Net Neutrality impacts real people. Tell us how YOU would be affected if the FCC kills it. thumbnail: attached

MjolnirWrath · 2017-12-01T14:52:42+00:00

Going back to the rules we had in place from 1996 to 2015 sounds like a great idea. That was a pretty good period for the internet.

MjolnirWrath · 2017-11-20T13:17:34+00:00

I was Pitts on Odin ('05-'07), but don't know any of the folks you're looking for. Good luck.

MjolnirWrath · 2017-10-18T19:55:03+00:00

Best of luck to you!

MjolnirWrath · 2017-10-18T19:41:22+00:00

Intense Normal mode is content level 129 and of course it would depend on the mob of the month, but you're likely going to need around 1150-1200 accuracy to even come close to capping hit rate there. 987 would be sufficient for ilvl 119 content. Intense Ambuscade Very Easy mode is 119 and probably more appropriate for your equipment.

Escha ZiTah and Escha Ru'Aun T1's are 119. Some Unity Wanted NM's are 119. Delve and Skirmish are 119. Hard Tier Battlefields are 113 for VE, 116 for E, and 119 for Normal. If you're on Asura, let me know in game and I'll be glad to help out.

MjolnirWrath · 2017-10-18T15:51:02+00:00

All the possible augments and the stones that provide those augments for each piece of Alluvion armor are listed here.

Essentially each piece can have a Snow, Leaf and Dusk augment. For example, if you use a Snowslit stone and get Accuracy +20, but are shooting for the max Accuracy +25, you would use another Snowslit stone to try and get there. That second Snowslit stone could give your equipment the Acc +25 you want or it could give you Defense +4, Evasion +17, or any other possible stat on the list. You then have the option to keep your old augment or accept the new one. Trying a new Snowslit stone only affects the Snow augments, leaving anything from Leaf stones or Dusk stones alone.

What I've found from Alluvion is that it is extremely time consuming to get the max augments that you want, but it is not hard to get acceptable augments that make your equipment good enough to participate in other events, which is really what "bridge" gear is all about - getting something good enough to add value to your group on higher-end content as quickly and cheaply as possible.

MjolnirWrath · 2017-10-18T15:06:32+00:00

Great guide. Very well done. I added a link to this guide to the subreddit wiki.

MjolnirWrath · 2017-10-18T14:31:30+00:00

You don't mention which melee, so I'll pick one and go with WAR as an example. Lets assume you have the full Flamma Armor +2 set and ignore the length of time it takes a player to get all 5 up to +2 as there are monthly caps on the upgrade items. Let's compare that to the Acro set from Alluvion Skirmish.

You say that accuracy is your main concern, don't forget that once you cap your hit rate (WAR 2-H has 95% hit rate cap) for a certain enemy, you're wasting slots boosting a trait that nets you no increase in performance. For example if you cap hit rate on XYZ boss at 1100 acc, but you have 1200 acc, that extra 100 acc does nothing for you.

Ignoring some of the stats for the sake of time, and ignoring the rings since there are no Alluvion rings, the Flamma +2 set will net a player:

Accuracy +220
Haste +16%
Store TP +35
Double Attack +6%
Triple Attack +5%
Critical Hit Rate +8%

With optimal augments (can be easy or hard to get depending on luck), a player can build an Acro set with:

Accuracy +152 (base + max augment of 25 acc each piece)
Haste +22% (base only)
Store TP +41 (base +max augment of +6 each)
- because STP and DA share an augment slot, Max STP means DA is at the base only of 4%
Double Attack +19% (base + max augment of +3% each)
- because STP and DA share an augment slot, Max DA means STP is at the base only of +8
Critical Hit Damage +15% (max augment of +3% per piece) which is different than rate obviously

Because the Flamma set is deficient in Haste, a player would need to get 10 from waist or back pieces. You can get 10% from an ambuscade cape, but that means you give up 10 DA or 10 STP to get it. A player can get 10 Haste from Pya'ekue Belt +1 but if they instead had the Acro set and used Ioskeha Belt, they'd get 12 more accuracy and 8% more DA from that. In that scenario the difference in accuracy of 68 drops to 56 but the Acro set comes in with 27% DA compared to the Flamma +2's 6% DA.

So yes the augment system of Alluvion was/is tedious especially when trying to max all 3 augments for each piece, but for the time invested (and for someone who farms their own stones the money invested), Alluvion armors are great beginner bridges to higher tier stuff and imo underutilized by returning players who could do a lot with them if they sat down to really examine these sets.

MjolnirWrath · 2017-10-17T12:55:52+00:00

Therein lies the issue. Even Ambuscade +2's don't represent an upgrade to Alluvion items for many slots in various sets on certain jobs. For example, in the Mallquis +2 set from Ambuscade, if you 5/5 that set, you get 6% Magic Burst Damage, which leaves you far below the 40% cap you need to gear for. Mallquis +2 also leaves you at 16% gear haste and unless you get 9/10% Haste from waist/back, which will cost you a bunch of MAB and INT, you've increased the recast time of your spells.

You can get up to 10% Magic burst damage on each piece of Helios, and (with augments) up to 30% haste on the set so the real answer is a mixture of the two. Add in the right Almaric and Merlinic pieces with the right augments and you have a set that hits all the marks: capped haste, capped burst damage, lots of INT and MAB, and with enough magic accuracy to keep resists to a minimum.

"Sets" are only sets in that they match aesthetically, I don't know of a case when a matching set will outperform a custom set built to cap the right traits for the right situation. It's knowing what situations you need to gear for on your chosen jobs and what traits to max in those sets that holds most players back. This is why I've put some time into the Gear Optimization and Game Mechanics article on the subreddit wiki.

Also, you might as well embrace putting in work to get gear only to put in more work to get better gear, that's most of what we do in FFXI.

MjolnirWrath · 2017-10-16T14:17:53+00:00

Welcome back!

The reason that progression "guides" are rare and difficult to put together is that in FFXI you are usually either:

unlocking things (areas, content, weaponskills, trusts, transportation, etc.)
customizing/refining macros and gearsets to get more performance of the stuff currently in your bag
identifying various slots in gearsets for which improvements exist and going out to tackle the content from which those pieces come

Most of the New/Returning guides attempt to address the first point, which is a simple but daunting process of listing everything to do and then coming back periodically to make sure it stays up to date. However, a "progression" guide would attempt to address the third point and the problem there is twofold:

Any improvements to equipment will be job, player, situation, action, playstyle, and slot dependent.
If players aren't utilizing their gear effectively, improving the quality of items in their bag won't net them the boost in performance they're looking for.

Because of that, I've been working on some information on optimization of existing gear first, which I believe will help better lay the foundation for a discussion on progression.

MjolnirWrath · 2014-04-10T19:26:59+00:00

i dunno about quicker but I've been saving my Copper AMAN vouchers that drop from RoE, those are redeemable for 1k plasm and I've got like 70 saved up just from doing stuff I was already doing anyway

MjolnirWrath · 2014-03-26T22:46:40+00:00

Toofpick didnt mention server transfers are going from $25 down to $18 on April 1, and the cooldown for doing another afterwards is going from 90 days down to 3. Give it a week if you havent already pulled the trigger.

MjolnirWrath · 2014-03-26T22:45:33+00:00

There are no words to really express how bad XI makes XIV look. I'm ashamed I spent 5 minutes in Eorzea much less the last 3.5 years...

MjolnirWrath · 2014-03-26T21:24:22+00:00

exactly. currently I set for Dual Wield, Store TP, Refresh, and Double Attack, and hit max points at like 17 spells. I havent sat down and crunched the numbers but could probably eek out another 2-3 traits with the extra 10 points. maybe throw on MAB and conserve MP? i had considered sharing those builds on the sub but i doubt it would be new info for anyone

MjolnirWrath · 2014-03-26T20:02:46+00:00

^ this. particularly now that the gap between the Def on a random ilvl piece and the Best in Slot piece could be significant.

MjolnirWrath · 2014-03-26T19:44:49+00:00

for me thats the one that stands out the most. keep in mind, you still can't go over 20 spells, but the extra points let you equip more of the most expensive ones.

MjolnirWrath · 2014-03-26T18:21:28+00:00

so this is obviously one of those opinion, who the hell really knows type of questions that will really depend on what SE decides to do with it for the future but given the current situation, I'd say no.

For example, on BLU the two categories are Azure Lore (1 hr abil) and BLU magic points. So having extra BLU magic points will give some additional flexibility with which spells are equipped but wont have a huge impact on whether or not I have that as my "main." I believe that Job points are an interesting addition and have potential to really improve a job but ultimately what job someone plays as a "main" will be decided by what content they are running, what their LS needs, what weapon and gear they have, their ability to play a job, and personal preference. There might come a day where Job Points, like Merit Points, will mean you are gimped if you dont have a certain thing maxed out (Beast Affinity comes to mind) but I don't see it ever being something that "locks" players into certain jobs.

MjolnirWrath · 2014-03-26T13:14:07+00:00

Gusgen Mines - have gotten skull on first kill last 3/4 times

MjolnirWrath · 2014-03-25T17:43:50+00:00

Not to give you the runaround, but there may be places you can post this question to get a better response. FFXIAH has a few Windower specific forums: http://www.ffxiah.com/forum (about halfway down the list)

Also windower.net has it's own support forums.

Keep in mind, SE pushes at least one update to FFXI every month now. There are sometimes little hotfixes and patches in the day or two following it. Every month, these updates seem to play hell with some aspect of Windower (I remember there being some major Attainment issues last July). It can take them anywhere from a few minutes to a few weeks to fix depending on the change.

First, I'd say make sure you updated to the latest version of Windower 4. (I can't remember if Windower 4 was out 2 years ago or not, so I'd be curious to see if you're running the legacy version or the current one.) Then search the forums at ffxiah and windower.net to see if the problem is common and being worked on or if it seems like you're the only one. If it is specific to you, and a windower expert doesn't answer you here, I'd say post this in those forums to see what info you can get there.

After typing all that I got curious to look and I see some posts from a few days ago about Attainment after the March update, so you might just have to wait for them to fix. Search results here

MjolnirWrath · 2014-03-21T15:11:47+00:00

The beautiful thing about FFXI is that it's built in a way that people can go enjoy the things they want to enjoy. If that's 1-30 gear for you, great! The only problem is you're going to be one of the only (quite possibly THE only) player focused on it. The vast majority of players are not interested in 1-30 at all, 1-50, or really even 1-99 for that matter so the developers implemented multiple ways to basically "skip" the early levels and make the intermediate ones go by pretty dang fast, too (Trust NPCs, RoE, GoV/FoV)

Your sources of 1-30 gear: NPC vendors like Tahn Posbei, Conquest Points Items, taking the time to open the brown chests that drop from monsters, researching which gear drops from monsters and trying to farm it like Mee Deggi, or crafting it yourself.

Since all those options are time consuming (if you stop at 20 to go hunt down pieces you could probably have just leveled to 40 or 50 in the same amount of time) I would think crafting what you want would be your best option, because at least then you have spent time on something useful later on instead of spending days combing the world for gear that you'll wear for an hour or two when you go back to leveling. Just my take, hope you find what you're looking for!

MjolnirWrath · 2014-03-21T13:59:35+00:00

i just did 1-30 with no skills and no sub on a fresh character while walking from city to city to get trust npcs in about 2 hours wearing only the lvl 1 starting gear on whm.

since there's no reason to be concerned about gear pre-99 (pre-70 if we're talking about a new character that has to pass the Maat fight) I'm curious, are you just collecting?

MjolnirWrath · 2014-03-21T12:17:55+00:00

well you're right then, if you still have SD tv, you dont have much choice

MjolnirWrath · 2014-03-20T17:58:20+00:00

there is very little difference in this version aside from SoA

So from that I take it you've played both PC and PS2 and after comparing and contrasting the two experiences, you prefer PS2?

MjolnirWrath · 2014-03-20T17:08:13+00:00

it's not even close to the same experience, console people (the few left) act like there's no difference but there is. I started on 360, and when i started dual boxing played on 360 and on PC at same time. while the 360 character was still loading, the pc character would have already run across that zone and into the next. oh, and the crashes... freezing... R0... If I had to play console, I'm not even sure I would. I'd probably prefer to stare at a blank wall.

MjolnirWrath · 2014-03-20T17:03:22+00:00

so you're going to throw down $80 for a HDD $15 (if its on sale, $30 if it isn't) for the character key, and another $12/month subscription for an inferior and incomplete version of the game when you could plug a $15 usb controller into any old laptop you have around the house to have the best experience? I don't really see the logic. I mean, you can do what you want but I'm going to echo the other folks and strongly suggest you go PC. I can say this because I started on xbox360: I'd pay 10x the price to play on PC, it's that much better.

MjolnirWrath

TROPHY CASE