What's your verdict on the expansion so farFollow

Have you done all the missions?

You should at least see the message "You do not obtain any bayld this evaluation" or something...

I'm pretty sure that atm the new jobs were not "intended" to be leveled up to 99, based on how they don't have their {limit}5 quests yet, and how all the GEO spells past 70 have a massive unexplained price hike (not even COR dice, for which as far as I know NPC vendors are the only source, have any price hikes like that)

No, they're intended to be level 99. They're not intended to be first jobs to 99 or to be primary jobs at 99 until SE sees how people actually play them, and then they can tweak them and give them gear to boost their roles.

A subtle difference is that SE ought right said that SCH and DNC were primarily designed to be used as sub jobs - and they are indeed very popular mage jobs even at 99 cap.

I'm considering GEO's role as an augment to the buffing job of BRD, in situations like Voidwatch where having an extra healer around is redundant. Some of the low level buffs, like the accurracy boost and the evasion boost, could supplement BRD's locked in role of Haste and Ballad (assuming no third song from Empyrean harp.)

SCH had the same complaint some spells when they were first released.

That would be my guess, which is why I'm holding off from buying (most of) the post-70 spells

I am a main Smn and yes enmity changed, it's a little iffier so to say to keep hate on your pet. Still I soloed a couple Black Mandragoras just south of the Frontier station in the battlegrounds this afternoon and it was doable with Ramuh. No Emnity- gear or enmity+ gear or super-hard-to-get-gear either. Sure, I spend almost my entire mp bar cause my summoning magic skill is still not capped (and probably need to rework my macros to inc. acc), but 2 summons and they were dead. I feel rather useful at doing colonization reives and even lair reives. Garuda heals and hastes everyone and I can engage a solo mob or attack the root np for xp and bayld.

Yes I started playing the expansion after the update so I dont know how bad Smn was before that. I feel pretty useful with just a couple people, even though I mostly solo and explore and do the quests.

I really like Adoulin, it's a nice big mega-city and you can decide for yourself if you want to walk everywhere or use the warps. That's a big plus. I did some of the quests and it's not really soloable if you want to fight mobs. I can understand SE wants people to team up much, but it'll probably take a while for people to do so... or it wont happen at all lol. Yeah, tricky the way colonization works atm. I see people get bored really quickly and colonization rate going down real soon. As a matter of fact, I lost interest in doing them already. I need to play some other games or take a day off to be able to enjoy that content.

The whole add-on does have a FFXIV feel, which kinda makes me worried. I mean, why would you want to incorporate ideas that already proved to be a letdown for most people? Time will tell how this is handled, I do have to say I wasnt a fan of campaign, never have been, and assault wasnt that much fun imo. It had it's charm but not all the time /grin.

I feel a LOT of content was not ready for launch, and the add-on feels kinda empty somehow. Maybe it's because im done with everything else already in the other add-ons and striving for endgame gear, but eh, yeah it's kinda empty. I was done in three days to be honest. Music is great, but why is there so little music? 5-6 tracks? Is it just me who has that feeling?

That said there is a lot of potential in this add-on, it looks good, it feels nice and im having fun nevertheless. Im doing a quest and oh, wait, roadblock, let's help and yeah, everyone happy, say hi to the regulars and continue on. There's incentive to work together.

I really hope this is going to be a story add-on, not battle content like Abyssea. My secret wish is another CoP, but apparently im one of the very few people who wants that nowadays.

End verdict/TL;DR: 50/50 on the add-on, I like it, but there's not that much body yet. Monstrosity/Mog Gardens/HNM fights/Beastmen areas/More questsn Yes,Please!

Still not found a reason to buy this expansion yet but I am still having fun doing old stuff.
(Mostly because I enjoy helm/crafting more atm which is something I can do without help.)

Rieve seems a bit like campaign battle (which I like) but do we really need another expansion with campaign battle you got to team up for? :(
(There are a lot of players would rather not do this and just lowman stuff with friends or something.)

Perhaps things may improve over time for the expansion will get better and I might buy it but not in it's currant form.

This is any BCNM fight really and I don't see the system changing any time soon.

Had you said campaign, I could have understood, but the best way to avoid trying to find people for an event such as a BCNM fight... is to be at the same point as everyone else. While there was much begrudging at the time, most/all lv95 players were able to clear the lv99 fight within a couple weeks, when everyone was doing the fight. Now, it had been made incredibly easy to balance the difficulty of finding people, but if you have a active, friendly linkshell, this should not be an issue.

This expansion is going to be the same.

Not only will there be fights that require a group of players, but you won't be able to simply buy the game and access those fights immediately or even within a couple days (It takes ~12 days to access the Naarkul fights). The only difference is that there will not be a lv125. We cannot wait for easy mode to kick in again.

Overall I'm very satisfied with Seekers of Adoulin thus far.
I'm loving the feeling of venturing out into the unknown and well... feeling like a pioneer should.
Our server only just established a foothold in Foret and Morimar with frontier stations and within an hour of that happening shout groups could be seen forming putting together Reive parties in those areas... parties that included all jobs and players of all caliber, it's just a damn good feeling.

There are almost certainly going to be at least four more regions to colonize, regions that would account for the four yet-to-be-seen Naakuals so this is an experience that is certain to continue.

The new jobs are slightly "meh" at the moment, but honestly that is what I was expecting; I knew that they would not have merits/AF/Relic/Abyssea gear and that they the developer team would be seeing how players use them initially before deciding how to implement changes. They are a work in progress that show potential.

People are understandably struggling without the crutches of Abyssea/Voidwatch status boosts and infinite temporary items, even more so with the changes to defense/attack/enmity. People will just have to adapt though, Abyssea kicked this game squarely into easy-mode... sorry but it did... and that needed to change.

So far, a solid first impression.

I think that's only part of it. In addition, SE can only produce so much content in between updates. More than likely, SE has a good idea of merit abilities and gear stats. When we do receive updates for the jobs, we'll probably see something close to what SE had originally planned. Sometimes SE seems like they don't really think things through, but I'd really be surprised if they did not have an almost complete outline of a job and its direction.

Releasing partial content like this simply allows SE to continue working on the planned content while we test drive everything so far without delaying an update. Then, if we do somehow surprise the developers, they will also be able to shift directions earlier in the process.

Edited, Apr 10th 2013 5:23pm by xypin

Im really enjoying the expansion a lot. I have been at it non stop doing coalition missions/quests/reives. Exploring and seeing new areas is pretty neat so is messing around with stuff that you know shouldnt.

everyone is like all moaning and complaining about the new high damage weapon instead of just enjoying the game makes me go (¬_ ¬). go do some quests or something. go help out the unlocks that you want get unlock. just today as i log on, a ls mate told me the scouts coalition got new maps and i was overcome with joy.

like someone said its pretty neat to be part of a changing world where your actions though rather very small do have some impact. i personally cant wait till ionis gets that synthing bonus.

Outsider's perspective leaves me thinking it's all just very incomplete, but that's kind of been SE's MO with releasing expansions and it still baffles me that more people aren't critical about getting 20% of a product on sale. The colonization cockblock might not make it as obvious to some, but there are people basically sick of having nothing to do buy run rieves with the fear fighting Naakuls(sp) requires a 100k bayld temp KI that poofs when you enter the area (thus lots more rieve farming). Meanwhile, as nice as the skirmish weapons sound, getting the pops is its own little circle of hell.

RUN and GEO still need some of their own perfection tweaks, but I also question SE's "Let's see how players use them..." tactic since it usually leads to the branding of being useless or pigeonholed into something passably useful, even if not themely. Could basically call it the chicken or egg effect that, as an example, has led to RDM being considered a backline support job by the general population because it lacked variety and oomph to do anything else acceptably.

Dammit, I want to play. Curse you, finances!



I dunno, I've kind of been avoiding reading about SoA's story until I can actually get in to play it myself, but Directionless doesn't really sound to uncommon for the first set of missions. Both ToAU and WotG were pretty story-lite and fuzzy when they first came out.


Honestly, I think that's just the double-edged sword of FFXI in general. It's always been a group-oriented game, I don't think it will ever fully escape that. I also don't necessarily think it's a bad thing, but SE just doesn't have the best way of going about it, given how poorly content has aged. Part of the problem was that they sort of half-heartedly tried to make things more solo-friendly with abyssea, and the second that happened, the game got flooded by people who hadn't wanted to bother with it because they had to rely on other people too much. That group of people, and the group of people who'd always thrived in the game, that prefer group content, don't mix well. They never mix well. That's a major part of why the game's community has changed so radically in the last few years (aside from the game aging and the players just growing up and moving on with their lives). The problem that arose from the new influx of a completely different type of player is that those players aren't the type who are really all that interested in regular coordinated group work, and the content at the time didn't heavily require it, and greatly favored pick-up groups. That it became the norm for randomly assembled pick-up groups to be able to pull off the same **** sort of spat in the face of all of those long-time groups that had become so good at what they did through practice and experience.



Campaign was broken from the time it was introduced and has never really worked right. I don't think it's really fair to call it the perfect co-op system, given how many completely different iterations it's had, especially given that no one was happy with every single one of them. Hell, when campaign first came out, it heavily favored melees and screwed over mages. Then it heavily favored idlers and ****** everyone else. Then soloers, then idlers, then anyone with good AoE, and at it's present state, the only way you'd really be able to excel is if you could tank, but then the level cap went up, and the event just died. TBH, I've always preferred besieged to Campaign, but that's entirely my own bias. Besieged was plagued by all the same problems, and I'm certain reives will be absolutely no different.


This is the one thing I was kind of hesitant about with this expansion. SE has to realize that their players at this point are going to blitz through content. The bulk of those players who would really love this sort of expansion premise have long since quit, and by the time they come around to getting back into the game to play with the new stuff, and catching up with what they've missed, all of the exploration and colonization fun is going to be long since done and overwith.

The players have been content starved for years now, since abyssea ended, and unless there's some pretty crazy *** mechanics in play that we don't know about, I don't know how they think they're going to keep the "Explore and Tame this vast land yourselves!" magic alive more than a couple of months.



I'm kind of in the same position. The player in me really wants to get in and get my hands dirty, but the realist knows how quickly I'll end up disappointed by how little their always is during those first few months, and with how hard-pressed my finances are atm, I just can't motivate myself to pay the current price. Pay-to-beta-test is a highly hit or miss business plan. Minecraft did it extraordinarily. FFXI has not one single time done it well.

As far as the new jobs go, I agree with SE's intentions, "let the players figure out what they want to do with them", but disagree with the their actually doing it, because they did the same **** with the ToAU jobs, and the WotG jobs, and the end result was the same every single time. The players get an unfinished product, quickly declare it worthless, then take ******* years to even acknowledge that it's long since been fixed, because it takes ******* years for them to finish the damn things, and even then, they're never completely in line with what the players want to use them for. They're horrible at understanding "what the players want to use them for" in spite of asking and trying to figure it out. It's like, they ask us what we want, and then think "Well ****, that's not what we wanted at all. Let's compromise; 75% what we want, 20% in the middle, and 5% of what you guys want."