NEW NM system

[radar]

I think this system is good:

Positives:
It gives all players something to do, that is low stakes (this is very important, a lot of players simply had nothing to do outside of big events).
The key system was really cool.
It drives a lot of interest in the community, to find the NM, to figure out what drops what, to argue about the stats etc
It allows player interaction, grouping up for these is a good thing even if it's just random chitchat while camping.
I like that the lower NM are timed, and the higher ones are lottery.

I hope you add more NM like this (even to Escha, Reisenjima etc), even to other areas. Things like earrings, neck pieces etc, other armor sets

Negatives:
There is no current word on the augment system, there really does need to be (even if just a teaser). Especially if this idea was dropped, cause a lot of people camped them specifically because of that, so they will be very annoyed if it's not happening.
They look the same as older gear, not even a recolor. This reduces the excitement of it, cause you've seen your character wearing it before.

I hope we can use different colors of this armor when we augment it, this would be very important (maybe with aptants). The other color variants already exist, red / black / white variants are already there.

I hope the augment system requires drops, that also come from the same NM and work like dark matter (but with different augments, based on the type of gear). That way the small community interaction aspect continues, and newer players can still get help to camp/kill them. Some randomness in min/max stats (and maybe some rare stats, like refresh 2 on escha gear) makes sure everyone doesn't just cap them in a week and never goes near them again.

I think it needs to be kept in mind that corsair and ranger are often used as a melee job now, with savage blade. So those jobs should probably be added to Olorun.

[Dragoy]

I didn't know some of them are lottery. I did try that with some of the early areas though, funny enough.

I'm not going to do more until I can store the gear away...

Though, I might hunt out for more of them just for fun, trying to find them without spoilers.

That's my main incentive. I doubt they'll be useful for me at this point, but I do find nice that they are doing it at all. I bet it is something someone wanted to do for so long, and now they got the chance. :]

I'd use the time for some other things, fer sure, but well, I'll not be complaining.

I'm not sure I'd go for the random aspect.

Why not rather do the gradual thing they did with the last (for now!) ultimate weapons stage, and Unity augments? That is, gradual upgrades the more you trade in items.

Random never was a friend of mine...

[radar]

I really wish they would use the HQ rare chest for these things, using the basic chests reduces the fun of it somewhat, should drop a gold relic chest.

[radar]

<Message from Taniguchi-san, dev of the gear> From a long time ago, we had NMs that popped with similar conditions to these and heard from a lot of players saying that they wanted a similar type of challenge that avoided the bloodthirsty situation that we had in the past.

People who played awhile ago might feel a bit of nostalgia for these types of NMs.

Since this is just the “surface” (of the earth), please look forward to seeing many more NMs in the future. (it’s a pun saying that it’s the “surface” of the plans, but also “surface of the earth”; implying NMs in underground areas next).



We’re enjoying seeing players working together and overcoming some of that stiffness that you feel when you join up with people you don’t know.

We want more and more players to group up to take down the NMs. When we were planning them, we wanted to make sure that we could do what we were able to reduce points where players might fight and instead create ways for them to cooperate.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxi/commen...lation_thread/

[radar]

Only problem with these NM is within a month, most people will have the drops and there is no longer any reason to camp them. Let alone to group up and camp them, which was actually quite a nice thing with it.

If they add a dark matter type system to the gear with rare high augments, and the items needed drop from the NM for each piece then they will continue to be relevant for a long time.

Remains to be seen if they are going to be reforged, or augmented though.