the player to find 100% perfect parties that can down the highest level mob camps in less than no time with perfect optimization. The curve should not be based on the few people who have optimized the game the most- not all jobs can even participate in such parties anyway. What about the jobs people don't play as much?

Even before 40+, Mlv was already the longest/slowest character progression mechanic (aside from finding rare drops for your perfect gear set I suppose), and now it's even more so.

[Velner]

I edited my reply to you to add the context that when I said L1 to L75 I meant during the L75 days. . . and if you're doing EP at the same pace as EXP on Colibri back in the day, you're doing EP wrong.

[Sp1cyryan]

MLs are absolutely better than trying to level to 1-75 as PUP or THF back in the day, absolutely. That's the context that should be applied to these very optional higher level master levels.

[Alhanelem]

and if you're doing EP at the same pace as EXP on Colibri back in the day

What I'm saying here is that EP gains per kill are comparable to what we got per kill when we were grinding merits before Abyssea. I'm not speaking to how good we are at killing things. But unless you're in a particularly good party, that isn't far off either.

If I don't have a party and I'm using trusts, kills are slow because I have 5 "party members" that are all significantly weaker than I am. Any party with 5 actual people is better, but how much better depends on the comp and how much everyone else is participating (which can vary wildly )

We aren't killing mobs (in an average, not top tier hyper min maxed party) designed for ML grinding that much faster, and the EP gains per kill are not that different (original max EXP a kill was 600. I haven't been to cnest but when i first began to gain EP, we were using existing apex camps where i saw numbers like 200-400. Just the other day I killed some apex empty and got ~440, but didn't like fighting those. But those numbers also go down as ML increases just like EXP did.) so if there's some magic easy way to dramatically increase that per-kill number, please tell me how I'm "doing it wrong." It would take a much much larger number for 29 million to go by in the same time we typically took to get ~2 million back in the day (And 2 million is actually 1-99 not 1-75 but who's counting?).

Consulting the chart here https://www.bg-wiki.com/ffxi/Master_Levels , that empty mob was +17 effective level (and checked as IT). Now, as the chart illustrates there's no upper limit and locus / high apex have a higher multiplier which allows the number to go higher. But those are newer additions, and thus far, I've yet to get into a party where these mobs exist. If you can kill +31 level mobs as fast or faster than we killed colibri at 75, that's still only around twice as fast of point gain, but the total points required is more than ten times higher. Even if you're perpetually chaining these 1100 point mobs, it's still more than twice as slow to max master level as classic 1-75.

Sure, I'll give you that maybe, even probably, I'm "doing it wrong." But the argument that ML 1-50 isn't drastically slower than classic 1-75 is farfetched at best. By all means, tell me the exact base and chain per kill numbers you get "doing it right."

Remember: ML 1-50 is 29,590,127 EP
Classic 1-75 is 801,350 EXP
and 1-99 is 2,051,350 EXP

Good 75 parties had no problem chaining mobs for the maximum of 600 (with no party competition), and remember also that most if not all of us were not getting 600 a kill our entire trip from 1 to 75.
To match the time it takes, you would have to be ~35 times more efficient than chaining 600s in the aht urghan days.

The highest known EP value listed on BG's chart is 1152. I don't know about this but I'll assume from your "doing it wrong" statement that you personally are eating these 1152s for breakfast and chaining them to 50 or more, which after reaching chain 50, doubles the number to 2304. That's still only a little under 4 times the per mob value we had back in the day. This means you'd need to kill the absolute best EP giving mobs 8 times faster (i.e. well under 10 seconds a kill considering how fast a good party could chain for merits back in the day) than we could kill the best EXP giving mobs back in the day, in order for the time taken to max ML to be comparable. You can cut that number down a bit more with corsair's roll, but it's STILL considerably slower.

Point being: Even the most perfect EP party is still taking signfiicantly longer to max ML, and ordinary people who are "doing it wrong" will take far longer than that. Even if we restrict these comparisons to *only* 41-50 as you wrote in your post, that's still over 20 million EP and so it's still slower.

Sure, we may be splitting hairs over details here, but I can not accept that killing the strongest EP mobs in like 5 seconds on average is the norm. and what *ordinary players* get "doing it right." (Feel free to share a video of your best EP performance without botting).

Exemplar point gains are relatively similar to EXP gains back in the day.

The maximum we could get per kill from an IT mob was 600 w/ chains in the 75 era. There is no hard limit on EP gain but so far the highest mob I've killed for EXP gave me 440 base (so 660 after chain 50 assuming that happens)

I edited my reply to you to add the context that when I said L1 to L75 I meant during the L75 days.

That is how I was framing this conversation as well.

[Velner]

I do average 250-300k EP per hour and sometimes 350k per hour once we get in the groove. Moving at that speed would get you L75 in 2.5 hours. . . EPs come significantly faster than EXP back in the day.

[Alhanelem]

I do average 250-300k EP per hour and sometimes 350k per hour once we get in the groove. Moving at that speed would get you L75 in 2.5 hours. . . EPs come significantly faster than EXP back in the day.

The question is this like a real average or an "I'm the best" average.

I definitely do not get 250-300k, or even half of that. With a party of people that are all actively participating. So please, tell us how to "do it right." But what I'm interested in isn't specifically your actual rate, it's the numbers per kill. Now, 250k based on the highest numbers I know exist, is around 3 mobs per minute. Certainly achieveable, we did that meriting on colibri back in the day, but it definitely required everyone actively doing their part the entire time.

And even if we use 250k, that's 4 hours for a million, or 116 hours for 27 million. Which would be a week if you didn't do anything else other than eat and sleep.

If you really tried, you could get 1 to 75 in a couple days, even back in the day. But that's if you're bending over backwards to do it as fast as humanly possible. A week for someone with no life is more like a month or more for someone who does.

So I mean, I suppose it's not that much worse for optimal people being optimal all the time all day every day. But that's not possible for everyone. I'm ML 15 on SMN and I question that I will ever reach ML50, much less do it quickly, unless and until they make EXP events apply to it.

[Velner]

I am certainly not the best by any stretch. I cleave in Crawler's Nest with whoever I can get together for EPs. 1x tank 1x healer and 4x literally any job.

[Alhanelem]

But the real TLDR here is even with your performance, it's still significantly longer than leveling to 75 optimally.

1234567890

I've never liked cleaving I feel like it's cheating. but at the same time, I can't pretend it doesn't work.

[Velner]

Meh. Maybe it is worse than leveling to L75 back in the day. . . maybe it's not. I know it took me months to get SMN to L75 as my second job back in the olden days when all I did was level. If I leveled like that now, I could M50 any job in a week or two. I'm not complaining either way. Nothing wrong with a little grind.

[Alhanelem]

Meh. Maybe it is worse than leveling to L75 back in the day. . . maybe it's not. I know it took me months to get SMN to L75 as my second job back in the olden days when all I did was level. If I leveled like that now, I could M50 any job in a week. I'm not complaining either way. Nothing wrong with a little grind.

Our first job always took longer because we had all the legwork like unlocking transportation tools, getting spells and gear, and the missions and stuff to do our first time out. For experienced players leveling their 10th job, 1-75 was definitely a few days at most.

My frustration is that traditional party killing (which is still sometimes done by people without someone who can do the cleaving thing) is getting worse and worse and it seems dumb to me that SE is setting the parameters for master level based on the few people who can do it the most efficiently (and least fun-ly, if I'm being honest with you).

Also, that tank needs to be pretty decked out from what I understand. simple EXP grinding shouldn't demand the same as defeating the hardest content.