Dev Tracker - Discussion

You may be right, but they could also end up ruining cleaving in the process. If all they do is sprinkle in Locus monsters here and there and leave all Apex monsters untouched, no harm no foul. If they remove, say 50 Apex monsters and replace them with 50 Locus, that harms cleaving groups a lot.

In the old Crawler's Nest, I can't think of any monsters in the basement that did NOT aggro (besides elementals), so I am doubtful they will add Locus monsters that are non-aggressive.

It depends what exactly they have in mind. Removing aggro/link flags will alter the camp significantly. Sure you can still easily pull with stonega, but no one will.

Anti-Cleave has multiple routes. And multiple levels of severity.

Make the mobs faster, make them stronger, aggro/link flags, MTDR, raise magic eva/MDB into redickulousness, instantly self destructing bombs if you aggro too many mobs. The possibilities are numerous lol

(The nocturus style bombs getting instant tp feed from magical ws for example, just alter the day mechanic to any. Now an unsleepable 5m hp bomb self destructs if you cleave)

My guess is they will use aggressive Locus mobs as barricade between two big groups of Apex, so it's possible for one party to only pull half of all Apex without aggroing Locus, instead of whole area.

I think that is the ideal outcome... but I don't trust SE not to make cleaving far worse so going to try to finish as many jobs as I can before update.

Is there no interest in the new Locus monsters coming to King Ranperre’s Tomb?

WHM burn parties in KRT, member

Why you think there is no interest? It was discussed in at least 2 threads asap. Problem is there is no details what mob families and what are this enigmatic description of them being super active, so it's hard to discuss viability for now.

Their comment about the new monsters being "active" could refer to their path of travel where they normally spawn being increased, or the cooldown on when they move being shortened, to allow them to roam for longer distances and to stop for shorter periods of time. I'm thinking something like Goblin Bounty Hunter's behavior. Or it might refer to their aggro range being increased (I highly doubt this).

Almost sounds like this is a maneuver put in place to deter bots, as there would be no safe spot to camp specifically without possibly blood aggroing other nearby monsters. Bots don't really move to run out and find their mobs, they just camp right in the midst of them, so it would be detrimental if the Skeleton for example used Blood Saber and took bots party into yellow, and then every single Skeleton/Ghoul/Hound in the area blood aggrod (would be funny actually). I say Blood aggro, because KRT monsters from vanilla was mostly undead: Hounds, Skeletons, Ghouls. So that's what I'm basing my guesses off of.

It is definitely made to control bots and it will probably make some people to up their botting game. I am mostly thinking of sight/sound aggro, fast speed, wide wander range, and links. So if you are in a party, you pull once and get 4-5 monsters due to links (slept) but if you are a dumb bot you provoke pull without moving and get murdered by either the initial mobs or subsequent links.

It will not defeat botting but might defeat bad botting.

More that it's just a bad camp not worth botting in, than an actual deterrent.

Magic casting mobs are terrible for easy farming where you stand in one spot and throw chakrams. That's why they never bot velkk. Not because they're going to link and aggro and kill but because they stand at range and cast. Too much effort to make the geo bot geared and silence ready.

Apex/locus gobs quads orcs yags demons all would be less likely to be botted than warrior type mobs like crabs pugils frogs birds etc

Apex-mage wasting 30 seconds casting freeze after a pull is horribly inefficient.

If the need for botting didn't exist we wouldn't be in this hole...

Increase points gained from omen, dyna and sortie.

Create items that give mastery xp like old dyna items. Put them in htmb fights. Allow us to buy them from ambu and sparks.

Job point trade in

Etc

SE made this problem by not addressing how terribly mind numbing exping is due to the 200k+ points per level price tag thats only getting worse.

Even if you got 10k per kill people would still bot and pay for their points. It's not an option.

Pretending the problem doesn't exist while those buyers/botters get capped mastery by the time they implement any changes shouldn't be the option they choose.

If you make it easy to cap out on ep then you take away one of the bigger time sinks, and we're running out of those to stall while we drip feed new content, can't have that, at least not yet. Was the same for cp til they were "done" and started adding high level targets, cp capes, etc

SOME people would keep botting regardless, agreed. But some wouldn't trust me.

I know I most likely wouldn't if the progression rate was sonewhat similar to the jp one or slightly more than that.

The current rates are awful, insane, and the more you level up the more stupid it gets.
40>50 is gonna be beyond reason.

This. The worst time of CP bots was right before ML came in, and you could easily get a job mastered in less than a week of non-bot grind, between cape, rhapsodies KIs, roe bonuses, etc. You'd get 1 jp per kill, sometimes more, 2 during campaign, and could kill pretty much any apex mob under 20s easily and reliably.

People still botted all the time.

0>20 => grindy but ok
20>30 => too much grind, maybe acceptable I dunno but that's already quite intense
30>40 => unacceptable
40>50 => beyond any reason

it is the laziest way to add a time sink if I ever saw it.

SE: Hey guys - new levels and a grind- awesome right?

Players: Awesome, new areas and monsters to get exp on?

SE: Maybe, soon.... Idk. just do it ok.

Players: I guess this is ok as long as it doesn't take foreve...

SE: 700k to hit 40 and you barely get 700 a kill...

Players: Why are you like this?

SE: 1million to hit 42+

mexp is made for boting and/or rmt, there is no break up, like in merits and jp, where u could unlock stuff. mexp is just a fukin zombie night mare, where u litetarly can stay in zone from 0 to 40.
i have always like grinding stuff when u get in the "flow", but with mexp there is no end...
~ like my favorite galka said its just stupid result of lazy work from SE's side.

It's the bog-standard MMO timesink, Korean MMOs love that model, just xp grind after xp grind after xp grind, each one as bad as the last, just with the added benefit of some offering payment to not suffer as much the results the same, you grind away * however many classes you feel like, then you grind the current end-game content with garbage drop luck.

It's what you do when you can't afford or are incapable of providing constant content that will have a decent shelf-life

It's stupid and lazy but, there you go, doin it anyway.

And the worst part, you do it SO you can do content. Instead of getting them FROM doing content. It's just sad.

You guys have it all confused with MLs. I think MLs are supposed to keep people engaged for the next 3-5 years, so to SE, the grind is reasonable because they don't actually expect people to grind it out like now. That would be dumb. The fact that they keep progressively adding more ways to ML easier is evidence of this. The problem is, too many players want to hit max level right now, and not later, for some reason. There is nothing (and I mean literally nothing) in the game currently that requires max level, or even close to it. That would be like hand building the absolute fastest car in the world where the roads only allow you to drive 70MPH max. What is the hurry for? Sure you can get there faster, but it's not necessary at all, so what does it matter? When SE puts out content where MLs are absolutely needed, then you can rightly complain about the grind. For now, SE is giving players time to beat the clock on the content that may require it in the future.

If it takes an average player 3 months to casually (meaning, maybe a couple parties every week or so) get to ML35-40 on one job, what's the problem? It's a grind because it's supposed to last a long time to finally "finish" your job. Did people forget how slow they release new content? Its like once every 12-18 months, it's really bad. MLs is their way of always giving you something to do in the interim until they can release a new event or boss. You can never ever ever say "there's nothing to do" anymore. Call it lazy or whatever, but its just a testament to how SE is now supporting this game. Really not sure why people are still confused with this model.

I don't think there's anything wrong with doing MLs so you can do content faster. That's just pushing your jobs to its limits. I think the issue is when people have too much of a completionist's mindset and they get annoyed with the process altogether. They add one random digit to the game and say it "matters" and people lose their minds trying to achieve it. See Mastery Rank.

well ofc we want, just like when a new relly good piece of gear gets out, we want it and want it now!:)
at ml 40 u can change ur play style, maybe fight in ur best tp set instead of swaping to acc set? swap a mad with a minuet, or even do a minne? and so on...
ml 40 is maybe not needed just like u dont need bis in all slot, but it def changes how u are able to tackle things in game:)

So the way I see it we have a few problems,

1) ML 30-40 and eventually ML 40-50 costs far far more than anything else and is seemingly unreasonable to get.

2) Cleaving in CN actually can make 30-40 bearable although it generates so much more exemplar than any other strat (and for far less effort) that it makes everything else feel like a waste of time also it makes anything below ML 20 a joke. For example last night I took my 7th job to ML 40 going 35-40 and someone else in group went 3-30 in same time.

3) I don't find cleaving very fun.

Now we are facing a potential nerf to CN, there is a chance it is a buff because it's actually more efficient not to run the full circle and so if they just set up a few walls of Locus mobs to try to force people to cleave more efficiently that could be a buff but I have my doubts so am cleaving as much as I can this week.

I like the idea of Locus mobs and hope they buff them a lot but their camps need to be a lot less bot friendly. I would also like to see their HP increased even further with appropriately larger exemplar boosts to support actually longer SCs and to make non-cleave parties not revolve so much around switching targets every other WS.

Is the emp +3 content going to be a different area of Sortie, simply where you fight towards NMs kind of like Omen? I can’t fully conceptualize it, but that seems reasonable.

I do agree with previous point, that they should buff content EP way harder than it is right now. I still feel things like Dynamis monsters/bosses/Volte/Megabosses, Omen Caturae, Odyssey Unity NMs, Agon Beastmen, Gaol NMs, and Sortie Bosses should give a high number of EP. Volte NMs something like 7500 EP a kill. Something like 2000/Kill for Unity NMs inside Odyssey (to encourage doing them), with a sliding scale the higher up you go. Gaol bosses should honestly give somewhere around 30k EP just from one kill at V20, and scale it down with Veng levels, as a final reward. That would benefit everyone a lot more than extra camps, because you get residual EP doing normal content, and since they want us doing content dailies, everyone makes significantly more progress doing dailies than they are now. And it wouldn't take away from actual EP groups, since you can only do your dailies once (or some cases, a few times) a day. Win win.

If they were capable of negating the severe congestion doing those kind of things would cause, they would do exactly that.

Make content worth doing.... but they can't stem the congestion.

It's obvious that exemplar should come at a premium, you shouldn't be able to kill generic bats in adoulin. You shouldn't be able to bot it 24/7 in CN_S or Promy etc. And if being a game mattered more than being profitable, it would. But it doesn't.

Good for game, bad for business. Bad for game, good for business. You can do that with people who will never quit.

They make you more and more annoyed, you pay bots instead of quit, they ignore the bots, they get double the subs. Plain as the nose on your face.

Nothing "strange" about it.
30>40 takes more EP than 0>30 if I recall.
If they keep following this pattern and make so 40>50 will take more than 1>40 then we're gonna see some wrist-slashing.

Oh and about EP coming indirectly from other content.
That's a common idea in "modern" MMOs but in this specific aspect FFXI has pretty much never been that way, with some due exceptions.
Devs still see "exping" as its own activity, its own content, and not simply a mean to an end.
As such they might keep letting you get points from other content, but they want the main source of points being "its own" content, its own activity.

I could be wrong of course, but I think that's how they feel about it, game-design wise.



Personally I think raising the amount of EP given by already existing content would be a neat idea, but honestly I don't see it happening, like, ever.
They could and should remove reduce the penalty that reduces the amount of EP per kill you get according to your current ML.
Having to resort to Level Sync to countermeasure that is stupid and grow old.
Was a cool dive in the past the first months, now it's silly.
Just reduce that penalty already gdi
And give us a KI that doubles amount of EP received, I dunno, from TVR missions?