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Originally Posted by
Tsukasa
Just general meanie-ness to others ^^, Most folk in-game are definetly willing to help you get started and give you some tips on things you will have to be prepared for in future (well, the folk that know the term "We all have to start somewhere").
That's good, I'm usually only an ass when making a point about something. I'm pretty stubborn about my opinions but I doubt that will be an issue until I get a really good understanding of the game.
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The advanced jobs (Bard, Blue Mage, Dark Knight, Ninja, Puppetmaster, Samurai, Beastmaster, Corsair, Dragoon, Paladin, Ranger and Summoner) all have some extremely tricky quests (well... most of them, some quick and others tedious), you have choice to 6 classes when you start (Warrior, Monk, Thief, White Mage, Black Mage and Redmage) but don't rule them out as useless as most (if not ALL) starting classes can hold there own (In other words... all classes have unique abilities that make them a core need for different situations, Mage jobs are loved in most parties and so is the Bard).
You have to be level 30 before being capable of pulling these off? Sounds fun actually.:)
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Nasty nasty people called Real Money Traders... unfortunately you will need ALOT of money (Bards only need a few million) and they GM quite strictly when it comes to botting, RTM etc.
Oy, I can see why they would be disliked....
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All classes are fairly balanced at most times, there are some ovcourse overpowered classes (Blue Mage >_____> among a couple of others) and some the community shun completely for past nerfs (despite they are still very useful).
Good to hear they are not as broken as I've heard.
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Originally Posted by
Yeargdribble
It is best to do some research or ask some advice on a how a job works before actually using it in a party situation. As the game grows older, the tolerance for ignorance is lower. That's one of the worst elitism issues. Always be ready to listen to advice from those in a party.
There are certain things that may or may not occur to you about party dynamics that you can often only get from experience. Understanding how not to pull hate is a big deal. Knowing not to us AoE (area of effect; multi-target) spells pretty much ever is important. Knowing how to handle links or adds. If you decide to play and have a job you plan to play, feel free to ask for advice and I'm sure people here would be glad to give you a primer.
Good to hear people are willing to help. I understand the issues of group dynamics and that will be the very unfamiliar territory of play style this game will enlighten me to. I think it will be fun though;)
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You sound a lot like me. Just remember this is a blessing and a curse. You'll garner respect for doing your best, but the game can take a lot of time and eat away at your life if you're this type of person.
Thanks for the warning, I'll try my best not to be the type of person who winds up on the news. I have a lot of things I need to do in my real life anyway so hopefully I'll be able to strike a nice balance.
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Just keep in mind that if you get into endgame, you'll be dealing with a lot of scheduled events. Before I had to break it off I was having scheduled events every night. This includes about 4 hours of Dynamis twice a week as well as sky/sea farming for anywhere from 2-8 hours at least once a week. You really have to police yourself.
Also, endgame is a mean MEAN place. Especially now. Everyone has to start somewhere, but most endgamers have been at it for a long time. Finding a good linkshell (guild type thing) can be hard. However, if you take the right approach you'll find yourself well liked and making solid progress and friends.
Defineltly need to make sure I strike that balance but thank you for warning me about the commitments. I probably won't have too much issues with the linkshells though unless I do something really stupid 3 minutes into the game...
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The races aren't bad. I was also disappointed at first, but you learn to like it. There is a bit of racism though. In general I would say pick the race and job that you want to play. However, if you have no strong leaning one way or the other it would be good to pick a race based on your playstyle. Also, some races are more flexible than others.
People are more likely to accept a Taru playing melee than a Galka playing mage. It's just easier for them to make up for the shortcomings. Hume is good all around, but some would say it's a boring choice. If you wanted to ever play Black Mage, Taru is so unfairly overbalanced over the other races it's just unfair.... and they are very cocky and elitist about it.
I'd tend to say that Mithra > Hume > Taru for flexibility. Elvaan is shortly after and Galkaa is a distant 5th.
As for jobs, you start with 6 jobs available (same jobs as FF I). You'll need to get to level 30 to start doing advanced job quests to unlock the other 12. Some of them are pitifully easy and some are very very difficult and will require much help.
I'll most likely be a hume since I am boring that way, but I prefer flexibility more than personal strenghts. Choosing a starting class may be an issue since I like most of those classes. I know this may be a chore but can I get a quick analysis of the job classes? Pros and cons?
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Joining groups is fairly easy. You put up your 'flag'
http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e2...ribble/LFP.gif and start looking for a group. You can add a comment for those who read them when forming a party. Parties need a tank, a healer and some DDs (damage dealers) in general. Things bottle-neck if there aren't enough tanks and/or healers seeking to join. I find WoW's LFG system to be far better and I wish SE would listen to the players. The biggest problem with LFG is that you can't seek on multiple jobs and you can't seek on one job while doing something on another.
The biggest problems with joining parties is that certain jobs just aren't as popular, or even worse, have a bad reputation and get no invites. Puppetmaster is probably the worst. Dragoon and Thief and pretty low on the invites as well.
Sounds messy but simple enough. I doubt I'll need to be too worried about that until I can build my character up to being useful. Sad to hear that Dragoons have gotten such a bad wrap though.
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FFXI has WoW beat here. They are called linkshells. You get a linkpearl from either the leader (shell holder) or a sackholder. You can be in as many as you like at a time... which is why it is so superior to WoW in my opinion.
Generally as you are just chilling out in a party, if they notice you don't have a pearl next to your name, you're likely to get an invite to a lowish social linkshell. Starting a linkshell in FFXI is also very easy as you just have to purchase the shell for a pretty low price from a vendor and pick the color and name.
Wow, that is better. I have too many friends who have issues in WoW or Everquest about joining guilds and going nowhere with them and then having to deal with the trouble of leaving and finding a new guild. This system sounds far more flexible.
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It's very helpful to know people going in, but not absolutely necessary. Having people that can answer your questions on the fly is great. Also having a little start up gil is helpful, but it's also good to learn how to manage on your own. You'll be fine if you start alone and you'll make friends as you go.
I can see the information part being useful but I do prefer to learn how to stand on my own, even though I like being well prepared but I hate being a hindrance to others.
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Well in the end my wife and I had around 14 mules (14 extra bucks on our monthly bill) just trying to keep things straight. I had several jobs at 30 and 40 and some at 50 as well as a 75 Bard, which was decked out beyond belief both at 75 and at all caps. She had 3 level 75 jobs decked out.
Many of our mules were simply gear storage. Capped gear for our mains and for other jobs. I had an entire mule dedicated completely to my Bard's gear as well as one for all of my melee jobs and another for all of my mage jobs. Beside that, it's great to have a mule in each city so you can have access to all of the Auction Houses at a moments notice and sell (or buy) things quickly and easily where the market is good.
One of the primary ways we manage to make money without stopping too often was to simply keep ALL of the random drops we got and sort them to be sold among our mules. A lot of people keep mules for gardening as well since it can make a lot of money. The number of AH slots you can use is 7. So if you went mining or something and wanted to sell a lot of stuff, it could be backed up in your box for well over a week unless you sent it to a mule to be taken care of.
SE keeps adding storage mediums, and this is great, but it's just not enough. Most people I know with multiple jobs just end up playing one gimp by sharing gear that is only marginally useful simply so they don't have to use that much more inventory space.
That does sound quite troublesome... Though I must say damn fine job to your wife for getting three job classes to 75. I'm impressed.
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Real Money Traders. You'll also see CGF (Chinese gil/gold farmers).
They play 24/7 and even though they get banned, they keep coming back. If a mob drops a great piece of gear, there will be probably 3 of them sitting where that mob spawns all day long and likely using cheats to claim it so that you have no option but to buy it on the AH at an inflated price.
I'm not sure how things like mining are now, but there used to be one of them at every mining point botting it so that you literally could NOT mine. They have destroyed the crafting economy and pretty much everything else.
CGF I've heard that term before.:D Sad to hear they are really messing up the economy.
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The sad answer is extremely. You really need money to make it in Vana'diel. People will generally expect you to eat food that enhances your performance. You'll be expected to have oils and powders (to keep sneaked and invised around aggressive mobs) in some places. You'll have to keep your gear current and it can be very expensive at times. Even passing up the luxury items you'll find yourself hurting for money a lot. Some jobs feel it a lot more than others.
Sounds normal for an MMO and in hindsight, that was probably a stupid question now that I think about it. ;)
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When I left the answer was 'almost not at all.' They've gotten better, but there's really no direct line to SE like there is with Blizzard. You don't feel the impact of your feedback much and the GMs, though better, are still crap. They are outsourced groups that don't really know that much about the game most of the time. They answer to the higher up JP GMs. There's a good bit of racism and racial tension in the endgame world and Japanese players will often be favored. I've been witness to some egregious examples of this.
SE is, however, slowly listening more and more (probably because they realize their apathy was failing). You will at least feel their presence in trying to fix problems in the game, but you'll still feel very detached from them in any direct sense.
It's sad that it doesn't seem like they respond to problems very quickly, but then again, at least they aren't lurking over and playing "rules police" Hopefully it won't be an issue.
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Patches will make you want to claw your eyes out, but other than that you should be generally okay as long as nothing else is eating up your bandwidth while you attempt to play. You'll have very little chance of claiming any NMs (notorious monsters) though.
I already claw my eyes out downloading normal things...:cry: my old job had a wondeful internet connection (I now understand why all my old friends insisted on playing WoW at work...) Well if worst comes to worst, I'll just "borrow" their internet connection to get the patches out of the way... :shifty:
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Balance is a big problem in FFXI. I find that WoW has fixed a lot of the balance issues by allowing each job to be able to fill multiple roles in a pinch. In FFXI this just isn't the case. You also have a major number problem. There are only a handful of healers and even less tanks while the vast majority of jobs at DDs. That said, people tend to pick one job as the best of each category at different times.
With DDs this becomes a problem. You end up with your flavor of the month DDs. It once was Dragoon, but after a particular nerf people just laughed at DRG. Despite how powerful it can be it wasn't as powerful as it was AND there seems to be a huge influx of retards to DRG (and Dark Knight... go FF IV). Even now a lot of people don't want to invite DRG. Ranger used to be a GOD!! They were the only way in endgame and often a party would kick any other DD at any point to get a RNG. After their nerf they are lower than dirt for the most part even though they are still great.
It has a lot more to do with community perception than the realities of the job. It's funny how years ago people would say "Warrior is only a subjob... it's stupid as a main." People wouldn't even pick up WARs for XP PTs and now they are the flavor-of-the-month DD for over a year.
The balance could be tweaked, but really it's in people's heads so you just have to learn to work around that.
It's a shame the classes are not too flexible, but isn't that where sub classes come into play?
Perception sounds like a bitch and it's sad to hear that DRG and DK are getting bad wraps due to incompetence. I'll wait to see how those play out.
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I've used a lot in this response. I don't think I could even begin to go down a list of lingo that would be inclusive, but I'll add a few.
AH = Auction House
LS = Linkshell
PT = Party
XP = duh
LFG/LFP = Looking for Group/Party
Also learning the shorthand of the job names is helpful, though you'll get it in time.
Thanks for the list;)
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In general, never buy on the AH, but always sell at the AH. Also keep in mind that in FFXI you have to level your subjob independently of your primary job. Most main jobs will be expected to have several subs by endgame. These are things you'll pick up as you go, but it's good to know ahead of time.
Thanks for the advice.:)
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Sorry for the uber long post. If you have any other questions I'd be glad to answer them.
No, I'm happy you went to such detail. It's been quite informative. I'll probably pick this game up in the next few days (when my work stops calling me in to pick up shifts cause my co-workers are useless:rolleyes2 ) and depending upon how bad the patch downloads are, I should hopefully be up in a few weeks throwing in time constraints due to work and personal projects.
