After this whirlwind update the level cap has increased to 80 and introduced a lot (some might say... a plethora) of new equipment.  I've been having trouble keeping track of where things stand in relation to the best stats available in each category.  I think I've been long overdue to look into this myself and so I spent some time compiling sets of gear with the maximum possible stats in many different categories.

Not included in these sets are augmented items, items with latents or enchantments.  RSE is included for comparison but not totaled into the sum since it's optional.  There are also certain special items that shouldn't get overlooked such as the Serpentes Cuffs and Serpentes Sabots set (which paired together grant a constant refresh and regen) and magian items such as the Surya's Staff with +17% Cure Potency.  Thanks to augments, the best obtainable gear is more debatable than ever.

Obviously the provided lists are not intended as actual gear setups to use in game.  It would be just stupid to cast in a maximum magic accuracy set.  So please don't be as clueless as to blindly follow after whatever item just has "the most" x, y, z.  Hopefully some of you find this useful, at least until the next update.  Enjoy.

Even though Visions of Abyssea areas have become thoroughly explored, a lot of unknown information and mysteries remain.  In case you haven't been keeping up with some of the talk and forum posting among the FFXI communities, here's some of the latest info you might have missed.

The Bare Basics
This is going to be a very long post covering much of the info known about Abyssea so far.  If you're new however you might not care to read every single confusing detail.  You probably just want to go in and have some fun with a little advice.  So to start with here's a really quick generalized view of what to expect in Abyssea.

Abyssea blends together elements from Dynamis, Assault, and ZNM in interesting ways.  Abyssea areas are open to anyone with access to the Abyssea addons level 30 and above.  You can enter freely and do as you please however you're limited to the amount of time granted with your visitant status.  Defeating enemies in Abyssea rewards experience and cruor points.  Cruor are points used to buy rewards, buffs, and travel in Abyssea.

To enter an Abyssea area you must purchase the addon then trigger the cutscene in Port Jeuno.  After that speak to the NPC Joachim for your Traverser Stone.  Traverser Stones act similar to an Assault Tag or a Campaign Ops Credit to grant you time in Abyssea (more detailed info later).  Once you have the stone travel to any of the three Cavernous Maws.  All 3 are located in a teleport crag area right before you reach the exit to the starting player areas (e.g. LaTheine maw is right near the exit to West Ronfaure).  Check the Cavernous Maw and choose to enter to continue into the area.  Just be careful not to enter a maw if you have plans to go along on an Abyssea group event within the next hour or you may have to wait (see time restrictions for more info).

Abyssea areas are generally not that hostile to a solo player, unlike Dynamis and Salvage where it's difficult to get around and aggroing means a quick violent death.  All regular enemies in Abyssea can be avoided easily by using sneak and invisible to bypass, or are already non-aggressive.  The areas are very large and so sneaking around isn't really any issue.  Time and slow travel is more of an enemy than accidental aggro.  And so if you are truly unable or unwilling to party up many jobs can find something to do solo in Abyssea.  You could farm some items and cruor from enemies, or do quests as you see fit.  To defeat the more challenging NMs however you will definitely have to party up with a group of friends.

After traveling into Abyssea you'll notice that the areas are nicely distributed with the same types of enemies all neatly clustered together in their own section.  In general, it's pretty simple.  Killing enemies of each type will randomly drop an NM spawn item at a fairly high rate.  Usually that type of enemy will spawn a NM of that same type (e.g. Bat mobs drop trigger for bat NM).  So all you really need to do is find out what NM you're after, travel to those mobs and start farming them until you get an NM trigger.  The trigger target is also conveniently located right where the mobs are.  As you fight in Abyssea the enemies level and spawn rate will tailor itself to your party's.  Eventually the enemies will become Incredibly Tough to your highest members level.  Be careful however, some groups of enemies will not drop any NM triggers because the corresponding NM of their type is already pre-spawned or a lottery.  And so as the enemies become higher level a pre-spawned NM could ultimately become drawn to you as well.

Once you have some NM triggers, it works on a pretty familiar tiered system.  Most NMs require 1 item to spawn, others can require up to 5 triggers.  All of the first tier NM triggers can be purchased on the AH as well.  You will have to work your way up the system to spawn the more powerful NMs after that.

That's basically it.  Go in, target the enemy type of your choice, and get to killing for some exp and cruor.  Figure out which NMs have some nice loot and work your way toward them.  Now if you want to get into the details there's plenty more below.

This is just a very fast summary of what players have discovered so far relating to the new Vision of Abyssea addon.  All of this info was collected from what little I've experienced and the pages of information posted to BG Forums here.  I'm not going to go into much strategy or evaluation, this is just one big summarized dump of info.  I think it makes it easier to read through.  The locations listed on the maps are not perfect, they only indicate the general coordinate something is located at.  It could be at any spot within that coordinate square, it's still rough going off of player descriptions.  All of this info is early and may be inaccurate so take that into consideration.

The June update is underway and the Walk of Echos area will finally be accessible for players.  Notably there's no in-game map available for that area and so it's up to players to find a way to create something to help make traveling and strategy easier.  I photoshopped up some such maps long ago, and now that it's actually relevant, you can download them for your own purposes.  (link for the download is at the bottom of this post)



It's pretty simple, just a pack of images done in a style similar to the normal FFXI in-game maps.  The total area is comprised of 17 distinct "sections".  Composite images of all sections together are also provided just because.

Concerning practicality, the images might be a little rough.  Which is because the WoE area is very fragmented and cluttered with materials and multi-level platforms.  And so a 2-D map image is only capable of showing the top down view which won't fully illustrate areas below higher platforms etc.  Additionally not all areas illustrated may be traversable in the game itself.  Certain portions may just be areas just for scenery players can't move freely around on.  So just keep that in mind.

Overall however I think it will be helpful for having a rough idea of this areas geography.  Hope you find it useful and have fun.

Download link:  http://sharebee.com/c5870580

It's always interesting to me to see how our ideas and assumptions from the real world can wind up manifesting in the virtual world of an MMO.  In particular, there are a lot of similarities between real economics and the economics of a game world.  In general a lot of the same principles apply such as supply and demand.  There are many differences as well, but the basics are very similar and allow for making some comparisons and observations between the two.  In this post however I'm more concerned with the attitudes toward trading.

By now you've probably seen some of the juicy loot obtained from the Shadowlord campaign Ops battle, Fiat Lux.  The Alexander and Valefor servers recently unlocked this mission and info has been steadily forthcoming.  But in case you haven't checked it out yet I thought I'd summarize some of the info and offer a little advice for anyone with the ambition to attempt unlocking Fiat Lux themselves.

The September FFXI update will complete the Wings of the Goddess Nation missions.  Here are some pics taken during scenes of the Wings missions.  Some spoilers are involved, but if you haven't gotten into the missions yet, get to it!  Wings has received a lot of criticism from players for recycling too much content, and focusing too much on low level and Campaign.  But Wings really excels at telling an interesting and action-packed story with all the usual Square-Enix flair.  Eccentric heroes and villains.  Pretty sparkly effects that make you forget FFXI is a PS2 game.  Snow that catches on fire somehow.  And extremely clever plot revelations, it's all there.  The final missions are sure to be nothing short of epic.  If you're the type who cares about the storyline in FFXI you know what you need to do.

The Final Fantasy XIV Alpha testing is rolling out and the hype continues to build.  FFXI and FFXIV are going to be sure to share much of the same players and demographics.  So what kinds of things can we reasonably expect for their upcoming relationship?  Here are some of my personal expectations.

This post is going to be nothing but pure nerding out.  So if you're the type who can't stomach a little speculation just for fun, then you've been warned, don't bother reading any more.  It also contains major spoilers for both the Treasures of Aht Urhgan and Wings of the Goddess plots.

The next FFXI update will complete the Wings of the Goddess Nation storylines.  Here are some pics taken during scenes from the Shadowreign San d'Oria story.  Only minor spoilers are involved, but if you haven't gotten into the nation missions yet, get to it!

The next FFXI update will complete the Wings of the Goddess Nation storylines.  Here are some pics taken during scenes from the Shadowreign Windurst story.  Only minor spoilers are involved, but if you haven't gotten into the nation missions yet, get to it!

The March update will finally bring the long awaited (and over anticipated) Summoner avatars, Alexander and Odin.  Strangely, it's been years since the Treasures of Aht Urhgan storyline ended and yet here is a fresh addition to its content.  ToA would still appear to have a few loose ends that never seemed to materialize.  One other such example concerns the Nyzul Isle assaults.  During an interview done at FanFest 2008, it was stated:

Here's some stuff that happened to me this week.

I'm in a new Salvage group after my months of being away from FFXI.  We must have stored up some kind of pity TH because the remnants have been pretty loose with their gear.  Totalling 3 drops in a row from SSR, and the next day 2 Brayette's from back-to-back Gate Widows.


I've been hitting up MMM casually whenever possible trying to grab a Mamool Ja Earring, but the event's totally ungrateful drop rate will have none of it.

Screwing around figuring out the Hunt Registry/ Evolith system led me to camping Hyakinthos.  I ran up and saw that he was just hanging out so I did him the favor of ending his tiny life.  He reciprocated by giving me some ring and 20 Scylds for my trouble.  Not bad.  I swung by to see if the partner NM was around (Lava's Ring is part of a two ring set) and found a scene resembling a tiny Lamina's-Aery complete with desperate AFK camping melees.  How adorable!

I've been checking out the Hunt Registry/Evoliths system in case the upcoming updates utilize more of its true potential.  I noticed that there was a lot of info, but there is no breakdown of the Evoliths by their rarity or difficulty to obtain.  And so here I've sorted the current list of Evoliths using info provided by FFXIclopedia.  It's interesting to see which types require the most Scylds as an indication of which Square seems to believe are the best available.  Since the purpose is to see which Evoliths may be "better" this list doesn't include Evoliths from any NM's that require 0 Scylds to hunt.  Here's how it goes:

Upon the release of Wings of the Goddess some were shocked at what they found on their game disc.  Or more precisely they were surprised at how little was on the disc itself.  The contents of the WotG CD totaled only 352 MB.  Not much bigger than the size of downloading maybe one T.V. show.  Over the span of several updates downloaded content has added around 143 MB resulting in a total of nearly 500 MB.  If they're only going to wait to add the bulk of an expansions data with updates then what's the point?  Why even bother producing discs at all?

The past year of FFXI has been slow and fairly dull. There have been smatterings of nice gear additions and many welcomed but minor adjustments (e.g. storage). But nothing really engrossing and challenging has been introduced for quite some time. Now that Square has announced future plans for the next year of gameplay let's look back at FFXI in '09. This is a long post so hopefully this can remind everyone where we've been and bring some perspective and insight.

I'm sure we've all seen a lot of bad shouts in our time. And I'm not talking about chatter or spam, I'm talking about shouts that attempt to provide info but contain useless words mindlessly copied because someone saw another person use the same format.

The purpose of a shout is to provide information. Your goal should be to provide all the relevant details other players need to judge whether or not they're interested. Basically that means: what your purpose is, capacity of your party, level range (if appropriate), and any caveats like a specific class of job you need etc. So it winds up looking something like: "CoP mission 4, [looking for members], @ 4, need support job". Or: "Salvage Arrapago Remnants 2F 3F 4F Boss, @ 3 please have permit ready". That's really all there is to it, it's common sense.

Unfortunately a lot of bad habits tend to creep up on some people. First of all there is the notorious auto-translate phrase "do you need it?" This phrase is entirely too overused in FFXI and frankly I can only picture a few instances where you'd sincerely need to use it. Maybe if you wanted to ask a foreign player if they need a certain drop in the loot pool. But somehow this phrase has become almost an institutionalized part of shout info. And without justification.

A typical example would be like: "Windurst mission 8, [do you need it?] @4". It adds nothing whatsoever to your information. Think about it. Isn't it already implied in my responding that I would need the mission? Why would anyone respond if they were not interested in joining you? It's like some bad rhetorical question randomly inserted out of no where. Imagine if someone were to shout: "ROZ mission 10, [Does this tunic make me look fat?] @5, need tank". That's not far off from using "[do you need it]". Variations of this same idea comes in the form of "[Can I have it?]", and [Do you have it?]. Then there's always the double-whammy of: "[Do you have it?] [Can I have it?]".

Not far off from this phenomenon is the redundancy of specifying whom to send a tell to join the party. For example:

Pukequeefa : Soboro run, [looking for members] @5, /tell Pukequeefa

Most of us have done this and in fact it's so common many people just add it on out of pure instinct without thinking. Now maybe Pukequeefa has an uber fine Soboro run brewing. But the problem is it simply adds no info to your shout. Anyone capable of running a complicated computer game will understand the implication that you would have to send Pukequeefa a tell in order to join up. Maybe they think that their request is so complex and unnavigable it blows the minds of the average peon. In which case reminding the stupefied creatures how they communicate might be required.

There is however a legit function for the "/tell X" comment. If you are shouting for your party but you are not the organizer of the event then it serves an actual purpose to point anyone interested to them instead. For example, if the organizer is shouting to find members in Whitegate and you offer to shout in Lower Jeuno to cover more area. Unless this is the case ditch that "/tell" comment for the better.

These are just a few specific habits that I see on a daily basis and wanted to finally and explicitly point out. I know there are many other varieties but that'll do for now. Just remember to stick to providing info while resisting using the auto-translator as a lazy-phrase machine and you're way ahead.

The 2010 FFXI Vanafest announced a new trilogy of add-ons to expect throughout the year. Vision, Scars, and Heroes of Abyssea. This series appears to be completely different from the last year's add-on trilogy. Where ACP, MDK, and ASA focused on a story wrapped around quests ranging from levels 20~75, Abyssea indicates it will focus on challenging high-level events. Given that the "quest" add-ons were generally scorned, this new approach is a welcome change and gives me high hopes for its success.

Here's what little info on Abyssea we've got so far. From the Vanafest site:

Abyssea is a parallel world existing beside Vana'diel. A land fraught with perils, Abyssea is home to savage hordes of heretofore unseen creatures. Ferocious, towering NMs, new-look HNMs—even the garden varieties will confound would-be challengers with their unfamiliar and formidable powers. These and a whole host more await hapless adventurers with open arms and voracious maws.

In Abyssea, concerns such as the over-population of battle areas and the need for large time investments will be a thing of the past. The development team is hard at work creating a world where parties can engage in rewarding battles with powerful foes and collect prized equipment with the least of fuss. The expansive realm of Abyssea will comprise several new areas which will be introduced over the course of three add-ons.

Not included in this info is the fact that Abyssea includes the debut of AF3 equipment. A new line of AF, new areas, and a focus on level 75 gameplay could make this a potentially great series capable of vindicating the term "add-on".

It's also interesting to consider how Abyssea fits into the fictional world of the game itself. (Mild Wings of the Goddess spoilers follow) If you've been keeping up with your Wings of the Goddess missions (you're keeping up yeh?) you know that the plot centers around Atomos creating a bridge between two alternate versions of Vanadiel. We're all familiar with the our universe where the Allied Forces won the war and the Age of Adventurers has lead to relative peace. In Wings however, we learn that there is a second universe where the Allied Forces lost the war leading to the four nations complete downfall. This second universe is probably Abyssea. (Not to be confused with Dynamis which is a kind of dream Diabolos created to escape into)

If this is the case I sincerely hope the "new areas" don't simply turn out to be yet another version of the four nations. It's one thing when enemies or equipment gets re-skinned, but when a whole zone is repurposed it's dejecting. To date we've got the standard present versions of each city, then the dream-world Dynamis versions, and now their past equivalents as well. A fourth second universe of a dystopian Windurst (e.g. "Windurst Waters_(A)") would be transparently lazy and come off as a Dynamis rip-off.

The last year of Wings content has been full of mediocrity and qualifications. Here's to hoping Abyssea brings about some fresh new ideas and fun gameplay. We'll find out in June.

In my last post I considered possible implications for the upcoming FFXI adjustments in general. With this post I thought I'd take a moment to briefly comment on the various specific changes themselves. There was an awful lot going on here that put Fanfest 2009 to shame.

In 2009 the Final Fantasy XI Fan Festival had set the bar pretty low concerning any expectations for FFXI's future. And so I approached this years affair with heavy skepticism and mild interest. Could they possibly have anything new to say? It didn't seem likely there would be anything beyond the already well known areas and the usual additions like missions.