Oathsworn Blade Master Trial

Magic dmg of corresponding element to the naakul to bring down the aura?

Since this is a fight to show off prime weapons, are people using prime weapons to hit August? Maybe hitting him with a Non prime (or even stupidly non stage 5 prime) causing him to do his Dispel move. Does he spam it when people are hitting with a prime weapon?

Wouldn’t it be great if the fight had drops that made you stronger, assisted with beating the fight, and incentivized people to actually do the fight? Yeah, that would be nice.

Nah, because making you stronger makes all other content weaker, and that's the last thing we need. At best, they should have like.. occ. atks 2-3x or +50% followup attack on these weapons so they're slightly niftier for procs.

games' main goal is to make you quit.

Are you quitting enough?

Are you kidding me? When I was one of the few big timer on puberty blockers, drinking vanilla soy milk and sleeping on my ultra rare hentai pillow I used to feel special about myself. Now it's mainstream (thanks alot Elliot Page).

I want to be the only one sporting these in Rabao, for at least one month. So, respect the dibs, please.

Nah, if this fight was designed to make people quite, they'd offer an actual reward. The aesthetic weapons are just for insane bragging rights. I still congratulate people who have the Crystal Paradise dagger lol.

I want that dagger it looks nice

Vicenarian on the AH forum asking about Master Trials :D

You caught me, lol. I'm wanting to do an acknowledgement / congratulations video on the first group that clears. The groups figuring these fights out and clearing them are doing some incredible things. I just wanted to point their accomplishments out in the community.

It sounds like the auras the naakuls get are the ones from the Wildskeeper Reives, so have you tried their proc removal method of just doing tons of magic damage of the element they are weak to since that's how its removed in WKR? Also can you stop Augusts' regen with a capped helix? Haven't tried the fight at all, but wondering if some kind of burst + ranged setup works.

Also wondering if something like a RUN COR GEO and 3 SCHs could just kill everything with helixes and kaustras.

I like how every piece of content that has come out in the last 2 years can only be successfully beaten by 1-5% of the population.

What a horrible business model....

Definitely not, since the Naakuals pop one at a time as you damage august. For that to be remotely viable you'd need it all alive at once.


Kind of how MMOs work.. if you can't challenge the latest content, it's because you haven't maxed out the earlier content(or got filtered by the ~85 IQ requirement), so it's not like you have nothing to do.

I'm fairly new to endgame. All I've heard from the players in my Linkshell is that, endgame is too small in FFXI now. Divergence (maybe), Sortie, and Odyssey is all they have. When Crystal Paradise came out, some got excited and started proging, but most just said that it was too hard.

As for me, I'm not in the top 5% that can clear this cutting edge content. What I do have, however, is all of the Relic, Mythic, Empyrean, Aeonic, and eventually, Prime acquisition content. I'm currently working on my Artifact armor, haven't even started on my Relic or Empyrean sets yet. None of this is even touching Unity, Ambuscade, HTBF, Geas Fete, etc.

I know I'm crazy biased from being practically a new player. I've been playing on and off for 2 years when my work schedule allows. But I am absolutely loving this game because I literally have 20 years of relevant content to play through. And for the top 5% who've already done this stuff, the recent combat content seems to be trying to cater to them.

Games amazing when the content you do makes you stronger.

Games boring as *** when the content you do kills your motivation.

These trials to me are more like slaps in the face because they wasted time developing these events that are meaningless attempts to satisfy veterans when in reality it is only feeding the fuel to just quit.

A returning player shouldn't be focused on these events

Returning player should be having fun doing omens! Good gear, super fun-quick content!

Omen fun > all other content.

Most MMOs that are still getting content releases release casual content, mid-tier decently challenging content, and hardcore content at the same time (such as FFXIV, which has Dungeons/normal trials for casuals, extreme trials for mid-tier players, and savages/ultimates/unreals for hardcores). Players of all skill levels get new fighty stuff to do with almost every content patch even if few people can do all of it.

Compare that to FFXI, whose only new content at this point in the game is hardcore 1% stuff (5% for non-multi-boss run Sorties if we go back a bit further), with everything else being monthly rotation stuff.

It's like SE doesn't even understand replay value

Additionally, that sort of strictly linear content progression model hasn't really been how MMOs work since, well, FFXI and Vanilla-TBC WoW. Some KMMOs still carry that tradition like Lost Ark in a sense, but otherwise the genre is seasonal these days. A block of content comes out that universally raises the power ceiling with tiering in that new power bracket, people participate in the content that matches their skill level, repeat next cycle/season. Some in-cycle grind or repetition might be required, such as getting Savage BiS in XIV to be able to challenge the Ultimate content for that cycle coming out in the next patch or getting gear in M+ in WoW to do harder iterations of M+, but old content is indeed old and outscaled. There are also usually provisions to get caught up to the bottom of that new power bracket easily.

This comes with advantages and disadvantages, naturally. Gear is much shorter lived and content has shorter half-lives of player interest, meaning you can't do something like tell players to run Dynamis-D twice a week for seven years and have that content endure, but it also keeps player populations in a similar band of content. There's a reason that new/returning players usually just grind out the HTMB drops they need via E/N spam (for older ones) or VE spam (for newer ones) instead of getting a proper group together and going for VD. Lot competition, of course, but as that content is both outdated yet still required in a sense the player population that's interested in it and still gets something from it doesn't have a critical mass.

See also the entire Odyssey situation where new/returning players have a nightmare of trying to climb from full v0 clears of all 17 fights to whatever relevant vengeance level they want to stop at because most people that would want to earnestly engage in that climb did so years ago. So instead people either get a single v0 carry and stop with 0 RP gear forever or try to cop a v15 skip from someone that already did it.

god forbid those who have played this game for almost 2 decades and have stayed up on content get a leg up on those who only pop in when XIV gets boring between expansions.

Those "returnees" are in the same place we were when the content was released- a better place, even...they can go rush some Empy+3 done and be far stronger than the players who got the first clears of the content. There's Master Levels which apparently everyone feels the need to buy, meaning 40-50 more skill levels and stats than we ever had.

You shouldn't be able to leave a progression-based game for a year+ and be on the same page as someone who stuck around and did the content then. That's why those 'modern' MMOs and their seasonal progression model is so offensive to many of us who still love XI- its the only place where this kind of thing matters any more.

sortie

Individually, absolutely. MLs and Emp+3 are strong enough to the point of making a lot of that earlier yet still relevant for accessories and whatnot side content quite easy to solo on the right jobs. Socially, more of a give and take I think. Trying to form an Ody static is like pulling teeth, JP/ML is largely a matter of buying or botting it (I rarely see CP/Exemplar parties being formed in the LSs I'm in), but if the content doesn't have a strict daily KI system and party size it's fairly easy to get carried (Omen and W1/W2 Dyna-D in particular) due to player power.

Of course, the personality matrix of a player that only really plays XI a few months every year or two at best is sort of incompatible with what Ody and Sortie ask of player organization and participation, so those difficulties are expected and aren't too surprising, I suppose. Outside of idly working at REMA when their interest allows that point might be where the game stops for that class of player and that's fine.

Regardless, I wasn't saying that XI can or should change and find the hostility towards on/off players a bit strange and unwarranted. I can only imagine that eventually people get tired of helping out players that disappear in 2-3 months, which is fair. I was more just talking about and refuting the notion that all MMOs are like what Thorny mentioned, it's more this one in particular which suits the audience still here.

I (and many like me) have zero hostility to returnees or those who choose to play XI in spurts, then go play something else for a while. Its a completely valid way to enjoy one's free time.

Just stop expecting XI to reward that the same as those who grind. 10 years ago this wouldn't even be a discussion, just a "git gud" and move on. I really can't understand where this mentality of "deserving" to be at endgame just b/c of one's 12.95.

---OR---

Am I to pity those without leadership or social skills to form up among the many just like them? If its a big problem, there surely must be more than just 2 or 3 returnees looking to get back into the game.....OH WAIT. That's right, years of telling returnees "get a Naegling you'll be fine" and nothing else has created such an entitlement system within the game. I guess if one took the effort to gather up all returnees to make an Ody group, they'd have 4 Kaja Sword WARs, a +5 roll COR, and a PUP.

Maybe the issue isn't the content, or lack of it in the eyes of the grinders...its that sense of entitlement among the returnees ignoring years of content b/c they're convinced they're just as ready as someone who's been playing the past 2 years steady.

O. R. THEY?

member how it used to be, you had to suckup to some spotty teenager that ran one of the 3-4 linkshells that could claim kings. When you applied to some linkshell, everyone voted on if you were to be allowed to join or not and if you did anything to annoy anyone in the ls you would not get in.

it would be stuff like, no that person camped on my colli party last week and broke out chain 87

Could not even buy it back in the day, cause shells refused to let anyone have that gear.

Back then you could not get the best gear unless you were in with the correct handful of people, now at least it's based on how good your gear / skill is.

Sorry for reading hostility when none was intended, that was my mistake. XIV Player (derogatory) is something I'm used to experiencing when talking in XI spaces about the broader MMO genre, which I enjoy and try to experience as many different parts of as I can including XI, Everquest, WoW, and so on as time and interest allows. Some XI players get Weird about it when it's even mentioned. I started on the back foot defensively there and tone is difficult to convey over text, so I apologize for reading things incorrectly.

My thoughts are usually along the lines of there being advantages and disadvantages to how every game does things and how design decisions can influence social dynamics one way or the other. That's why preferences and different games exist though and there's no Ur-MMO that does everything in exactly the right way. I also experience XI completely unfiltered by nostalgia and just as the modern game has existed since ~2019 or 2020 or so (when I started), which likely also colors my perspective on it and its relation to the genre.

Regardless, I think the thread's a bit derailed at this point and apologize for that.

Don't apologize! That's what friends are for!

You can't have it both ways. Either there are extremely few returnees and the 1-5% number is grossly misrepresenting how many people are doing the content or 95-99% of players need the content and it should be easy to make a group.

If the majority of people are completely unwilling to group, but still playing the game, they must like it as is. This game has always been designed in a way that required grouping and dedication. The difficulty has ramped up substantially, but that's largely because players forced SE's hand with things like react and auto-play gearswaps.

SE obviously doesn't want top content in this game to be casual and solo-friendly. They've made that clear time and time again. If that's what you're looking for as a player, you should probably move on once you clear the 20 years of content that is currently casual and solo-friendly.