Prime WS Information, Testing, Discussion

You don’t need your dancer to have prime dagger for hq aminon. I use twashtar because our bard is using mpu gandring to avoid weaponskill walling ourselves. I still hit 99k with climactic Rudras and my overall weaponskill average is around 80k with the non climactic included. However, it is beneficial to have both. I’ve already mentioned Dancer wants mpu for ruthless stroke on aecg bosses and twashtar for b and f bosses. Otherwise your doing shark bite on aecg and that does impact kill speed. But if your mainly concerned with aminon either or is perfectly fine.

Prime horn is also not required but does speed up the run. Your likely looking at the difference of two extra bosses if you have all the stuff versus not, and that’s 12k muffins so it’s not insignificant. But if you just want mesosiderites a 20 minute kill will suffice just as well as a 10 minute kill.

Meso drop rate is on the low side but not unmanageable. We’re seeing roughly 25% drop rate after almost 40 kills. So if you kill him enough you’ll eventually get extras. The actual fight itself is really simple though. As long as you don’t let him get a tp move off he’s not that hard to kill.

So sad the most important end game boss came to this. It's no worse ***content design than something that can be stun botted.

Stun botting was just lazy. Those mobs we did manually and I found it quite fun juggling between stun and DPS.

Aminion its necessary which IMO is much worse.

Bumba V25 seems/seemed to be in the same sorta boat, nice that the end of both current end-game is dont let the boss do a thing or you likely lose

Yep. Good content would be:
1. Tank needing a certain level of gear to be able to mitigate damage to survivw.
2. Healer needing to be geared enough with refresh/conserve MP/cost reduction (whm legs) to manage MP.
3. Either melee, BLM, or Ranged fight specificially. Say Bumba is melee, then Animon should be nuking, and another end game boss be a ranged fight to force diversity.
4. DPS check that requires good gear.
5. Ability to mitigate some damage with skill that cannot be stun botted or React cheesed.
etc. but the game is what it is now and it is done and needs to be left to RIP after about 2 years from now.

Bumba is the same, v25 tree is the same. It's sad that the intended mechanics are so incredibly annoying or outright impossible to deal with the best course of action is to simply not let the mob do anything that you have to use mechanics for.

Not a great advertisement for top level content when all the clears have been made by ignoring the mechanics put into that content.

But yes, highly unlikely anything will change.

Maybe in 10 years Fujito-san will grace us with the intended mechanics of the bumba fight. And they will still be ignored.

It's pretty obvious what the intended mechanics are. They expected us to "just proc him a bunch". The kaustra thing was almost certainly an oversight on their part. The intended strategy is probably impossible, but they don't know that because they didn't playtest the fight. And when they looked at their metrics and saw that players were clearing it they were vindicated that it was beatable so they just left it be as is. No change necessary right? No matter how dumb the fight actually is.


I mean what the hell do they expect us to do when aminon's tp moves are AoE petrify, doom, paralyze, plague, taint, mute, haunt, and full dispel. His moves may all as well just be called "bend you over" because the moment he gets any of them off you're ^%$#$@d. The fetters aren't even the breaking point. You just die to the severity of the status effects. Add to that bane of tartarus and the message is clear. He cannot be allowed to get a tp move off... period.

Sure, but Fujito still personally goes on the forums to tell everyone they need to cast white magic spells an infinite amount of times to reduce the dmg he does.

Next thing you know mobs will start showing up with 100% resistance to absorb-tp on top of everything else.

100% the case. They probably intended Animon to be unbeatable in current form also, only to make it winnable later to drag the content out longer.

I'm not going to sit here and pretend that these fights, especially Aminon, are easy to do the "intended" way, but...

All those status effects can be removed by having the seal (for a certain # of instances)
Using ranged strategies, you can out-range them
WHM can remove everything you listed easily, and full dispel would only affect the tank, who doesn't really need a ton of buffs to do their job

I think everyone does the meta TP drain strats because they're the easiest, but that's not to say it's totally unbeatable "as intended" just that we found something easier than "as intended" and chose to do that instead, because it's simpler, more reliable, faster, and less prone to mistakes.

I guess you could argue they should've made it immune to Absorb-TP, Reaving Wind, Feather Tickle, Mewing Lullaby, and TP Drainkiss and forced us to do it "as intended" but barring that, people were always going to go for the path of least resistance.

I guess what I'm getting at is: the reason the strats are TP denial is because it's the path of least resistance and once TP denial was figured out, nobody bothered to look for other strategies. If TP denial was impossible, maybe other strats could be implemented. We'll never know because once there's an answer nobody's going to bother.

Something as Grindy as Aminion needs a consistent strat for winning. I'm glad someone found the absTP strat.

Bumba is a little less annoying since its 1 clear and then a simple grind.

Did people beat it with nuke strat or ranged strat without tp drain?

They do playtest the fight...with godmode on.

Speculation followed by more speculation. The community assumes that they've tried literally everything and if they can't figure out the "intended strategy" then SE didn't test it and has no idea how the fight is supposed to be done.

TBH I'm not sure if SE does any testing or if they do under what conditions they do their testing. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say they aren't doing testing the way we'd want it to be done (with actual humans playing the characters) because I don't think they have the dedicated resources to it and have employees who know WTF they're doing in this game. They might though, how the hell do any of us know?

SE has a history of not telling the community ***about strategy and letting us figure it out on our own, that's what they've always done, regardless of the size of their team and their ability/interest in doing playtesting. This is not out of character or unusual for them or for this game. It's entirely possible that there is a solution, SE tested it and figured out that it works, and we haven't tried whatever they're doing.

Or maybe they intended for us to use TP denial strats. I kinda doubt it though, because it would be really silly to bother making all those mechanics if your intention was that people would bypass and ignore them.

Maybe they had no idea how we were going to clear this stuff and just hoped we'd figure it out. I'm not convinced this is true though because (PW/AV aside) SE has created hundreds of fights and they've all been cleared. What are the chances that they just randomly lucked into that for decades, with 0 testing or design, by happenstance?

Don't you think it's odd that the "path of least resistance" was also both the easiest and unintended method of winning? Shouldn't the intended method of winning be the strategy the players naturally find?

I don't think continuing to blame the players for bad game design is a good argument.

“Speculation”
Correct me if Im wrong, but when they ran their ambu videos in the freshly picked, they were duoing VD fights in some basic *** gear with 4 trusts with minimal effort. If thats even partially true, thats some form of godmode applied.

Even rolfstomping D the way they were with 4 trusts and mid-tier gear is highly unlikely.

Hmmm. A lot to unpack here but:

-I'm not trying to say it's good game design
-Doesn't the community usually complain when devs railroad them into only using the intended method and not letting people use alternatives?
-The intended methods are pretty natural to find: Bumba has procs, we know what they are. Aminon has procs, we know what they are, and the ways to avoid his TP moves are well-established.

Should the intended strategy be the easiest one? IDK, maybe, probably? The solution is to disable TP absorption, which would make the fights MUCH HARDER, less consistent, and more frustrating though so IDK. Under the current system, there's also nothing (other than meta and efficiency) stopping people from using the "intended strategies" so...at least it gives options?

I guess my point isn't "Ackshually, SE design is the bestest" but more like...it's not really practical to assume SE does no testing and just hopes we'll figure something out & also this philosophy has been around since the dawn of FFXI and is pretty much what we signed up for playing this game.

Maybe it's ***game design and that's why it's bleeding subs, but I think it's just different to the modern MMO design and that's part of what makes it what it is. Fact of the matter is there are dozens and dozens of strategies for hundreds of fights in this game, focusing on only 2 of them, even if they are both the apex fights of the latest content, is really belittling the FFXI experience. To even attempt Bumba V25 you (or the merc carrying you) would have had to go through dozens of other, very complex fights with deep strategies.

Sounds like you're assuming that their freshly picked video accurately depicts all of their testing, which I would call speculation.

I disagree. I much prefer the HQ aminon fight to v25 bumba. At least with hq aminon you get consistent progress. If you do an 8 boss run with the mage strat, kill the 4 upstairs mini bosses, and throw in a set of naakuls you walk away with 55k Galla. If you do a hq aminon and just 6 extra bosses that’s already 65k Galla and a guaranteed +1 old case, and possibly even a mesosiderite. Even without optimizing to the point you get a 9 boss run hq aminon is still better progress than a standard 8 boss mage run.

Contrast this with v25 bumba, where the only thing you get is frustration and the feeling of smashing your head pointlessly against a brick wall with very little control over your own destiny. It’s a RNG crap shoot. Most groups I know that cleared took a long time, upwards of two months or more to get the clear. Does he yaeg, denounce, perfect dodge or invincible KI 1? Do you get magic attack or accuracy down on ki 2? Got some bs resist on kaustra even without m acc down? Razz and matamata out at the same time? Got a comet or impact cast off on you and spawned fetters? Did reaving wind just resist for no good reason? We’ll fook you, try again later. Even when the stars align your group needs to hold to the execution. I've seen so many things go wrong for reasons completely out of our peoples control that the fight is nothing more than a test of endurance in the face of futility. I cleared it literally just last night for the first time after two months of agony, and the amount of frustration is beyond reasonable. And unlike when we killed arrebati, there isn’t the same sense of giddy joy or accomplishment either.

When we killed arrebati we were legitametely stoked because the fight felt like we were more in control and our own actions mattered. When we killed bumba last night the only sentiment was “thank GOD that’s over”. That’s not the kind of feeling you want your players to experience when they literally beat the ultimate final boss in your game. The fact that even when you win you still have such negative vibes toward the experience because of the way you had to do it is a sign that the fight sucks. It’s terrible game design and nothing will convince me otherwise.

If the TP denial strat didn't work you wouldn't feel that way. That was my point sorry if it wasn't clear.

Ooooh, well I'm pretty sure if the tp denial strat didn't work we wouldn't even be at the stage where groups are killing HQ aminon regularly >.>. I've seen what happens when he gets a tp move off. It's only happened twice to us I think, and once because our tank disconnected shortly after the pull. It isn't pretty. Feels pretty impossible actually. Maybe it isn't, but god damn is it stupid how much pain you have to go through when a single tp move goes off. You're absolutely right. If HQ aminon couldn't be killed with the tp drain strategy I think it would actually be FAR more painful than V25 bumba. Going through the hellish experience of him spamming tp moves on you the whole fight 14-18 times on average for a single set of mesos..... freakin no. That just fall into the realm of self inflicted pain. They went way over the top with him. His TP moves are beyond unreasonable.

That reminds me, was the latest Master Trial ever cleared?

Not yet. Still waiting on that one. People are kinda still looking for the worlds first title so I don't think there's going to be much more talk beyond what we saw on the thread until/if someone gets the clear.

“SE tests all their fights”

https://www.destructoid.com/final-fantasy-xi-boss-causes-vomiting-takes-18-hours-to-beat/

I like that you put "SE tests all their fights" in quotation marks because you couldn't provide an actual quote, because I literally never said that. In fact, I said:


Which is kind of, the complete opposite of your fake quote? So IDK who you're "quoting" here because it sure as *** ain't me.

Highlight and quote doesnt work on a mobile device the way it does on PC.

These kind of comments are unnecessary and unhelpful. Not everyone wants to be carried, merc or no mercs, and even more people don't even bother with v25s because of the randomness.

These "deep strategies" presumably include gravity kiting a big crab while it spits at you, or having to use Sch mb+burst on one fight and piercing/slashing/blunt dmg on another.

Or are we saying a FU move that 100% happens after 3min that no proc in the world will save you from is deep strategy.

The merc comment was just a little pot shot at the Asura crowd, the rest is true though.

Anyone who is attempting V25 Bumba has already cleared 16 other fights on V25, most of which involve high levels of execution, planning, coordination, flexibility, and creativity. One, maybe 1.5 of those fights involves any kind of TP drain. My point was that ignoring the other 14.5 fights that don't involve TP drain and pretending like only the one fight represents Odyssey, or FFXI as a whole, is really reductive and not very accurate.

Sortie is a little less so, at least with the current melee meta, since the rest of the mobs in there don't involve *much* strategy, but there's still plenty of planning, coordination, skill, and gear that goes into doing those runs, especially at the highest level. So once again, it seems really reductive and simplistic to say that FFXI's peak gameplay is those 2 fights just because they happen to be at the end. In order to be fighting them, you have to have gone through hundreds of hours of other content which has a wide variety of strategies, involves every job in the game, and takes advantage of a variety of different mechanics.

The game has a lot to offer and I just think it's a really dumb take to say that SE can't design an encounter based on a tiny myopic view of the combat in the game. Especially so when we're only judging those battles based on how fun/challenging they are to do with the current meta strategies.

As bad as it is, imagine feeling that ***and worse after NOT winning like was the case with AV and PW. SE has a history of being sadistic and no real clue about the game under real world conditions.

I honestly think Kirin (prior to melee burn strat) was some of the best designed content. KB was great, even Nidhogg and Fafnir just positioning it. Tiamat I barely remember but I remember it felt like a mammoth effort and was rewarding. Salvage bosses were really good. ZNM were good. Odin was fantastic, some of the best content ever.