1.20a Patch notes

[Murugan]

yep. and part of the reason moogle felt like such a grind was every time you won you spent the next 20 minutes killing NMs to get keystones so you could reenter again. every single time. with ifrit, you could at least farm a bunch of inferno tapers solo or in SB groups until you had a nice reserve built up, which gave you the opportunity to take breaks between kills, since you didn't have to keep farming each and every time you won.

so at least at surface value this is a very welcome change.

I'm a little worried it is going to be a chance drop making farming them ahead of time take several times longer than farming the NM's between kills. Hopefully not though. Either way it is still better and I know we will take advantage of it, and the whole thinning of the tree herds should reduce the timesink. We were even resorted to having people drop/claim/link/die so we could kill steal the NM's and not have to wait for the trees to move (Cassie being the worst hopefully she doesn't have as many trees pathing through her area).

Yes it does. Some of the NMs were much easier to deal with (Queen Gougou), while others were more annoying (Buata) so I can see the trend shifting to the party going to kill Gougou and taking care of all the vultures, spriggans and whatnot on the way there and in the vicinity for keystone drops. Can also farm these keystones outside of the quest like tapers, so overall a very nice improvement.

There are only a couple of Spriggans between turning leaf and Queen. Also I think queen is one of the more annoying NM's because of her bouncy aggro and liking to sit at range behind a tree so melee have to walk over to her.

I plan to simply farm the hell out of the the keystones ahead of time so when we run two groups at once and swap members around we don't have to worry about getting people keyed first anymore (which was a huge hassle).