The Odyssey - || Strategy And Discussion ||

In other words, the catch up process is to just pay a merc for clears.

You don't need to pay a merc if you're friends with people that are capable of doing the clears. Knocking out V15s is braindead easy for most groups that have done V20, and if you're trying to succeed on a smaller server you kind of need friends or what's the point. You don't necessarily even need a whole group, if you have 6 people looking to move through the ranks you could sit one person out to have someone pop for you while doing V15s, then group back up for V20 and everyone's caught up by the end.

If you're on Asura, yeah, pay a merc. Being able to skip tiers by just having someone else enter is more than generous enough as a catch up mechanism, in my opinion.

Probably a silly question, but Denounce is a TP move, right? He has to have TP after the fetter window opens to use it?

I've been going in on DRK and popping Soul Enslavement around 2:15-2:20 after the pull to try and control his TP, but I can't tell if it really cuts it down enough to prevent him from using it. I realize there are a lot of factors there (4+ people hitting it, may already have 2k+ TP when the window opens), but wasn't sure if it was a TP move or some time / random roll / JA move that he may use regardless of TP.

It's a TP move. When we used to do it the Monk method on V15, we had everyone else turn around while Monk would Chi Blast > 4 step SC with Impetus up, with the GEO checking for proc. You'd normally be able to get this process off twice or so during his aura window, which through process of elimination, allowed you to figure out the correct proc with as little chance at a wipe as possible. We also tried this with DRK using SE as you mentioned, which does significantly cut down on his TP feed during this window, and thus, lowers the probability of him using Denounce. When we used normal DDs and power through it, it went off much quicker.

However, it's still a TP move and it's random, so you could do everything right and he might still get it off and wipe the group.

It's very generous. Other content like Incursion progress isn't designed that way, and it makes grinding it for yourself a lot more frustrating. But you still have to clear all of the lower NMs in Gaol to even get access to pop the later ones, so I think when people refer to a catch-up method, they really just want a way to clear those lower tiers and unlock upper tiers (to the bosses we care about) without expending as many segments to grind through A1+2. A person low on segments has to invest so much of his stash just to be able to access the fights they really want to do. Getting dragged in for a clear is fine, but you still require a popper to amass RP from that higher-tier boss.

Thorny living in a fantasy.... a final fantasy... lmao

If you want to farm Bumba RP, for example, here's what you need to do:
Clear a T1 at V15 (4 fights)
Clear the rest of the fights on V0 (3 T1, 6 T2, 6 T3, Bumba, total of 16 fights)
Get someone to clear V15 or V20 Bumba with you (1 fight)

And you're caught up, at least to be able to get the gear. You can do 3xV20 T1 for a charge, fight Bumba V5, and get efficient RP. This costs you a total of 21 fights, or 63k Segments. You could accomplish this in less than two weeks with a decent group farming segments, or even less with a good group. If you need a better catch mechanic IDK what to tell you. This also assumes you've never fought a single Gaol NM before, and have no segments to begin with, and doesn't include the 3 free mog2s you start with.

Sure, you could argue it's difficult to put together a farming group, or find someone to let you in to V15 or V20 Bumba, but we're not talking about the player part, we're talking about the game design part. This event has probably the easiest catchup mechanic possible. As a matter of fact, if you have a generous friend you could skip ALL of the T0-T15 and just go straight to V20 and be done with the entire event in less than a month, just 17 fights (other than RP farming). From a game design and mechanics perspective, this event has the most catchup of catchup mechanics possible.

If you have friend or pay merc, it's 10 few minutes fights on v20 (A1+A2) that requires 30000 Segments, which is like 4 runs in pugs or 3 with friends or merc. Whole catch up process to pop V20 A3 would take 90-120minutes of Segments farming and maybe 2h of doing V20 A1+A2. In the Final Fantasy XI world, 4h is nothing.

You guys keep saying "if you have a friend". If someone is returning after a long break, they may or may not have a friend to carry them through the clears. Even if they do have a friend willing to, the catchup still costs the friend something. It costs the friend the same amount of segments to get people up to speed. I've seen a lot of complaints from the people who would love to help get other people their clears without it costing segments, where if they could forego the option to receive RP, they would otherwise help. With V25 coming out, that won't change either.

That's why I say the best catchup process is to just pay someone to do it for you, since that's an option for everybody.

Are we talking about getting someone to help you unlock a set of gear, get ready to start farming RP, or be able to pop V20 T3/T4 by yourself? Because honestly, the first two are already WAY too easy to bypass and cost the friend or merc almost nothing. Spending 1/2-1/3 of a single seg farming run to help a friend is an extremely low bar to clear and if you don't have a friend of that caliber you maybe need to play the game more.

If you're a newly returning player, the first thing you do shouldn't be jump straight to the end of the highest-tier endgame content and start collecting that stuff, before you've even gotten a linkpearl or made some friends.

If we're talking about how cumbersome it is for someone with all the clears to hand them off to a returning player so he can pop his own V20 Bumba or something...once again WTF is this scenario? Someone who's never done Odyssey before and has no segments wants to skip through all the grind and quickly get to the final boss on the hardest difficulty? Maybe you're playing the wrong MMO...

Instead of worrying about "catching up" just come back next year and skip odyssey entirely when the new gearset comes out that drawfs it.

I'm not surprised. Recently, SE has implemented methods to ease acquisition and progress on newer content. I think people are just hoping that same trend would follow for Odyssey. You even hear people talk about how they need to lower the grind needed for Exemplar Points, Sortie or the +2 earrings. It's a pretty common mindset nowadays that players want an easier method vs the grindy days of old.

Jokes on us. They are banking on V25s, Master Levels, and Sortie +2 earring grind taking us all the way until 2025.

Who are these people that have V20 bumba access that are so seg starved that they refuse to help other people. Everyone I know that finished V20 clears and R25 gear is sitting on 400k+ segs. That's almost 90 runs w/ an amplifier and ~130 on regular entries. Even with V25s coming out it'd be hard pressed to get super low on segs by the time you get to Bumba even assuming it takes 5+ run average to kill all the T1-3 V25s. That's assuming 0 additional seg farms which for a decent group spending 30-60 minutes for 1M-2M+ gil is a pretty easy thing to do every couple of days even if you aren't maximizing moglophone usage.

I refuse to believe people that have clears and access don't help other players because they can't. It's 100% because they just don't want to. Which w/e it's their 30.95/month they aren't obligated. But don't act like segments are this super hard scarce resource that can't ever be used for anything but the current best tier fights. At least not at this stage of the content life.

/raises hand

This is a really bad fight to bring up helping people with. Our static killed v20 bumba once and it took 20+ attempts over multiple days.

V20 bumba is a segment sink just for 1 clear. Rng with the 1hr, aura, add, and proc all determine your success. Sure a V15 clear is cake for most players v20 for the A3's and bumba is not something 1 person opens a fight, coaches the group through nuances and succeeds with 5 people who've never been IN the fight. The fights for A3's really come down to execution and reactivity or bringing 1 person at a time in a role that won't hinder the core party mechanics if they don't react.

Bumba is RNG to the extreme, get lucky and win, great you got the unlock, for our team we spent 60k+ for 1 win. You're ridiculous if you think helping people get a v20 bumba kill just by giving them access to the fight will be enough. The segment loss is real.

Obligatory: Boromir: "One does not simply walk into V20 Bumba."

Edit: Furthermore, we're talking about people with augments from previous tiers getting hamstrung on this fight for the level of rng you have to beat. Helping someone (save for maybe a whm with a good dt everything set and healing gear) will be a huge issue because beating 2:30 with an undergeared player (read: little to no augmented nyame) in a dd slot will not be possible therefore you HAVE to deal with the proc and God help the under geared players vs raaz if you get defense down aura (the rng combos get ridiculous).

This is not the fight to say "people are gate keeping because they just don't want to open the fight for people". No they don't want to open the fight that has so many levels of RNG that greater than 80% of the time it will literally just be a waste of segments.

If you think the fight is that easy are you successfully opening the fights for people? If you are preach to us about the players you regularly assist in getting this kill just by opening the fight for them.

None is talking about clearing v20 Bumba for new players tho. We are talking about clearing V20 A1 and maybe A2 and access to V20 A3 at most and Bumba clear and access to V15. After you grind your gear to R20 having access to super easy RP farming by doing 5%+ HP to V19-V20 A3 and V15 Bumba, you can then try to join some V20 A3 or Bumba clears. I hope no new player expect bigger shortcuts than that, unless its via merc or long time friendship.

Sorry I had to reread a couple times to make sure I wouldn't mischaracterize what you're saying Simon, so for "people should help people get access to "this""

"This"=
A1 bosses either V15-20 1 kill x4
A2 bosses either V15-V20 1 kill x6
A3 bosses at MOST V15 1 kill x6
A4 boss at most v10 1 kill x1

So a group sends 1 person to work with 5 people to open fights for their group, they now have R20 augment-ability on everything except Nyame, they bring their group and get 1 V15 Nyame kill, now the entire group has R20 ability on Nyame and no experience with any of the bosses. Let's say they RP Grind nyame, and finish that. What are the odds that the group continues to do odyssey? About the same as the amount of people who are doing odyssey to get to that point.

What are the odds that the group leader starts doing PUG for stuff they want RP on, high I'm sure, but as soon as they're done with what they want the server is back to where it was with 1 more person with augments and the same amount of people with access to the fights doing the fights.

The only way to counter this is to bring 5 people with 1 leader opening the fights the problem is your odds of a 1 fight success at that point go down unless the 5 people have already been putting in the time to level jobs and make comps between them capable of the content, which is the biggest complain people have about doing this content.

No one is screaming omfg I have a group and we have all the jobs needed to do the content, and the will power and knowledge to complete the fights but God damn its just too hard to do V0, V5, and V10 in order for our group to really start working on this content. The complaints come in when people can't use the same jobs for every fight,

"Well I only have X, Y, and Z jobs leveled/geared so I'll never be able to do odyssey"

The problem isn't access to the fights it's the unwillingness to do anything more than they have to do the content. All of the fights using magic strategies rune fencer doesn't really require epeo, but do we have a sudden influx of players making rune to do odyssey? No. Because all they want is access to bumba and if they get 1 kill we can do 6% and keep doing our dd jobs with better gears and reap the rewards from a game system asking them to do something more than they currently are, for rewards that they want.

All giving someone access to V15 bumba will do is increase bumba pugs for a few weeks and it will die off again. The players who are actually building jobs to do odyssey deserve a way to skip the grind for V0-10 I would agree but it shouldnt be with someone carrying a leader through 16 fights.

Edit: The only valid reason, imho, for someone to be able to "skip the V0-10 grind is its a waste of 144k segments for their group which is a lot. The problem with skipping the grind is once most people won't even look at odyssey again if they had r20 nyame. That's the carrot at the end of a very long stick that requires groups to coordinate and level/gear jobs they may not have or have no interest in.

I wouldn't really say you're wrong, I have a great example of that myself. Some friends play too late at night for me to join them, so I let them log my GEO (with all V20 clears and a million+ segments for them to waste) to boost themselves. 8 months later, they still don't have all V15 clears.

That said, would you really want it another way? Experience and job points have been massively reduced in grind, and there are campaigns for most things that you need to catch up a job quickly. Having job variety has been a core part of the game for a decade, people who aren't willing to do that might be playing the wrong game in general.

SE doesn't have the resources to overhaul the entire game's balance, so either you end up with a trivial game where everyone can have everything by just showing up, or you need job variety. There's not another way to do things, because if mishmashed jobs can win everything then optimized jobs will have 0 trouble.

I mean imo people should go and do all tier thresholds and fights themselves. Not only because it feels more rewarding, but simply because it's actually playing the game >.> People cry about lack of content, then cry about content requirements like making new jobs, building pug, grind or just play better. It has no sense, so I generally don't even write what I just wrote in first sentence, because I don't expect those people to be convinced by logical arguments.
If people start to tell me that Odyssey lacks catch up mechanic though, then it's simply not true. It has one and it's very exploitable too. Requirements for it's exploitation is whole other story.

I think people in this thread give "catch up mechanic" a different meaning and are arguing about the same words but different definition.


To me a "catch up mechanic" in a MMO is something that
1) is not available at start
2) is useless for old players or those who did that content when it was in its prime
3) is useful for people who are returning to the game, or who were simply late, so they can "catch up" (i.e. reduce the gap) with the people who already did that content.


In most mmos basically, once a new content or a new tier is released, they "nerf" the previous or add feature to make it easier/faster. You can do that through thousand of different means, but that's the goal in general.

Odyssey doesn't have such a feature, for now. Altough you could argue Amplifiers fit the role but imho it's a different story.

The main problem hindering catch up in odyssey imho is:
1) Everyone has to spend segments to participate in a fight, even if u're not interested in that fight (i.e. doing to help friends)
2) The sheol entry KI is once per day (and u require that to farm segments)

These two things, especially the latter, are going to seriously slow down any player who wants to "catch up".
I'm not sure how SE could deal with that, supposing they even want to.
Double segments campaign?
Make so you can store 2x KIs instead of only 1?
Give players the option to participate in fights without spending segments (and without getting rewards either, of course).
Give a better RP>Segments exchange as a form of compensation for people who want to help others?

I dunno, so many ways they could address it, but do they even want to?
I think it would be very beneficial for the event itself and for the FFXI community.
Other people in here claim it would destroy the event and the game and the world and blah blah
Agree to disagree?
I doubt anyone will change their opinion at this point, and honestly everyone is perfectly entitled to do so.

did you just describe empyrean+3?

You mean that, for some jobs/roles, the performance increase granted by Emp+3 achieves the goal of making the previous content easier?
I disagree.

Or rather, I agree that it totally does so, but I don't think it changes anything with the "problems" (supposing we want to consider them such) I described.
Sure if you manage to get emp+3 u'll have an easier time going through old odyssey content on the relevnt jobs, but we still have the issue that

1) You have to get Emp+3, it won't magically appear in your inventory
2) You still have to farm segments
3) You still have to "waste" segments to help other people


So, in the terms of what I described, nothing really changes and I personally still stand by my opinion that yes, I think it would be good for the game and for everyone if SE ever decided to do something practical about it.

Lol

Other MMOs have way bigger jumps in vertical progression. Meaning previous content can be way easier because stuff is way worse than current gear. Odyssey isnt worse than current gear. Not even some gear from 10 years ago is worse than current gear.
Such catch up mechanics would have no sense in FFXI, even with recent gear being slightly stronger in vertical than horizontal progression.
That being said, you have catch up mechanic to gear that is indeed vertically behind in general, like Escha gear (through Domain Invasion points) or Ambuscade (you can now get way more +2 upgrades in one month, maybe even all at once?) or even Artifact+3 (scales dropping from trash). Similar mechanic for Odyssey gear would be nonsense.

You can minimize that loss to almost being a non issue.
Assuming you want to help people with V20A1, V20A2 and V15A3 clears (I hope you dont expect people to get carried to V20A3 clears right?). You can do V19 A1 clear, V15 A3 clear, 5% damage to whatever V20 NM you want to farm for RP (use amplifier). Your friend will get V19 clear on A1, V15 on A3 and you will get RP for NM you want. Repeat at least 6 times for all A1 and A3 clears. Then replace A3 with A2 V20 for even better RP farm. Then if you want replace A1 V19 with V20 for clears etc. There is more combination and you lose almost nothing. If you dont clear, you still will do 5% to get RP and your friend will get RP too. It's not the fastest way to clear everything, your friend will need more segments to get all clears, but he will farm lots of RP in the process too. Perfect solution for people who want help, but still want to farm RP.

I think you're going beyond the core point.
Can you minimize the loss?
Yes.
Can you be creative with the current system in finding better compromises while helping friends and still getting something for you?
Yes,

Is it relevant with what I described before?
Alas, it's not.

Been thinking a lot about how little (by comparison) the population has embraced Odyssey vs Dyna-D and Sortie...and after this long, its probably time to just accept was SE told us on release:

'Those who put more time into this content will see better rewards.' (sic)

They flat out said when Gaol came out that not everyone would have the same results, and thus not the same rewards. But no one is satisfied with just having R15 A3/4 gear, apparently- if they can't find a way to finagle a v20 Bumba win for their Fudo-onry SAM (because its just their FAVVVS way to play FFXI- with real people having to be their trusts), then ***, I guess Sortie is ***content and I just won't bother.

The All Or Nothing mentality among most players is what's killing Ody. It already scales beautifully, its just some people aren't accepting that they're not gonna get v20 wins, let alone v25, due to either their own or their groups' stubbornness to not become more flexible in setup, combined with the extremely harsh fact that sets have to be altered from our previous "ideals" a lot in there (more -DT for backline in things like midshot on Arebati is one example, there are dozens).

Honestly, not everyone deserves R20+ gear from there, and that's ok. What boggles me is the people ok with walking around with non-augmented pieces instead of at least getting some v5/10 wins and (in some cases) seeing massive improvement. But alas...it isn't TEH BESTEST so it must suck til then, right?

I've said it before but I'll reiterate because I think Sechs brought up some good points.

I still think a returning player or an existing player just getting into Ody should do it themselves, one vengeance level at a time, to learn the fights, gain gear and RP, and gain experience with their jobs.

Failing that, if you really need to get an unlock for a piece of gear, I think it should be trivial to get someone to get you an unlock with good social networking.

If you want to farm RP, it's pretty easy to do with a fresh group starting from nothing. Failing that, if you really want to skip to V15 Bumba or V15 of a T3 NM, you can get a single clear from a friend to get the higher ranked augments. This should also be pretty trivial and also highly unnecessary.

I don't think it's easy to hand off any V20 T3/T4 clears, but IMHO it shouldn't be, that's the best gear in the entire game, it necessarily shouldn't be easy to pass off your year-long accomplishments to a brand new player.

I like the idea of "spend no phone, get no rewards" system for a player who has already cleared a fight. This could be a good way to incentivize friends to help get clears. This would, however, make it much easier to merc things and much easier to help friends get clears, and I think it would dramatically cheapen the achievement because while the fights are difficult, with infinite attempts I think a lot more people would be handing off clears if it only cost them their time.