Dev Tracker - Discussion

I like when they had the surprisingly long lasting glitch of WSD applying to all hits of every WS. They should bring that ***back.

It was really fun to see people scrambling to rethink things with such a significant mechanics change, actually felt fresh and exciting for that several month period.

My man, you are way off on this particular point. I've done easily 250+ VD Odins, all with at least TH4 (and a not insignificant number with TH9+), and I have *never* seen Zantetsuken drop. Not once. Zantetsuken X I think I've seen maybe twice.

I know I might be unlucky on particular drops and you might have been luckier, but I've spammed VD fairly recently for friends probably 35-40 times and not seen any bodies, swords, great swords in that time. I've also definitely gone with people needing bodies and not seen any in 10+ runs.

I actually agree with you that Odin is not that bad of a model for drops, and I kinda find the fight fun too (we usually do it PUP RDM SMN SMN COR ???). But telling people that in 5-10 VD wins you'll almost certainly get 1 of every drop is just wrong and sets up false expectations.

Im nowhere near 200 Odins and I have 3 zantetzukens. I know I maxed head/body before I seen some other firsts. Youve got a string of bad luck, but one groups testimonial about Odin doesnt compare to the testimonials of many groups across all servers regarding Wyrm God ***drop rates.

I've botted enough VD Odin to get both rings and armor pieces on 12 characters + some other runs for friends. It seems that I have only 1 Zantetsuken, 2 Geirrothr, and 4 'Zantetsuken X'. I don't care to comb through logs(multiple chars, filtering double records of same instance, etc), so it's possible that I did toss some of the weapons or give them to others since they are kind of trash.

But, if I hadn't actually looked, I would've had no doubts about MT's assertion that the drops are all pretty common there. It does seem likely that the weapons are substantially reduced.

I've got dozens of rings and armors and have only seen the spear and gs once each, never a sword.

No different than any other htmb. Different rates for different pieces.

You'll get a thousand h2h before you get the ear from A&O. You'll get a thousand backs before you get a shield in Alex. You'll get a thousand stones before you get a hammer from cait.

Oh, I'm not saying Odin is in any way comparable to Shinryu. That's obvious. I think the Odin/Cait/Alex/Lilith fights are pretty fair from a drop rate perspective. And I'm well aware that I am less lucky than the average for that particular drop.

I just took issue with Maletaru saying "If you spam VD like 5~10 times, you'll almost certainly get 1 of every drop". Get outta here with that, there's no way in hell every item in that pool has a 10-20% drop rate. That's such a wild exaggeration.

I don't even have a huge issue with having an especially exclusive rare drop. Like Gyve Doublet from Dawn as an example. If they wanna make one super shiny rare drop, that's not crazy to me. What IS crazy to me is the Shinryu approach with way too many items in the pool fighting for that one super rare slot, and at 30 merits no less. But that's obviously not a very hot take, feels like everyone but Fujito is in agreement on that point.


Yeah, that matches up with what I've seen over a lot of Odins for many people. Even just eyeballing it, I've seen way fewer weapons than rings/helm/body (with body feeling the lowest of those). Which is fine, and not really unexpected - and FAR more reasonable than the Shinryu approach, no argument there at all. But thinking you'll get full drops in 5-10 Odin fights is a massive exaggeration and would require being extremely lucky. That's all I'm trying to say.

Only did enough VD Odin to get four rings and saw two swords and one GS in that time. One body.

It does vary a lot.

Iv done exactly 264 ODIN D this year and have seen 2polearm, 1 GA, 0 sword, 1freke after 5 runs, 2nd after 259 more runs. the rest of the drops I got years ago so cant compare on that. all runs had th9+. Its no shinryu but still bad drop rate on weapons and accessories.

Certainly possible I've been lucky, I've not done hundreds of fights, maybe 50-100 total. I also definitely overstated the weapon drops because honestly they all suck so I sorta forgot they exist. The sword is ok I guess but not really a must have and only (debatably) useful for one off-meta job+situation. The others are basically totally useless for endgame.

Their drop rate is definitely much worse than the accessories and armor and they will take a while to drop. If you want the actually useful pieces, the armor and accessories, you'll get them in a night of attempts. At least a few in the first 7 runs, and on average I'd say you'll have 1 of every non-weapon drop by your second merit refill.

Was off base with the weapons though, my bad, overlooked that trash

I was after Freke ring for a long time and it refused to drop for me, despite soloing N/D on and off for months. Didn't see a body in that time, but saw everything else several times. Random is random.

As for Shinryu, the drop rate on the rarer stuff only torments players. SE won't do anything about that, so I choose not to do it and hope I get what I need from AMAN Trove. I have found a few things, and I know someone who got the cloak as well. It is such bad game design that many players choose to stay away from Shinryu. I told SE this would keep happening on the official forum, and while many agreed with me, they predictably did nothing.

Thats fair
I think one round (round = burn thru all merits) will usually net you one or two drops.

That's pretty apparently not true though, some drops have a lower chance than others. Gyve Doublet is a very obvious example, there is a lot of support in this very thread that Odin weapons don't drop at the same rate as the accessories/armor, Eiryl called out several more good examples (Alex shield, etc.) And of course, we all know Shinryu.


Whether or not they suck is not the point though. Relevance here is regarding approach to other new HTBF drop rates like Cloud of Darkness.

I don't think it's reasonable (or realistic) to expect that you'll be able to get full drops by one evening's 5-10 wins. And something like the Dawn model with one highly rare drop, or an Odin model with a handful of drops with significantly lower rate (but not Shinryu tier bad), doesn't strike me as especially unreasonable.

But I guess it's all just a matter of waiting for the update to see how painful it is. Since this is 2025 FFXI, I'm setting my expectations at "very painful" and anything reasonable will feel like a big win.

Expect to be as painful as possible.

Expect to do it anyway.

Expect to be reminded it's your own god damn fault it's miserable.

And if you luck out, it won't be.

I'm not going to even put in the words. You know what it is.

http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/guide/development/census/2024/

So they did read comments for all the skeptics.

They presented data that may or may not be dishonest or whole, isn't reading what people said.

Just to be clear.

5% of the foreigners who responded claim they started playing before foreign launch.

57% of the foreign response to what would make you come back is lower the price. That's kinda funny. "I'm willing to pay for the abuse, but how about a discount." So officially you know that more than half of all private server players do infact primarily (only) play because it's free. If you were uncertain.

For a survey done across two languages / cultures and apparently also age demographics, the responses of the JP and non-JP players were shockingly similar. Their analysis indicates they don't seem to interpret it that way, but I would probably do a little more analysis (control for age) and then combine these results if it looked good.

Anyway, I basically agree with their conclusions about points of community consensus.

The only survey that matters is the active players online in the winter everytime I do a /sea all and then I consider how many are multi-box and bots and it's f**king grim, boys.

Lol so literally anything except Master Trials. Big party, small party, hard content, anything new. Just more.

Also notice how low the %s are for the response "I don't think I'll return to the game". Makes sense that anyone willing to fill out a survey wants back in. But also the 2nd lowest category is collab with other titles because no one wants the obvious FFXIV crossover. The audience for this game is ancient. We don't like the new ways of doing things. Classic.

It seems like we're getting more stories and quests unless the dev team absolutely doesn't want to. They thought they could deter us with TVR, but instead it just made us ask for a good expansion instead.

100% of players overseas play XIV and came back to skew the survey, instead of taking a shower.

Questionnaires like this are obviously carried out to show to the higher ups, in order to prove further investment will lead to greater revenue from returning players.

Brother, tVR started almost half a decade ago. Even someone who loved tVR would probably like to see some new story by now.

Your right about the collabs though. I don't know anyone who would get excited to see a new Shantotto character model in a mobile game, so I'm confused as to why they bother with those sorts of things.

Yeah so imagine the people who wanted a valhalla zone and got a really mediocre anime story line instead with an underwhelming gold bahamut fight at the end.

They can still salvage TVR by having the damage to the underworld spill out in some unexpected place like shadow reign or promyvions and not have to create new zones for their next story line. I'd love to believe we'll ever get new maps and zones, but since we really aren't, we need to use what we have and isn't in use.

I see Rhapsodies as a hard reset to the stability of our previous storylines because it made it's way to Atomos and defined conflict as a way to ward against the stagnation of the Cloud of Darkness (or the end of game service, whichever you want). Since I'm tracking down 15 undead mobs per month to get psyche, that means Odin and the demons are doing a ***job at containing their mess. Anyone can come back with knowledge from the grave and that can change the motivations of past villians we've fought against and form coalitions that wouldn't have been possible during their natural life.

^ This.

Its a good sign IMO. The executives don't care about the individuals but they do care about statistics. The response rate alone could get some money to the FFXI team. This game is a cash cow they would be dumb not to throw some carrots at it.

"Overseas, the second most popular reply was "Other." As we looked into the reasons behind this answer, we discovered that many of them wanted the game to create an “FFXI Classic” server that would recreate the game as it was during its Level 75 era. This response echoes that of many similar requests that have come from North American players for quite some time now."

This, absolute this. A Classic server era Aht Urgan era or WOTG era is the best.

This was my favorite



Toss pup and smn in there, too.

Agree, it was surprising to see they didn't include SMN in that. But I suppose it was the jobs that person plays.

I don't know why they would tease a zone just to not have it in the game. Valhala was a bummer. I felt the same way after finishing SoA without getting to Tartarus. If they make new zones, I feel like these two locations should be at the top of the list of places to explore.

Your idea of the RoV reset is interesting. To add to that, RoV introduces the concept of proximal evil vs. primordial into FFXI's lore through the contrast between Promathia and CoD. This concept is ubiquitous in mythology. But without getting into the weeds, proximal evil can still be portrayed as evil. Many of the previous storylines portrayed glimpses of moral ambiguity, but RoV is the first time that moral ambiguity was put (more or less) front and center.

"How satisfied are you with the login campaign rewards?"

No one should be, it hasn't been updated in years. Always the same dumb stuff or stupid lockstyle.

You misspelled worst.

I truly hope they ignore the "classic" rose tinted goggles huff and puff.

Think they've said in the past that making a classic server is super complicated given how much the game has changed since.

I also doubt it would truly feel so classic even if it is done.

Would be like granpa putting on a santa hat and pretending to be Santa rather than granpa in a santa hat.