Dev Tracker - Discussion

I've seen upwards of 5 or 6 aura removals on the bee with no discernible difference in its behavior. After a certain point these auras become very difficult if not nearly impossible to dispel in the tiny windows that you have to do it in. I'm not sure how reasonable it would be, in this case, to get much more than 5 or 6 aura removals on the bee, for example.

Really just playing devil's advocate here, I don't think it's likely some magical mechanic is going to redefine these fights. But, if there were a mechanic of that nature, the increasing difficulty to remove aura would make sense as it requires an increased level of coordination and involvement from each member to pull off. Otherwise, it's just another form of time limit, which makes little sense for the 45 minute fights they seemingly want us to do. It wouldn't be that hard to take a group into a low vengeance Ngai, for example, to rule it out.

Magical "Hidden" mechanics are bad design period. There needs to be context clues or other ways to point the players in the right direction, even if it's just NPC dialogue somewhere referencing it. How long as Sortie basement been out? Do we still now know the chest mechanics to Ixion and the Flower? This is bad game design because it becomes impossible to tell if a mechanic even exists, or of it's just bugged.

Same thing with Odyssea, chances are that any additional mechanics are flat bugged to be nonfunctional forcing the players to just DPS check their way through it. Of course if the mechanic is bugged, it's not possible for the players to "figure it out" and the content becomes just another Absolute Virtue / Pandemonium Warden.

It's worth looking at. In the end though, it's easily believable that the only intended reward for proccing these things is removal of the fetters and removal of the worst TP moves/lower probability of them occurring for some of these.

Where proccing does have a noticeable effect on the fight is Sortie. Would expect any effect that this would have to be similarly easy to spot when/if it happens.

Willing to bet that whole "takes zero damage from non main damage type" thing is a bug and they are gonna likewise blame QA when they notice it.

So because we found something that works means that there's not a "right" or intended way?


May 17, 2021, syto posted a screenshot in the odyssey thread, the devs even said we weren't doing the fight in the way it was intended.

Prior to that someone(iirc dev) posted to jp's (in Japanese) about something with (poor translation Inc) "eye stars" as an intended mechanic for mboze or handling timber, that no one in the community for NA has ever come across to attempted to figure out because we had our own methods to do the content. Again, saying a mechanic doesn't exist doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, it means that with 22 jobs, I'm pretty sure only 10-12 have even seen the fights in the various comps NA has come up with. Which means if we haven't found a mechanic there's a real possibility It could be tied to something never tried or attempted.


This was 15 May, 2021, and a year and a half later our community has no idea what any of that means/meant because we found a way to solve it without these mechanics. So if you wanna say wow in weeks we haven't figured out how to beat these bosses, I raise you:

"In a *** year and a half we haven't figured out something they told us (poorly translated) existed"

Any extra mechanics simply don't exist or are likely bugged. There is no QA or UAT for FFXI anymore, it is just the devs adjusting battle scripts or stat blocks. And since everything is "hidden" with little to no communication, we have no way of knowing if it's really working as intended or bugged.

Not so much a bug but a result of devs not thinking through what vengeance scaling to 25 means. At V0 those bosses have 75% SDT to "wrong" damage types. Each Vengeance level grants them +1% SDT to all damage types along with a +1% damage output effect. At V20 they were 95% resistant to "wrong" damage types and 20% to "right", at V25 they have become 100% resistant to "wrong" damage types and 25% to "right". Much of Ongo's cheap behavior is a result of Waktza's having crazy magic resistances to start with, before SE added on Vengeance adjustments. If you start with 30% resistance to earth then add another 20% (V20) we land smack at the magical 50% mark that causes all effects to automatically fail the first resist check.

First of all that translation isn't even correct. He's saying that he was looking for a way to weaken Timber, but depending on what the weakening condition is he still categorizes Timber as an instant death move (native JP speakers can refine this further).

SE telling us that we aren't fighting it the right way while providing absolutely no insight as to what the right way is or how we are doing it wrong is meaningless. Both the Global and JP communities have tried numerous strategies on Mboze and barely anything works.

That's completely correct, we have no way of knowing, but instead of brute forcing something and expecting it to work, and if it doesn't decry the whole system, maybe it's worthwhile to actually think outside of the "rawr zerg" box

I remember we went thru almost the entire voidwatch era without knowing about /fume. They add some weird stuff

Except ... people are testing these all the time, like for the first several months of an events release people test it nonstop. Not all the test get reported here but they are happening. On Asura there is a JP Taru we know that has ran over 60+ T3's with various configurations testing every aspect. Can think of him as the JP version of that Bahamut group. There is no magical "hidden" mechanic that is actually working, and no amount of "manifesting" it will make one start functioning.

The blame lays with dev's releasing buggy or not completely thought out content, not with the community. Basically Steve jobs is always wrong for saying "you are holding it wrong".

Then why the *** are people complaining within weeks of new content that something is wrong/unbeatable. Regardless of odyssey: gaol existing for a couple years now, V25 is entirely new content lacking that months of testing you're referring to.

Dude, the Japanese didn't even follow that "eye star" *** - whatever it was (it could have easily been rampart or something). They actually have the NA strategy of TP denial on THEIR wiki page:


http://wiki.ffo.jp/html/38245.html


Mboze's mechanics are complete ***, even the Japanese try to completely bypass Tiiimbeeer entirely the same way we do.

Because you are not in the know for the ones doing the testing.

And just to drive this point home, they broke how Bar spells worked... in a way we would be very unlikely to "notice" without HEAVY statistical analysis of resist results, that level of analysis is not something many players are capable of.

If a hidden mechanic would require some high level analysis to even start to understand it seems to be rather stretched to believe people will find it on their own.

Even note that the post from the image shown in an earlier post Fujito states
So if the indented method is more difficult than the "current solution" people may have identified it and thrown it away.

The examples weren't given as an exact example of how to win but more of an example of how mechanics aren't even fully known, and yet people claim nothing else exists because people test so much stuff instead of just copying what worked for someone else which we are all guilty of to some extent. It's not a bad thing but claiming that there's no other mechanics because there's so much testing going on is pretty disingenuous.

Because months of testing have taken place in the last 3 weeks?

Lmao okay dude, cause I'm sure not being in the know changes anything about how long it takes to test something works.

Stockholm syndrome is real, we all should invest in copium sales.

A random JP on twitter and Fujito saying that we aren't doing the fight the way they want us to doesn't say anything about our understanding of individual 'solved' mechanics. Nothing in either of those posts indicate that our understanding of Timber is wrong. The JP guy postulates that their may be a way to weaken it (but no one has ever found one), and Fujito merely says that we aren't fighting the NM the way he thought we would.

Neither of those things say that Timber isn't a semi-fixed damage AoE attack (based on observable factors; HP, enmity, etc.) that is reduced by having more nearby targets and can only otherwise be reduced by SDT and thus normally deals more damage than a person has health. They say there might be other things that we don't know, but if we haven't figured it out by now how much does that actually *** matter seeing as there are some very industrious minds doing this content all the time for the last 1-2 years.

Are you proposing that the mechanic is brand new and was not present on the earlier versions?

I'm proposing there are mechanics present in all of gaol(v0-v25) that still haven't been discovered because people just bandwagon the solutions that worked.

Nothing would ever have to have been tested in V0 because with decent gear even solo or duo players can do alot of the fights, going up on difficulties, everyone migrated to 2 strategies, multi dd/healer hyper buff zergs, or solo dd tp denial strategies for all of A3. Even when V20 was cleared, the running trend was "we didn't have to deviate much if at all from our V15 known strategies"

No what you clearly stated was months of testing can't happen in 3 weeks, V0-V20 has been out for much longer than 3 weeks

Nobody said V25 is unbeatable. I myself have said that it's too early to make any real assessments on it's viability until people have had more time to try things out. But it's fair to criticize the content for what it is. Each vengence tier is simply a scaled up version of the previous tiers. Are you suggesting that you believe they added new fight mechanics to vengence 25 that never existed on V0-20?



This is a valid counterpoint and the main stance most here are taking. When S-E originally released absolute virtue do you remember how long we banged our faces against him trying to figure out the hidden mechanic? It took the devs years before they posted that video with the hint that you needed to use your own 2hr ability within a split second of the moment AV uses his to seal it away. And the timing of the window was so sensitive that not just player reaction, but system lag and latency caused by the distances data travels between NA and the datacenter in japan was enough to interfere with our ability to execute the strategy. I'm sorry, but it's valid criticism to call that bad game design. Because it IS bad game design.

If there are hidden mechanics within oddy gaol that nobody has ever figured out within the past two years, between both the NA and Japaneese communities, and there are no in game hints pointing us toward whatever those mechanics could be... then at this point the devs should just flat out tell us what those mechanics are or at least start dropping hints pointing us toward them. It's fine to develop content with hidden easter eggs in it. And it's even fine to make those easter eggs mandatory for the playerbase to discover in order to complete the content...provided they give us some form of hint as to what those easter eggs are. A NPC dialogue, a visual cue, an event that will trigger on its own spontaneously.... whatever it may be. It's NOT ok however to implement a hidden mechanic that's intended to be mandatory to to complete content and not provide us with any hints to what it is.... and then wait for multiple years and still not give us a clue pointing toward it when nobody figures it out. If there are secrets in oddy (which there very well may be) then it's time they came out and started sprinkling hints to what they are. If a community as robust as ours can't find the easter egg in 2 years and that easter egg is required to find, then I'm gonna call that out as bad game design.

The hidden mechanic is if you use 3 phones in one run you get subjobs for the 3rd fight.

None of you would ever figure that ***out cause it's hard.

I'm only partially kidding.

(not just any 3 phones, 3 specific in order, or by family, or in tiers, or exactly equal to your MM)

Oh Tesa, you and your logic!

"it has an eye star" is just a grievous mistranslation. 目星を付く literally means "to figure (something) out", there is no eye star.

I told everyone forever ago, if you don't want timber to be used, just don't do any slashing damage! Then the tree won't be chopped down. Timberrrrrrrrr

When I used the term "right answer" I didn't meant magical hidden mechanic like AV incident. I meant certain combination of job/skill/gear choices that devs expected us to use to deal with the mechanic, which isn't necessary the same as the most popular strat playerbase discovered later on.

Just reading Dev's posts here I get the impression that they intend to create content that forces setup diversity by needing multiple KI to beat the boss.


And yet Mischief's strat so far all beat it with only 1 KI. So they are already doing the fight slightly more efficient than Dev's expectation possibly.

If the boss is designed to be beatable by 6 average skilled player with 18 high progression jobs using 2-3 KI, then top end groups with tools and top skill struggle with 1 KI would be expected.

That's why I can't say for sure if dev never beat it. Maybe they did, they just used more gear/jobs than top end group's attempt that's all. I wouldn't jump into the conclusion and say dev never beat it only because top end group struggle. Need more evidence to support such claim.


Edit: Just FYI, I do agree that their testing method is flawed btw. Flawed testing method doesn't necessarily meant content is impossible to beat by any means.

Im almost sure that dev's test this by botting. I mean they probably don't actually play it in real time, just automate whole fight, so they don't need to be skilled players. Just need to know the strategy and considering the fact, that they designed the fight, they know what works too.