Third Doubt: The Floppening

If you are 1-boxing FFXI, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, and have zero ingame friends, you're playing the wrong game.

I am well aware of this however odyssey is a 45 day lockout for new characters so no way to clear it at all if your character is newer than that at the time the objective is up.

Incursion as well. There’s also a decent number of these that even if soloable require such obscure setups that most players will need to team up.

I can speak from experience it’s been a lot harder this time around to get party members to deal with the fights compared with round 2. With round 2 it was on a 4 day rotation so most players that were on daily would have predictable objectives. This time there seems to no rational basis to how objectives have been assigned, odyssey has been up only once and yet I have 3 objectives today that are up for the 3rd time and aren’t Ambuscade related. The fact that the water damage in Ambuscade still isn’t corrected despite it being bugged in round 2 is beyond incompetent

Day 1 characters can enter sheol A, they can't clear it.

The Bout objective is touch the end, not "win" (again I assume, I'm not doing it)

And that's before you realise that bst could charm monsters in the wild that were level 85-90 and have a pet that hits harder than any DD.

For about 10min until Familiar wears off.

Only sky really had that luxury iirc, outdoors specifically. Dead horse but for a job whose identity was charming/using mobs, endgame areas reeeeaaally hated having charmable mobs

That isn’t the point, I actually have done most of the party ones with friends rather than pugs. I like the idea of having players team up for the objectives but the carry over system they decided on gets in the way. There is also a distinct lack of variety of objectives here. SE still has an unhealthy obsession with ambuscade and they seem to also have one with npc meme battlefields. There are so many things that they could use but do not. Limbus, Pankration, Monstrosity, Legion, Moblin Maze Mongers, Meeble Burrows, Garrison, Brenner, Ballista, and god knows what else. There is so much content in this game that there shouldn’t even be a duplicate objective at all.

"I skipped X yesterday, so I dont have Heroines Combat listed as a VB objective, *** you find someone who has that fight on their VB lists, I have better stuff to do than spending five minutes helping you clear that"

You have great friends :)

Also suggesting Brenner and Ballista is *** hilarious

Upset about “npc meme battlefields” that take 10 minutes including prep and travel, then suggests Brenner And Ballista, which take an hour just for the match, not including the entry time.

If “do 4 PvP matches” was a VB goal for 200 plaudits, im not doin it. Big ol NOPE. Give me chocobo digging instead.

Not only do Ballista/Brenner matches last one hour, they also require 6 players (3 per team) to start or else the match gets cancelled. It's also on a daily schedule with rotating level caps. Imagine how unlucky or disappointed you would feel if you are on a lonely server and can't find 5 other people to Ballista and can't do an objective or that day. Or how annoyed you would feel having to invest a full hour to get clear for the objective. Meanwhile, the tryhards will troll you endlessly for that hour by killing you nonstop. That sounds like a terrible experience for pretty much everyone.

I thought I remembered there being a minimum player requirement but I couldnt find it on either wiki, so I didnt want to say it.

Does brenner have a minimum limit though? I thought that was the hotspot for testing certain things in a controlled environment?

If you create your own custom matches there is no minimum limit, but the official Ballista matches have a minimum entry limit. Don't think Brenner has a cycle schedule since they don't have official matches, you have to sign up, but thats what makes me think if SE ever did use Ballista as an objective, it would be an official match and not just a random scheduled match (because you can make a match last 3 minutes long and be done with it, wouldn't be much of an objective to start and finish without doing anything).

It seems like the objectives they chose (with a couple exceptions) were mostly chosen because they're still difficult, because of level caps and SJ restrictions. Doing a run of Limbus, Legion, MMM, Meeble Burrows, etc. would be absolutely mind-numbing.

...I guess they did include some of those (Swarm, Hunting Grounds) but TBH they're the worst objectives in this event in my opinion. They provide no challenge whatsoever and are over in an extremely short period of time.

Similar to how Limbus would be...a bunch of level 70 mobs trying to kill ilvl characters while being slaughtered in droves. Or people just walking straight to the end, ignoring all the enemies.

Update: Buffs don't wear on entry to some of the level capped BCs. Was able to bring in a level 99 pet (Generous Arthur) into the fight. They scaled him down of course, but weird they allowed that. Corrosive Ooze did 1300 dmg aoe in Mercenary Camp (and then proceeded to tank all 5 Serpent Generals).

Sultry Patrice, it is your time to shine pal

5,476,010/5,500,000

Won as of right now, plus a whole week to do 2.25m for the extra days. All but certain.

They should just push out an entire line of 75 cap or lower content that rewards new ilvl stuff so that we can do something different for a bit. It would certainly make a lot more spells and abilities ...less worthless...

Day 1 characters ca6get to level 99 in a single day, much less even access vana'bout.

This is the worst idea and I actually hate you for suggesting it. Level capped content is garbage.

With a PL, its a tall order because of the runarounds for lvl caps, but very doable.

No PL, not happening.

If we're talking about a day 1 character that isn't someone's mule, I'm not ready to shed a lot of tears that they can't access 1 of the ~30 Vana'Bout objectives on their brand new, freshly created character.

You guys always take something so simple and still manage to *** it up, its impressive. (it's that illiteracy)

No one said to do it. Or that they wanted to. Only that it can be done. The 45 day restriction does not apply to vanabouts objective. Any new character is not hindered in any way, from doing it. That's all.

Now if you want something to say is impossible for a newer player, it's sinister reign. Locked behind a week~ of imprimiters or 100 quests.

There was some complaining about "flawless technique".. getting a craft to 11 to get 2 HQ is annoying, but not difficult.

Eiryl: "there are no new players to FFXI"
Also Eiryl: "omg a brand new character cant do vanabout, think about the brand new players!"


Anyways, a brand new player without a PL cant do any of the following:
Any of the Ambuscade goals (there are 3-4 different daily ones as well as the HM/GA goals)
Monster Rearing (requires a summed rank of 20 across all the locations)
Campaign Ops is unlikely
Pioneer
Unlocking Seals, unless they made friends that quickly
Emptiness is unlikely
Incursion
Sinister Reign (requires clearing ALL of SoA lol)
Sheol
Some of the weekly

I’m not particularly upset about the meme battlefields being present, it’s the fact that those fights and ambuscade have such a dominant role in Vanabout. My list of content wasn’t necessarily a suggestion to use all of them but rather to point out that so much of the content they could use hasn’t been used here. Most of the fights are fun for the first run but are just irritating afterwards.

I would be infinitely more irritated at having to do ballista, a one-hour scheduled event that happens every two hours requiring a minimum of six people, vs doing mercenary camp or a cloudy orb fight or swarm or wtv that takes five minutes and I can do at my own schedule.

Chocobo digging is among the dailies and it annoyed me greatly.

Bring on the pankration and monstrosity!

I wonder if anyone left at SE even remembers what those are.

Tested it and yeah it works just like you said BUT did you find any way to exploit it?
Because I have literally zero gear for BST at level 60 and other than level 60 food for Reward I literally have nothing.
I don't see this approach beating the PUP one which makes the Mercenary Camp BC quite easy simply using the Up in Arms attachments setup.
Bit slow maybe, becomes fast if you use Overdrive lol.

The slug alreay has a load of HP and slashing/blunt SDT, and mdb dont think you'd need a whole lot to keep it alive beyond reward

You don't need any level 60 gear, level sync gear is better than mostly anything you can buy at that level. The ballista community contributed one good thing to the larger FFXI community by discovering many years ago exactly which jobs/slots and stats scale down to when synced to level 60.

https://vyiv.wordpress.com/strategy/lv60-sync/

Anyways, BST gets a ton of useful pets. PUP use great for what it does, but it's pretty cool too be able to spam whirl claws from pondering Peter for absurd damage at 1 charge, or fluid spread from sultry Patrice. I haven't tested it yet, but I'm guessing Patrice retains her unique physical damage taken, which would probably make everything at that level deal next to no damage on it. I'll check it out tomorrow.

There's a ton of pets to play around with: Lifedrinker Lars, Mosquito/Weevil. Not that it matters because it's an easy fight, but you can play around with the various types and see how strong they are at that level. Arthur was already capable enough on his own.

When I tried Arthur it died very fast, but that's probably because I didn't "pull away" the mob and used charge right there, and that aggroed all 5 of the serpent generals, which slaughtered Arthur pretty fast before I even got a chance to use Reward.

I returned there on PUP and did it easily with the Up in Arms setup.
Some differences: Acc was being fine, didn't need food or a better stabilizer (see what I wrote there).
Using a lower rank ARK and Optic Fiber II in place of I still makes sense to me though.

Maneuvers were Fire/Earth/Light but I think Fire/Thunder/Light is gonna be better.

Last but not least damage was very manageable aside from a couple of situations (which got easily solved with Repair) but that setup has no magic defense at all, and because of that Galadar's spells were quite... well, potentially dangerous? Most of them were getting interrupted, but it might be worth to use an MDT attachment in place of heatsink.

Unless it has rewards behind it and then you love it!

Plus you have something we didn't have at 75, Wardrobes!

I'm just thinking of all the gear you'd have to get to be tip top for 75 again. Much less the work that would go into lua to have a level 75 toggle. It would be terrible. Sarcasm doesn't translate to post so I'll just state that I am being sarcastic and don't want this at all. Thank you for the reaction.

Ok fine you got me.