Continued Prime Weapon NA Review

I'm pretty sure the token cap was never 100k. Wyrmseeker of Areuhat costs 150k tokens and always has.

First Wymseeker of Areuhat I got was in like 2010 and it cost 150k then, not sure where he got this random idea, but it's very innacurate.

6 months is the benchmark for 'dedicated players'. That means daily. If you don't want to run daily you don't have to. ~200 hours to completion. Plan accordingly.


Also, the 'dynamis was only twice a week' statement is nonsense. People making weapons back then were spending far more than an hour a week to make that happen and it still took more than one hand to tally the years to completion.

Absolutely.
Either that or buying gil, often both but that's beyond the point so let's get back to what I was saying.

Absolutely! More work than "just" twice a week.
But, once more, this is not 2005, it's 2023 ffs.

Its not the grind of time spent working that people are bitching about. Its the inability to use down-time from the content to speed up that grind the way that has been possible with all prior time-gated RMEA content.

Can only run OG Dynamis twice a week? No worries, you can farm gil like a psycho and then buy more currency beyond what is possible to just farm. One's progression is limited by some group aspects of the content (defeating the Fomor NMs originally was certainly at least party content), but mostly just by how much of their personal playtime one wanted to dedicate to a single purpose.

But this is SE artificially gating progression not through the content, but through the dead time we're not allowed to progress. Its the exact opposite of a grind, its a wait. And wait. And wait.

I don't want a return to the old grind here. It's just perspective for what an actual grind looks like. 200 runs is no unreasonable for a weapon that's possibly better than something that I slaved at for years.

There are a bunch of gacha phone games you can play. I hear those are industry standard.

A 20 year old MMO isn't in line with industry standards no matter how you look at it. I don't personally enjoy the way gaming has devolved over the last 5-10 years and XI is one of the few islands left from when gaming was good, imo.

They already told us to our faces that they were downsizing. They didn't do this for transparency because they are a good company, they did it because it was going to be so obvious that not doing it was going to get them negative backlash. Prime Weapons are in line with what is acceptable for a game that has told you that things are going to get real slow for a while.

Relics:
If you have 63 people helping you and you can get ~500 currency per run (IDK how much we used to earn back then, just comparing to modern 2 hour runs) then you can completed one in ~4 months. ONE of those 64 people completed ONE weapon in 4 months.

Mythics:
If you have a good Salvage group of 6~12 people, you can farm 100 alex/run every day, you could expect to finish a single mythic for one of those characters once a year, give or take. Salvage is a 1-2 hour event. Not including all the other ridiculous requirements like killing the beastmen kings, PW, ZNM, Odin, etc.

Empyreans:
You have to engage in alliance-level content (Abyssea NMs + Voidwatch) hundreds of times to get the drops off the NMs and 1500 HMP, which takes about ~2800 Aellos, plus 60 Rifts which is a comparable amount of Bismarck or whoever. To get a single weapon for a single member.

Aeonics:
Arguably the "easiest" in that you "only" have to farm 50k beads (~20 hours), get all the pop items for all the GF NMs, and kill them. With an extremely good alliance (time of release) maybe this would only take an alliance of people a few days.

I think the comments in here are a combination of rose-tinted glasses, people who expected their ultimate weapons in an unreasonable amount of time, people who are just salty because they don't like Sortie, and people who think the game should be getting easier/less grindy.

In the context of Ultimate weapons, Primes are the most lenient at time of release, by a mile. You can do 12 weapons/yr with just you and your 5 closest friends, spending 0 gil.

IMO the biggest issue with prime weapons are:
The stone requires are completely token at this point, you'll have 100 of them by the time you have the muffins
The currency for the prime is the same as the empy armor

These are valid points a million people have raised, they've been beaten to death. I don't think #1 is as big of a deal though, it's not a hindering factor it's just a silly decision that doesn't hurt anyone.

I don't think "It should be sellable/tradable" or "6 months too long!" or "If I want to solo it, it's going to take 10 years!" are very valid points. Try soloing any REMA to AG with a single character and not buying anything off the AH. It will take you longer than 150 hours (group rate for prime) by an unbelievable factor.

So it really just comes down to the fact that this is the first ultimate weapon you can't buy progress with (if you count mercing Aeonics) and frankly, I'm OK with that. At least if you have a prime weapon people know you actually worked for it and didn't just swipe your credit card or spend the billions you made crafting or mercing to pay other people to do the work for you.

Every single one of those events rewarded more than just the currency for their respective weapons, often having some of the best endgame items available. Comparing them apples to apples is disingenuous.

Sortie only offers empyrean armor (which you can't farm at the same time as a prime weapon, you do one or the other, otherwise it'd be comparable to something like Dynamis or Salvage), and JSE earrings. JSE earrings are between awful and really good, but getting a +2 earring, let alone one with high augment rolls, doesn't happen.

Let me trade one of my inevitable stacks of sapphires, eikondrite, etc for a random +2 earring or something

Love this framing, moving it from a question of how much freetime we are to allocate to this on a given day to how many of our remaining days in this mortal coil we are to give over to said allocation

But the game unquestionably became less grindy than it used to be, and there's a ton of difference, not just a small amount.

ML past 30 and Prime weapons* are maybe the only 2 exceptions I can think of in the content we received in the last 9 years.


*
Prime weapons won't necessarily be that huge of a grind. They probably will, but we need to see Stage4 and Stage5.
People are just projecting their (reasonable) expectations based on the Stage3 requirements, but that could be completely wrong, who knows?
And even if it turns out the first weapon will take a ton of time/effort, nothing denies the possibility that successive ones will progressively take less time/effort. Really, it's way too early for us to get the whole picture.


This is a pretty valid point honestly.
Pros and Cons of not having a sellable currency required to upgrade the weapon. I can't say which approach is the best, they're just... different.


I personally don't think it's that big of a deal, but I can't deny the fact I find it somewhat irking.

Yes, agreed. I corrected my typo. Gallimaufry was set to 100k initially to slow our growth. Nyzule aisle was raised from 100M to 1 billion last summer due to technical limitation.

Let's do the math. 22 jobs * 5 empyrean armor pieces * 80k (for +2 and +3) = 8.8 million gallimaufry. Meanwhile, they gave us a 100k starting limit. This was either to slow our growth or to buy them as much time as possible to develop the Prime Weapons and additional sections of Sortie (perhaps).

It objectively has been. See RoV KIs, assault adjustments and eventual once every 10min KI (used to be 3 a day).

The prime weapons are a regression in the grind department. Even Ergons don't require you spend 1 hour a day, despite the 6 month wait.

If 200+ hours for a Prime is fine because other Ultimate weapons used to take a long time, I'd like to suggest some additional changes that would truly make the experience more... authentic.

While in possession of any incomplete Prime weapon:

• Player movement speed is reduced by 25%

• Sortie costs 250k to enter

• Homepoint, Waypoint, and warp ring access is disabled

• RUN and GEO can't start at all until December(lol)

• You pick which currency you want from Sortie each day, and only that kind drops

/s, obviously.

It's not 2008 anymore. The game and the players have fundamentally changed with time, and things like 18-hr HNM fights or insanely long grinds aren't part of modern XI.

The cap was in place mostly to keep people from preloading galli for their weapons.

I think what you mean to say is the grind is too spread out for your tastes?

I challenge you to complete any REMA in less than 150 hours by farming all of the materials by yourself. Please tell me which one you finished and how long it took.

I think the only valid argument left for the old REMAs being easier than the primes are:
1) You can buy your way through the hard stuff
2) You can grind as hard as you want with no time gates

Which I find funny because #1 encourages RMT, separates the rich from the poor, and encourages people to complete an ultimate weapon by mercing, crafting, running ambu, and doing other grindy BS, and #2 means that you're grinding way more. So I guess people want to be able to buy their way past the grinds, or to be able to grind really hard, all at once, to finish their weapons? IDK I guess that's fine, if you don't mind people being finished with your content in a week.

Spread out is fine, it's the required 1hr long and daily runs that are the issue.

This has been said a lot already.

See Ergons for a better alternative.

My expectation is that they saw people were sitting on hundreds of thousands - 1m+ segments to the point they don't have to do segfarms anymore and took that as a lesson to cap Sortie at the start. They obviously wanted us to not get Primes too quick from the gate, but it also served to throttle Empyrean upgrades and force players into dragging content out regularly instead of stashing muffins and quitting the content.

I think they should've raised it to at least 300k with the +3 upgrade, but I don't necessarily fault them for this approach given how people tend to stash this stuff and quit doing the content. I'm actually surprised they raised it to the extent they did, rather than cap it closer to the upgrade cost of Prime weapons.

I'm not sure I see the point you're tryin to make here, Maletaru.
Is your number accurate? Much probably.
But the point is why?
I mean if you wanna go to those lenghts, then you might as well challenge players to do it while keeping their eyes closed all the time, or by playing with their feet instead of their hands, or any other not necessary requirement.
Sure if you accept any of these it would take you more, but the point is that you don't *have to*?

For Sortie you don't have a choice.
6 months of daily runs (supposing that will be the real amount, let me remind everyone that we still don't know the exact details of Stage4 and Stage5) is a very intense grind given the standards FFXI has been living with for the past 9 years.
Nine years, not nine months.
A sudden return to the past after nine years is... I mean, you can't expect the majority of people to be happy about it after such a long time.


Personally I'm still waiting to express my final judgement.
First I wanna see the Stage4/5 real requirements and see how much they differ from our expected ones.
Then I wanna see if this amount of grind will be the same for every weapon.
For instance if the more weapons you make the less grindy it gets... well, it could be a more than acceptable compromise to my eyes.


And I think this is exactly SE's point.
They have no resources to give new "stuff" to people. So they resorted to make the content more gated/grindier.
They did it with ML, they might have done it again with Prime Weapons.
I'm afraid such an approach for a game that is not free won't exactly prove to be beneficial for the game's health, I rather think it might accelerate the rate at which players stop playing.
I could be wrong of course.
I sorta hope I'm wrong actually.

My point is that the effort is still similar (or lower) for Prime than for REMA, but with REMA the effort is democratized by selling/buying mats. So while YOU may have only put in 30 hours to get an Empyrean weapon, you spent ~200m gil paying others to complete hundreds of hours of work for you. Ditto Relic and Mythic.

Which goes to my second point, the difference in Prime is that the effort is all yours and not distributed amongst the entire community, which is why it seems like a lot more.


I see your guys' point on this one, which is that Sortie is the only place to get muffins, but I don't think it's as straight-forward as that. You have lots of choice, you don't have to go for an hour a day every day for 6 months. You can go for 30 minutes a day every day for 12 months, or for an hour 5 days a week for 10 months, or whatever you feel like. Ultimately you can't grind out your muffins in abyssea, or throw cash at it, but you do have options about how (or if) you want to grind it.

You don't have a choice to skip Assaults or voidwalker NMs by buying items off the AH either. You can't (directly) buy Azdaja horns off someone's bazaar, or sell someone a Wyrmseeker. You have to do those events, but they don't see this scorn because of the second (valid) point: you can't grind it all at once.

I think the fact that you can't grind it all at once can be seen as a negative and I see your point on this one, but imagine if they removed the timer on Sortie. People would want to blow their brains out after doing 12 hours of Sortie straight, and see above point: people would be done with their Prime weapons in 2 weeks, which isn't exactly conducive to a strong server population 9 months or 2 years from now.

Except I don't think it works like that.
I seriously doubt there's a relevant number of people who, for the past 9 years, have been grinding the necessary steps completely alone, without buying a single penny, exclusively doing the content originally meant for that weapon.
Are there people like that? I'm sure there are.
Are they a relevant number? Pretty confident they're not.
What does it matter that there's people like that?
I get that you're trying to pass the idea it matters something, but it seems to me it's completely irrelevant?

You could grind a REMA weapon in a few days if you have the gil, or it could take you a pretty large amount of daily grind or, which is where like over 90% of players fall, it's gonna be somewhere in between.
Where you grind some content, you buy something else, you trade with friends, you get stuff from Ambuscade, you take advantage of the campaign and so on.

Is there any sort of option or variation for Prime Weapons? (as far as we know, of course). No. Just an endless grind which strips you the possibility to upgrade empyrean armor and grants you nothing else in return but only a plethora of stuff that at the moment have no use at all. (Sapphires, Starstones, -drites, etc)


You're kinda hyper-stretching the concept of "having an option" here.
Sure, you could also ignore Prime Weapons (which I'm afraid, alas, a lot of people are gonna do) or you could go to Japan and point a gun to Fujito until it gives you a free Prime Weapon, or many other things. See? Lotsa options!

But seriously now, let's suppose it really is about ~6 mils Gally.
With a current average of 10k for someone who's completely solo (no mules etc), do you really expect a wide amount of players to spend 2 years of almost daily 1hr event, the very same event?
And I bet you expect them to be happy about it lol?

It's all about having a drive, a motivation, feeling you're making a noticeable progress, that something is changing, that you're getting something out of it.
Let's call it a carrot on a stick.
We all have different subjective values for these, but I'm pretty confident we can agree that >2 years for this is way too long to reasonably keep motivation.

I'm talking in general of course, this doesn't concern me directly, I have a static and I don't solo.

People really undervalue the personal loot aspect of this event. We could have had single items dropping to the pool and people forced to lot against their peers for upgrades.


Instead of 50 threads for weapon speculation we could have 50 threads about someone ninja lotted the +1 case. How glorious would that be?

Look I don't think anyone is insane enough to solo a Prime. Despite what it may look like, I'm not the SE PR team and I would never claim that a Prime is soloable, despite the fact that, as it seems right now, it is TECHNICALLY soloable. At 10k/run, with current estimate of 6m/prime, it would take 2 years for a single weapon, which is insane and asinine.

My point RE: the gil thing is that you are investing your time making gil to trade for someone else's time in farming the item. Gil = time = gil. Therefore you can't just handwave away 150-200m gil, as that took you some amount of effort to get. Sure, it's nice that instead of spending 200 hours you can spend 30 hours + 170m, which might've taken you 100 hours to farm. And you can farm that gil however you want, even by selling beehive chips or whatever stupid idea you have.

Thing is though, someone is still putting in stupid amounts of effort to get you that Masamune, it's still a ridiculous grind and the only difference, in my view, is that you can pay 100 other people for the pleasure of borrowing their effort to finish your weapon.

They could've done that for Primes, made HP-Muffins which are tradable and exchangeable for muffins and then someone could finish a prime on day 2 by trading his 8b gil on Asura for all the HP-muffins to complete it. There could be a market where new players do Sortie and sell their HP-M for the gil they need to buy a Rostam instead, or whatever. Maybe it would've worked out fine and people could do 1 run of Sortie to get their -edrites and then just buy the rest of it. I just want to emphasize that the guy who bought 6m muffins from other players didn't complete his prime weapon in a day, 300 players finished it for him, and the difference is that instead of 150 hours of his time, it cost 150 hours of other people's time and he paid to bypass having to play the game.

10k is top end for a true soloer. Only a few decked out jobs can manage that completely solo.

It doesn't have to. BRD and PLD already have other primes to grind on, just make the the shield\horn stupid easy.

Hmm. Idk if there is much more to expect in ffxi... content wise. Also idk what people expect of Prime weapons... I might have missed it, havent been playing alot... but will those weapons even be an upgrade at this point if their weaponskills dont do 99999dmg every single time? and if they do, whats the point of playing this game anymore?
maybe its a "the route is the goal" type of thing, same as ML (for most jobs). also I enjoyed ffxi for the most part since 2004, it was never too easy or too hard. games got rules. Nobody gonna change chess because you allways lose and I'd be pissed if se would suddenly do that because some kids cant wait for their new toys :)

I get you're making a comparison in the REMAP grinding process, but I still think it's a dumb argument. Try getting a SU5 weapon without buying one, or the mats to build one, off the AH. I just increased the time to get your Rostam by well over 150 hours too.


Is a bought Rostam worth less in your eyes than one that was purely farmed and crafted without an AH interaction too? Is everyone just supposed to ignore that the AH exists so they can brag about how they took 10x longer to accomplish something because they can only get so many resources per month from ambu or dyna or w/e?

And what makes you think people can't just pay for pilots for sortie, like they do in XIV Ultimate clears? Chances are they won't, but you don't know that, so we've still got to be suspicious of every Prime we see unless there's uploaded video receipts documenting the entire Prime building process, no exceptions. (/s)

It's fine if you like/prefer that the Primes don't engage with the game's economy, but the idea that if you don't personally grind every stage of a REMA or SU5 or +1 AH piece, it's somehow worth less, is a really dumb take. I'd rather pay 5mil (or cheaper during NNI campaign) for a Tinnin pop than ever *** with the ZNM climb ever again.

Still don't think people care that much about the time investment nearly as much as they care about the time investment in content that's already stale. (Shitty RNG earring system aside.)

I mean, we're talking about r/e items that are achieved by completing in-game quests, not crafted items. I wasn't trying to argue that a gold ingot you farmed yourself is somehow more valuable than one you bought off the AH. My point was that the grind involved in REMA is the same or more than Prime grind. But to your actual question no, getting a Rostam (assuming you're not including making a smythe's escutcheon in this) is about: 4 dynamis runs (8 hours), ~3 vagary runs (3 hours), and ~5m in Ruthenium ore? So if you count a million gil as an hour's worth of effort, it might cost you conservatively 20 hours to farm. Maybe your group isn't very efficient at farming dynamis, you can double that if you'd like, maybe it's 30 hours.

Sure, maybe people are paying for groups just like they are for Aeonics, but even if you're paying the cool kids to carry you, the player still had to go to 150 Sortie runs with their own character and walk to all the bosses because muffin rewards don't transfer, so you can't just AFK for the entire thing and drop the cash in the merc's mailbox, so dude still had to spend 150 hours wandering around Sortie to get his Prime weapon.


It's a good thing I didn't make this point at all. My point wasn't that you have to grind it yourself, or that it makes it any more valuable if you grind (REMA) yourself. My point was that these require similar (more) grind than Primes, the only differences I see are that you can do the grind all at once (assaults, nyzul, salvage, dynamis, voidwatch, etc) and that you can pay for it.

So my original point still remains: people are upset either that you can't pay other people to complete your item for you, or that you can't grind it all out in a week or two bender. I also stand by my previous statements as well: it is good for the game that we have something which isn't bought, and it's good that no matter how much you no-life it, you can't complete the new content in a week or a month.

I also agree with people who wish there was more content to go along with Sortie to mix it up/make it more interesting. I wish they had 5+ different events like Mythic weapons do, to keep it interesting, but unfortunately the game has nowhere near the budget, developer resources, or player base as it did back then. Sorry, they don't have an army of employees and they aren't charging $60 for an expansion to millions of players. This is a free content update they gave us, the tiny amount of people who still play this, for our subscription cost.

Can Rostam be made without a shield? If not, then yes, you have to include the hours. Why? Because, how did you put it,


and


I don't see how this isn't the same thing. You're paying for someone's time to farm you aby items, or you're paying for someone's time spent crafting a shield and making a rostam, it's still gil = time, does the what-for really matter? Does it matter if one's rare/ex and one isn't? If so, why?


Good for whom? Certainly not the players that are already complaining about the content being tiresome. The only winner I see here is SE, but if you can describe a positive benefit for the players by dragging this out, I'm here for it.

I don't really wanna go ***-for-tat with you, but your posts above really led me to believe you have a problem with utilization of the economy vs only rare/ex items + time investment content for REMAPs.