Level 99 R/M/E and WoE Weapons Follow

The cardinal rule of marketing after all is growing your most profitable customers,

[ The cardinal rule of marketing after all is growing your most profitable customers, and 99 R/E/M are nothing if not profitable. There are multiple levels of bad messages sent by companies when they **** off their most profitable customers.

Tom Brevoort, Marvel Executive VP talking company policy.

Bad word of mouth rarely hurts sales, whereas lack of interest always does. And happy fans are going to buy because they're happy. They have no reason not to, so expending energy isn't your main concern. It's good to keep them happy, sure, but your main demographic is to convert apathetic individuals. An angry customer is still someone who is thinking about your product, so at the most minimum level you've still got their attention, at which point you can draw them in. People love to hate. People rarely rage quit, no matter how often you hear about anger at a game. People quit games because they're no longer interesting or something more interesting comes along. It's a weird psychological twitch people have. Theory is nice and all, but I'll take the word of a businessman over it any time. Theory vs parser, yannow?

Of course that's not to say make the worst game imaginable and a commercial of someone taking a crap is a good choice, but pretending that the happy customer is the most important target for marketing is, in practice, not nearly that worthwhile an endeavor.

They outdated skirmish one update in. Even if they add the parts to the drop pools of the field mobs, few will do it when they can get weapons just as good with out fighting the RNG not only for the drop but a good augment on top of it. That should have you very worried right now.

Matsui here.

Thank you all so much for the feedback on relic, mythic, empyrean, and Walk of Echoes weapons. It has helped out tremendously.

After reading over all of your feedback, instead of continuing the growth of these weapons by unlocking the weapon skills that are tied to each of the weapons, I feel it would be better to perform a revamp on RME weapons. (Regarding Walk of Echoes weapons, I will talk about this below, but they will be involved with unlocking the specialized weapon skills.)

I've been reworking a lot, and writing it all up, but it seems the post turned out rather lengthy, so once you have been able to read through it all and digest it we'd love to hear your feedback.

Content Level
We've received a lot of questions about the stats on Adoulin equipment, and I'd like to once again explain about growth and content levels in Seekers of Adoulin as this is a critical aspect in order to receive feedback on the revamps for RME weapons.

The content in Adoulin has been designed with a repeating play-cycle where you challenge content that you are able to at that moment in time, gather equipment, become stronger, and then take on higher tier content which will allow you to gather even stronger equipment.

It's through the procurement of equipment that will allow players to grow and level up.

We've established content levels for Adoulin content as a means to objectively display difficulty benchmarks. The below is a concrete illustration of these content levels.

 
Content Level    Up to April 2013 	Next version update (currently adjusting)

Equipment strength is dependent on the level of the content you need to challenge in order to obtain the equipment, not the level in which it can be equipped. With the gear that is released in Adoulin from here on out, they can be equipped at level 99; however, instead of considering these to be level 99 pieces of equipment, it would be better for you to think of their level in terms of the content level (for example, level 110 or level 120).

The strength of the monsters that will be introduced are matched to that of the content level, but since there is somewhat of a solidified hierarchy between content, it's been setup so that the strength can be felt with even one level difference in content level. Oppositely, the parameters on Adoulin equipment have been calculated and set in order to deal with these monsters.

Fundamentally we will be making it so that the content level for content to come in the future continues to become higher, but there may be cases where we fill in areas where there is a large jump in content level as needed.

Also, in order to make it so there are various types of content sprawled across a single content level, we are supplementing it with content variations. We've also designed plans to enable resting periods where we will expand laterally instead of vertically, because players may get burnt out going full steam ahead.

In the next version update we will be adding content focusing on filling in the gaps as well as supplementing with content variation.

In the above chart, please look at the “Next version update (currently adjusting)” column. For content levels 6-9 (Skirmish/Wildskeeper Reives), we will be adding equipment appropriate for these content levels that can be exchanged for Bayld along with new Colonization and Lair Reives. Additionally, we will be filling in content for levels 13 and 17.

For those players who are already able to take on Skirmish, Wildskeeper Reives, and Delve at this point in time, it will not be absolutely necessary to challenge this content, but we will be making the above adjustments in case you want to increase your success rate, or are feeling that the current situation is still a bit tough.

Also, as a plan to resolve the issue where Skirmish is not really connecting the content as was planned, we will be undergoing maintenance at the end of this week and making it so statue segments can be obtained from Colonization and Lair Reives at a set rate. (These adjustments are separate from the rules associated with obtaining these items via Coalition Assignments, HELM, and Soul Pyres.)

By performing these adjustments we envision the below flow:

1. Challenge Colonization and Lair Reives
2. Obtain statue segments by participating in these reives
3. Challenge Skirmish with the parts you have obtained

Weapon Revamps

Sorry, I got off track for a bit, but now I'd like to return to the topic at hand.

To start off, I still need to discuss the implementation period with the rest of the development team, so it will be a bit difficult to address this immediately in the next version update, and we cannot make any promises as to when this will take place.

In regards to the kind of stats that will be added when we revamp these weapons, fundamentally the afterglow and aftermath effects as well as the other special stats will carry over and we'll be setting damage values, attack, and accuracy stats to coincide with the content level.

While the stats will be quite strong, we do not plan on making it possible to continuously enhance them in short intervals like the original method of enhancing via Trial of the Magians.

However, RME weapons have been considered the ultimate weapons up until this point in time, but I feel that this needs to change a bit.

I would like to make a shift so that instead of having it so that other weapons aren't necessary if you have RME weapons, you have a choice. If you are happy with RME, than you can use RME, and for those who want other weapons you can use other weapons.

With that said, there may be players who are worried if these weapons will eventually become unusable, but to give an example we had the lead make some calculations for the stats needed to combat the Delve boss monsters, and the below is what the RME swords would look like:

Excalibur



↓


Burtgang

↓


Almace

↓


In regards to Walk of Echoes weapons, these were implemented with the concept of allowing players to use the specialized empyrean weapon skills, so instead of revamping them we felt it more appropriate to have them serve to unlock the weapons skills (planning to have restrictions based on jobs and level). Also, we are looking into adjustments for the method to create Walk of Echoes weapons.

In conclusion…

Apologies that this post is so long, but based on all of the above we would love to hear your feedback on the revamps to level 99 RME weapons and unlocking weapon skills with Walk of Echoes weapons.

I will be sure to read over each and every comment you all post.

My thoughts and ideas have completely turned around the plans that were originally drawn up, and I had to sit and really discuss the idea with the rest of the development team, including the possibilities of making this happen.

I apologize that this response was late and that I made you all wait.

Thank you all very much.

I really dont understand why every single RME holder was crying out over these weapons though. Seemed childish to me.

I obtained the Delve Sword and the Great Sword, and while they look impressive damage rating wise alone, the actual output really isnt all that spectacular...

Almace, Excalibur and Burtgang already were miles ahead of the sword, which was perhaps 20~30% stronger than the best AH weapon available.

The Great Sword, while having better damage during the TP fase (i was hitting 360's in Adoulin, a Rag holder was doing about 300's), as far as WS damage was concerned, Ragnarok beat it down completely. My WS's with effort reached 2000 and took off... maybe 20% in the best of cases against trash mobs in the Ceizak jungle, his WS's were one-shotting them. Not to mention the occasional 2.5 damage hits.

There really was nothing even remotely threatening about them. But people just had to complain and now these weapons are even more outclassed by RME's. Good going player base. Good going SE for giving in to whiny demands of infants. You're really showing you care about everyone.

That sounds a bit backwards. The WS phase of Great Sword should, if any, favor Bereaver over Ragnarok. It's the TP phase with the double damage proc and increased crit hit rate where Ragnarok should be pulling out ahead. Outside of higher accuracy (and that's a minor one at best), there's nothing that Ragnarok has over Bereaver that would make Resolution with Rag do more than Resolution with Bereaver.

I really dont understand why every single RME holder was crying out over these weapons though. Seemed childish to me.

There really was nothing even remotely threatening about them.

But people just had to complain and now these weapons are even more outclassed by RME's. Good going player base. Good going SE for giving in to whiny demands of infants. You're really showing you care about everyone.