Dev Tracker - Discussion

Coo, 12 people did the master trial, it's officially over now.

6 month tease/build up? Lasted a week. Before primes could even be completed. GG

Just because some very skilled players managed to beat the trial doesn't mean the content no longer exists for everyone else...

I think enraged Aminon took longer to be beaten (and still, i only heard one group achieving it).

When a supposed farmable content is more difficult than other that is characterized with the only purpose of being difficult, then i see a point, that devs were kinda soft on it.

Well, i suppose thats what they got by revamping guys that already lost twice in lore

"Skilled" "Content" "everyone else"

Some heavy lifting with those words creatively lol

Odyssey v25 came out December 12 2023, at a time where many people were capped out on their relevant jobs. It wasn't beaten fully until late February. Over 2 months.

This didn't have to be balanced for winnability in the same way, since it has only a very tangental item, and the idea of master trial is to create something that exists only to challenge the most extreme players. With finished prime weapons incoming over the next few months, it could have been technically unkillable right now and that still would've likely been ok.

For it to be beaten in a week is absolutely a failure on SE's part. Throw in that it was beaten without even employing any form of unique strategy.. it's disappointing.

The manpower used to make that content

The decision to make it purely cosmetic

Mentioning it needed prime weapons to beat

Telling us this is the only type of content we should be expecting going forward

- Failure? Lol no. Big waste of time? Yes.

Bit of a wet towel for last content addition to the game. Doesn't actually require primes, was beaten quickly without them. Meh.

It wouldn't have made any logical/lore sense to require primes to participate in that MT, I really just felt it was a quirky translation and not being mentioned as an entry condition. Then again, they've unreasonably linked some ridiculous requirements to other things that had nothing to do with the other (Mog Gardens + Unlocking Ygnas makes no sense), so I can see why people might take what they said literally.

Seeing as how it was beaten so quickly that there wasn't even a "strategy/discussion" thread talking through the failure/attempts of the fight mechanics among the players, this seems pretty underwhelming of content to me. As mentioned by Thorny, by comparison, clearing Bumba25 was pretty outrageous for a while in terms of difficulty and there was a bunch of discussion surrounding v25 t3. The thread is dozens of pages long. There was literally none of that with this MT. Could be that it was the lack of a tangible reward that didn't facilitate such a discussion, but the build up and release was really underwhelming imo

And I don't even think they took any large amount of time on this fight. Like all they did was throw in 3 different sets of HTBF bosses into one and just bumped up the level? Not really a large time investment, all of the assets were already created and just repurposed.

This is by all measures an absolute failure. You can't possibly think they are putting any amount of time into these things anymore. Nor are they testing anything. It's really a shame

Not my intention to play devil's advocate here and defend SE, because I 100% share the opinion voiced by many in this thread.

Despite that disappointment, you can't really make a 1:1 comparison with T3 and T4 V25.
There you have a PLETHORA of limitations.
No same job, no sub job, 15 mins timer, last but not least limited number of attempts.

With such a controlled environment, of course it becomes harder to get through those hurdles.
It's precisely the exact reason why they put such limitations in the first place after all.



With that being said, please let me once more share my disappointment, along the lines of what has been said so far.

There should be a checklist of requisites for hard content:

Mandatory:
1. Mob lv +20 over the max cap of players. Supposing players can reach lv149, then foe must have lv170 at least.

2. Mob defense must have high defense enough that you never gonna cap pdif

3. Mob mdb must have 300+ and INT500+.

4. Mob must be immune to any debuff that can halt it (sleep, petrify, stun, bind, extreme gravity).

Choose 4 out 5:

1. Can have a gimmick related to dmg taken (you cant deal reasonable dmg unless exploiting gimmixk).

2. Can have a gimmick related to dmg dealt (if you trigger gimmick, entire party must wipe out)

3. Can have raged stance, limiting the time to win

4. Can have adds

5. Can have any of the above triggered by entirely random chance, instead of allowing some degree of control for players

If the playerbase didnt spend 18 hours straight fighting it just to get physically ill and still fail to kill it, is it even worth adding to the game?

People are pretty quick with the finance argument even when discussing mainstream content.

I mean sure, be

but I'd rather see them save resources on content that only a handfull of people are going
to enjoy than for content that's ment for everybody.


And befor someone strolls around the corner with "there is no new content they could put those saved resources to work on"...
the game isn't dead, right?

FFXI players: Bumba V25 is so ridiculous, it's impossible, it's immune to every kind of damage and *** you over 10 ways from Sunday, why did they think it was a good idea to release this, it's way too hard? Do they even do playtesting? I can't believe it took months of testing and experimentation to get our first kill in.

Also FFXI players: God damn, this master trial is so easy, we beat it in less than a day. Did they even try to make this content challenging? They're not even immune to sleep, silence, and bind! These guys need to make things more challenging!

Reading these threads has a serious risk of getting whiplash. People get upset that Savage Blade spam is nerfed in one thread, then get upset that another fight boils down to nothing but Savage Blade spam in the next thread. "OMG these mechanics are oppressively difficult, they're nerfing all the strats we come up with into the ground!" Immediately followed by "why didn't they think to make this more difficult by nerfing our strategies into the ground?!"

Oh yeah I forgot "I can't believe they're making Prime weapons a requirement for this trial" followed by "The fight doesn't even require prime weapons like they said it would!"

And most of this is being thrown around by heaps of players who have never completed any of the content in question, because it's too hard for them...

"Actual content" shouldn't be regoddamndiculous.

Trash like master trials can be literally impossible. Absolutely no one cares.

Not that hard to figure out.

SE hasn't made any assurances that they're working on any content that is "meant for everbody." Why would you wholeheartedly accept SE's position when you continue to pay for it?

OK, I see your point. BUT why does Bumba v25 have 2 or 3 Auras that are auto-fail 1/4 times, but the Master Trial has no Auras at all? Their is clear intention behind certain forms of difficulty, and then there's SE's half-assery.

It's like SE designs content to make us argue amongst each other and distract us from their lack of a real road map.

The fact of the matter is that there's a variety of different content in FFXI and they all have different mechanics/feels to them.

All Odyssey bosses feel more-or-less the same, some more difficult than others, but very similar ideas.

All Omen bosses feel more-or-less the same

All Vagary bosses are very similar

All Dynamis-D bosses are very similar

All HTBF are very similar to each other. Some "generations" are different from others, but there's a lot of parity here.

All Unity NM battles are similar

All Master Trials feel very similar

You can't compare the content though. Nyzul Isle is nothing like Einherjar, which is nothing like Dynamis (original), which was nothing like Limbus. It's the way the game has been designed since day 1. Salvage is significantly different from Sea.

Where shall we hang the "He will not divide us" flag?

Don't forget the start of v25 was a bit of a cluster, they released it with the OG WS wall and nerfedfixed it after a week or two. Most groups I know of were stuck on Gigelorum until that was changed, AFAIK no one made much progress getting through T3s until it was changed either.

After that was lifted, most strats for the T3s were starting to get ironed out within a week of each other with people beating Xev, Kalunga, and Ngai the first 2-3 weeks, then the others after. It seemed like people were largely following the same selection sequence (Xev > Kalunga > Ngai > etc), which is why it may seem like it took longer. I think if you cut up the v25 T3s, you'd find they individually took the same or less amount of time for the groups beating this MT right now. Bumba is a different story, there was a longer delay there IIRC, but I think that's because of the mechanics involved and the silly/absurd strategy we ended up with that wasn't really obvious to most. If these were entirely new mobs with entirely new mechanics, I think you'd have seen a longer period between bosses being beaten, though.

I don't think it's that unbalanced if the best players in the game are beating content within 2 weeks of release. That's not gonna apply to the majority of players or groups, especially if they are taking 45min+ to win, most groups will time out.

You can still draw comparisons to other 'difficult' endgame throughout the lv99 era. Hall of mul, delve1, original master trials, reisen t4 were all in the 1-2 month range. However you feel about the 1 week number(it was not 2 weeks, it was 1), it's much less time than other difficult content has taken. For something intended to be a final challenge of sorts that doesn't have a clear place in the gear progression, the difficulty bar should be set higher.

Maybe some slack can be granted because lack of other activities allows the more serious players to focus on it more, but you can't read that strategy and tell me it's a particularly difficult fight that was only cleared due to the exceptional ability(which is there, don't get me wrong) of the players who did it.

You can ramp up the difficulty pretty easily if you're looking for a challange, just restrict yourself to certain spells, abilities, jobs and gear.
You can even make it a competition if you agree on the same restrictions with others seeking a challange, kind of like speed running.

This hits the nail in the head. I know me and Bigtymer spent hours per day testing and reviewing footage of what went wrong in this new MT to fix and test everything (idk about other guys). And this fight was still somewhat challenging, despite how easy it seems. Was it the hardest fight ever? Definitely not I was expecting it to be slightly harder, I thought Iroha master trial (before we knew to skip adds) or Sealed Fate were harder on release, but still doesn't make it less hard. This fight that we got seemed balanced. It's fair in the difficulty, just like the other MTs (if you wipe it's down to player error not RNG ***).

People are comparing Odyssey V25s or Aminon completion time is dumb. V25s often require the stars to align with Auras and adds that spawn as a win condition, that's not hard that's luck, relying on luck to win a fight is not a sign of difficulty, that's *** poor game design.
Bumba is still bugged with Denounce that got confirmed to be a bug, so you add so many RNG elements to Bumba + a bugged move and that counts as difficulty, that's dumb. It's just a *** fight no one likes.

Aminon took a bit longer cos only 1 group had access to enraged mode and the attempts are on 1 day lockouts, this new MT you can attempt 50 times per day if you wanted, can't really compare them.

I think if you're in the camp of people who have completed all the content in the current game up to Prime weapons & this Master Trial, then yeah this is disappointing because there's not much to sink your teeth into.

Seems like every time SE released a new piece of content there was whinging about how this battle wasn't enough to keep veteran players busy. IMO they've realized they don't have the funds (or desire?) to keep hardcore, veteran players occupied with a constant stream of new content with the player/subscription base they have. It's unfortunate, but it's the truth, and one we have to live with.

Consider, however, if you're not a veteran endgame player with a few billion gil, every REMA in the game, all jobs ML40+, every valuable piece of JSE upgraded to +3, full Odyssey clears, every Master Trial weapon, etc. there is still plenty to do. For a lot of people, myself included, this game still has objectives to complete. The amount of people who are truly "done" with the game are such a miniscule percentage of the overall player base.

If you're one of those people and you don't feel the motivation to complete any prime weapons, just move on and let the game be enjoyed by the new players coming in who have a checklist longer than their arm of stuff they want to work on. Maybe give them a leg up on the way out.

Damn,

I just want the developer of the game to actually put effort into the content they hyped up, not be told I need to set the bar really really low because I'm so damn strong in a game I need to pay monthly to play...

They should've made everything Bumba 25 difficulty, but when you beat it, confetti shoots on the screen and says "Happy 20rd!" with a cake. Then it's new content and 20th anniversary material all in one.

Uhm... have we ever seen those Ambuscades they mentioned for the october patch?

I see a Dvergr and a Troll megaboss, I don't recall those ever being part of any ambuscade but I'm probably wrong, eh.


October should be the month where Mischief's group completes their Prime, right?
After you complete your first prime, the gallimaufry cost of the following ones will be cut in half!
(yeah, right...)

Uuuh, I like this idea!

It was a silly joke Masaru, it's not real alas

halve the galli, double the random *** rocks and psyche.