Continued Prime Weapon NA Review

The bit about 'solo' is from the below statement. My notes are a summarization of the interview.

――強化の行程は、かなり歯応えのあるものになりそうですね。

藤戸：そうですね。現状でのプレイスタイルに即して、ソロでもコツコツ強化できるようにはしてあります。ただ最終段階の強化については、少々きびしい、という感じになるかもしれません。なお、プライムウェポンを最終段階まで強化すると、いわゆる“モヤモヤ”が付くようになります。

My translation:
--It seems like there's plenty to sink your teeth into (chewy) for the progression process.
Fujito: Yes, you're right. We've made it so that you can chip away at it bit by bit even as a solo player. However, the final stage might be a bit tough. However, once you've upgraded the weapon to its final stage, you'll get the final 'glow'.

Google:
――It seems that the process of strengthening will be quite crunchy. Fujito: That's right. In line with the current play style, we have made it so that even solos can be strengthened step by step. However, you may feel that the final stage of strengthening is a little harsh. In addition, when the prime weapon is strengthened to the final stage, so-called "moyamoya" will be attached.

the part after hya's quote also mentions that there may be people who finish it earlier, which then makes me wonder what their expected "average" time is.

――年内にひとつ!?　完成までに約半年はかかるということでしょうか？
--One by the end of the year!? Does it take about half a year to complete?

藤戸：実際には、もっと早く完成させてしまう人も出てくるかもしれません。
Fujito: In fact, there may be people who finish it earlier.

If the above translation is accurate then he's not saying the process is soloable, but that you can make progress solo (between runs with your friends or until you can find a group or whatever).

I don't take "you can chip away at it bit by bit" is a way of saying "you can do this completely by yourself"

Took me 10 months to make my first mythic back in the day. 6 months now is too much. I've already quit, and few more guildmates gonna too after seeing indeed it will 6 months per weapon. At least they didn't make it so u can only make one..or did they.

6 months and everyone in the party gets one isn't that bad, the problem is that requires 1 hour event every day and scheduling a full group doing that. The other problem is while a few of the weapons are clearly pretty strong they are just very uninteresting. If I could choose to get a bonanza weapon instead of prime for the same work I'd probably pick up like 5-6 bonanza weapons before I'd pick a single prime just because they open up far more interesting builds.

Yea, I don't really see much value in most of these for the level of effort.

Relics and mythics were game changing for most jobs attached to them, they had a really tough grind to achieve them during an era when the game was at its peak, but their quality and stats made it worth it and they still are to this day albeit in upgraded form. The value of the empy weapons was pretty high too, although probably not as obvious at first (I don't remember, been too long), I was around when aeonics were released so idk what the response was to those.

The Primes are just kinda meh. I don't see where any of them are going to make major changes to the way jobs are played. The stats are decent but I'm not sure they are good enough to justify doing ~200 1-hour long Sortie runs. A select few look good off the bat, some could be promising depending on the WS, and others are just hot garbage.

This could, of course, all change if the weaponskills are super good, but their continued emphasis and investment into Sortie makes me think they are going to be something for Sortie and below tier content, not Gaol type content. The PDL everywhere kinda lends itself to that too IMO. That would somewhat make more sense, though, given the amount of content covered by that in the game.

Then again, I'd probably complain if they were so good I had to go farm them for every job I had, so like another user said, I should probably consider it lucky that they aren't as game changing as the other weapon types were and I don't have to make one.

Yes, this is a fair comment. The JPN comment isn’t saying you can solo the whole thing but it also doesn’t state otherwise, just that “you can even make progress solo”.

theyre still less boring than aeonics tbh

Personally I'd greatly prefer challenging battle content to unlock primes, rather than an arbitrary hour-long daily grind.

Missed opportunity not to make a Reisenjima-esque Valhalla zone with new tiers of geas fete or something. An evergreen type of challenging content players would actually semi-enjoy doing to create a weapon.

Could've even still tied Sortie into it by making pop items drop from its bosses/Aminon/chests. Such as those currently useless -drites.

edit: oh maybe you're talking about the weapons themselves. yeah, I guess that's fair. though not by too much.

I just meant the weapon design, Sortie is still the worst endgame event we've possibly ever had

I'm really quite annoyed with how they've botched Prime Weapon implementation as they were something myself and so many others were looking forward to. Expectations weren't high, but it was still interesting to see how they'd turn out.

It's too late to adjust some of the gallimaufry costs, but man I wish they would've had Stage 3 cost like 250k Galli instead of 1mil and reduce the Psyche cost to perhaps 2, allowing for 2.5 Stage 3 weapons a month. One million galli isn't so bad for people in decent groups, but for solos/lowmans/returning/unskilled players, it's just too much to achieve reasonably for ONE weapon's stage 3.

Something like 250k (or even 500k) feels reachable and exciting enough for players to want to achieve and likely make multiple different primes of. Making a Stage 3 I'd imagine would help motivate players to go for Stage 4 if the weapons actually do perform strongly in Sortie too. They could've been something like a step up from Ambu weapons, a reachable goal for players of all groups and calibers to achieve and have (I'm hoping... Time will soon tell) a strong weapon in Sortie to help you farm Stage 4 more easily or even just farm Galli more easily for Emp +3.

But anyways, I can't see them changing stage 3/4 costs ever at this point, unfortunately.

A friend and I were discussing possible things they could do to perhaps realistically ease this Sortie grind, and a few things stood out.

1. Allow alliances into Sortie.

A lot of shells are *** tired of having to scale down their parties to 6man for content that requires it. For Odyssey, 6man party limitations make sense given the scale; however, with how huge Sortie is, why not allow us to bring all our friends (or mules, w/e) and work on Primes together, especially if they're going to have outrageous costs and be TIME-GATED anyways. It's not like Sortie is particularly that difficult anyways for good groups. If they do add some kind of HP scaling to bosses because of this, w/e, I'd just like people to not feel left out. Although it is funny because Sortie is such garbage content that most people in our group are willing to sit out lol

2. Add a weekly purchasable "Amplifier" for gallimaufry.

Perhaps Gama could sell a weekly amplifier (1mil gil cost?) of sorts that triples your next received gallimaufry within Sortie. I kind of like this because then gil could have some kind of value in progression of both Primes and Empyrean armor upgrades, and it could help remove some gil from the game at the same time. It would also encourage people to work towards Aminon to maximize the galli bonus (possible 90k galli?!). It wouldn't ease the Prime grind too much, but I think something along these lines would be interesting to implement, and all types of players would likely enjoy its value.

Ultimately, I understand why SE wants to make the Prime weapon grind outrageous in order rather arbitrarily extend our playtime, but for modern times and modern gaming, this just seems like too much. People within my shell are already demoralized and ready to peace out since it seems like this is all FFXI has to offer now, and I don't blame them. We're not young kids anymore with so much time on our hands too.

If they want to more heavily time gate Stage 4/5 Primes, honestly w/e, that's fine and makes more sense to me than doing so with Stage 3. But with how they're currently implementing Primes, it just feels like now more than ever, SE doesn't respect our time at all. Their tactics are just driving away some the remaining loyal players this game has, so it just feels so *** dumb to me.

A third try at Abyssea? I like the idea, but I've always though that Abyssea wasn't popular with the community?

Someone got a video? I'd like to watch an 18k solo run.

Edit: Weaponskills posted

Search youtube for 'lute ff11'. He did some live streams of sortie runs. I'm pretty sure there are A/E runs there.

Preliminary testing for Oshala (Prime Staff WS) - not much here as we were also doing a normal-ish Sortie run to see if anything changed, but it's more than nothing:

Aftermath effect seemed to boost magic damage by ~7-8% or so at AM3, lower effect at lower levels. It follows Relic Aftermath rules for duration (1 minute at 1k TP, 3 minutes at 3k TP), but it has three levels like Mythic.

There was no difference in Gallimaufry rate with Opashoro on compared to other characters or other runs, and no visible difference in boss AI, though we didn't do D/H/Aminon. I got Hexahedrite from Gartell, everyone else did not.

Does the ws dmg reduction is remove when that only sortie weapon ws tho? Or still better wait that delay before going in again!

Great idea. Our shell still does twice a week Dynamis, not because it's super compelling content, but because it's a fun way to get together and do an event that allows more than 6 people. Make a little spending money. But we need something new...

Even if they added something like a separate Odyssey Alliance KI that you could only use every 72 hours (and maybe even make entering on that reset the "normal" 20 hour KI timer), that would be great. Would let everyone play together, make some good progress over time, and eventually get a weapon. And if people wanted to do solo or smaller group Sortie in between event nights, cool.

I'm WAY past the point of wanting to make Sortie a daily hour long job. 30 minute Odyssey trying to encourage daily play was bad enough, an even bigger grind for an hour long event is too much.


Yeah, current design approach is horrible. Similar philosophy behind the god awful Shinryu BC droprates, or the ML timesink that is so brutal almost nobody actually does it unless they're botting.

An incredibly punishing grind isn't going to keep people engaged or playing the game. Maybe that appeals to 0.2% of the player base, but IMO the vast majority of people would be more interested in continuing to play if goals were more realistically achievable. I don't care if that means a tiny handful of people who want to rush through everything immediately say they finished content too fast - let them complain, and design the game for the much larger chunk of your playerbase who aren't quite that masochistic.

Honestly the fact that you're getting those kinds of numbers out of a melee SCH is kind of impressive. Aftermath doesn't sound bad either.

Surely you meant the weapons stats?
Because design wise they're just recoloured Relics, they didn't even bother to create new 3D models, so I can hardly see how someone could define them less "boring" than Aeonics, which were all new and unique models (some pretty cool even now after all these years)

I don't agree with the Sortie part either. I won't go as far as to claim it's one of the best endgame events ever created (spoiler: it's clearly not) but I wouldn't say it's the worst. I can think of several other endgame events in FFXI which were way worse than Sortie across different FFXI eras.

I mean... weapon design as in the stats, the theme, the overall design. Aeonics are just copy paste across the board and had no new weaponskill at all (regardless of shared animation), same aftermath, same everything with the exception of the staff adding Occult Acumen in place of store tp.

Oh yeah, in that sense ok.
But they're probably second right after Aeonic and pretty close to them, using the criteria you just said.

Not sure if that's quite an achievement, would've been honestly been pretty hard to create something even more bland than Aeonics lol

Sure, they're obviously not better than relics (to an extent, only cause of some of their unique effects) or mythics. Not even Dynamis SU5. But they're better than Aeonic, and that's something


Could argue that Empyreans aren't much better than Aeonics or Primes either but at least those also came with unique-at-the-time weaponskills and some of the latter upgrades made ones like club and staff 'cool'.

I also think they really underestimated how many jobs people who will do the current grind would want to get. I, like many people, could make most jobs work in some fashion for a large chunk of content, with some sort of rema on nearly all... even if it was 2 months to final stage for hardcore group and me plunking away for 5-6 months on my 3 boxing of alts/weaker chars I'd be for years anyway... as it stands, might pick one weapon on each of the 3 mains, and will go for that over years instead. Isn't about the content, just hard to commit to regular times with real life these days, as it is for many. I suppose the good news is, it isn't like any of this is required... I mean what do we use these weapons on? I mean how is pdl going to make a big difference, even on the the master trials... unless they all have low low low def but have capped damage outside of pdl or something...

You could say that, but on the other hand, its still R30 Nyame and accessories aren't that much worse than DD have access to (its total of 83%WSD). So if that would be done by pure DD it wouldn't be that much higher (unless by DRG with WSD boost from wyvern and trait, but its an exception)

Also not enough data obviously, but it looks like Oshala has a very steep increase from 1000 to 2000TP, then much lower for 2000 to 3000.

My guess from experience and provided data would be:

WSC:
50%INT
50%MND

fTP:
1000 2.4
2000 8.25
3000 11.5

How did the weaponskill create a Light Skillchain? Its level 2 property is Gravitation?

The skillchains attributes for most of the WS were updated in the 24th patch, it's now "Induration, Reverberation, Fusion"

Edit, full New List:

Damage varies with TP. Skillchain attributes: Detonation, Compression, Distortion. Helheim: Aftermath effect various with TP.
Damage varies with TP. Skillchain attributes: Trasnfixion, Scission, Gravitation. Laphria: Aftermath effet varies with TP.
Absorbs HP and MP. Damage varies with TP. Skillchain attributes: Induration, Reverberation, Fusion. Foenaria: Aftermath effect varies with TP.
Delivers a twofold attack. Damage varies with TP. Skillchain attributes: Transfixion, Scission, Gravitation. Gae Buide: Aftermath effect varies with TP.
Delivers a fourfold attack. Damage varies with TP. Skillchain attributes: Induration, Reverberation, Fusion. Dokoku: Aftermath effect varies with TP.
Damage varies with TP. Skillchain attributes: Detonation, Compression, Distortion. Kusanagi: Aftermath effect varies with TP.
Converts damage dealt to own MP. Damage varies with TP. Yagrush: Aftermath effect varies with TP.
Damage varies with TP. Skillchain attributes: Transfixion, Scission, Gravitation. Pinaka: Aftermath effect varies with TP.
Damage varies with TP. Skillchain attributes: Induration, Reverberation, Fusion. Earp: Aftermath effect varies with TP.
Delivers a twofold attack. Damage varies with TP. Skillchain attributes: Detonation, Compression, Distortion. Varga Purnikawa: Aftermath effect varies with TP.
Delivers a fourfold attack. Damage varies with TP. Skillchain attributes: Dissolution, Impaction, Fragmentation. Mpu Gandring: Aftermath effect varies with TP.
Damage varies with TP. Skillchain attributes: impaction, Compression, Distortion. Caliburnus: Aftermath effect varies with TP.
Delivers a twofold attack. Damage varies with TP. Skillchain attributes: Transfixion, Scission, Gravitation. Lorg Mor: Aftermath effect varies with TP.
Damage varies with TP. Skillchain attributes: Induration, Reverberation, Fusion. Opashoro: Aftermath effect varies with TP.

There's no notes about that anywhere that I saw, not that it matters

Where/How did you see it

I could list at least 10 endgame events we've had in the history of FFXI which are much, much worse. Probably at least half of end game events are worse.