VanaFest 2010 Post-event Report Now Available! (02/28/2010)

[Fluffy]

FINAL FANTASY XI Official Web Site

This doesn't even mention some of the other things.

• Level cap is being raised to 99.
• Servers are being merged next update. (Alexander will be unaffected)
• Three new add-ons that seem to focus on endgame content, Abyssea.
  http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/addon/index.html

Can't think of the rest. It's a ton of announcements.

PUP going from C to A skill will probably overpower the job. It already keeps up just fine with other DD.

And three years of promised avatars for... two new additions to Astral Flow? Seriously SE???

[Andromeda]

Hey, Odin's a AoE one shot on everything that's not NM. I'd say that's pretty cool. Though are all campaign monsters considered NM? If not Summoners would have a blast in campaign. And Alexander is like a party Sentinel I think, I don't think its as strong as Invincible, but still Sentinel on all party members is pretty good. They'll make good the party just got add-ons and we need to save our butts face sorts of moves.

I can't wait to see the new skills that we get up to 99. I want to see what PLD and DNC look like at 99. I thought that SE would never give us 99 since they were always saying that we had the Merit Point system. This is going to throw a lot of things out of whack. Not to mention completely change sub jobs for so many jobs. Going to be seeing WHM/RDM and BLM/RDM everywhere. And RDM's importance will suddenly disappear in post 80 parties. The reliance on refreshers won't be as important since sub jobs will fix a lot of that.

They were saying that the new level cap only exists in the new add-ons. Is that right? Because that'll be a little disappointing not being able to go around the other parts of the game at 99 and not have to worry about aggro from anything. But dang it, I though I was finally over FFXI and ready to move on. But with a level 99 cap I may want to come back.

[Fluffy]

I'm not sure if the level cap thing in add-on areas only is official or just speculation from players. I haven't seen anything official said about it.

And don't get me wrong, I do like Alexander and Odin for SMN. But 3 years is a bit much to have SMN's excited over a 2hour adjustment, when that wasn't at all what they were expecting form the announcement three years ago. But depending on exactly how they perform, I think I'll enjoy them. Astral Flow generally isn't that great in most situations. It's good in a few missions and that's about it.

BLM/RDM is already standard. But BLM80/RDM40 would fix a lot of issues with the job. WHM/RDM will probably become the new standard, with WHM/SCH being optional depending on the situation. And SCH/RDM is currently standard, but we'll see the addition of SCH/WHM option. Haste is good stuff.

[Andromeda]

Well imagine when you want to finish up the party for the night and you've got a summoner in the party. You have all five of the other party members go pull one or two monster bring them all back to the summoner and the summoner goes Astral Flow Odin and boom finishing the party with a nice 1k to 2k exp bonus. I can see that being a pretty common thing to do before breaking.

Though curse SE for making me want to come back and start playing again. I had to go torment my best friend that played with me back in the day. And they are seriously considering starting back up to play again. Because being 99 is something that everyone since you started playing dreamed about being. It's classic FF and not to mention being able to be that high. Makes me wonder about all of the skills and traits we can get. I hope PLD gets its own Provoke finally so PLD can start trying out some other sub jobs. Or do a double Provoke with WAR and PLD be the ultimate unbreakable tank.

According to their plan the level cap increase looks to be at least a three stage process that won't be finished until December. So it'll look very similar to how things were when they were moving from level 50 to 75 back in the really old days.

[Fluffy]

They did throw out some ideas for the jobs.

BLM getting Meteor (I imagine they'd get more than this, like Tier V and Tier IV -ga nukes, and maybe Comet. I'd like like to see Death, since SMN is getting Zantetsuken.)

DNC getting more ways to regain TP.

WHM new healing and divine magic.

MNK possibly suppress WS and TP to increase accuracy of normal hits. I'm unsure of this one, but I think I can think of some applications for it.

RNG lower enmity or boost damage.

They said they'd be adding stuff to make the jobs more unique to counter the fact that subjobs are going to be granting more now.

[Andromeda]

How many more ways to gain TP does the DNC really need? I mean a level 75 DNC is already pretty good at gaining how much TP you want and if you're subbing SAM with them the DNC never really has TP problems. I'm more interested in seeing more new and better dances out of the new levels. It'll be nice to have some more accuracy bonus for abilities and dagger since the natural accuracy is rather poor. You have to do a lot of augmenting to the DNC dagger skill and accuracy into a viable range.

One thing that might be nice for dancers is TP meter increases unique only to Dancers, since it is the only class that spends TP like MP. Getting a 400 or 500% meter would be nice for those times you need to do big cures or something. Or even for really strong WS. It is a TP job, having a special meter would be a nice bonus to make them stand out. Either that or TP cost reduction.

[Zargabaath]

When I first saw someone mention this news on VGChartz.com they said that there was a sub-job level increase; looking at that now it is just another way of putting that the level cap increased. When I first caught the news about the sub-job level increase I thought S-E was implementing something I had always wanted in FFXI and if they had done so I would have purchased the game and start playing. This feature I hoped for was the ability of the sub-job to gain experience along with the player's main job but still only be 1/2 of the main job's level. That would have cut down the time needed to get towards the end game, but alas, my hopes were not realized as it was just a level cap increase for the main job which in turn would raise the level cap for the sub-job. I've always thought that, that feature would have greatly helped FFXI's appeal to the market in a big way since people's thoughts were it took too long.

I do want to play FFXI for the story but I'm unsure I would have the time or the funds (at the moment) to play at a "level" I would want. Plus, FFXIII is 8 or 9 days away depending on how somebody looks at it so that would be less time to put towards FFXI. Maybe one day after I beat FFXIII I could do a good run on FFXI.

[Fluffy]

Just saw video of Alexander and Odin in action. They didn't show much of Alexander, but these have me pretty excited. Can't wait to get them.