Dev Tracker - Discussion

Debatable, but if you make a master trials "exclusive skin" into an item you can get elsewhere, you've essentially deleted the content. Theres no way they'd do that. Imagine they added the lightsabers as iLvl weapons to a new HTMB? It'd never happen

I had the +1 version but I felt it was lacking. Last Stand wasn't doing much and Donar Gun didn't help. Now I just Ullr and Empyreal Arror for ranged stuff but THFs need to use crossbows imo. Bows seem weird.

I'm gonna assume most are using xbow on THF like I do, and almost exclusively when solo. Even for Corsairs and Rangers, Last Stand is super dependent on buffs to really shine; THF's lack of quality equipment and ammo only magnifies that gap.

I'm with y'all that Bow on THF just looks and feels weird, and I do still stick with xbow just bc of how I use it (not as a primary DPS option, but mostly for the enfeebling bolts and a pulling tool), but Jedi is right that if your desire is just dps, Ullr with Chapuli Arrows will serve you much better.

I opt for the Tsoabichi Crossbow on THF just for the Recycle+15.

All I'm reading is that you got something against my man Robin Hood.

We Rangers Claim Robin Hood, don't let them Thieves claim him! I mean, we got Bounty Shot after all!! :D

I guess for it to have been relevant to me I would've had to have known of its existence. Which I did not.

Since tVR has upped the ante on mission battlefields, how difficult can we expect the VD version of this fight to be?

Count on it being super annoying.

You'll have to feed it tp with shitty nukes or get pain synced for a million damage.

Can't help but feel like people are setting themselves up for disappointment, given how well Shinryu went over. My first thought was "Cool, now they have more items to add to AMAN Trove so maybe we'll see some +2 cases afterall..."

Never gonna hold my breath for these guys but id like to hope they took some feedback from shinryu, liliths atleast somewhat reasonable if you put a group together and grind D/VD while shinryu os just crap regardless of difficulty

Almost all of the HTBFs they've released since the Selbina battles have been straight up annoying, and the drop rate made it worse. I anticipate Cloud of Darkness having shinryu-level drop rates with even worse mechanics.

Lilith - most ignore the mechanic and Zerg her (I kind of liked this fight personally because it did give you a way to enhance drops), but knockback, gyves, border, spitewardens. Ultra annoying fight

Cait Sith -not bad, can get one shot for no reason other than luck, but not a hard fight

Alexander - can't fight with buffs, constant invincible but easy (long) fight

Odin - super annoying; dread spikes, instant kill moves. Can be done with mew or low TP feed, or Zerg. But very annoying

Shinryu - the worst drop rates in HTBFs game at large ever seen before. Drops are so good they had to make them not drop. Shinryu is so weak, but merits are 30 so you get two chances to be disappointed before refilling merits and bring disappointed again. Terrible fight


Hope I'm wrong but doesn't matter either way, something to spend merits on again (not doing shinryu without Cornelia)

Both Alex and Odin are zerg-able with right buffs and/or 1hrs. Still annoying and drops still suck. Same goes for Lilith.

Shinryu drop rate is either bot it or hope for trove drops.

You can always do the entirely reasonable thing and just make sure your HP is not divisible by 2-6 in any of your swaps that might get caught during ? holy.

Odins also not super terrible if you work around his instant kill via def buffs/atk downs, and his hp based atk can be eaten by most scherzo like effects iirc

Alex is as you said easy just takes awhile dont sc/debuff him and hes mostly harmless aside from the full dispel/mp wipe move.

Lilith/shin stand out as the most obnoxious ones but atleast lilith had a more dificult but also more rewarding path, or you could just beat your head against VE/E like im sure many(including myself)did

I had zero problem with dealing with any of those fights. Annoying as they may have been, I didn't mind them because stuff was dropping. And some were kind of fun imo. But once they released shinryu, it became clear they wanted players to suffer through an unreasonable grind. That's the only part of this new htbf that worries me is that the drop rate might actually be just as bad with even worse crap to deal with. Don't really care how bad the fight is.

Yeah IDK, I agree with later Buukki here. I have zero problem dealing with any of these fights. Frankly, I really enjoy when SE introduces new or challenging mechanics. It forces you to use non-meta buffs, jobs, and strategies that makes it so you're not using the exact same 6 jobs, same buffs, and same debuffs on everything. It's really pleasant to have some variety in the content. All of these HTBF have several viable strategies that, with proper execution, make the fights pretty easy and not at all reliant on RNG (other than the drops).

I agree with everyone else on the planet that the Shinryu drop rates are ***, and adding those items to AMAN trove made it pretty much totally pointless to actually do the HTBF. Two pretty ***design decisions, TBH. The fight is fine though, quite engaging and interesting, just like the original one was.

I hope the cloud of darkness fight is really challenging, has some twists, difficult mechanics to overcome, requires niche jobs, buffs/debuffs, weird strategies, throw in some adds, auras, fetters, everything and the kitchen sink.

...and make the drop rates decent if you face VD. I think Odin is a really good sweet spot of reasonable drops. If you spam VD like 5~10 times, you'll almost certainly get 1 of every drop. Can get anything you want off him in a single evening.

edit: actually, re-reading this I think Odin's drop rate might be too high...at least for a "solved" fight. Might be more appropriate once the content is older, but for new content if you have the (an) answer for how to beat it regularly and can be "done" with the fight in a day or a weekend, that's maybe not the best drop rate...

Or they just do it and it does. Maybe put them in the trove while they're at it.

You can still subject yourself to the FFXI equivalent of a japanese punishment game show if that's your kink. They aren't going anywhere. Just like most people aren't wasting there time on them.

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Nothing wrong with Shinryu's drop rate for 3 of the items! I'm not sure if I expect them to put out a couple similar items in the kiddy pool and then keep the cocaine at less than 1% drop rate again.

I'm mostly salty with Shinryu that there ia no blue proc for better loot procs on VD. No readings, can be any WS. Pray for good luck.

I have to be honest, I'm not too worried about what the Cloud of Darkness refight drops; if it's like 10 merit points and only drops rem's tales and plutons/boulders/beitetsu, I can live with that. It's a fight I keep saying I wish I could go back and do again (without having to run a character through all of Rhapsodies again for it.)

However, if they for whatever reason decide not to reuse the arena and music from the original fight, I will be back here to start a prison riot over it.

They exist as a challenge, the reward is a unique lockstyle. I disagree on principle that they can release anything with that same skin... it defeats the purpose of the content wholesale. If you're unwilling to take on the challenge then the 'trophy' isnt for you.

If you want to argue that iroha's items specifically shouldn't be tied to MT's and that her MT in particular should reward a different skin, then I think everyone would be more receptive to that argument.

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I'm guessing your either being sarcastic or pessimistic regarding the Shinryu stuff? It'd be foolish of them to repeat that mistake given how much the community complained about their poor judgment around the whole affair, from launch to merits to drop rates.

Agreed mechanics would be encouraged and preferred... Lilith is a great example of an acceptable grind. Low drop rates, a mechanics to improve it, and a great scaling difficulty

This is the part of that battlefield that makes the least amount of sense from a design standpoint. The original fight had procs improved drops. For whatever reason, Shinryu HTBF has no mechanic to up the drop rates, which is dumb because it wouldn't have required much effort to really implement. It could have been something different than the abyssea proc mechanic since that's quite simple, but still tough to pull off while trying not to die. Strangely enough, they gave Lilith HTBF a special mechanic that is quite challenging for most players to handle, but improves drops, (again, something I am OK with). So they clearly understand not simply giving out drops to the players, but making them work for it. Shinryu HTBF came AFTER Lilith. The fact that they danced around the drop issue when players complained, and then pretended to fix the drop rates, when in reality all they did was make it harder to get what you wanted while costing more merits, means they went out of their way to make Shinryu a miserable grind for the players on purpose. Then they turned around and put all the drops in Trove and as if that fixed the problem. Problem could have been solved right at the design phase had a simple proc mechanic been included in the damn fight.

They didn't need procs, you went a thousand times despite it being bad and disliking doing it.

In simple terms, that's literally perfect design.

You cannot keep saying " I don't like this", while your actions say "I love this"

Have done countless VD with no drops
Got back to back drops on E with THF
Both the Crepuscular Helm / Crepuscular Mail
Go figure

questioning SE in making battlefields like Shinryu with zero procs and essentially making them spins of an eternally large roulette wheel? Why? We live in an era where companies who sell anything even remotely addictive, be it alcohol, social media, gaming, nicotine.....anything of that vein, have slowly realized that the quality of their product matters less and less the longer that company exists. Til we reach a point where the only thought process for SE regarding Shinryu was "how do we make the need for this battlefield last as long as possible?"

They long ago realized the only thing that makes us die-hards leave XI is a lack of things to do. They can treat us like ***, but as long as we still have some goal nagging away at us we haven't reached yet, they're still getting our 12.95.

The worst thing? We can't even fight back in a proper consumer way. If we all left in protest, SE would just shut down XI and focus on XIV and their next project...no skin off their back.

You can just not do that content, let them wonder why they spent limited dev time on it and the metrics will show no one cares for that type of content.

I did approximately 100 Shinryu VD, saw not a single drop other than pebble earring ring, never went back. Shouldn't have taken 100 runs either, but it was a nice round number.

Im sure rdm and or sch will be able to solo this new HTBF on VD like all the others. looking forward to it.

here's a refresh of CoD moves, yeah it will be a fun fight :) Lots of healing it so much that it will OHKO you incoming.

say what you want but making sure that my HP was a prime number in all my gearsets was actually a fun hour or so of work even if I then immediately dumpstered it all the instant I got the drops

That full dispel might be a problem on VD

SMN Burn
Maybe ranged attack

The reward was the challenge. The lockstyle is a participation trophy at best because it has no stats. Its empty. No one is going to look at your lockstyle and be impressed. If anything they are going to question why you like wasting the time of 5 other people.


They clearly recolor everything because they aren't willing to make new assets. They done it the entire length of the game. There is a recolored Nirvana. There isn't any arguement that needs to be made or my tone needing to be adjusted, they are going to the least amount of work. There isn't anything special about Iroha's gear other than a level of fanaticism you're exhibiting. It's not even a glow stick like the rest of the ugly trash.

I completely disagree, to me you're off your rocker. We wont see eye to eye on this

I accept your statement and return it to you as well. Merry xmas