Atma farming...Follow

I can pop into the forums all day at work. Can't play the game there though.

I've put my 100+ hours in now and I won't be working on Atmas any longer. 7/12. Don't even care to log in.

It seems I'm on the unlucky side of this crap system. The mind numbing boredom of the last 20-30 hours with no drop has made me remember exactly why I quit FFXI.

Also boring:
- Brayflox
- Farming Coil 1-5
- Even more Leviathan

The only thing I plan to do this week is cap soldiery. But why? So I can go to more Turn 6? Who cares really. There no doubt that the Atma system has, at least for me, severely underlined the pointlessness inherent in all MMO's.

"You may get nothing and not have any fun doing it!"

Oh yeah? I have a better idea.

Eh we'll all be in that boat soon. Most hardcore groups are clearing 8 and 9 now. We won't have anything to do but our animus weapons after. I'm only on book 3 and I can't really do it anymore.

It's the same thing that happened last time but I have a feeling this 'midway' patch will be lackluster compared to the one midway between 2.1. New CT, new PVP perhaps, some primals maybe? They already did Leviathan Ex. Few new dungeons. Expansion upon the Zodiark quest stuff which many still haven't completed. I do see an impending nerf to drop rates of atma and mythology costs for books coming along when novus is introduced.

Honestly a little disappointed. They could have prevented this quite a few ways (from the endgame perspective):

1) Make T7, 8, and 9 a huge gear check. AKA: outside of having full i100-105 for the entire group, it shouldn't be done. That would have halted people from rushing through endgame too fast.
2) Put some more thought into the Zodiark quest line so that it is actually viable to do it on multiple jobs but not at the rate that the normal relics were completed at. Somewhere in-between.
3) Add a new type of system to appease the consistent players that do not have time for endgame. I'm thinking things like low man Limbus, Salvage, etc.
4) Expand upon crafting more than they did this last patch by giving you all a new set of gear and many more recipes.

It's not just those perusing atma that feel this way. When it comes down to it, there just isn't that much to do honestly.

Edited, May 6th 2014 11:48am by HitomeOfBismarck

This. It sounds like any option would have made him quit regardless. Every single option seems to bore him, so there's honestly no use in complaining about the Atma farming if your FAR EASIER AND Guaranteed droppers also bore you. (Guaranteed in the sense there's always drops on kill.)

That might have been a possible temp. fix.

Really, what they need to start doing is expanding upon what can be done at 50. I have a feeling that these new systems are being reserved until the expansion is announced/released.

If it weren't for leveling MNK, I'd just be 'raid logging' so to speak. Logging in to do raiding, cap soldiery, and then doing something else.

Coil is nice but there should be more to endgame than just that. Ex primals introduced a nice aspect and so did Mog: alternate bosses that you could farm. A new system not tied to soldiery should probably be high priority. Something that has a 2-3 day lock out instead of the 7 day one that coil has that can perhaps be done with a group of 4-8 (not necessarily requiring max numbers). This keeps people logging in throughout the week.

Or they could go with the uncapped approach where you take your entire FC and try to farm for 'pop' items for special events and such. This makes use of the world outside of Mor Dhona.

They could have amplified beast strongholds and added incentives to go there instead of just for books. Most of them are really not strongholds at all.

Anything that requires people to get together (FC or not) to accomplish a task but doesn't necessarily require the entire 4 or 8 people would be ideal. Treasure maps were a good start but the rewards are way too weak to be worth it. This is the case with quite a few systems currently in game.

I personally want something like BCNM or KSNM...or whatever the system was that had you climb Ule. Range and kill a Tarus for the hedgehog bomb. You could duo that in most cases. Something to do with a friend that tests your skill and has decent rewards. Nothing like that really exists in this game.

Edited, May 6th 2014 12:02pm by HitomeOfBismarck

Not wanting to multi-quote all the good ideas here, and this one is exactly right.

Need:
More battle related content for different levels of players. (Somewhere in the difficulty mid range-between 50 dungeons and Second Coil.)
More options for party setup quantities - Dou content - 24 man content that you can do with your FC - Not DF parties of 8
Just more battle related activity options. 8-man only Endgame content is restrictive. With weekly lockouts, doubly so.
How about a really very hard, challenging, longer dungeon that rewards 100 soldiery? i90 requirement.

As far as I can tell, Gold Saucer is none of this. So I'm looking forward, based on what we've been told, and thinking it could be a year, at least 9 months before some battle related content will replace the Leviathan/Brayflox patch.

I'm not suggesting anyone should agree with this. I'm stating that there are far more people than just me unhappy with what they see now, and what they see coming in the foreseeable future. Why? Because the backbone of this game is fantastic! And it feels as if the development direction is squandering the potential.

Look around and tell me what you see. Do you think the majority of players are happy?

Majority are happy as they enjoy these themepark "Standard" MMORPGs. Hence why Tera "got better" when it became one. In all reality, if you want to pinpoint the "Blame" it can be towards the people who said XI and earlier style MMOs are archaic, the type of MMO that splits up content between x ranges and keeps soandso relevant beyond 1 patch, so Yoshi took that to heart, much like he took to heart that most people wanted a pet class.

Leviathan will be outdated come 2.3 because of Ramuh, Brayflox will never be outdated in terms of Myth unless SE nerfs Myth tomes in 2.3 like they did in 2.2, or Tam Tara hard is 100% faster and easier than Brayflox. CT will be armors again and probably i90 considering he said CT will always be "behind" coil, so it'd be a once a week i90 alternate vanity gear.

I see lots of unhappy people, but you're not allowed to be "unhappy" openly on any XIV community beyond 4chan and reddit, otherwise you get accused of..well, just read any topic on any forum if you see someone post they're unhappy about x. Even here, Atma farming makes sense but absolutely no one asked for this style, especially through FATEs and if you get too specific and use an MMORPG the developers of this game designed before, you get accused of wanting an "XI-2" even though this game is more like FFXI than even XI is these days.

If anything, all they REALLY need to do is get away from 4 man being the main content style, it's limited and can NEVER be used as progressive content in any meaningful manner unless it's related to tomes. If they switch to making 8 man standard, despite popular belief it doesn't change queue times or make matters "worse" because of cross server duty finder, but for DPS it'll always be long no matter what. They need to make more content like even Praetorium, 8 man story related dungeons...we are playing Final Fantasy aren't we? City of Amdapor is so much wasted potential but that's the life of instances. It could have been an open world area with multiple dungeons linked to it that reveals more and more about the lost civilization and Diabolos's fight itself being the closed off instance ..

Which is another issue...the instanced dungeons are story based...yet once you're in there...there aren't even cutscenes or story throughout, only the very initial vanilla dungeons had some and Stone Vigil being a good example. Most bosses are just "there" but SV's boss actually made since other than just being another clear objective.

The issue is though, these theme park MMOs, the journey doesn't matter which is why you're assaulted with hundreds of copy pasted quests to rush you to end-game where Yoshi himself said "is when the game truly starts", so littering content inbetween is kind of pointless in this type of game sadly, while it would be nice to have more to do, unless the first Expansion significantly changes the game's design direction, it's been far too long for them to switch it up now because then it'll shift people towards, let's just call it "War of the Magi" section of XIV and the vanilla will be a wasteland, much like in XI during Zilart and CoP days, vanilla/Zilart/CoP areas were always teeming with life with 1 central hub because despite everything, content in those areas remained relevant...if they didn't introduce Roulette, how likely were you to log in and load up level 16-35 dungeons? Or Cape Westwind?

This is why whether you liked it or not, in terms of content style as XI developed, it worked and why CoP was capped in the first place, not to cause "annoyances" but to allow people who happened to not be 70-75 to actually progress through the game's story and give you something to do beyond just leveling. With XIV, you can do multiple things but once you finish initial set of dungeons, you have nothing besides FATEs or Leves. There's no "right or wrong" way to design something but when you really sit and think about it, many MMOs these days hardly survive and it's not because they're necessarily bad, WoW for example probably wouldn't have survived if it came out later than it did because it came out at the perfect time when MMOs were starting to get noticed, but there's a reason they're offering to sell you "maxed out" characters and it's not out of the kindness of Blizzard's heart.

If they were to split up content like:

1. Open World content (no FATEs don't count as even their "reasons" are meaningless, but the non JP text is more..."here's a story")
2. Something like BCNM, since we get currency and many of us legacy still have hundreds upon hundreds of 1.0 currency
3. Dungeons that have multiple paths, like 1.0's TotoRak, which can have multiple end bosses or end objectives.
4. More 8 man content kind of like Hamlet Defense which let us fight with Gatherers and Crafters...
5. Golden Saucer having versions for low/mid/high level players.
6. ZNM type system where you can go out and spawn tough monsters for gear/items that goes in a chain.
7. THEN comes the primals.
8. THEN comes CT/Coil

There's just such a huge lull from early/mid game to end game, as the only things you truly have are the initial "story" dungeons then FATEs, no actual content. That's why Copperbell (1.0), Cassopeia Hallows (1.0), Mistbeard(?) Cove that was closed off were perfect to reintroduce as open world areas that can house certain type of content to do inbetween progress. It's just really obvious their trump card is in the expansion, especially with them busy working on the chinese version, DX 11 that "won't significantly change much (own words)" and remodeling housing areas to make them more attractive...there's not much they can do until then it feels.

what i think they should do with atma farming when the new novus comes out is either:

1) make atma shards buyable either with gil or myth tomes

2) make them 100% drop or at least make the drop rate so high you WILL notice a difference.

the only catch to this? In order to qualify for one of those two things you must have gotten at least ONE atma weapon the hard way already. So basically this would only help people who want multiple atmas while at the same time requiring you to at least work for an atma ONCE as not to make it easy for first time atmas hunters and pissing off the ppl who had to work hard for their atmas because of it

I'm actually kind of staring deer-at-the-headlights because I'm about to hit my last two crafting jobs at 50, and for me then it will be "what next?"

I'd like some kind of crafting endgame. Housing turned out to be "meh" for crafting once the retainers started pillaging and looting - I want to build a boat. I want to have another series of quests for DoL and DoH jobs.

Making obscene amounts of money in this game is all good and well, but...

We should have been able to sell atma on the market wards.

I do like the fact that I can farm for Atma while waiting on DF or for a PF group to complete. If obtaining Atma required group content (like a BCNM style fight), I wouldn't be able to do that any more.

So players would quit if they weren't happy and BTW you're taking a break. Hmm.

I hear that more and more each day.

I think the fact that this topic is pushing 300 posts long and has more than a few people talking about themselves and friends either outright quitting or taking a break from this game is not good no matter how you spin it. I'm pretty sure the point is to make your customers WANT your product still.