Anyone Wanna Make The "Botless Asura"?

I know of a group that started off as a pug, eventually turning it into a static and full clearing all v25 t1-t4.

Here's the best part, not once did they use a voice chat (discord).

Whether it's Discord enabling audio cues OR a third-party Windower/Ashita addon that covers your screen with additional, colorful indicators ...what's the difference?

None of these (including vanilla text clients) should be praised. We're playing a 20-year old game with ZERO accessibility features.

Really no excuse not to use it these days in something like that, everyones got a phone, everyones got a PC if they are playing. Don't be shy!

What about deaf people? °-°

Or people who play in rooms/places where there's other people as well and you can't disturb by having a voice-chat software active?

FFXI has already accomplished smaller gaps between static and PUG in the past though. Ambu VD was very PUG-able even in 2017 when it was new and somewhat challenging for most people back then, because of how easy it is to join a party or recruit someone. This part is irrelevant to actual skill/gear requirement.

About 60%+ of time whenever I try to ask a friend with free time to help on Odyssey clears, the answer were usually "sorry, saving seg for my group" "No segs" "my rp is full". It's not even "I am busy" nor "I don't want to", but "I am saving segs for my group so I can't help" lol. This design is fundamentally anti social.

This kind of response has never happen to any other content that you can freely join with no penalty. I definitely got less rejection for Ambu VD and the reason was usually "busy" or "I am done this month" but it's never entrance KI related.

I think it's certainly very possible to accomplish high difficulty by having high gear/skill/coordination requirement, on the same time give anyone incentive to help. If someone wants to help, they shouldn't be punished for having to spend valuable currency that hurts their own group progression. Helping and socialize is the whole point of mmo after all.

I think you nailed it here. If the only thing you were losing in a bad seg/sortie/v25 run was time invested, it wouldn't be such a big deal to take a chance on a PUG. I wish more content were as accessible as ambuscade in that regard, especially given that the harder content requires specific party comps and/or 6 LS/static members to all be on at the same time.

I know they'll probably never change it, but I really hate time-gated content. If I want to spam content, let me spam content.

There are SO MANY THINGS I want to say about this. How this is the MMO model, and that's it's turned into "IDC who I play with as long as I get my ***", and nvm...............

If I had to go back to pugging instead of just multi-boxing everything outside of Ody id quit tbh. The gap between character power in this game is way to far apart with ***like gearswap. I had the same issues post Abby/SOA start, supporting whining lv85 empy dps wondering why they cant kill bosses with 60% accuracy and no hybrid sets, now the gaps x20 worse.

This is absolutely the fault of players normalizing ***like gearswap. The early spellcast was nowhere near as broken, and so few people used it it barely mattered. When gearswap started normalizing automation in profiles and people started copy/pasting insanely complex profiles, the standard was set.

Content and equipment have to be designed around that. SE has tried to fix it by giving us insanely overpowered hybrid pieces like Malignance, Sakpata, and Nyame. Those allow non-react users to at least survive in content that would challenge react users. But, when half of the endgame population is using insanely powerful third party tools and they don't have the option to ban them, their hands are pretty tied.

If they wanted to solve it by releasing a set of gear that's powerful enough to use on it's own, but can't be swapped out, you'd just have players pissed that they 'wasted' resources creating gear that doesn't have any use for gearswap users.

It isn't the fault of non-gearswap players that the rest of us go balls out cheating. Expecting people to learn a scripting language and maintain files just to play a MMO competitively is ridiculous, even if it is what the game has now become.

You also end up with really stale gear progression like XIV.

Yea, I'm not really suggesting it as a serious solution. It would have to be weaker than the current endgame gear so there's still a reason to have a variety of options, and that would make it pointless to anyone who uses gearswap now.

I'm just saying that gearswap users kind of forced their hand in terms of design. It's obvious there was no need to have gear with insane levels of m.eva and DT while still competitive offensive stats. That decision was driven by the people using react to have DT on every single TP move.

You're right, and when I came back to the game, just as you described, I decided I would finally figure out how gearswap works so I could keep up with the Jeffersons.

Now that I have, right, wrong, or indifferent, I enjoy playing with builds in gearswap and making highly situational sets for screwing around nearly as much as I enjoy just playing the game. Even with /equipsets, if I had to go back to smashing macros between every action/ws/spell, I'm 99% sure I wouldn't even want to play anymore.

If there is a x20 gap between players, I don't think the gap is caused by gearswap. Ive never seen such a large dmg gap between GS and vanilla on parses, if the job and gear level is identical and nobody died.

There is only a few noticeable advantage that GS user has, such as no animation lock in /ra pt. It makes winning parse without GS incredibly hard against multiple targets that dies fast. That's it really.

If there is a gap I think it's caused by increased gear/stat complexity over the years. I had like 5-10 gear sets on cor before 2011, eventually it increased to something like 50 after a few years, then 100, then 120....

back then there were like 2 DT- sets, one for magic and one for physical, even then many people didn't build them. Now there is DT-30%, DT-50% offensive, DT-50% defensive, DT- meva, DT- HP+, DT- evasion. Add DW swap tiers to all of them thats dozen sets only for damage reduction......

But gear set increase isn't caused by gear swap, it is caused by increased effective stats combination. I am vanilla for life but I still built all of the DT- sets above, because such sets existed for me to build. If SE has to put +200 HP stat on one accessory, which allows capped DT- and high HP being possible, then it only make sense to build such sets for weakened or one shot kill situations. The same can be said for things like DT evasion. Such set didn't even exist in 2020, but it works now, only because stacking evasion to high level of effectiveness is now possible with newer gears.


GS only makes building hundreds of sets easier, it doesn't add hundreds of effective sets to the game. Even if GS doesn't exist at all Id still build hundreds of sets as long as there is a use for it. Then SE still needs to balance the game for people like me, so whoever refuse to build this many sets would fall behind equally.

In a sense Id argue that GS lowered the gap between players. Without GS I bet more people will fall behind as they feel too lazy to manage this many sets, and resort to multi purpose sets with less performance. But the ceiling remains the same with or without GS. GS only raise the floor.

I always feel the amount of sets available to be built in FFXI has gotten to a ridiculous level anyways. They really should simplify how some of the stats work and reduce effective gear sets in game, so not-so serious players can catch up more. but nooooo they choose to add even more stats like pdl+ so now we have to make multiple tiers of attack capped sets to min-max LOL.

LOL. You're telling me you're going to use 120 different sets on COR without gearswap? Have you ever considered how many macro pages this would take?

GS absolutely increases the floor AND ceiling of play, and it is a massive crutch for everyone who uses it, raising their gameplay level tremendously no matter where they were at before it.

GS is broken, if it was a paid service it would be pay to win.

GS has been normalized in the western endgame community, it has not been normalized in the JP community and they consider it cheating. Which is why many of them refuse to play with NA players, they invite you and you're gamesharking it up and doing max out dmg numbers, resisting everything and taking barely any dmg.

A large portion of the difficulty of this game is in the debuffs and dmg taken (and if the healer can keep up with it) and you can negate most things with gs, react and 0wait.

These are all indictments of react, ja0, anchor, and character movement/action automation. You can argue that gs has been a vehicle through which these tools have spread to certain people who don’t pay attention to what they’re copying off the internet (which is absolutely a thing that happens), but it’s also not really difficult to use gs without any of this other stuff. None of the gs users in my ls use them anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Alternatively:
a-Language barriers they dont want to deal with
b-クソバカ外人

Its probably b

It's fine to use it ofc, we have left the point where it really matters from a judgemental position. Whatever makes the game fun at this point, within reason.

Just that if people complain the game is too easy now or people are scrubs cause they don't have perfect gs setups it's a bit stupid. Gotta have a bit of self awareness and all.

Are you serious? SE designing content around GS? You mean like the time they designed PW to take 20 hours to complete? You mean the 50000 alexandrite to make a single Mythic? You mean how they designed Odyssey to completely lock out PUGs? You mean like how they appear to think 100 MILLION muffins is a sane number?

You and your ilk are disingenuous as hell or frighteningly naive if you think SE is designing around GS. This post, and others like it, scream revisionist. Miss me with this nonsense.

It's common knowledge. They didn't, until it reached a point where they had to.

Just like when they said they don't design content with specifically expecting GEO to be there.

TP sets with massive -dmg is an acceptance of the advantage of gs.

日本語は上手ですねwwwww

How do you have mythics and think it takes 50k to make them?

It used to

No ***? That's so gross lol

mmm thats an extreme case really.. For the second one, you can just use headphones and listen at the least.

Way back when they were 50k, prior to the salvage bans.

To this day, I still believe that Alex requirement would have been lowered further if it werent for that exploit. Its only logical that the amount of alex in circulation was higher than it should have been based on anyone using the dupe exploit generating 3x the cotton and linen purses (when they dropped).