Dev Tracker - Discussion

These things are absolutely true, but the same would be applied to top endgame at many periods of this game's history, as well as almost all other MMO.

The skill aspect is practicing enough to not make player mistakes that cost you the run when luck lines up. It is meant to be a fight that takes a lot of attempts to win(Bumba specifically, as Simon said the others are much more forgiving), which is why the reward for winning once is so great.

I do not personally think the amount of luck rolls is the best way to go about things, but players have handicapped SE by using endless tools to remove player error from the equation. Without luck rolls or overpowered moves, you'll end up with a set of addons to load that just kills the boss for you.

Think its also just SE not curbing player side power creep via gear and buffs/debuffs potential

I don't mean to keep coming at you. I understand the point you are trying to make.

But just to give you my perspective. It felt great to beat V15, it felt amazing to beat V20, but the general feeling of the group on V25 was "I'm glad this plague is over".

If they gave us a way to counter these TP moves by turning or some other means, we all know everyone would be using react to counter it immediately. If people played fairly and by hand, maybe we could see fewer unfair mechanics to keep people engaged with the content. At this point I don't really care if people use these tools, but I think it's probably made designing the content more challenging for them especially combined with gear creep.

It feels like with v20, you got unlucky if you lost. At v25, you got lucky if you win. I don't really think that's a great way of designing the fights, but at the same time, I don't know what else they could do to make them challenging, require dedication, and avoid people running around with r30 Nyame 2 weeks after release.

The randomness sucks, but it requires everyone to be persistent, stay on their toes, and not screw up so that the one time the stars align and you can win, you do. As said before, it only takes once. If you keep at it with a consistent group, you'll eventually get the win, you just have to be willing to deal with how frustrating it can be, but the auras IMO are just one piece of that.

FFXI never really had great mechanics but they had more engaging (to some) elements.

TP moves that required stun
TP moves that had mages at 20.1
TP moves that needed status effects removed
TP moves that give massive stoneskin
Shadow Requirements
Turning from gaze effects
Adds you actually have to kill

Apart from the stun and ranges i think most of those still exist in some fashion, and even in the case of range there's plenty of moves that wont touch the backline. SS got replaced with some kind of shield/powerful self-buff. But it was more common in the past iirc.

EDIT: Also adds mechanics kinda died, gaol had some potential to make the add worth killing but made it too large a hassle to be worth it

I'm not convinced procs carrying over across entries isn't a bug and that they know that it works that way. It seems like with the change to v20 after v25 came out, the removal of the regen/etc with the add dying, and different damage types required to kill adds, they would have emphasized killing them across multiple KI runs. Seems this would open up more strats too, but as it is now, no one bothers.

I'd like to tack on to Godfry's statement here.

We fought Bumba approximately 40 times (KI 1 and KI 2). This doesn't count times he just wrecked us on KI 1.

Of those 40 times, we saw non macc/matk auras twice. First time RNG screwed us anyway with a resist on Kaustra. Second time we absolutely destroyed it.

1/10, sure, that's not too bad, but 1/20 (if you average our runs out), that was just a freaking relief to have it over.

Obvious typo due to multitasking while shitposting, but its pretty clear what I was trying to say.

Just need to win once but the reality is not everyone plays with 5 other real people for the entirety of their gameplay and sometimes you want to play with others who also need clears or heaven forbid someone has to miss the one run where the static wins.

Combination of heavily lottery based and 6 person only fights favouring statics means vast majority of players will never want to repeat a clear once they have it. Everyone else that didn't have a static to clear them? Well fu you don't get clears.

Not defending the content by any means, but you can reasonably get access to v15, possibly v20 for some. There's always stuff that you'd need a top end team to clear reliably, just happens to be ody this time and the gap between v20 and v25 isnt that massive a gap for much of the pieces.

It wasnt clear because you said "use". I still don't understand what you are trying to say. You use v20 for what? farming RP?

My point is there is no incentive for people that have already cleared it to go on runs with others that also want clears. Literally zero.

Can get RP with or without clears and arguably easier if you don't go for clears.

The small pool of players that have both the gear and know-how to do the fights just gets smaller by getting clears and not wanting to do the fight anymore.

Use V20 to farm points to upgrade gear.

Or maybe they do the Mog Amplifier exploit by doing a portion of V25 then dying, not sure tbh. I never fully grasped that exploit.

I thought most people do V25 triples for RP so they can get charged amps because who wouldn't want 9000 RP for doing 25% damage. Are we gatekeeping RP methodology these days for clout?

Like Jedi said, what you should do for points is 3x V25, doing as much damage as possible on A3 (or killing if you are good enough) and for example killing 2x A1 V25 (you can exchange points to segments if you don't need RP from them).

I thought doing 5% damage then waiting to time out is an intended mechanic, by SE, for Amplifier charging?

I always thought this was unusually lenient coming from SE.

I doubt the way amplifiers work was ever the actual intended way for them to work and it was more of a compromise on what they had time or desire to implement. Amplifiers were a quick bandage fix to how reprehensibly terrible farming RP was before their introduction.

But that's how they do work and it is what it is.

Verve is a really strong attack/magic attack bonus. It simply makes Tidal Guillotine hit for above 5k each time, turning it into an one-shot. Somebody in my LS claims to have attempted to Perfect Defense, and have seen 400-500 dmg from Guillottine anyway. That'd means it literally hits for over 9000.


I feel this, but as far as I'm seeing the effect on the game has been nothing short of amazing:
- it can't realistically be merc'd at higher tiers, at least not with a high enough frequency for it to matter (3 fights per day tops, for maaaybe 2 carries on Atonement 1-2 and 1 tops on 3-4, who can't even afk)
- it requires job variety. Remember a couple years ago, right after malignance, when every party was MNK MNK BRD GEO COR WHM, with sometimes a RUN in place of the MNK, and any other job didn't matter at all? Nowadays everybody that wants to do Ody has 1-2 different good DDs geared, and at least one out of BRD/COR/GEO/healer jobs.
- linked to the above, it made underused job shine again: I have never seen as many people gearing and playing BST, DNC and PUP as I have seen since I came back and Gaol v20-25 is all the rage
- it enforces variety in strategy, since it's not possible to just engage and go afk while your bot spams WS. You still have to react to mob actions (proccing auras) but it requires coordination and can't be just scripted away like stuff like Dancing Fullers or the Meeble ambu is.

It has overall made the playerbase much better, at least on my server.

I do share the wish that there were some kind of "make it easier", like dunno it would be interesting if by having all mobs at v25 you'd get -50% discount on moglophones. Would make it much cheaper to help other people once you have completed the content.


All of these have been automated to hell and back. Heck, Selindrile's gearswap does all of this to you. The truth is that as a playerbase we got complacent because we just got used to steamroll content with SV songs, Bolster, WS spam, and scripts. And now we're unhappy that none of the above applies anymore, and we had to, as the youngsters nowadays say, git gud. When was the last time we were presented with some actually challenging content, before Ody? Divergence we just cheesed with PLD GEO SCH BLMx15.


This is an issue, but it's also always been an issue - I clearly remember my LS stopping doing aeonics back in 2018, because the guy leading the runs got all the weapons he wanted and decided that everyone that helped him get his stuff didn't deserve his help back. So I got into another group that did Aeonics regularly every two months even if the leaders already got all of them. And do I have heard horror stories about relics back in 2006...
This hasn't changed, there's plenty of people who have done and overdone Ody that are more than willing to lend a hand to newer people to clear tiers. And MLs and Empy+3 and r0 Ody gear made segment farming a lot more accessible, too.

Such amazing content that you beat it once and then never do again because it triggers PTSD

I wouldn't call Ody challenging, I'd call it pure gambling. The fact of the matter is most of the actual wins in the atonement 3-4 fights feel comically easy when they happen, but it's just slamming your head against a wall of bad RNG until you get there. V25 Gaol fights are the epitome of better lucky than good.

Now that's not to say it's completely easy breezy but the level of execution and tight play that is required and available for this game isn't exactly 360noscopeheadshot. The game has severe delay and there's only so much you can realistically expect when trying to handle latency to servers based out of Japan from an international player base. Most of this game has always been about strategy, setup, and planning which is why so much of the gameplay is so easy to script. Beyond that, the FFXI player base has always and will always try to follow the path of least resistance and either ignore, bypass, or circumvent as many mechanics as possible. Which has continued to be true in both Odyssey and Sortie.

I agree with this to an extent, but it's an oversimplification imo. I thought the fights were very challenging, too the point that you needed to gear intelligently for several difference scenarios, have a solid strategy for dealing with the boss, adds, aura, and bad TP moves, and execute next to flawlessly to secure wins. You also needed the right people on the right jobs to make the strategy work. What made it frustrating was that you could do all of those things, but get unlucky and still lose. Or you could make one mistake and lose. Or several mistakes and get lucky and still pull off the win. Or any combination of those scenarios. It was both fun, challenging, exhausting, engaging, and also demoralizing all at the same time.

The benefit to doing the fights over again was you got better with execution andmuscle memory, so you started to anticipate the fight mechanics well before they showed up. I recall the group I was in did no less than maybe 40 Arebatis spanning over several days. It was miserable. I even recall one scenario where we took Arebati so low on KI1, that KI2 basically a guaranteed win, until I foolishly insisted that the Corsair did not need dirge but rather DPS song, and we ended up pulling hate under 10% and lost. Major miscalculations like that were the difference between winning and losing, and doing lots of fights you learned a lot. every few fights, despite being frustrated, the group slowly got more confident. Eventually we won, said we would never fight the bosses again, and then cleared it again within two fights a day later. We were all floored with how masterfully we executed the fights after we finally got that first win completed. All that knowledge and practice paid off. I think there was a really sense of satisfaction when you finally could pull off the intended strategy and then look back with the "it was all worth it" face afterwards. Personally, that's what made it the most fun. The "oh we almost had it" moments and the range of emotions struggling through the fights.

So I think the fights were heavily dependent on a lot of things, luck playing a small role in whether you win port lose, but personally, I thought those fights were very fun, albeit extremely frustrating at the time.

My bad, so people DO actually do V25...they just dont kill the NM and instead use an accepted exploit that involves doing a fraction of damage and timing out.

Did I get that right?

I didn't call the content amazing. I called the effect it had on the playerbase amazing.


But that's how FFXI has always been, if you stick to the strategy well enough the fights are smooth and uneventful - you say it yourself. It's when you go off script that the mayhem starts. They designed fights that if you try to just bulldoze, or if you're sloppy, or if you try to engage and afk with your bot spamming ws, are impossible. If you play well, coordinate with others (this part is important), position yourself properly, react accordingly, and pay attention, then the fight is doable and you "only" need to get good rolls on auras to win - and you only ever need the win once, unless you decide to help your friends, but I'm just starting to repeat what Thorny said here.

If you look at it from the point of view of more modern games, or even simply other types of games, it doesn't make sense. Within the constraints of FFXI, its game engine, and its network protocol, it works pretty well. It's not like Absolute Virtue that was absolutely impossible to proc if you were outside of Japan, either.

And, most importantly, at the cost of repeating myself, the main benefit has been the effect it has had on the playerbase. I unsubbed right before they put Gaol in the game and came back shortly before v25 was a thing, and the difference is ENORMOUS.


What this guy said, 100%.

I thought T1-3 V25 ody was fun, too bad it just had to finish with a dogshit v25 bumba that completely soured the experience, it really made me not wanting to go into odyssey ever again after beating it.

I do agree that after after a certain point, especially if you have cleared it before, and even more now with empy+3 power creep, you can negate a bad aura on some easy v25 T3 (like ngai) completely and get a reliable kills in 1-2 attempts regardless of aura just by sheer brute force.

To an extent. You have to reach a level of gearing/coordination/strategy/setup to even make it a "luck" situation- until you're capable and steady enough at those other things, many of those V25 T3/bumba fights will quite quickly *** your day up without luck^^

And I'm with many posters above- its a way for SE to see steady performance over and through the randomness of the luck factors, so that when all the dials line up, your group is stable and capable enough to take advantage of that moment.

Plus, I've never heard someone who lost 11 straight v25 Kalungas in a row to win their 12th complain about the 40k stored RP they have when they ding that next tier of augments.

You can't bypass the high skill requirement needed to beat v25 with luck alone. You need to both perform close to flawlessly AND roll good rng on the layers of *** that you can get hit with. They're not the kind of fights that you can bring your sleepwalking friends through just by having stars align, everyone has to perform their job next to perfectly.