Prime Weapon Feedback Thread

Hello FFXIAH.

I'm posting a thread to gather feedback on the Prime Weapon creation process. Please be serious. If I see anyone being the usual shitter you're getting topicbanned and your post deleted. This isn't a playground for your dumbass circular arguments. Just write down how you feel about the prime weapon forging process (as we know it right now), what you think could be changed, etc..

For the future this thread will also be the place to post about Stage 4 and 5 feedback as well as weapon balance feedback. For now keep it to what we know, not speculation.


My feedback to get us started:

A) The primary currency used to upgrade Prime Weapons being shared with the Empyrean Armor upgrade currency with no alternative paths for either thing is needlessly oppressive.

Suggestion: Something like a system where Sortie bosses can drop a voucher that Ruspix will accept in place of Gallimaufry for Empyrean Armor upgrades. Ground floor NMs could drop a ticket worth 10,000 Gallimaufry for +2 upgrades, and Basement Bosses could have a chance to drop one worth 70,000 for +3 upgrades. These tickets would not be redeemable in any other way.



B) Octahedrites are meaningless. This may change for later stages, but as it stands these items could simply not exist and it wouldn't matter. You need only 2 of them, they drop from everything, and by the time you have 1,000,000 Gallimaufry for the Stage 3 upgrade, you will have enough Octahedrite to do almost every Prime in the game, if not more than enough for all of them.

Suggestion: Skew it more toward needing these stones than Galli? Probably too late to change this but that's what I would have done.



C) The time investment that SE wants is kind of ridiculous. I'm not saying that 6-12 months is unreasonable for an ultimate weapon, that part is fine. If they want to have these be long term goals that you're working toward for a while, that's not unusual and I have no problem with that. I do have a problem with the fact that progress is tied to a long daily event that, quite frankly, is losing its luster for a lot of players. I could also mention that the amount of Galli needed vs the amount acquired by the average solo player (read: joe schmo going in there and getting 6-8k a day, not turbosweats with 3 characters getting 30k+) is pretty much unattainable even at just Stage 3 but I don't think this is that big of a deal since Ultimate Weapons don't have to be tuned around soloability. It's worthy of consideration though.

Suggestion: There's no easy solution to this due to how it has been set up. Ideally I'd set Sortie to a 3 day lockout and triple Gallimaufry gains to compensate but you aren't likely to do that. Stacking plates (the ruspix plate is not sufficient in its current form) a la Omen canteens would help too, but since population imbalance in some servers would prohibit ease of access to the content if you did that, I can't see this happening either. Either way, the way it is set up now is pretty awful and I wish it were different.

I agree with the tuning up how many stones are needed vs galli. Make it like 300 stones and 250k galli, or something like that. Also, I would cut down the requirements to get to stage 3 so that the weapon is usable soonish. Make stage 4 and 5 more ridiculous to get so that the ppl that want to do the endless grind have something to shoot for, whereas the soloers or casuals can still have a weapon that's on par with other weapons reasonably quickly.

Lack of Alliance Content. Every other REMA involved parts you would do in an alliance when it first came out.

The process, the amounts of currency, the sharing of currency all seem fine to me.

It's just sortie is the problem. It's dumb, it's really obnoxious content. Just like vagary was, but so much worse.

The whole sharing with gear thing is dumb. It's 2-3 days worth, it's not a big deal. (if you're going to say well it takes me a week to solo that much!, well tough ***it'll take you 6 years to solo the weapon too guy)

I solo sortie 2-3 times a week these days for about 6k galli per as a long term player. Yeah Prime weapons are way off my radar and a huge swing and a miss for me.

They need to unlock the 24 hour time gate which discourages participation and cap the galli per day at something like 50-100k.

Yeah Sortie was obnoxious content from the get go when they said you had to walk to some objective from the start. Luckily that was a one and done but it was still stupid. Get naked/wear empy/stand still for 30 sec, all dumb as ***.


That's one part of the issue. Me, I don't care so much, they have to go a long way before its worthwhile.

they should make aminion immune to absorb tp

I also think they should add a tradeback system for Sapphire, Starstones, Eikondrite, Octahedrites and the other stones.
You trade them to Ruspix, you get a little bit of Galli.
How much i hardly relevant, just give those stones a purpose please.

Also, personally I assume the Stage4 and Stage5 will follow the same model as Stage 3, this is the scenario I envision:
Stage 4 Prime Materials:
2.000.000 Gallimaufry
3 Hexahedrite
10 Voracious Psyche

Stage 5 Prime Materials:
3.000.000 Gallimaufry
4 Mesosiderite
15 Voracious Psyche

Then again, we don't know and we can't tell.
For all we know, stage4 and stage5 could require very small amounts of galli, and require instead very large amounts of various -drite stones (and also unlock the possibility to buy them from Ruspix with Galli, maybe?)
I don't expect that to happen but... who knows?

I agree Sortie needs a lot of changing, but I honestly can't think of anything they will realistically do that solves its biggest problem for me: it takes too long and it isn't fun. IMO the best thing they could do is to cut it down to 30 minutes somehow and increase the efficiency of galli gained.

Stacking KIs so I can go more in one session isn't really a good solution if you still have to spend an hour in there dragging along. The last thing I want to do is spend 2-3 hours every few days doing back to back Sortie. It would also be nice if less time was spent running as opposed to actually doing stuff, but again, that's a fundamental mechanic, I don't see that changing.

For Primes, I have 0 desire to do one just because the idea of spending 6 months doing Sortie every night is enough for me to quit. The weapons, aside from the shield, are basically useless at phase 3 unless the Sortie proc is really good, so my appetite for doing one is going to depend heavily on what phase 4 requirements are. If their end goal is really what they've stated and they want to make it a half year to one year long grind in Sortie alone then I don't see myself ever finishing one of them.

I do agree with the tradeback option, they really should let you trade in useless earrings and items back for galli. I don't anticipate them doing this soon, though, given the whole purpose behind the galli cap was to throttle people finishing them and this would speed it up.

Dont give SE the idea that "anything is better than nothing" , otherwise you wind up with something like Omen's 10:1 card exchange.

There is absolutely no way these items could have been implemented in a way that would have been considered satisfactory to the entire community. I am not a video game developer and therefore will not even attempt to make suggestions on how to change the process. But I will give my feedback on Prime Weapon Stage 3 acquisition.

Personal opinion:Sortie sucks. One hour of running through the same hallways, fighting the same ~20 trash mobs to get Shards/Metals, and killing the same 8 (9) bosses. There is nothing dynamic about the content aside from Bitzer positioning and (somewhat) where the mini-NMs are located. At no point have I ever considered anything within this content to be challenging, and it's certainly not exciting to do anymore.

Personal opinion:Most of the Prime Weapons, even at stage 5, are not enticing enough for me to care to grind this much Sortie to acquire. The stats on many weapons are not all that impressive, especially so at stage 3. Because of my feelings on this, I have zero desire whatsoever to do Sortie multiple times a week.

As far as the -drite and Psyche items, they strike me as just more Sapphires/Starstones/Eikondrites. You will very quickly have far more of these items than you will ever need, and the only real thing holding you back from upgrading a weapon will be the staggering amount of Gallimaufry required.

My group has completed all the (current) hardest content in this game, and I see no reason to bust my *** for a weapon that might help me make things slightly more dead. As such, I will not actively be making a Prime weapon. I'll do Sorties when I feel like it (twice a week is pushing it for me). If I happen to accumulate 1mil+ Gallimaufry after upgrading all the armor to +3 that I desire then sure, I'll put the points into a weapon. But, barring more updates to Sortie, I'm not going to be frequently engaging in this content.

I think my opinions of the prime weapon creation process specifically could change depending on stage 4 and 5 requirements. It could be that they made stage 3 the longest grind, although I would prefer a shorter grind to test out the stage 3s sooner and then commit to a longer grind for the weapons you really want. We will see on this front, but I dont feel 1M gali + easy to obtain items is too terrible. If stage 4 and 5 are much worse I will have a problem with it.

I think the biggest issue is the lack of simultaneous rewards.

1) Progress on Emp+3 being competitive with prime weapon progress is a dumb idea.

2) It would feel rewarding if we were making steady progress on +2 JSE earrings during the course of farming gali, but the JSE earring system is a huge problem - most players will die of old age before seeing a perfect augment on a +2 earring for a specific job: 3) Welcome any other rewards e.g. decent EP, Gil etc.

I agree with others, without completely admitting they messed up and backtracking on requirements (this will not happen), the implementation of a trading system could fix these issues. Spare sapphires, starstones, eikondrites, octahedrites can be traded with earrings to reroll ear augments or be used in place of gali for armor upgrades, trade +1 earrings x 5 for a +2 case etc.

Feedback: I just want to violently agree with the notion that this should have been alliance content. It makes so much more sense for splitting up to do objectives by having varying party comps in the same alliance (I'm well aware you can do this now with both prevailing party comps, but I'd argue Average Joes in PUGs would have a much harder time splitting off into pairs than well-greased statics). There's only so many SCHs to go around.

Recommendation: Make current Sortie alliance content, then implement separate instanced Sortie boss fights, like they did in Vagary with "Alternative Battlefields" for the initial Empyrean reforge. Would require aforementioned implementation of reward trade-in system, or weekly RoE objective(s) that gives single -drite/psych/galli upon completion. Maybe a RoE for old cases, or just have them x% chance drop from bosses directly upon kill, whichever makes the most sense.

Why and beyond fry farming, what does this really have to do with prime weapons.


The prime weapon grind is weird. Sortie is not exactly fast (there is a lot of down time in sortie). Most players are not likely farming 40k+ fry per run. Empy Armor and Primes sharing upgrade currency is rough, not only does this delay the one not picked but it divides groups on what the goal of runs should be. That being said, it is "easy" to get ~10k fry solo. So anyone can eventually get there but farming sortie will be a cause for burnout.

The BRD instrument is questionable, depending on the cost of Stage 4 and 5, it may be faster to just make the Relic and Empyrean. The Song is also questionable. Unless it scales very well with +song, it seems like you will never be using it. Maybe the Prime WS will make the song make more sense.

The biggest disappointment, for me, was the WS SC elements not matching up with their relic counterparts (tell me you are sword user, without telling me you are a sword user). Though, that was more about me self hyping myself up for my BLU.

Still a little early to comment on all of the PDL being thrown at us. If the prime WS can make use of PDL normally in endgame encounters, cool. If not, why then? I would also argue that the prime aftermath would also need to be of some value for lowman\solo situations.

1. as OP stated and I have yet to find a person who disagrees- the primary currency being shared between gear and weapon is a first for Legendary Weapons and their associated content (and no, I haven't forgotten about needing 1 of an Abyssea NM drop to upgrade empy gear- there was no limit on earning those beyond player limitation) and a really horrible move by SE in my opinion.

2. Its clear that SE wanted to make a gil-free RMEA with Aeonics and failed horribly, not understanding their playerbase well enough, and here comes their second attempt. But all I see with this system is justification for the absolute ***STORM the Earring System in Sortie is.

3. We all understand that not all servers have the populations to keep requiring true alliance content for game progression (speaking of content that actually requires 2+ parties, not 6 GOATs and 12 leeches), and that's leading to SE's move to only release 6man content lately. But who's fault is that? SE, merge some servers if one of the most endearing aspects of your gameplay is no longer possible on some of your servers.

In the end, all I see is a way to keep us chasing our tails while they do some very appreciated long-term maintenance to the hardware aspect of things without giving us new content. These weapons, while quite interesting, come across as very shoddily thrown together- from the storyline, to the content, to the results themselves.

I think the earring system could be more viable if there was a way to work towards +1 or especially +2 earrings, even for random jobs. It seems like they put that out there as a carrot to bring players back into Sortie and drag the content out, but the carrot is so far out there that it has the opposite effect.


This could be somewhat mitigated by scaling the rewards based on the size of the group that enters. 6 people could obtain similar galli returns in a few objectives where an alliance of 18 requires more completed objectives.

If you scale this aggressively enough then it can reduce the viability of leeching especially if the content is difficult.

EDIT: reworded

Yeah at least let me trade them for Galli.

NQ Earring = 100 Galli
+1 Earring = 1000 Galli
+2 Earring = 10000 Galli

Sapphire = 1000 Galli
Starstone = 5000 Galli

Eikondrite = 1000 Galli
Octahedrite = 2000 Galli

SE should let you take an NQ/+1/+2 earring, a sapphire and 1000 gallimaufry to re-roll the augments.

Earrings you don't want, should turned in for 1/5/10k gallimaufry. I mean, they let you do it for WKR drops at 1/5th their value.

Or they could not merge servers and just let the content be alliance applicable. You're on a top 3 most populated server already.

Unfortunately, SE does a VERY half-*** job scaling mob HP: They increase HP as a set amount per character implying each person pulls the same amount of weight, except it doesnt work that way. You throw more melee in, and skillchain damage goes out the window (unless you're fighting one of those "dont SC" mobs). You add more nukers in, and they just run into the nuke wall. The DPS potential drops.

inb4: "becuz mercs will merc everything"

Muffins are the bottleneck. They'll never let us trade anything for more muffins, only try to sucker us into trading them away to prolong the anguish and suffering.

Not every FFXI player is a merc RMT shitlord

Look there's a ton of players I enjoy playing with who might not be amazing at this game and its a lot easier to fit them into an alliance rather than trying to rotate people into 6 man events, even worse when it takes a set up run for the Sortie mega boss and then you have different people the next day. Sortie is especially bad 6 man content if you have more than 5 other friends.

I don't care if making it alliance allows people to merc ***, that's Asura's problem.