Stage 4 Prime Weapon's Effect On Sortie

EDIT: Most of the information in this thread is now outdated, as the EFGH boss enrages have been removed and Aminon is now a toggle. I'm leaving it up so people can see what happened, though.

So, I posted yesterday in the Sortie main thread about how some of the basement bosses had changed AI after acquiring a Stage 4 Prime Weapon. We went in again tonight to test the rest of them, and...well...this is bad. It's bad enough that I felt it justified its own thread so more people can see it.

TL;DR Do not upgrade your Stage 4 Prime Weapon until you are finished with acquiring Gallimaufry, or be prepared to tank the Galli rates for you and any group you join as soon as you get it.

First off, a few commonalities - despite the basement bosses getting harder, the rewards are completely unchanged. 10k Gallimaufry per boss, no guaranteed Case+1, no Mesosiderite (this is probably luck based). Second, actually equipping the Prime Weapon is irrelevant, the bosses are harder if anyone has the Stage 4 anywhere in their inventory. It might be the case that it only looks at the person entering Sortie to determine the AI (both times our party leader had a Stage 4), but that's unlikely. Finally, the base stats of each enemy seem unchanged, it's only their AI that gets altered.

Now, on to the specific bosses. We have recordings of all of the new enrage mechanics, in case anyone's skeptical about all of this. There may be other changes, but these are the ones we've seen. This is all mage strategy, too, so YMMV if you use melee strategy.

EDIT 7/15: Updated information on new mechanics based on more runs.

Dhartok - Uses Cesspool at somewhere between 50-65% HP. No other changes.

Gartell - Enters double hands mode at 65~66% and 30~33% HP, and stays in it for about 3 minutes each time. Bind works from a RDM fairly easily in this mode, but all damage gets tanked and his damage output skyrockets, so it's basically a forced staring contest eating your time while waiting. Gravity seems to work once, then resists badly. We don't know how to break double hands mode other than waiting.

Triboulex - Uses Setting the Stage at around 75% HP, and more times at lower %s. You can still avoid Setting the Stage going off by kiting him. There might be a Skillchain mechanic that also triggers it based off of previous runs, but it's consistently gone off at 75% HP so save yourself the trouble and just Gravity kite him.

Aita - Uses Vivisection at around 65~66% HP, and again at around 32~33% HP. These uses reset the 3 minute timer. There seems to be a mechanic to lower its damage based on repeatedly hitting him with the element he is weak to, but we don't fully understand it yet.

And last, and certainly worst...

Aminon - 10 seconds after using Bane of Tartarus, Aminon will now instantly use Incessant Void again, regardless of TP. After upgrading to Stage 4, the Absorb-TP strategy is IMPOSSIBLE. Anyone who tried to fight this thing pre-Absorb strategy knows that it's an absolute disaster of a fight, so Aminon basically doesn't exist for our group anymore.

I'm honestly speechless. The fact that the bosses are this much worse for *** reasons, there's seemingly no way to opt out of it after upgrading a weapon, there are no extra rewards beyond a worthless -drite we haven't even seen yet, and there was ZERO indication that this would happen prior to upgrading?! There wasn't even a chat message or any visual indication the bosses are buffed until our group got blindsided by Vivisection at 70%!

The worst part, though? Not everyone in our group even HAS a Stage 4 Prime Weapon! So, unless it only counts the person who enters the group (which, in that case...why?!), that means that if you upgrade to Stage 4, you're destroying the Gallimaufry potential of ANY group you join! Truly, this is one of the most severe case of punishing the player for upgrading an item I've ever seen.

That's why I'm making this a separate topic I guess - making sure as many people see this as possible. Our group was the first to upgrade to Stage 4, and we're paying the price for it now. Spread the word: either keep your Prime Weapons at Stage 3 (and thus be unable to use their WS outside of Sortie), or tank your Gallimaufry rate. What a fun choice that is......

Woah.
So we gotta pick one :

1. It's bugged
2. The remaining dev on the project lost his mind for good
3. It's all part of a big plan to make the most hardcore of players leave for good so they can shutdown the servers once and for all.

I don't see any logical reason for this. The fact that if one player has a stage 4 somewhere in his inventory make this happen is just beyond *** up. The fact that you don't even get extra reward for it is the icing on the cake.

I can't imagine the JP players won't complain about this, sounds unintended.

It's just the "Slowly devours your soul" effect but Lv.2

Tbh only potentially unintended part is the lack of extra rewards (which probably isn't unintended either). These changes seem too deliberate to be an accident.

Would be interesting to see how SE responds if this got reported as a bug on the official forums.

This *** sucks. Do you plan to try melee method to see if actively used Primes maybe counter this effect?

Imagine if Mesosiderite only drop from Aminon with stage 4 Primes...

The update notes DID say that sortie boss behavior would change based on the level of prime people have in their inventory. Up until now we assumed that only meant they'd drop the appropriate stone upon kill. But it looks like s-e went and threw us a curveball. If EVERY boss is acting up it can't be accidental. This is intended behavior. I think it's a terrible design choice, but it seems to be what they went with. The message is to get all 8.5 mil galla up front, or just not bother with primes apparently. And if you think you may have plans to do a second prime...well that just makes things even worse.


It's possible there's a mechanic to offset the more aggressive behavior, but it's also possible there isn't. Most groups already kill the Naraka at minimum if he's on the way to the boss, so if Tribuolex is still going off after the second fusions that implies the metal doesn't affect it. This is really stupid.


There is nothing that compares. There is no "one of" here. If what the OP is reporting is actually the intended mechanics, then this is by far the worst punishment for upgrading a weapon stage.

Not necessarily. Having a stage5 could proc yet another behaviour change or whatnot.
Could make things worse, could make it better, maybe nothing will change I mean, what do we know?

This sounds like, what, a "neat" idea they had to make the last stage harder than what the 5mil galli requirement might suggest?
Which indeed is a "smaller" increase than the 1m>2.5m one after all.

I have very mixed ideas about this, but overall I think it's a terrible implementation, whatever angle you may want to look at it from.


A big thanks to Mischief and his group for sharing all of this with the community /kneel

I mean, it was explicitly mentioned NMs had behaviour changed, why this would be a bug or unnintended?

I think it would be nice to test if the leader, either with no weapon or with it in say locker would still trigger the behaviour.

As anyone can enter the boss room first or last, its not the interaction with bltzer that causes the change of behaviour. Sso it must be determined on Sortie entrance.

What if you put stage 4 weapon in wardrobe 8 then cancel the subscription for that wardrobe.

Yeh, trying to gimmick the completely BS mechanics, what else is new.

Yeah, but the thing is it can be bypassed entirely by just not upgrading your primes until you have all the galla you need beforehand. If the behavior pattern only applies to people who have a stage 4 or higher prime in their inventory, then you could just not upgrade and go along your merry way happily farming your 8.5 million galla with no behavior penalty. Then when you're ready you just have everyone in the group upgrade to stage 4, get the few -ites you need and then leave the event forever. Obviously this won't work for a second prime (unless waiting a year plus is your groups agreed upon thing), but for a first time run through with a static.... the mechanic can be completely skipped. We just had to know about it beforehand. I bet if mischif's group had known this would happen they'd have gone that rout too.

So yeah, terrible design choice imo. I'll be curious to see if anyone figures out a way to counter the changes or if it's literally just "hard mode" for anyone who upgrades to stage 4 too early.

Maybe, maybe not. Stage 5 might not apply this effect, so you can go for another stage 5 upfront, never doing stage 4 ;)
It would *** sucks tho.

I still think Mesosiderite is from "buffed" Aminon >.>

Throw away stage 4 before engaging and get it back from recycle bin :)

I wonder if putting in mog safe will change as it would make sure you can't "use" the weapon under system eyes if that makes sense. Doubt it works but worth a try as at this point you guys kinda screwed without test.

Did you have metal for the basement bosses? (I know aimon doesn't have a metal) Maybe they are required now, and maybe they intend for us to use a new strat on mega boss.

Still horrible changes without enhanced rewards.

While the thought of SE deliberately baiting the first batch of cheaters into publicly embarrassing themselves (rebirth feather anyone?) would be hilarious but it seems too slick of a move for 2023 SE.

Maybe you don't need to farm KIs anymore after stage 4 in order to weaken NMs and this difficutly spike is just a hint in case you still show up with the KI despite having a stage 4?

Are you implying Mischief is a cheater? My real response to that would get me banned, so I will just calmly suggest watching their 9/9 run on youtube, where you can clearly see no cheats.

Maybe empowered bosses can drop +2 cases (rarely)

/cope

Edit: suppose they would of been in the dats tho

Does this address the critique that Sortie is a boring grind?

There are no +2 cases.

+2 cases do not exist in the game files, atm.
They might create them in the future, I can't say, but at the moment the item "Case +2" doesn't exist, so of course no NM or event or activity can "drop" something that doesn't exist yet.


Lolz

To be fair it's not like Relics weren't a "boring grind". The difference there was less risk for burn out because you couldn't do the event more than twice a week.

Another difference, shared by all other RMEA, is that you could speed up the process if you had in-game gil, or real life gil (which can be converted to in-game gil through RMT or mercs)

Arguably Aeonic are the only type of legendary weapons which weren't particularly grindy I guess but... try to farm Relic currency, Alexandrite or HP Bayld without powering through them thanks to large amounts of gil, then we'll talk about "boring grind".
HP Bayld maybe a bit less boring in the sense that you could get bayld from so many difference sources/activities, compared to Relic/Mythic/Prime where there's only a single content for that.


In hindsight having Sortie on a 40hrs lock but dropping twice as much Galli would've been a better solution, I wonder? Especially since we're talking about a 1hr event here, not 30m.
Probably so, but that would've gone against their "prime" game design direction of these latter years, where they want to do everything possible to motivate/force players to login every *** days, and making you feel like you're missing out if you don't.

i'm not.

My inbox is always open.

If you not, then it's cool, but it sounded like that.

Did you try using the Prime WS on the bosses?

They did yesterday (Oshala from SCH). They even thought it might be the trigger, but it wasn't. I still think that maybe keep using Primes stage 4 actively (maybe just auto attack, maybe Prime WSs or maybe SC from 2 people with Prime WSs etc.) through the fight might block some of this effects. That's why I'm looking foward to some melee method tests.

After some point in FFXI, every single NM has a proc system.

So, im thinking either its something like abyssea where drops change once you hit a proc, or maybe they will further implement extra rewards for the new challenge.

Maybe now is like the beta test: "hey guys this is the NMs you gonna have to deal for the next 6 months.

Please check if its balanced enough for challenge.

P.S.: once we conclude its balanced, we will add the rewards.

Love, devs"