April Version Update

[Yoji_Fujito]

Good day, adventurers!

As we transition from winter to spring, people often refer to alternating cycles of three cold days followed by four warm days, but I think the large fluctuations in temperature recently have given us all a severe case of weather whiplash. I hope that you all look after your health while we wait for spring to properly arrive.

Now, I'd like to talk about the April version update.

■ Server maintenance
As previously mentioned, we have two maintenance periods scheduled during the month of April. Therefore, please note that you will be unable to view the official website while its servers are being replaced. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your understanding.

You can find updates regarding these maintenance periods in the following locations:

• FFXI Official Site Latest News section
• FFXI Official News X account (@FFXI_NEWS_EN)

Please keep an eye on these sources for more information to come.

■ This month's updates to Ambuscade
In April, Volume One includes Goblins, while Volume Two features the Shadow Dragon.

The Goblins in Volume One will emit a special aura and become stronger if they get close to each other, so make sure you don't let them group up while fighting them. However, you'll also need to be aware of the bomb types as well! In some cases, you might want to let the Goblins get closer in order to take them out more easily.

In Volume Two, the Shadow Dragon's breath can be extremely deadly. Make sure to take note of its position and the direction it is facing, and also remember to keep an eye on the remaining HP of any tanks in your party.

Both volumes this month require the use of important tactics and battle knowledge, making them the perfect opponents for players who are just getting to know the game. Furthermore, starting with the previous version update, we have relaxed the exchange rate when trading hallmarks and badges of gallantry for certain rewards. I hope that you will take advantage of this opportunity to upgrade your equipment.

■ Adjustments to Besieged
In response to various feedback we have received, we will be increasing the army's movement speed.

However, since all of the beastman armies are marching on Al Zahbi, we have tried to prevent the appearance of them "teleporting" while moving that would happen if we boosted their speed too much.

In regards to the issue where you were unable to get back inside Al Zahbi if you dropped down while the door was shut, we've created a method that will let you get back in. This should make it easier for you to drive off any beastmen that have managed to wander inside.

■ Bugs
- Selling of Limbus items
In the previous version update, we made some items from Limbus available for purchase from the Curio Vendor Moogle, but some equipment upgrade materials were missing for certain jobs. We will be adding those items to the shop list with this update.

- Incurring heavy damage as a paladin while wearing empyrean armor
It took a long time for us to get to the bottom of this one, but we were able to identify the rather complex conditions that caused this issue to occur. This bug will be fixed as part of the upcoming version update. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

■ Cardians in the Macro Test feature
We've received feedback that many of you would like to accumulate TP when attacking the Cardians during the Macro Test. We've decided on a proper method for managing the resulting TP, so the feature will be applied along with this version update.

Although we anticipated requests regarding TP when we added the Cardians to the Macro Test, we were worried about the potential impact of players taking that accumulated TP and using it in other battles (and how we might have to take steps such as adding rules on the types of enemies it could be used against). Therefore, we decided to simply remove the ability to accumulate TP and focused on your prior request, which was to make the Cardians a target to be used in the Macro Test.

In addition, while implementing the feature, we also discovered a bug that had gone undetected for many years, so we plan to fix that as well.

To be more specific, in the series of quests that enable you to unlock a weapon's latent effect in order to learn Weapon Skills, the counting of points that occurs when the Weapon Skill is activated applied to any monster.

Therefore, we will return to using the original specification (using Weapon Skills on monsters that give experience points), but since the process of using quests to learn Weapon Skills is somewhat outdated now, we also plan to significantly ease up on the method for counting the necessary points from the May version update. We'll include more details with the version update info, so please refer to it for more information regarding this matter.

That covers the content of this month's version update.

Safe journeys!

Content and System-related

Implementation Timing	Update Task and Details	In-progress Task	Details
April	Besieged	・Adjust arrival time of enemy forces ・Add entry warp outside Al Zahbi gates	-
April	Macro Test	・Add TP generation while under enmity from Macro Test Cardians	-
April	Ambuscade	・Replace notorious monsters	-
April	Wings of the Goddess Mission - Traitor in the Midst	・Add visual indicator of opportunity timing in mini game ・Increase opportunity rate in mini game	-