Thread: The Current Status of FFXIV Patch 3.1 and How to Address it Moving Forward

Alahra, I don't see it as the same at all. If you compare it against the entirety of the relic quest chain, sure. But seriously, the books I did pre-nerf, and was able to do it in about three weeks of straight work on it over 2-4 hours a day. Same with Novus, which is where I paused until light and Zodiac drop adjustments hit. If you run all 5 roulettes - MS, 50, 60, Ex and Trial (Sorry PVP, you're highly unviable, says my 55 of expected 28 minute PvP queue)- that's about that much time there, and that's still 91 days for Poetics and 44 days for Law. And then for my server, Faerie, you're looking at about 8m spent on the items, if current prices keep up, whereas I think I spent maybe about 2-3m total for my Nexus, including materia and the desynth mats (which by the way are pretty lewd in price themselves compared to where they were when the content was fresh; I also didn't worry about BiS stats on the materia, since that's really an optional cost and doesn't compare to the essential base costs we're seeing here). I've heard of prices coming down on some servers for these items yet I think this is coming from the more populous servers, which makes sense, as there's more people crafting to undercut each other and level out the market; Not so much on servers where the populations are already dwindling. And I'm in the position where if I could, I would craft all of these items myself, however the devs see fit to artificially prevent that with the 'specialist only' crafting.

Even the other options to cut down on the days of grind just tally more grind into one day... But I want something to do in this game that doesn't also dictate I spend literal months doing only that, and not benefiting my skills at all. I miss the original first relic step, where it actually demanded I demonstrate skill. And sure, I was about iL80 when I did it so it was a little bit easier than it was for most, but I felt it still asked a lot of me that I was able to then put into doing other content capably. This will never achieve that, and works to the opposite end.

EDIT: And where the heck is the lore in what we're doing? Why do people deal in bloody cakes and unidentifiable slag?

Originally Posted by Alahra

Zodiac Weapon Comparison

Just because it's not said verbatim doesn't mean it's not said. If the Anima Weapon difficulty used the difficulty of Gordias Savage as a benchmark for its own difficulty, and they admitted Gordias Savage was too hard, then it stands to reason the Anima Weapon was consequently tuned to be too difficult (or rather take too much time, since the Anima Weapon quest traded Gordias Savage's difficulty for time).

The Animus stage, as I've noted, was not bad after you got the Atma. RNG always sucks, but the Animus books themselves were not bad - you could hop on and see progress within a matter of minutes usually, assuming you had an incomplete book, and would often finish it before you needed more tomestones to get the next one. That's the way it should be. It took time, but the visible steady progress (and actually getting those stats on the weapon) made it relatively bearable (almost enjoyable in some ways).

The Novus stage was not bad unless you absolutely had to have optimal stats. Casual players don't care about optimization. Do a roulette, hunt a treasure, stick a materia on the scroll. You made progress. You could do a few more and make more progress. If you only did your EX roulette, it would take 75 days (2.5 months) to get it done, but for only an hour or so a day, that's not so bad, especially given you probably ran your EX roulettes anyway and you'd accrue tomestones to get a "bonus" map as a matter of course. It only got outrageous if, as I said, you absolutely had to have optimal stats, and that was due mostly to the expense of materia and failed melds.

The Nexus step was an outrageous grind, which is where I called it quits for trying to keep current on the Zodiac Weapon. A mind-numbing, endless grind with nebulous conditions for progress is not fun. Show me just a little progress day-to-day, just a little, without undue effort and I'm happy.

The Zodiac step was probably where even a lot of "casual / solo" midcore players (the people Zodiac weapons were designed for) called it quits. 16 "Dungeon Atma" is insane, and further gating it behind HQ master crafted materials that need desynthesis ingredients is absurd. That is not something a casual and/or solo player can accomplish. Consequently, this is the step I would most compare the current Anima Weapon quest (Step 3) to, as while lacks RNG reliance the effort needed to get the 80 tokens is through the roof and also includes gated crafting materials (more on that in a minute). You called it grueling yourself - nothing "grueling" is fun.

The Zeta step was probably a bit more bearable. Slow and steady progress.

In most of those cases, except the RNG reliant ("Dungeon") Atma and Light farming, you could get on and see progress in a few minutes. It might take time to reach the goal, but you made progress quickly, which is enough to satisfy me (and most casual players). Now, let's look at the effort needed get one item to make progress with the Anima Weapon:

• 10x Gordias section runs (~55 - 75 minutes).
• 2.x non-Ixal Beast Tribe Lv48 Dailies (4.3 days), assuming you can do them.
• Vanu Vanu Dailies (6 days).
• 1000 Hunt Seals (luck / chance reliant) / ~5 - 15% chance of obtaining from a 3.0 treasure map (1 / day if you're lucky and can get them, time depends on how long it takes to get a treasure map to appear gathering).
• 680 Poetics / Law Tomestones (doing every daily roulette, 2 - 3 / day @ 2 - 3 hours).

... that's hardly "casual friendly." The calendar days may be lower or on par with the Zodiac steps, but the sheer amount of time required to make progress is far greater than any Zodiac step bar perhaps the Zodiac forging itself or Light farming (which, again, is mostly due to RNG and stupid high Light requirements / stupid low Light payouts, and the one step I absolutely cannot stand when it's current).

And, as always, that does not include the HQ Crafted Items, which casual / solo players are likely unable to make or afford. Specialist crafting may as well be Desynthesis by another name, as it locks you out of crafting items if you aren't specialized to do so much like Desynthesis locked you out of obtaining certain materials if you weren't specialized to do so. Either way getting crafting to those levels takes a colossal amount of time and effort casual / solo players likely don't have, and the prices for said items on the Market Board are simply outrageous (~750k / item on Famfrit last I checked, which totals out to 12m gil. I have a little shy of 1/3 of that, and my brother wants me to give him 90k so he can buy a sanuwa mount). This can't be fairly compared to the Novus step as getting that perfect stat version is entirely your choice; here we have no choice. It can be somewhat compared to the Zodiac step, as that was also gated behind high-end crafting requiring specialization (of a different sort, but specialization nonetheless). Keep in mind that it feels, to me, that 3.0 intro gathering / crafting was designed around players having done 2.x endgame gathering / crafting to the end, so it's hard to get into it and if I (a 2.0 Master of the Hand) cannot find a good foothold I don't know how newbies (casual / solo players) can.

... but I don't see the need for slogging essays at each other, so I'm just going to bow out here and agree to disagree. Learned this the hard way criticizing Minfilia over on the Lore board...

Originally Posted by Arashmin

If you run all 5 roulettes - MS, 50, 60, Ex and Trial (Sorry PVP, you're highly unviable, says my 55 of expected 28 minute PvP queue)- that's about that much time there, and that's still 91 days for Poetics and 44 days for Law.

Expert provides 180 Law; Level 60 provides 200 Law and 120 Poetics; Level 50 provides (on average) 153 Poetics (though it's actually weighted higher than that because of increased incentive to do the six dungeons that provide the most Poetics); Trials provides 60 Law; and Main Scenario provides 140 Poetics daily.

So each day, that's 440 Law and 413 Poetics. My original estimate of about 40 days up there is off—it's actually about 62 for Law and 66 for Poetics (I'm assuming I was factoring something else in originally that I've now forgotten--I came to the 40 days figure several days ago). Those roulettes tally up to a bit over an hour and a half of game time (30 minutes for Expert, about 20 minutes each for L60/L50/Main, and perhaps 15 minutes for Trial) if you have somewhat poor luck in groups. Round up to two hours.

So, you're looking at around 2 months to complete the weapon, which is actually fairly comparable to Novus, Nexus, and Zodiac if they were approached at a similar time investment. (It's about 53 days if you do the Alexander route of 640 runs of that at about 10 minutes per run, for the same 2 hours per day). If you invested about 2 hours per day in Animus, you would be looking at about one month (31 days--270 Mythlox runs at 10 minutes each for the Mythology and roughly 2 hours per book), though that assumes a lot of luck with the FATE timers.

So you're right, Animus isn't as bad (discounting FATE luck, anyway). But the other three are still rather comparable (which I think you would agree, since you said you waited to do them until after nerfs). That's ultimately the only point I'm trying to make: anyone who completed the Zodiac quests as they were current really shouldn't be intimidated by the Anima one, and anyone who didn't, shouldn't really be surprised that this one is the way it is. The Zodiac Weapon saga had more player engagement than a lot of the content we got in ARR from what I can tell (I'd be interested to know what portion of the playerbase had a completed Zeta in 2.55), so it's not surprising to me that they're generally following the same patterns in creating the version of the quest for Heavensward.

(Regarding the Animus stage, though, it's probably relevant that it wasn't a "complete" stage in and of itself. To get from i90 to i100 with the full stats, you had to do both Atma *and* Animus, so in some sense, it's not surprising that it takes about half as long as some of the other stages--it's only half of the full stage.)

And just a friendly reminder regarding the crafted items: nearly all of them (with the exception of the one that requires Pterodactyl Leather) are made from relatively cheap materials. Even if you can't gather the materials yourself, you can probably buy them and have the pieces made (by multiple crafters, as necessary) for a notable fraction of the cost of buying the final products directly on the MB.

Just as one example, let's look at the Titanium Alloy Mirror (chosen mostly just because ALC is one of my specialists and I could look at the recipe while on the MB), using prices from my server (which are not intended to be representative--I'm just giving an idea of how much you can save going by the materials instead of the final products).

The Mirror needs:

1 Titanium Alloy Square (ARM Specialist): 5 Sphalerite (1,000 for 5 NQ or 75,000 for 5 HQ), a Titanium Nugget (3,500 for NQ or 8000 for HQ) and a Dawnborne Aethersand (40,000 NQ, 65,000 HQ): 148,000 if you go the safe route and get all HQ mats.
1 Holy Water (10,000 HQ)
1 Hardsilver Sand (1,200 HQ)
1 Vitriol (3,000 for NQ--no HQ up as of writing)

So that's around 170,000 gil (rounding up from 162,000 since I didn't factor in cluster costs to keep it simpler) for the materials to craft a Titanium Alloy Mirror. The HQ Mirrors are selling for about 800k on my server. That's like 1/4 of the cost. Even if you buy the Alloy Square directly, they're going for about 200k HQ, which is still around 1/4 of the cost (you just save a little more having it made).

But 800k is a lot less intimidating than 3.2 million gil for that step, no?

I'm not saying you'll necessarily get buy at 1/4 of the cost for each item or on every server, of course. But crafters do charge a hefty premium on the MB for items that are in high demand, and you can get around a lot of that if you take the time to get materials and then find one to craft it for you. Most crafters are happy to do so in my experience (really! We haven't had hardly anything useful to craft the entire expansion, most crafters are probably just excited to feel valued again).

All these complaint about Grinding, I think many lost the main point.
We all knows games are grinding, and we don't mind.

HOWEVER, make the grinding worth something please.
Not grinding work that you know it will be obsoleted in 3 months time. Then what's the point?

So...I am still back to this :

We are on Final Fantasy Series, and 14 is along this series.
Please do not forget the game, Story, Relic (Best weapons with special effect - not the glaring...), Gaming System and so on...
(If you don't like Final Fantasy, I don't see reason to stay and not going to others MMORPG... - strong statement, but hey, this is Final Fantasy Games!)

Yoshi,
For the love of FF games, please do not lose these specials from Final Fantasy Series, or this game is nothing different from WoW and other MMORPG.
Final Fantasy series has their special, and it's why there is a large group of Final Fantasy Fans Base.
And you really want to have the group of people (who are not FF Fans) playing this game, turn into one of the Final Fantasy Fans.
Not changing your FF games into something similar to other MMORPG and keep the people playing.

Yet, I like you at 2.0 launched, because you listened, and you saved the game.
Now, I dislike you because you have forgotten the history and simply take that we forgot what you have promised, and bs so many things.

Please do something to make me like you again.

Thank you.

Originally Posted by Velhart

snip

God forbid a lot of ppl having trouble with harder content and want it easier when they are paying for it?
As for content I haven't been to impressed to push me to even sink into end game repetitive content. Everyone has a right to complain or want some change especially if they are paying for it. Your sarcasm is not needed. It helps no one. SE isn't perfect but that have shown many times they do want us players to have meaningful content. The whole "get gud" mentality doesn't always work when its a minority. Is this recycled content? Yeah it is...its an mmo. They try to put out updates some small than others til the next big patch/expansion.

"hey could of at least made it interesting and made new content for it between recycled content" then help and tell them what you want or else they are just shooting fish in a barrel. Sarcastic and mean responses do no one, any favor. Give constructive criticism and suggest changes not "As always, good job SE.". There is a problem currently or else Yoshi wouldn't have made this topic/etc

Alahra, as I mentioned I did all but the last two steps pre-nerf, so including the alexandrite grind. 23 days to do it, about a week before HW hit when it became 5x Alex per map. Materia I spent maybe about 1-2m max, I was plugging in cheap materia under the assumption I'd be giving it up a lot sooner in the 3.x cycle when getting it to Zeta. The other two I only did post-nerf because there literally was no time left to do them until it happened. Atma, I was even counting that, but I think I did it in about two weeks of that much play time. This would have been after the very first atma bump though. So maybe about 5 weeks if you lump Animus and Atma together.

And because of that, I am more than surprised that this very first step requires that many days or hours of grind. Nor that much gil; You're underselling the values immensely by not mentioning that 800K consists only of 4/16 crafted items, so you're back up to 3.2m again. I spent maybe 120k on the first relic step MBing the items and spiritbonding the materia , and as mentioned in the last post just over a couple million across the entire thing. How far or deep is this one going to run if it's multiple millions in just this one step? And while I'd love to have the resources that most players do in terms of time of day playing and therefore access to the playerbase, I've got demands that limit that greatly, as for example I'm writing this on my way off from work, when most of Faerie is likely going to be in bed or heading thusly. It's definitely not kind restricting these crafts so and effectively being segregated from content, because I'm well able to craft all of them otherwise, but instead I have to spend precious and extended playtime garnering the service of others when that has taken upwards of a couple hours in the past. Because of a flag on the crafting methods of these items, and little more.

As for roulette playtimes, I never used to be one for bad DF experiences, yet Alex and the roulettes have actually been worse lately, even accounting for gear overcompensation. People rushing, not communicating in the group, randomly dropping, lots of people underperforming across all roles, likely not even paying anywhere near full attention. They can do that because the game just isn't asking for people to actually know how to perform; What it is asking is to dedicate two months of probably most of your daily playtime to this, so might as well just make everyone suffer through it, right?

Depends on what you want from it, really. I personally just want something enjoyable and worth doing long term in the game and for it to be properly accommodating to its lifespan. Some people want that from glamour and bragging rights, some people want raid weapons; I just want something that I can do at an enjoyable pace. And I don't think this is anywhere near enjoyment.

In fact, the actual utility is that it isn't for dummies, it's to enable non-raiders to have more powerful weapons and perhaps with some effort, hone themselves and defeat difficult content. Except there's then no real tie-in between the two to actually even do so, despite SE claiming it to be part of the design effort, and to put it so far out of reach so late in the cycle... I don't think that's good for anybody except those who can dedicate vast amounts of time already to the game.

Originally Posted by Arashmin

Alahra, as I mentioned I did all but the last two steps pre-nerf, so including the alexandrite grind. 23 days to do it, about a week before HW hit when it became 5x Alex per map.

I'm a bit confused as to when you did your Alexandrite, but if you finished that part about a week before HW, it had already become a lot easier to acquire. The maps cost half as many tomestones if I remember correctly (400 Soldiery), and Soldiery was available at roughly twice the rate that Mythology was when Novus was first introduced (for an effective cost of 1/4 the Tomestones per map). If you got Alexandrite from FATEs, they had also by this time significantly increased the drop rate. So it might have taken you 23 days to do it, but you weren't doing it when it was at its most grueling (whereas you're discussing Anima when it is at its most grueling).