Random Question Thread (FFXI Related)

No, but you're missing out on gil, matters, and units/cap progress. Doesn't appear there's anything currently this will wall progress to, but that could change. Use history as a reference point. When Odyssey was released with segments but no rewards, nearly nobody formed groups. Then they dropped Atonement bosses and everyone was scurrying to get points. It's always better to get progress sooner rather than later, but the model for Limbus looks entirely different as casual content, so it's maybe not the same kind of situation.

Theyre adding the last update with new nms, certainly, it will cost units to spawn

That's your possible point of friction

I think that doing a moderate amount of runs to raise cap is probably worthwhile if you are worried about falling behind and being undesirable. If they introduce content that rewards (or costs) very high amounts of units to ease the grind, you'll wish you had.

Matters, whatever. It's a long grind, it'll probably be eased in some way at some point, and I doubt future content will rely on you having done them past the value of the gear itself.

There also have been mechanics that punish early adopters like decreasing odyssey gear prices the more are sold. What ever this version of vorseals are called in Limbus increases in potency and I'm not sure if they are already at cap.

I'm also not sure if the unity point cap is something relevant for later on or if it's just another hand break tier to throttle botting.

There's nothing explicitly making you undesirable in the future or stopping you from making progress in the future, but there are weekly caps and overall units held caps and you will run into those VERY fast if you're trying to upgrade a bunch of armor.

Similar to people who complain that primes and empy armor cost the same currency...if you're suddenly trying to upgrade some cursed armor and get RP on it while simultaneously trying to upgrade your JSE to +4...you're gonna be pissy that you didn't get started earlier.

But, nothing mechanically stopping you, just lots of FOMO.

If we are to believe what they said in the last Vana'diel Talk, they were at "roughly half potency" when they were at +50 Acc, +1500 HP and 50% exp loss.
Which leads me to believe the full potency is probably somewhat around +100 acc, +3000 HP, 100% Exp loss etc.

The way they talked about it sounded like something else was in store in the future, like... more "vorseals-like" things to be added?
But it was a very generic sentence maybe it was a bad translation or maybe I just misinterpreted it, we'll see in a few months I guess.


As far as "catch-up" mechanics I'm not sure. I do believe they should be doing something, but I said the same for Sortie and 2+ years after they did absolutely nothing, so...
Like I said elsewhere they should release a new tier of chest where 1x Matter is 100% drop even from the base chest, and chance for a second matter if you get a 5k chest.
Also by raising the ilevel to 140+ they would indirectly raise the amount of Units you get per run. Small difference but everything counts, right?
As far as the weekly caps are concerned they already raised them from 50k to 70k so there's that, I guess.

So anyways
I was wrong on this. You actually need to get through the craftsmanship on your stage 3 shield to get the KI to desynth spheres. I skipped that part when I went over the page on wiki.

As far as "it takes no time and cost 0 gil". Well thats just straight up horse ***. Stage 0 and 1 craftsmanship was like 1 hour. Stage 2 took about 6 hours of botting synths (yes, theyre rotating around). I'm about 8 hours into stage 3 grind and I just hit 20%. Those 0.02 and 0.05's really add up.


Now outside of craftsmanship, there are plenty of other issues:
You need 122,000 crafter points. At ~70 points per kit (presuming you're sticking to 70-95 kits) and 450 GP per crystal, you'll need approx 785,000 guild points. Thats not even factoring in the forced NQ ring you'll want for phase 2, the two skill+1 items, any key items you may (or will in Alchemy's case) need nor the Emblem. How many days is that? 2-3 months? Thats not "quick and easy". Lets not include how much it will cost in materials for these crafter points.

Every craft will run into atleast one material shortage along the way:
Alchemy is surprisingly kind, but that Anima stage sucks. I also had to raise a clot to get beastman blood access on tap.
Bonecraft has a heavy reliance on Coral Fragments and Wyvern Scales, none of which come into supply that often. I hit a huge roadblock for like 3 months until the VW event kicked in and I could get a huge overstock of these items.
Cloth needs something like 500 silk cloth. I probably overestimated this.
Cooking I dont care
Gold needs to pump out 20 sha'ir manteels. And again, I already know what you're gonna say "you can get cashemre from Garden". 20 cashmere cloth = 60 cashmere thread = 120 cashmere wool = 2.64 mil presuming no breaks and no HQ. That also involves getting Garden to rank 7, raising dragon hatchling, evolving to abyssal wyrm (2.5 stars only), evolving to lunar wyrm (again 2.5 stars only) then getting memento. I dont think that falls under cheap, quick or easy. Once they get past this, then they have to shitout 5 Brass Jadagna +1. Which involves getting a supply of ~90 Jadagna. To get these 90 Jadagna, you need to go on a mass culling of trolls to desynth the -1 club and shield as well as their pauldron and vambrace to get ~200 troll bronze ingots. And then you also need to have a stock of ~90 aht urhgan brass. Then two of the 6 stage 3 choices involve getting your hands on 40+ diamond/angelstone/emerald and 40 topaz/spinel/sapphire. Sure if you've stockpiled Avatarites, that might not be a problem.
Leather needing 40+ Wivre hides is a big *** you. Theres two sources: Wivres in Grauberg with a 2% drop rate, or voidwatch. Yup, I did voidwatch. The rest isnt bad, but their kit item choices are pretty shitty.

I've gone through 6 of 10 crafts, I'm bored of this. I've established its none of "quick", cheap" or "easy". Getting up to a stage 3 shield and doing the craftsmanship on it isnt a *** lulz task your average FFXI player will do so they can "flood the market with spheres", which was the line from the original topic.


But I will finish with this:
If "Mr. I play vanilla I dont bot I never bot I dont even use winodwer addons" pumped out ~5000 craftsmanship synths manually (per shield), thats says more about you than me or anyone else here.

Wondering if worth making Fudo Masamune B for cap subtle blow or is C really the only option. If it matters have all nin REMA. Thanks.

startup(110 craft, 70 subs): ~60 hours
GP / stock phase: 2 months of 10 minute daily (GP and buy things you need for stages 2-3) = 10 hours distributed*
craftsmanship/actual synths: around 25 hours**

'doesnt take that long' can be interpreted a whole lot of different ways, and sure, it's fair to say that it's not long compared to a finished s4 (around 2000 hours botting cards and another chunk on the focuser, if i recall correctly)

but, that's over 2 work weeks for a normal human. that's an entire vacation. for a vanilla player to say it 'isnt that much' is just insane, imo. if you assume the craft is already 110 with needed subs, sure, you can cut it to 35 hours or so. that's still a lot.

complaining about stage 3 not being buyable all at once off AH is just silly. you didn't decide overnight you were doing a crafting shield and manifest stage 3. you should've been looking ahead and buying them while doing GP.

*cooking will be much longer. most crafts will have days over 10 min, but many days where you can just hit a vendor or the sparks npc and be done in under 5.

**sure, if you're botting it's longer but you also don't care as much about the time. if you're manual, you're going to get a ton of objective bonuses because you'll want to make better use of your time.

I know you're jumping on my reply, but context of how that started matters:

Unless I somehow misinterpreted, which is unlikely, Maletaru suggested that having the Reassembling technique KI should be common place and sphere stock should be plentiful.

I've been stockpiling for 3 months whenever I catch the less-common stuff on AH and theres still a lot of items I'm short on. Call it perils of smaller server, sure, but it could also be the people on the small server not knowing the usecase of items. Had I been aware way back when that the wood shield needs Dark Beads, I would have kept the ones from my boxes in Visions/Scars boxes when I was cleaving for emp weapons. I'm not tying up my inventory for a 100k/stack dark ore. None the less, needing to camp AH for months just to have adequate stock goes against the claim of "quick and easy".

What do you mean worth it? Fudo - B is the only option NIN has to Cap Subtle Blow, so it's the best path for any low TP feed scenarios (NIN can only reach 65 SB otherwise, with Ranked Gleti's Knife + Mpaca's Hose). Is having the best item that can fulfill a specific role not "worth it"? It's worth it inasmuch as that niche alone is worth it to YOU, if you have something specific in mind you want to use it for.

TLDR - Decide for yourself what is worth it, I'm really not sure anyone can answer that for you besides just giving their experience with it.

well yea, i'm agreeing with you that it's not quick, but even on a small server there are a lot of ways to handle the mats if you have foresight(which is kind of key to crafting effectively anyway)

you also don't need to raise a rank 7 dragon or any of that, you just need to find one person who has and pay them to buy all your mats

Short answer, no
Long answer, nooooooooooooooo

The juice aint worth the squeeze imo.

Anything I say below is from a cycle of 3 synths (though occasionally they will step over each other with a repeat)
If I dont follow the conditions, I get 0 to 0.09, depending on result:
0.09 5x on HQ3
0.08 13x on HQ3
0.07 many on HQ2
0.06 many on HQ2
0.05 many on HQ1
0.00-0.04 from NQ
If I do follow the conditions, I get 0.04 all the way up to 0.17 depending on result:
0.17 7x on HQ3
0.16 1x on HQ3
0.14 3x on HQ2
0.13 13x on HQ2
0.10 many on HQ1
as low as 0.04 on NQ
I dont believe this either, but:
Maybe I need to throw in a fourth or 5th synth in the cycle, but thats a .4 on NQ with bonus condition.

Could I rig it to play nice with the worthwhile bonus conditions that catch? Yeah, and I probably will.

Am I gonna keep extra materials on hand to catch the "do [some t0/1/2] level craft" knowing I'm probably going to NQ it and wind up with the same result as a HQ'ed non-bonus craft? No, thats not worth it.

you're botting my guy, of course you don't care and i don't expect you to

someone who is sitting there starting every synth by hand is probably going to bother, though

You said its faster to follow the conditions, though in an unquantified amount.

I'm saying its not faster by any significant amount based on the following:
1-Its clearly established you get bonus craftsmanship for HQing. Going back to my smithing one, if the expert or higher pops up, you have to dig up materials (beryllium ingot would be a an easy candidate), but you're going to likely get 0.04-0.06 craftmanship because its a T1 synth at best. Or you keep churning out what you were making, have a 50% HQ rate (higher with Ionis and Rusk) and get anywhere between 0.0 to 0.09 craftsmanship. How much faster is it to hit the bonus?
1A- this applies to any of the other requirements that fall under T1 or T2 craft. How much quicker are you to the finish line by doing a synth you are less likely to HQ?
2-Are you hitting the brakes because the bonus is "craft between X-Y hours" and you're not in that window for a 1-5 synths?
3-"The bonus condition for increasing the Craftsmanship has changed to Use 7+ materials!". The lowest level one I could find was Bronze Ingot via nuggets. I dont think tying up my inventory with nuggets for is a good play, that will just slow things down as it will require more restocks, though not a significant amount.
4-"The bonus condition for increasing the Craftsmanship has changed to Craft w/light crystals!" Unless you're gonna make a JSE neck, your only option are rusty's. And while they're not overly difficult to fish up, this is time away from getting craftsmanship. Maybe you'll luck out and there will be a few on the AH. If the suggestion is "prepare and have on hand", again that is still opportunity cost. 10 minutes fishing rusty's is 10 minutes away from crafting for negligible gain. As unstackable items, they also tie up your inventory further leading to having to restock materials more often.
4A-"The bonus condition for increasing the Craftsmanship has changed to Craft w/lightning crystals!" According to the wiki, there are zero crafts available that meet this criteria, unless desynths count.

So like I said, I dont think the juice is worth the squeeze. Any gains to the speed have their own cons that slow things down.

i'm not going to spend all day arguing over nothing, but you don't have to do *every* objective to get gains.. there are a lot of objectives that are low hanging fruit a manual player could easily recognize and hit every time they come up while most reasonable botters won't bother with that level of optimization

i've made 16 shields and i didn't see it as worth writing code to change synths based on objectives.. so i get it

I was just following up on an older post saying that "crafter shields are quick easy and cheap".

Though I did take the opportunity to fire a personal shot about manually pumping out a couple thousand craftsmanship synths.

Do yourself a favour and setup a farming thing for materials. I had to farm all the stuff I needed to get 110 alchemy and cap subs.

Voidwatch spamming is my preferred method of craft material farming. They have all the hard to get mats that don't drop that easily anywhere else. Lookup which vnm drops the stuff you want, fill up your bags and craft your heart out.

I already have been my dawg. I did cartwheels when the Feb campaign list dropped and voidwatch was on it.

Told my friend "I'm using your accounts deal with it". He was on a little sabbatical so he didnt care.

Funny...you're all about using FFXIAH's quoting feature, until it comes to this quote.


So why aren't you quoting that one, buddy? Is it because I never *** said that? Seems like pretty dishonest framing to me. Seems like you can't even quote mine that one, because it's so far off what I said.

If we take what Thorny said as being true (IDK if those are accurate numbers but they seem reasonable enough) then it takes 35 hours to make a shield (from having a 110 craft). If you consider that "I'm going to sit down at my keyboard and not leave until it's done" then yeah, it's insane. If you do 5 hours a week for 7 weeks, it's not so insane.

Now distribute that across all players on your entire server and suddenly, there are dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds, of shields. Not so difficult to make some spheres now, is it?

This is the design SE implemented. Hundreds of players can farm spheres, sell them to one guy, and that guy can make a finished escutcheon.

Getting a "stage 3" shield and doing the craftsmanship to be able to make spheres is not difficult. It doesn't take long (in the grand scheme of FFXI) and it costs very little (compared to the other items in the game).

It costs very, very, very significantly less than a single empyrean weapon and takes less time. How many people on Asura have 1 empyrean weapon?

"It doesnt take that long" = quick
"basically 0 gil" = cheap
"not some herculean task" = easy <- now this is subjective because "herculean task" would be a 9 or 10 on the difficulty scale, so you could have meant an 8/10 difficulty, which would just as equally be be "not a herculean task". But in the full context, this is an exaggerated statement implying a low difficulty score.

Unless I've taken these groups of words completely out of context and I've interpreted them poorly.


edit: I forgot to highlight "herculean task", its at the end of the quoted line. I can reupload the screenshot if necessary with it highlighted.

I said it was not exactly this. Which, it isn't. It doesn't require great strength, determination. It's not unachievable. Anyone with a pulse and a handful of hours over the course of *whatever period they feel like* can make one.

Also see the word "so". This is used to connect the two statements, not add a new one.

It doesn't take that long (let's say 40 hours) AND costs basically 0 gil, therefore...it's not a herculean task.

Do you think there's any difference between something that's easy and something that's a herculean task? On the spectrum of difficulty, would you say there's someplace in between herculean task and easy? That's what I meant.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd say easy is like...2 or 3. Herculean task is like 12. Making a "stage 3" shield is maybe a 5. Which makes it "not exactly a herculean task" but still nowhere near "easy"

There's also a big difference between "doesn't take that long" and "quick". Quick is probably 2/10 as well, "Doesn't take that long" is like 4~5/10.

Let's see if you disagree with me. I said:
It doesn't take that long. Do you think it takes "that long"?
It's cheap. Do you think it's expensive?
It's not exactly a herculean task. Do you think it's a herculean task?

I think in the context of a FFXI item, it's not significant at all. It's mundane ***anyone can do without much gil, no special skills, and including nothing I would call challenging. Is it a grind? Sure. But way less than a ton of other items in this game, and considering the payoff: printing money, it's not a lot of work. It's well within reach of anyone who has an active subscription and an ilvl 119 character.

As a fool who actually HAS had both Fudo Masamune B and C at rank 25 for ages...

Eiryl is 10000000% right lolllllll.

C is fun though and really opens up some powerful enmity generation. That one for sure.

Anybody got a rough approximation of how to compare the weight of WSD vs PDL for single hit WSs?

If you're attack capped, they're both multipliers so you want to maximize their product, which gives greater value to the one you have less of. Typically that is PDL.

In Maletaru's set here, for instance, he has 68% WSD and 41% PDL.

1.68*1.41 = 2.3688

Swapping legs from Maculele +3 to Nyame R30
1.8*1.31 = 2.358

So even though Nyame Flanchard is 12% WSD, 10% PDL beats it

PDL also has the additional benefit of working on additional hits, granted that for single hit WS additional hits barely mean anything at all, but everything counts I guess!

Under my bias I was doing the same reasoning for stuff with the same value (so in the example before, 10 vs 10) but in general I was leaning to pick the one with the higher value.
But that's clearly flawed, thanks for answering my doubts!

Rule of thumb, always with the ceveat that the more pdl you add the more attack you need to use it:

While total pdl < total Wsd -> adding pdl is worth more dmg than adding wsd

They are multiplied, so if wsd/pdl > 1, add more pdl. If wsd/pdl < 1 then add more Wsd.

I'll just make a generic response to this, by ignoring them all completely you'll do significantly more synths. (also true by serializing objectives) Particularly on stage 4 (although perhaps that's irrelevant to this discussion).

A THINKING human player will probably do 50-75% of the objectives. Depending on the craft, some are just too hard (inventory intensive, rare/expensive materials, craft between XX hrs (and its 30 min. away, but you're free and doing it now)). I mean spending 10 min. getting 7+ materials and having it last for 1 or 2 synths is not time well spent.

You can craft a lot of other things while doing it and save some time, but it does take some thought and planning. Most players will probably take reasonable advantage of it, although surely some just aren't worth the effort.

Of course there's a trade off here too, the cheaper and less work done the longer (calendar wise) its going to take.

Before I proceed, I just want to point out that somehow no one has ever noticed that all the "craft on X-day" is always Firesday? Clearly those claiming to follow the craftsmanship bonus arent following it that closely otherwise someone would have noticed "hey, its always Firesday".


Its just basic math, and I dont think the juice is worth the squeeze due said math and the requirements involved.


I'm not sure why theres no spreads on the HQ1, may I missed it scanning over my log, but anyways.

Heres the goals that popped up for my Smither in roughly 100 minutes, I'll sort them by type:
Skill based
9x Craft Recruit/Initiate recipes!
7x Craft Novice/Apprentice recipes!
9x Craft Journeyman/Craftsman recipes!
2x Craft Artisan/Adept recipes! T2 (mostly)
11x Craft Veteran recipes! <-T2
7x Craft Expert and higher recipes! <-T1

Time based
6x Craft between 18:00 and 5:59!
2x Craft between 6:00 and 17:59!
12x Craft on Firesday!

Crystals
3x Craft w/earth crystals!
11x Craft w/fire crystals!
2x Craft w/light crystals!
3x Craft w/lightning crystals!
4x Craft w/wind crystals!

Material Counts
10x Use 3+ materials!
3x Use 5+ materials!
5x Use 7+ materials!

Freebies
8x Perform a synthesis!

Thats 114 Bonus goals.

Of the 45 skill based goals that hit:
Expert tier is a writeoff, doesnt matter how easy it is. Theres a 94% chance you'll get 0.04-0.06 craftsmanship doing an expert synth, theres a 50% chance you'll get 0.05 or higher craftsmanship continuing your rotation. I'm not the best statistician here, but this one looks obvious.
Artisan to Veteran may be worth it depending on what synth you can make use of in that craft and how annoying the least annoying synth is, but we go back to math: 75% chance you'll hit 0.04-0.06 vs 50% chance to get 0.04 or higher.
Novice to Craftsman is worth it, based on the math, since you're hitting the same 50% HQ rate but getting the goal bonus too.
Recruit/Initiate is already getting hit.

7/45 is a writeoff
13/45 might be worth it
25/45 are worth it


Of the 20 time based goals:
You either hit it or you dont. No ones sitting around for 30 minutes because its night time and the goal is day, and vice versa. Similarly no one is waiting 20 minutes up to 7 hours for Firesday.
I doubt theres any disagreement on this one.

20/20 are luck, you either landed on it or not.


Of the 23 Crystal based goals:
This will vary by craft obviously, but my smither is hitting 15/23 of them with their synths. There are literally ZERO lightning based synths listed on the wiki unless desynths count (which have a very high fail rate, so thats a writeoff) and the only light crystal synths are restoring rustys. How many low level trash synths can you make in the time it will take you fish up some rusty's to have on hand for this?

I would presume other crafts have similar garbage options. I saw my bonecrafter got "use dark crystals", guess what their options are: lv91 Demon Helm, lv94 Shadow Throne that requires a rare/ex necropsyche, lv98/99 Wyvern Helm. None of those are worth it.


5/23 are writeoffs
3/23 are worth it
15/23 are getting hit


Of the 18 Material count goals:
This will again vary by craft. Some may have easy options for this (ie: smithing can do 7+ with 6 bronze nuggets and a tin ore) and some have shitty options for this (bonecraft 7+ options are fang necklace (4 batfang, tiger fang, 2 bone chip, grass thread), various arrowheads with shagreen file, bone cudgel). The 5+ material counts are more likely, but still will tie up inventory leading to restocks more often, 3+ is easily doable for all crafts.

10/18 are getting hit
3/18 are worth it
5/18 are writeoffs.


Freebies are freebies.
8/8 freebies are always worth it. Highly recommend.


Now that we've gone through the list:
51/114 goals are getting hit by a brainless bot
31/114 goals are worth getting hit that my brainless bot is skipping on
13/114 goals may be worth it. These are all the T2 skill based crafts and it comes down to the bonus to craftsmanship for HQing.
20/114 goals are time based luck, you either hit it or you dont, no ones waiting for the time to roll around.
17/114 goals are writeoff


So if we go back to "A THINKING human player will probably do 50-75% of the objectives", the brainless bot is hitting 44.7% of the goals.


If I remove the coincidental time based goals that no one is waiting around for:
51/94 goals are getting hit by a brainless bot
31/94 goals are worth getting hit that the brainless bot is skipping on
13/94 goals may be worth it. These are all the T2 skill based crafts and it comes down to the bonus to craftsmanship for HQing.
17/94 goals are writeoff

The brainless bot is hitting 54% of applicable goals.