FFXIV

[The Legend of Sunblade]

http://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/1bbb52f23cb2a462dec0230aa523d0406f57ed97

Patch notes for patch 3.5. Some stuff here that's relevant for ya, like exp gain for crafting-gathering from level 1-45 going way the fuck up

Anything that has 2.x is possibly relevant to where you're at. Some good QoL changes in there.

[Bebpo]

So before I head off to sleep, I'm gonna tell the story of my FIRST EXPERIENCE WITH FATE CAMPING.

Now that I understood one more system in FFXIV (hunts), I thought I'd go kill one of the FATE dailies.  One of my FATE dailies was Sekhmet, the Coerul in Raincatcher Gully.  So I look around for a lvl.50 fate/lvl.50 enemy and don't see one.  I google and find this:

http://ffxiv.gamerescape.com/wiki/Closing_Time

which seems a little weird since it's lvl.34.  So now I'm curious if the daily hunt bills aren't necessarily lvl.50 enemies and only the B rank weekly bill is lvl.50 (+ the non-bill A rank hunts you just see going around).  I've never waited for a FATE before, so since that link says "15M" I figure I'll wait 15 minutes and it'll pop.  Well, after a while it's not appearing and I'm going around doing other fates and stuff in the area.  I realize the "15M" probably means the length that the fate lasts.  So I google around about fate camping and spawn timers and apparently it can be up to 2-3 hours between a fate re-appearing :O and the more I read, the more I see that there are going to be sidequests and animus weapons and stuff that will require FATE camping and apparently waiting around for hours for fates to show up is one of the major issues people have with the game and I read a bunch of posts of people quitting the game because they couldn't get their fate to spawn for their animus weapon.  Yikes.

And then suddenly my FATE spawned and it was only lvl.34 after all, so I down-synced and killed it and got 20 allied seals and 2,000 gil.  Which answered another question I had which was if you had to kill all 5 dailies to get the reward or if you could just kill one or two and get the individual reward for each, which you can so that's good.  I won't go out of my way to search for hunts but if I see an enemy with a hunt symbol over its head I'll definitely kill it and get some allied seals.

I keep seeing A rank hunts everywhere I go in the game.  Like probably one every hour I play.  Usually in dead areas with no one around.  I wonder if I should be yelling the location in case anyone cares?  I don't touch it since I'm not even sure I can take B rank hunts right now until my chocobo learns cure.

Had a good session though.  Now I'm totally done with 2.0 MSQ dungeons, have tried my first hard mode trial, did my first hunt and this questline to open up the Crytal Tower raid is long and great.  Just got 2 of the Aethersands and am looking for the other 2 now.  Really enjoying the game currently.

http://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/1bbb52f23cb2a462dec0230aa523d0406f57ed97

Patch notes for patch 3.5. Some stuff here that's relevant for ya, like exp gain for crafting-gathering from level 1-45 going way the fuck up

Anything that has 2.x is possibly relevant to where you're at. Some good QoL changes in there.

Wow, I read all that.  Holy shit that's a lot of changes.  Some good stuff in there
Do they really change/add this much stuff every 3-4 months in a .1 update?  That seems crazy

[The Legend of Sunblade]

Yup! It's the biggest reason why people have no qualms with paying a sub fee for the game: You get a whole lotta bang for your buck, specially with how much recent games have attempted to charge you more money for shit that should have been part of the core game (lookin at you, XV).

It's always fun to look back on the trailers/notes for every patch to see how far the game has come since 2.0. In your case, it might even provide a roadmap for the order to tackle the 2.x content/dungeons, if you choose to do it all.

1.0 - Opening Movie

1.23b - End of an Era / A New Beginning - (Link) <- This played at the moment of 1.0's shutdown, just without the "reborn" bit at the end.

2.0 - A Realm Reborn (Launch Trailer)

2.1 : A Realm Awoken (Trailer)

2.2 : Through the Maelstrom (Trailer)

2.3 : Defenders of Eorzea (Trailer)

2.4 : Dreams of Ice (Trailer)

2.5 : Before the Fall (Trailer)

Heavensward

3.1 : As Goes Light, So Goes Darkness (Trailer)

3.2 : The Gears of Change (Trailer)

3.3 : Revenge of the Horde (Trailer)

3.4 : Soul Surrender (Trailer)

I keep seeing A rank hunts everywhere I go in the game.  Like probably one every hour I play.  Usually in dead areas with no one around.  I wonder if I should be yelling the location in case anyone cares?  I don't touch it since I'm not even sure I can take B rank hunts right now until my chocobo learns cure.

Hunts arent very active right now cause they're more or less seasonal. The majority of players already have what they wanted out of them and there's no reason to hunt them down right now. Hunts usually pick right back up after a big patch like next week's, where they usually add new content that players will need Tomes/Seals for, thus refueling the Hunt machine. Don't be surprised if you just randomly see a whole bunch of people shouting INVITE PLZ in whatever zone you're in.

[Bebpo]

Cool.  Those trailers will be fun to watch in retrospect.  I'll wait until I beat the stuff first to avoiding too much spoiling.  In fact, I keep kinda beating myself up for looking at the lodestone stuff too much because it's spoiling a lot of the "oh shit, Ifrit is in this game?!?!"  From this point on I'm trying to avoid looking to see what primal fights/dungeons there are so sometimes things can surprise me.  I already know most of them already but there might be a few I've glossed over that'll surprise me

Was there a 2.0 ARR trailer?

[The Legend of Sunblade]

Yeah, there was a 2.0 launch trailer. Added it to the list, tho its fairly generic.  In fact, I'll go ahead and add the 1.0 trailer too, since its actually relevant to the story and shows you how Mor Dohna came to be.

Every time you do a new major boss trial, you're pretty much done with the story for that particular patch tier, so it should be safe to scope out the trailer then if you don't wanna spoil the story.

[Bebpo]

Oh man, that 2.0 trailer is suuuuper spoilish for the 2.0 MSQ.  It has like every voiced cutscene in the entire game in the 4 min trailer lol.  Makes it look more epic than it actually is too :p  This is why I generally avoid trailers for games until after I finish the game.

So like, from my limited understanding of 1.0, it seems like 2.0's MSQ was sorta a ...remake of 1.0's MSQ?  I mean from what I understand, 1.0's MSQ = Go fight the primals that the beast tribes are summoning, band together the three GCs to fight off the empire trying to invade.  2.0's MSQ = Go fight the primals that the beast tribes are summoning, band together the three GCs to fight off the empire trying to invade again.  Like there are slight differences (Meteo/Ultima) and different characters, but generally it seems like they just wanted to retell the plot from 1.0 because not a lot of people played 1.0?  Am I'm missing something here?

[Positive Touch]

I think you're generally right. some events were repurposed, like getting kidnapped before fighting Ifrit. I'm sure this was done to save time and money.

[Bebpo]

Unlocked Labrynth of the Ancients.  Thought it was a 24 person thing since it's a Raid.  I'm not really sure what the difference is between an 8 person dungeon & 8 person raid but I guess I'm about to find out!

Been getting lots of poetic tomes so I keep trading them for 120 pieces.  Up to i95 now.  I'm almost lvl.52 as well.  I really think I'll hit 60 before I start HW.  I haven't even done any of the hard mode dungeons or new dungeons like Pharos or Amador's Keep.  Even if I just gained a half level per dungeon that'll take me to 60 at this point.  I tend to do all the side content when I play rpgs, so at around 155 hours now I bet I don't get to HW until about 200 hours in.

Also I think I'm going to stick with my Ninja as my only combat class.  Like NIN 60 + all crafting 60 + fishing 60 is my goal for the longterm.  If I hit that eventually maybe I'll try other combat jobs.  The thing is I just wanna see the content/story and outside of job quests I only need one combat job for it.  Crafting is cool because I like all the neat stuff you can make like glasses or furniture and fishing is always chill.

At this point since I'm getting more than enough XP, I could start using my Paladin and getting him up from 38->50 but honestly playing with good high level tanks now in this 50 and over stuff has shown me that I'm nowhere near the level of tank needed.  When I play tank I take on one set of mobs, keep them aggro on me and kill them and move to the next.  But these tanks I'm matching with will just run the whole level grabbing enemies one after another until they group them all at an exact point they know and let the AoE DPS kill all the mobs at once.  To do this you'll need to know each level pretty well and how many enemies you can survive tanking at a time and where to round them up at and which areas in dungeons you want to be slow and just tank one group at a time.  Since I don't know any of this stuff I'd be a bad tank and slow down my team, so kinda reluctant to go back to my Paladin.  If I did an Alt at this point I think I'd do a healer alt since you can follow like a dps and help out.

[Positive Touch]

man there's SO MUCH good quality of life stuff in 3.5! text auto advance finally!! way more selfie options, duty finder progress on-screen, chocobo isn't a party member anymore, cross world party finder, ability to look up old party members, better fitting room previews, MORE CRAFTING XP,  Returner program, etc etc etc. all great changes to great up for Stormblood!

[The Legend of Sunblade]

Unlocked Labrynth of the Ancients.  Thought it was a 24 person thing since it's a Raid.  I'm not really sure what the difference is between an 8 person dungeon & 8 person raid but I guess I'm about to find out!

They're kept in the same raid tab, but the crystal tower raids ARE 24 man. It may take a while to queue into it cause it's old content, in which case you might want to wait until sunday to give it a whirl. The community has unofficial days where people queue for certain content to get matched parties, and "CT Sundays" are a thing, so you might have better luck then.

[Positive Touch]

ct is still pretty populated bc of that one relic quest that requires you to run it

[studyguy]

New patch is going to be dope. I'm trying to finish my relic before then. Lazy piece of shit so far all this last patch, never bothered to finish A12 just 9-11.

[Positive Touch]

a12 is easy; do it!

I'm still working on my crystal sands. I fucking hate it so much. been working on it for like two months now and I'm not even halfway done.

[studyguy]

a12 is easy; do it!

I'm still working on my crystal sands. I fucking hate it so much. been working on it for like two months now and I'm not even halfway done.

Same, I have like... maybe like 1/3rd of the second bar left? Not much but it's a pain in the ass.

[Bebpo]

Big package from SE store came in today with my FFXIV and HW artbooks   Will holdoff on the HW artbook until I've cleared that.  I really want the Eorza history lore book once I've caught up to 3.4/3.5 since I'm big into lore books but it's totally sold out still; hopefully will come in stock before Stormblood.

I actually used to collect FFXI artbooks, lore books and soundtracks even though I never played FFXI just because I liked the art/music.  At least with FFXIV I can follow along now!

[Positive Touch]

tell me how the hs one is; i still haven't got it. the arr one is pretty great tho and very through. lore book is great too and definitely worth the purchase whenever they figure out how to meet demand.

[Lucretius]

I finished my second i260 relic last night.  I have the DRG and the DRK relics now!

The Encyclopedia Eorzea is so fucking nice, btw.

[Bebpo]

Ok, I fought and beat Odin and I have many many many many many questions.


I was doing some crafting quests and someone shouted across all of Gridania that Odin was in Central Shroud near Brentbarch Meadows.  So out of curiosity (I have the Odin quest but I haven't started it yet) I thought I'd go check it out.  So for like 5-10 mins people kept shouting and more and more people would come.  Everyone kept saying invite plz/party plz. 

I just stood there because A) I don't know how to talk in the yellow text that everyone else was using (Yell?  Shout?) and B) I don't understand how partying works
Since it was just a FATE enemy, why would you party up instead of just all fighting together on the spot? 

So then the battle started around 12-14 mins left.  I have 3k HP as my lvl.51 NIN.  I'd get a few hits in, some helpful status effects for others, and then I'd get hit once somehow for 10k damage and instantly die.  There were like 30-50 people so it was chaos and I couldn't even visually see what was going on in the center.  He seemed to have 2 kinds of large AoEs, one was big, but I could get out of the circle and dodge.  The other was so hugely big there was no way I could escape in time.  Sometimes these AoEs would do status effects and not instantly kill me, other times spears would rain down and instantly kill me.  I think I died about 20-30 times in those 12-14 mins as people kept reviving me.  I'd get in 4-5 hits -> die -> 4-5 hits -> die -> repeat.  I started to think that ranged DPS is way better for this kind of thing because you can keep your distance and escape AoEs either vs. Melee up in the enemy face when they do a giant 1 mile wide circle that you can't escape.

Anyhow, the group beat Odin with about 12 seconds left (was really really close).  I got like 80 xp, 50 gil, and 5 seals or something.  Basically nothing at all. 

So yeah, I have no idea what was going on.  How does partying up work?  How does Odin work?

I probably should finish the questline...

[Positive Touch]

at first I was like and then I was like oh

odin has two fights: a rare fate, and a normal trial. the fate always goes like you describe, with everyone dying and odin going down at the last second. you should always get in a party for that date or hard hunts bc your rewards are based on what you do and being in a party pretty much guarantees you'll get the max reward. in this case you would've gotten more of what you did get, plus some items you could trade in for odin-themed weapons or barding.

the trial itself is also super fucking hard and arguably the hardest fight in 2.0.

[Positive Touch]

oh and you'll wanna select shout to use orange text, then just type something like "inv plz"

[The Legend of Sunblade]

Yeah, Odin has two versions, the FATE that you did (which has been around since 2.0) and a trial that got added later.

The reason why you got destroyed is because the FATE version is one of the game's few genuine "world bosses". He levels up every time you FATE is beaten, and levels down every time it fails. He can go beyond the current level cap, so you would often see Level 60 Odin back when 50 was the cap, and I'm pretty sure he can go up to 70 now, which means he is impossible to kill with just a handful of people. FATEs work the same way as hunt do: your rating for rewards depends on your emnity contribution to the fight, so its unlikely to get higher than bronze without a party. No matter the role you fight him in, you're very likely going to die more than once.

The reason why you party up is because: a. emnity contributons made by your party for both Hunts and FATEs are added to your own rating, and b. it's much easier for healers to heal you in a party (they can individually select you from a party list and AoE spells don't work unless they're in your party).

Trial Odin is just a regular 8man fight that shares a lot of the FATE version's mechanics.

And yeah, /shout in the chat window is the option you want to join parties like that. If you get an invitation, you get a popup window that you can select on PS4 by pressing the touchpad to tab along all the interactable things in your HUD.

[Positive Touch]

wow didn't realize odin leveled like that. first time I fought him as a fate there were prolly 30-40 people wailing on him for most of the full 30 minutes, and we got maybe an 1/8 of his health depleted. it was unbelievable.

still haven't seen the super fate from hs, either

[Bebpo]

Yeah he was lvl.56 when our group fought him.  I'll try partying up next time I see a hunt like that.

[The Legend of Sunblade]

Patch 3.5 is supposedly increasing the rate at which Odin and the other major boss FATEs spawn, so you'll probably run into him more often.

The other 2.0 "world boss" Fate is a Behemoth that spawns in Coerthas, around Behemoth's Dominion. He's significantly easier than Odin because he's fixed to level 50 rather than having that quirky leveling mechanic.

[Positive Touch]

glad to hear about the increased spawn rates; they're too damn rare. I only fought behemoth once or twice iirc.

[Positive Touch]

i know I'm beating a dead horse here, but seriously -  FUCK SIGHTSEEING. about a third of the way thru the 2.0 book and way too many of these have bullshit platforming. the community must have been so pissed when they were trying to figure these out.

also in other obvious statements: holy fuck the 3.x extreme bosses are hard as shit. aside from the initial two easy ones, i haven't made it more than a fifth of the way thru any of these.

[The Legend of Sunblade]

lol yeah, I haven't beaten any of the 3.X Extremes past Bis and Ravanna. It'd be one thing if I had a group of 8 to learn it with, but having to go through the same first phases teaching rando newbies how the fight goes every time got old. Most of us are waiting for next patch's bird farm carries or undersizing them during 4.0.

And yes, the 2.0 Sightseeing log is putrid shit. Not only do you have to wait hours and days for some of the weather/time of day conditions to line up, but you might even miss the window entirely if you can't fucking platform to the thing on time. I'd often just do the platforming, then idle right on the spot and leave a clock running on a third party site to ping me when the right conditions were met, cause holy god it was infuriating.

A quick google search shows me this website for tracking that shit, and man these are better than what I had way back when.

Thankfully, Yoshi-P is finally rewarding me for going through that hell years ago. 



Can't wait to flood the marketboard with those things and make some hard cash on patch day.

[Bebpo]

Yeah, I saw that and was like "well at least there's more rewards for the dumb sightseeing 2.0 log" although it should be that you get 1 painting unlocked for each sight, not forcing you to do 20 of them.  I've been stuck on the Leatherworker's guild one in Gridania, I cannot make that platforming jump to get on top and sightsee.


Anyhow, I got into the Labyrinth of the Ancients and did my first 24 man raid.  I was really confused for most of it and at parts it seemed like there were only 8 people?  Does it split into smaller groups at some point?  And you don't see the names of any of the players in the other 2 groups, right?  Was pretty chaotic but fun.  The final boss dude was pretty cool, I liked the AoE's of his attacks and the whole ANCIENT FLARE 9999 DAMAGE thing where everyone has to stand on the circles is great when you have a few people like me who don't know what's going on and nobody says anything and we all wipe lol

I feel like with these 8 person+ fights, after I beat them the first thing I want to do is google a guide to learn about the mechanics of all the stuff I just blew through without fully understanding it.  Also I keep getting these faded orchestration rolls in loots but I can't use them.  Do I need to take them somewhere to craft them into usable orchestration rolls?

[Bebpo]

Although honestly when I saw that Painter update I was like "they should just make a painter crafting class", like a class where you go to spots and sit with an easel and paint a viewpoint portrait.

[The Legend of Sunblade]

There are sections of the 24 man raids where you're expected to separate into your three separate alliances, yeah. Labyrinth of the Ancients has the Atomos part in the second hallway and the Bomb section in the third.

An Alchemist can craft Usable Orchestrion rolls from faded ones, yeah. There's a few low level ones, but most of the notable tracks can only be crafted from 50+. Either ask someone with the job if they can make it for you, put it up for sale on your retainer or dump it if the price on the roll is trash (and most of them are).

Also gj, you beat Titan. I mean, Acheron. I mean Phlegeton.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

When making the Labyrinth of the Ancients raid, the dev team obviously couldn't call him Titan cause there's already another Titan in the game, so they called him after his later common enemy variant, Acheron.

...But then, when making the Syrcus Tower raid, they realized that if they wanted to use the grey skinned common enemy that appears in FF3's Syrcus Tower, they wouldn't be able to use the name Acheron cause they already used that for the first boss. So to avoid another renaming, they went back and renamed the Labyrinth boss while keeping the grey Acherons with their real name.

[close]

Other Labyrinth enemies turned bosses:

[Positive Touch]

alchemists can make orchestrion rolls

[Bebpo]

There are sections of the 24 man raids where you're expected to separate into your three separate alliances, yeah. Labyrinth of the Ancients has the Atomos part in the second hallway and the Bomb section in the third.

An Alchemist can craft Usable Orchestrion rolls from faded ones, yeah. There's a few low level ones, but most of the notable tracks can only be crafted from 50+. Either ask someone with the job if they can make it for you, put it up for sale on your retainer or dump it if the price on the roll is trash (and most of them are).

Also gj, you beat Titan. I mean, Acheron. I mean Phlegeton.

(Image removed from quote.)
(Image removed from quote.)

spoiler (click to show/hide)

When making the Labyrinth of the Ancients raid, the dev team obviously couldn't call him Titan cause there's already another Titan in the game, so they called him after his later common enemy variant, Acheron.

...But then, when making the Syrcus Tower raid, they realized that if they wanted to use the grey skinned common enemy that appears in FF3's Syrcus Tower, they wouldn't be able to use the name Acheron cause they already used that for the first boss. So to avoid another renaming, they went back and renamed the Labyrinth boss while keeping the grey Acherons with their real name.

[close]

haha, yeah I liked how we got to fight Atmos in the raid.  The FF throwbacks are neat.

[Positive Touch]

the side stories have a ton of throwback stuff. i love it.

oh and sunblade that's the exact site I'm using. must be new bc I've searched before and only found reddit guides.

[Lucretius]

the [Odin] trial itself is also super fucking hard and arguably the hardest fight in 2.0.

Hardest fight in 2.XX was and still is Turn 7 Savage.

Odin's trial was just a tight DPS check when it first came out.

[Positive Touch]

i avoid Savage content bc i don't want to put my controller thru the screen

[Bebpo]

Did Tam-Tara Deepcraft.  As my first (Hard) mode dungeon, this was a lot of fun.  We wiped on the first boss a couple times until someone googled how to deal with the exploding zombie bridegrooms.  The boss fight was good, I like how these hard mode battles have like crazy AoE spam and adds and lots of stuff to keep it interesting.  Much more fun than the normal mode battles where you just wail on a big boss.

Then did Ultima's Bane trial.  We wiped a couple of times on this because of the purple balls that you gotta eat or everyone dies.  My low HP DPS can't eat many balls   But eventually we beat it.  Again was fun with more AoE challenge.

Also someone told me to change my character's hair to black and equip a robe because my character looks like Harry Potter ^^; 

[Bebpo]

Fates that are required for single player quests kinda suck.  The first Hildebrand quest has me waiting for a zombie fate in south thanalan and I've been sitting at the spot for 15 mins now waiting for it to spawn :/

[The Legend of Sunblade]

Fates that are required for single player quests kinda suck.  The first Hildebrand quest has me waiting for a zombie fate in south thanalan and I've been sitting at the spot for 15 mins now waiting for it to spawn :/

That's... odd. The zombie fate for Hildibrand (Fallen Corpses Writhe in Style) is up almost 24/7, its the FATE I did the most when farming them for relic stuff was a thing. It's weirder /not/ seeing it up.

[Bebpo]

It popped a few mins later.  I think the problem is that the non-HW server is kinda dead so the other Fates on the map have to expire first (because it seems like there's a max fates on map limit at any time) and no one is doing them.  I mean outside Coerthas/Mor Dhona, no one is doing almost any fates in this game.  I'm guessing it's because everyone still playing spends most of their time in the HW areas doing fates there.

[The Legend of Sunblade]

While true, that's the reason why they massively jacked up the spawn rate for the few Fates that are required by all 2.X story quests. You'll see the FATEs needed for Labyrinth of the Ancients, Hildibrand, etc up and running more often than they're not there. You probably just caught the FATE at a bad time, cause, really, that FATE is up every time I warp into the zone for anything.

[Bebpo]

I just read all the relic weapon -> zodiac weapon pathline reqs.

Nope.  Gonna bail on this quest early on.  I'll come back 200 hours later after I beat Stormblood if I'm looking for something left quest-wise to do.  Are the Chimera/Hydra boss trials locked behind this?  Because I wanna do those fights....

[The Legend of Sunblade]

You can get up to the Zenith step for the relic weapon with no issues. You make the base relic weapon, then use some poetic tomestones to buy a tonic to upgrade it. It's what was included as part of 2.0, its painless, and it includes the Hydra and Chimera trials for you to unlock. It also takes you to the spot in north shroud where you can upgrade your 120 poetics gear to 130 using the upgrade materials you can also buy from the same NPC in Mor Dhona.

Every step after that is the ridiculous grind that is obsolete at this point unless you really really want a Zodiac weapon for glamour purposes.

....I have three of them. 

[Bebpo]

What do you think the market price is for the material melded base weapons these days?  If it's like more than 20-30k I don't have that kind of Gil around.

I'll check the AH next time I'm on.

[The Legend of Sunblade]

Heh, I completely forgot that green weapon you need to use as the base. You're doing Ninja, right? Those should be relatively cheap, and if not, I can craft one for you next time I log in. Those weapons are completely obsolete, so the mats for making them are dirt cheap.

[Bebpo]

Alright, I checked the AH:

Vampire Knives w/Heaven's Eye III Materia = 88k
Vampire Knights without materia = 45k
Heaven's Eye III Materia = 1.8kgil
Carbonized Matter Grade 3 = only available in packs of 99 for like 30k gil

If I didn't have to get the carbonized matter, it'd be way cheaper to just buy the knives without materia and the materia.  Anyone have extra carbonized matter grade 3?

*edit*, nm the NPC in town did it without the matter for 500 gil each lol.  Man why would you ever meld your own material when the NPC in town will do it for cheap and you don't even need carbonized matter?

[Positive Touch]

that materia melder guy was only added over the summer iirc. before that you had to do it yourself or find someone who would. also if you ever do need carbonized master for whatever reason just let me know. I have tons and can easily get more.

[Bebpo]

that materia melder guy was only added over the summer iirc. before that you had to do it yourself or find someone who would. also if you ever do need carbonized master for whatever reason just let me know. I have tons and can easily get more.

Yeah, I figured that was what happened.  Definitely a very nice solo-friendly QoL change there.  Can't wait for the new patch so I don't have to keep dismissing my goddamn chocobro every time I sign up for a duty and get in queue.

Did Chimera earlier this morning and the party just melted him in <60 seconds lol.  Seemed easier than when you fight him as the boss in Cutter's Cry because he doesn't have those blue eyes/violet eyes symbols where you gotta move around.  Next up for my relic is Amadoor Keep.  Glad I hadn't done that dungeon yet!

[The Legend of Sunblade]

Did Chimera earlier this morning and the party just melted him in <60 seconds lol.  Seemed easier than when you fight him as the boss in Cutter's Cry because he doesn't have those blue eyes/violet eyes symbols where you gotta move around.  Next up for my relic is Amadoor Keep.  Glad I hadn't done that dungeon yet!

He does. He just, like every version after Cutter's Cry, doesn't have a big text symbol telling you what move he'll do next. You have to actually pay attention to his cast bar to see what he's doing. 

FFXIV likes to follow the old school philosophy of introducing an easy version of a monster/mechanic earlier on, then complicating it later once you've already learned it.

[Positive Touch]

I'll run amdapor with you if you haven't yet. i need to do it again for my last shitty zodiac book

[Bebpo]

Sure, I'll be on tonight.  Maybe in an hour or two?

[Positive Touch]

ok I'll get on in the next 30

[Bebpo]

Had a really good session with PT!  We did Amdapor's Keep & Lost City of Amdapor and some Fates and Triple Triad.  Are the two Amdapor stages supposed to be two versions of the same stage?  Because they seem like totally different stages.  Had some cool bosses.  DEMON WALL and Diablos out of nowhere was awesome.  Good fights.

Did the Hydra which was a little more challenging than the Chimera.  Next step for my relic is to do Ifrit/Garuda/Titan hard modes.  Which is fine since I haven't even unlocked Garuda/Titan (hard) so when I do I'll get the drops needed to almost finish my relic.  Don't mind replaying Ifrit (hard) since it's a fun and short fight. 

So looking at the Relic/Zodiac list.  Since I can just buy i120 weapons (which I already got from silver chocobo feathers trade-in), the Relic/Zodiac weapon won't surpass that in strength until the Zodiac Brave i125 stage.  Yeah, definitely sounds not worth it.  Once they started giving away i120 weapons for nothing in Poetic tomestones, you'd think they would have let you skip the outdated levels of the Relic/Zodiac quest and go directly to whatever is slightly stronger than i120.  I think I'll stop once I get my Relic Zenith.

Oh, I just saw for the Anima weapons you don't need to have done Relic or Zodiac line.  That's good.  Maybe I'll get my Relic Zenith and then do the Anima Weapon line when I finish HW and just skip the Zodiac weapon questline.

[The Legend of Sunblade]

They don't let you skip the steps outright because you're technically meant to do those steps as the patches drop, so your relic weapon was up to date with the item level for the patch. And those steps have been nerfed as they compared to how they were before, it's just the the anima/animus steps are so bad that even with the nerfs they take a long ass time. 

By comparison, the nerfs they did to all the later steps and parts of the anima weapon quests are much, much better.

And nah, Amdapor Keep and Lost City of Amdapor are different dungeons. They're just called that cause they belong to the same extinct culture. 

[Bebpo]

What did they do to make the Zodiac questline easier?

[Bebpo]

Ok, so got into Sycrus Tower (Crystal Tower pt.2) and it was AWESOME.  Really good music, cool stage, throwback Skeletor boss dude and final boss.  Some good loot too.  Only downside was it was really easy?  It actually seemed easier than Labyrinth of the Ancients because there weren't any tricky mechanics like that boss's ancient flare wipe stuff.  I don't think anyone died the entire raid compared to part 1 where we had a bunch of deaths along the way.

Still was a blast.  These raids are fun!  Fighting in big arenas with tons of big enemies one after another, everyone doing their stuff.  Pretty great.  Makes me look forward to Matsuno's Return to Ivalice raid.

[The Legend of Sunblade]

- All the tomestome mats you need to buy for the base relic / zenith were indirectly nerfed by tomestone replacements. The game launched with Tomestones of Philosophy, and every special currency they released afterwards replaced the previous one until you got Poetics. With every upgrade, the number of tomes you needed to get the mats went down.

- Atma: The 12 Atma you needed to gather by doing FATEs had a ludicrously low drop rate of 5-10% per fate. Now its around 25%, which is still low, (48 fates on average to get all 12), but still better than it was before.

- Animus: Each of the nine book you need to complete required tomestomes to buy, so they got nerfed with the tomestone changes over time. This is the step that is arguably the most time consuming, but still got the lightest nerf: For every single book, you need to kill 10 different monsters, 3 dungeons, 3 levequests and 3 specific fates. The nerf made it so instead of killing 10 of each monster, you only need to kill 3 of each monster. As if that's the time consuming part of it. 

- Novus: You need 75 Alexandrite/materia to finish this part. Alexandrite is obtained via special treasure maps that only dropped one at a time, but now drop 5 at a time. You can also buy the maps for tomestones which, again, got nerfed by having more valuable tomestones be added later. The materia side used to make it really expensive (you used to need to get up to rank 3/4 materia for a specific stat back when it relevant content), but because the weapon is obsolete, you can just fill it up with cheap tier 1 and tier 2 materia of any stat.

- Nexus: With the Relic equipped, you need to beat any instanced content (dungeons/trials/etc) to fill up your weapon with 2000 "lights", with the specific content you do giving differing amounts. The value of lights used to be really low (with 1 for the weakest tier for stuff like Cape Westwind), but now the values are much higher at 8/16/32/48/96/128. Plus, there's 2 hour periods were certain instances have double light values, making it go by even faster.

- Zodiac: Instead of Fate anima, this step had "dungeon anima" which made you run dungeons with a 25% chance of getting the drop at the end. The nerf made it so those items dropped 100% of the time instead. You need to finish four different quests to finish the step, and to finish them, you need over 400k gil, 80k Company Seals, 1600 Allagan Tomestone of Poetics, drops from 16 dungeons, 8 3-star HQ crafted items, many desynthesis items and some miscellaneous items. Overall the most time consuming step alongside Novus.

- Zodiac Zeta: a joke final step to get your weapon to i125. It "combines" some of the previous steps with 12 Atma that you need buy for 50 poetics each, then fill up with lights the same way as before, but you only need to get 40 lights per atma for a total of 480 versus the 2000 from before. Didn't get a nerf because it didn't need one.

[The Legend of Sunblade]

Ok, so got into Sycrus Tower (Crystal Tower pt.2) and it was AWESOME.  Really good music, cool stage, throwback Skeletor boss dude and final boss.  Some good loot too.  Only downside was it was really easy?  It actually seemed easier than Labyrinth of the Ancients because there weren't any tricky mechanics like that boss's ancient flare wipe stuff.  I don't think anyone died the entire raid compared to part 1 where we had a bunch of deaths along the way.

Still was a blast.  These raids are fun!  Fighting in big arenas with tons of big enemies one after another, everyone doing their stuff.  Pretty great.  Makes me look forward to Matsuno's Return to Ivalice raid.

Yeah, Syrcus Tower is much "easier" than Labyrinth because the latter tended to be too frustrating at times way back when. There's very few "do this or wipe" mechanics to it, and for the most part you don't need to split into groups like the others ask of you. Still fun though!

Amon is cool, you can get his hat and clothes as drops for Bard and Machinist.

[Bebpo]

Wow, I just watched a raid guide for Sycrus Tower and I had no idea what 90% of the things going on during that raid were but got lucky and never died just by sticking to the bosses and killing adds.  It's fun watching this stuff after doing the raid and going "oh, that's why everyone was standing in those yellow circles"

Although I think the 2nd boss glitched with the jump pads because we never had to do the jump pad thing.  He just did some weird unleash thing and then came back down and we finished him off.

[The Legend of Sunblade]

Although I think the 2nd boss glitched with the jump pads because we never had to do the jump pad thing.  He just did some weird unleash thing and then came back down and we finished him off.

That's just how he's killed now.  People found out that if you burn him down quick enough during the early phases, you can kill him before that phase happens, which lots of tanks cause raid wipes on due to not being able to position the robot adds that show up in the right spots. i1120/130 gear helps lots in that regard,

[Bebpo]

- All the tomestome mats you need to buy for the base relic / zenith were indirectly nerfed by tomestone replacements. The game launched with Tomestones of Philosophy, and every special currency they released afterwards replaced the previous one until you got Poetics. With every upgrade, the number of tomes you needed to get the mats went down.

- Atma: The 12 Atma you needed to gather by doing FATEs had a ludicrously low drop rate of 5-10% per fate. Now its around 25%, which is still low, (48 fates on average to get all 12), but still better than it was before.

- Animus: Each of the nine book you need to complete required tomestomes to buy, so they got nerfed with the tomestone changes over time. This is the step that is arguably the most time consuming, but still got the lightest nerf: For every single book, you need to kill 10 different monsters, 3 dungeons, 3 levequests and 3 specific fates. The nerf made it so instead of killing 10 of each monster, you only need to kill 3 of each monster. As if that's the time consuming part of it. 

- Novus: You need 75 Alexandrite/materia to finish this part. Alexandrite is obtained via special treasure maps that only dropped one at a time, but now drop 5 at a time. You can also buy the maps for tomestones which, again, got nerfed by having more valuable tomestones be added later. The materia side used to make it really expensive (you used to need to get up to rank 3/4 materia for a specific stat back when it relevant content), but because the weapon is obsolete, you can just fill it up with cheap tier 1 and tier 2 materia of any stat.

- Nexus: With the Relic equipped, you need to beat any instanced content (dungeons/trials/etc) to fill up your weapon with 2000 "lights", with the specific content you do giving differing amounts. The value of lights used to be really low (with 1 for the weakest tier for stuff like Cape Westwind), but now the values are much higher at 8/16/32/48/96/128. Plus, there's 2 hour periods were certain instances have double light values, making it go by even faster.

- Zodiac: Instead of Fate anima, this step had "dungeon anima" which made you run dungeons with a 25% chance of getting the drop at the end. The nerf made it so those items dropped 100% of the time instead. You need to finish four different quests to finish the step, and to finish them, you need over 400k gil, 80k Company Seals, 1600 Allagan Tomestone of Poetics, drops from 16 dungeons, 8 3-star HQ crafted items, many desynthesis items and some miscellaneous items. Overall the most time consuming step alongside Novus.

- Zodiac Zeta: a joke final step to get your weapon to i125. It "combines" some of the previous steps with 12 Atma that you need buy for 50 poetics each, then fill up with lights the same way as before, but you only need to get 40 lights per atma for a total of 480 versus the 2000 from before. Didn't get a nerf because it didn't need one.

So you do all of that and then 3 months later the next patch introduces a better weapon that you can get just from a drop or tome trade-in?  Don't they need to like make these ultimate weapons worth it more?