Stage 4 Prime Weapon's Effect On Sortie

There is not always a room for it, or there is hate reset or there is time limit (gravity kite is usually slower, because you cant TP/WS as fast while chasing the target).

Also core of this strategy is easy, but the details here are what's really important.

I think it's great that most strategies for Sortie is SE giving us the literal run around.

Lol looks like we are fighting it Mboze style...

The only difference is that in Mboze you stand still like everything around is lava.

Now that you mentioned Mboze, I wonder if BLU would work on Aminon.

And just like Mboze, players aren’t bothering to fight the bosses the way they “intended”, because the bosses are so badly designed (which isn’t their fault at all). Between Mboze, Bumba, and now Aminon, it’s pretty lame that even the best players are just fed up with cheesy mechanics and would rather innovate vs deal with whatever garbage way SE “thinks” you should fight the bosses.

I still remember when people fought Frogbuscade this way (gravity/kite), then SE nerfed gravity method, and then players STILL used TP denial method to get easy kills, because the other way of doing it was dumb. SE seriously never learns.

Only if you can lock him into Ice mode where he's vulnerable to Wind. From what I understand you want him to be weak to Light / Dark for absorb-tp?

Given Fujito's hint, I honestly wonder what the intended method is supposed to be for Aminon given it's 90% MDT while earrings are active along with the added 25% DT starting next month. "Just stagger him with magic btw all your magic do 0 dmg". Also, after reading long_horned's information on twitter where FIFTEEN nukes are required to red proc him after seven sets of fetter spawns before bane goes off, no wonder we just go straight to cheese because *** that.

You still have to do "that" even while kiting. Somewhat.

As gross as it is you're all still gonna do it.

New tinfoil hat theory:
Eiryl is sick of bot farming gil to sell and wants to quit it, but doesn't want to quit outright, so he spends all day bitching on the forums trying to get the players to quit so his customer base quits.

I have literally said that, a couple times! Keep up. Work is work, no one likes work.


I've also said "anyone I can get to wake up and quit, while making money is just icing" Something along those lines.

I honestly don't understand why you don't like players being unhappy with bad mechanics. You defended the prime4 upgrade where bosses become much stronger, for no reason, when YOUR WEAPON BECOMES STRONGER.

Then Fujito comes out, apologizes, admits they messed up, promises to roll it back, all the while you still pretend nothing happened. I honestly just wonder why.

Eiryl doesnt play FFXI though.

I am just sad the strat does't involve 6x ceremonial daggers :(

I don't have time to write one of my usual essays right now but the short version is: I stand by what I said earlier, and I think it falls pretty closely in line with what Fujito apologized for and didn't apologize for, and how it was adjusted.
-I don't think adding harder mechanics once you are working on stage 5 is a problem
-I don't think the mechanics themselves are insurmountable/too much
-I do think they should've had a toggle (for when you want to make non-prime progress)
-I do think they could've, maybe even should've, added extra muffins for the HM bosses

I wasn't aware of the fact that meso dropped off Aminion only, knowing that, I think it's a little silly that they made the basement bosses HM. I think my proposal would've been: when you have a stage 4, you get the option to enter HM zone, all bosses are HM, but only Aminion drops the meso. I think non-100% drop rate is appropriate. Having to fight him 4 times in 3~5 months of muffin farming is kinda anti-climactic. The #s of all drites/muffins are off.

All of this could have been avoided by a simple "trade your stage 4 weapon to the bitzer, Balamor pops out and tells you Amimon now drops mesosiderite, but he's hard mode, haha, you're ***, have fun, I'm so entertained now", tbh.

"Yeah, you know that brand new strong weapon you got, yeah guess what n00b you get to fight Amimon for non guaranteed drops *and* he stops taking magic damage and requires 50000 procs to do dmg to him again so good luck with that."

"Lol mechanics, imma gravity kite."

"..."

?
Does your *** hurt from straddling the fence for so long? Pick a freakin' side, jeez.

No. I'm not salty. I just think his opinions, as he stated them, are the definition of ambivalence. Why would one support the sudden increase in difficulty, across an entire party?

Anyone playing this game for a minute knows that if SE's mechanics make a job or a player the slightest hindrance, then they get dropped like a hot penny. (In this case, it would be Stage 4 owners, complicating gallimaufry farming). How do you think this would have played out if SE didn't intervene? I think that people have just farmed enough gallimaufry to skirt from Stage 3 to Stage 5.

I just don't understand why this alone, doesn't influence a person's opinion to believe that SE made a short-sighted and just plain terrible decision.

I mean it's really simple. If they want us to have harder fights that we actually do the mechanics, then they have to design fights that we can't cheese. You know, their job.

Instead we got sneak attacked with punishments out of the blue because they were angry we didn't want to figure out their gimmicks. So from player perspective, they are lazy ***. Because they are lazy ***. They could have either been less lazy or not *** and the JP forums wouldn't have erupted with vitriol pointed at the developers.

They did this to themselves.

Maybe they'll learn to develop content that will actually make their player base happy from this experience. But most likely they will learn nothing.

We don't have alliance content anymore so the social aspect of the game has been mostly removed in game. We are 6 mans or less that try to tackle content efficiently because the devs have given up the facade of working on this game. The logical outcome is that we do things in the most efficient way possible for whatever comp we have. If they want to make these well-oiled 6 man balance challenges like odyssey and sortie are presenting themselves, they have to actually be well-oiled.

TL;DR they should either do their job well or not be *** to us.

This is my last sortie run.

https://youtu.be/vpBebdT4n84

I guess there's just no room for any level of nuance in anyone's opinion, you either hate SE and everything they've ever designed (but somehow still play this game and actively participate in the forums), or you suck their *** so hard and have absolutely no criticism for them.

I never said the content shouldn't be adjusted, and in my post yesterday I said it was implemented wrong and gave suggestions about how I thought it should've gone. But yet somehow I support the old system?

Here's another way to look at it, from a game design perspective: The "normal" mode bosses are there for you to learn and practice the mechanics of the fight. You can kill them without doing the mechanics, but throughout that process you will (they hope) notice the !! blue procs, the punishments you get from not doing the mechanics, the damage/effects of their "*** you" moves, how the metals work, etc. Some groups will be killed by Setting the Stage, some will not. They will notice that the difference between these two was how many times they blue proc'd. People will experiment and try to figure out what triggers the !!.

Then when the stage 5 bosses come around and they start using STS, Vivi at set percentages, the community will use the information gained during the NM fights to implement strategies for the HM fight. While you may have been able to kill the enemy before it got off its *** you move before, now you are forced to deal with the mechanics of the fight. This makes it more challenging, requires you to bring different job/subjob combinations, think about how much DPS you're putting out, slow down the fight, and coordinate more. Rinse and repeat for the other bosses. This is like game design 101, you implement a mechanic, show it to the player, let them play with it in a less-threatening state, and then later on you make it more demanding once they have experience with it. Also: as you progress through a video game and get better at it, acquire new equipment and skills, the difficulty of the game increases, to test your skills and equipment and also to continue the sense of challenge. The Wily levels in Mega Man games are more challenging than the robot master levels.

The problem is that since the community found a way to kill the bosses without dealing with their mechanics, we never bothered to deeply investigate them (how many !! to reduce STS/Vivi to 0 damage, how many nukes per !!, how many nukes per hand swap, how many hand swaps before double hands, etc.). This left groups who actually had to deal with them lacking in information.

I think you could argue that SE should've seen this coming and done...something...to stop the community from Blitzkrieging the bosses down without dealing with their mechanics. I'm open to people's suggestions on how to do that, though I imagine the answer will be something like "Hurr durr don't have BS mechanics like 'the enemy can kill or dispel you' at all." If someone wants to take a stab at designing these fights from the ground up, I'm all for it.

I'm not going to say SE has made 0 mistakes with Sortie, or with this particular aspect of Sortie. I've never said that, and never will. I also do not agree with the narrative that they're complete *** who couldn't design their way out of a wet paper bag.

They should've made it more clear that the challenge increases with Stage 4 weapon in hand. They should've made it an option. The zone is too large/bosses are too spread apart. The -drites are way too common/the number of drites is imbalanced. Muffins being for empy armor & prime weapons is a bit annoying.

I really like the sandbox-style of Sortie. You can plan your route, try to be as efficient as possible and clear as many objectives as you have time for. Adding extra stuff at the end is always exciting for my group, we try to beat our best run every time. The RNG of the bitzers, mini-boss paths, and whether or not someone dies/loses a song make each run slightly different than the one before it, and we have to adjust on the fly.

After running it every day for quite a long time, and most days before that, is it getting a bit stale? Sure, a little bit. But compared to other events in FFXI, it's not really that much different. Ody seg farms are insanely boring and offer almost 0 variation from run to run. Dynamis, other than the placement of Aurix, is basically the exact same experience every time. Omen is literally the exact same experience every time. All of the old content (Nyzul, VW, ZNM, abyssea, etc.) you do for REMAs is entirely repetitive. We're playing an MMO for ***'s sake, that's the whole point of the game, It's a loot treadmill.

Maybe this is a dumb question, but did u try magic/ranged damage from melee range? If the earrings are seemingly impossible to take off, it would make more "sense" if they intended for people to have to risk being up close to him maybe?

If it was important to them for us to be learning on the easy modes, they should have made them impassible without doing the mechanics. Under this format, it makes sense for stage 4 > 5 to be the hard versions of these fights. There still would have been complaints, but it wouldn't have been everyone is pissed because when they entrapped stage 4 owners. It could at least be seen as a logical progression. If they added a warning akin to magian trial upgrades when you change the level of a weapon and that the change is irreversible, then at that point they have done everything they needed to.

But they sloppily did none of that. They did the bare minimum. And it turns out the bare minimum on the JP forums is to actually get pissed in response.

There isn't room for debate on that. They actually pissed off the only player base they listen to, the JPs. They did a bad job and needed to half *** apologize for it.

I still like this game. I still like doing content. But if they aren't going to make the fights impassible, I'm going to continue to do whatever works for me. The game has a history of people doing silly stuff that really shouldn't be possible by normal MMO standards because normal MMOs don't offer creative tools. It is literally part of the identity of the game for people who play it more than casual and have kept the servers on for 20+ years.

They have crushed Alliance content with their stingy staffing and developing practices. So again, regular event socializing has been taken from this game. The community, in part, continues because of forums like this. LSs no longer serve any real purpose in end game if everything is going to be a 6 man challenge event.

With Odyssey, it became clear that if you weren't going to do it somewhere close to the intended methods that you were going to have a bad day. We got it and it was fine. With Sortie, they gave us the flexibility to run down purple hallways in infinite patterns and stomp easy bosses. Then they made them harder in basements and continued to let us stomp them for better rewards. If you think the next appropriate step is to lower rewards, increase difficulty, and punish flexibility then it's no wonder you're having issues with the community at large.

And no I don't think you're actually taking that stance. You just don't seem to understand that basically everyone that used to defend SE has actually gotten fed up with their negligence and we don't want devil's advocacy. They don't deserve the benefit of the doubt until they actually do something that looks like they actually attempted to do their jobs again.

Can think of at least 1 other type of people, ones that sit on the forum all day crying and writing walls of text while typing nothing of value.

:)

Credit where credit is due. Maletaru vaguely exposed his opinion before, then he gave us a much detailed one. The much detailed one is pretty consistent with what the rest of the people in this thread think. One might say, he finished his mythic...

Sortie sucked on day 1 but was ok because of the gear. Get the stuff. Get out... never go back 6/10

Now? Its the worse content se ever made to date. 1/10 get *** help

What a way to put a cherry on top of something... in this case the cherry is a steaming pile of dog ***

If prime weapons weren't good no one would bother with Sortie.

Can say the same about Nyzul and the entire mythic process. The carrot is what keeps you doing it.

Shame it's so not fun.

That's untrue, it's new, some are going to do it no matter what. Good or bad isn't always a qualifier. "Explorers" and "Achievers" do not require a thing to be of value. Even the biggest steaming pile of ***as long as it's new.