Help from anyone please... Especially Nudawn LS members (wasFollow

Seven years gone? Wow, you are in for a hell of a shock. The threads with tips for returning players are in various states of decay as far as what you'll actually encounter, as many of those are as out of date as your own previous experiences now.

As for obtaining FFXI, Steam makes it easy -- one purchase and done. You probably made things harder on yourself than necessary. Also, if you haven't picked up the Abyssea addons, you'll want to grab those as soon as possible.


To address your first question, parties, in the traditional sense you are used to, are virtually non-existent now at ANY level range. You'll be soloing your early levels (which is far easier than you'll recall), and likely either taking Grounds of Valor or Abyssea the rest of the way to the cap. And you'll still be at cap magnitudes faster than previously, despite the higher level cap.

Three systems you'll want to look up:

Fields of Valor -- You'll want to be using this for your earliest levels.
Grounds of Valor -- A solid leveling option from low-mid level all the way to cap.
Abyssea -- Basically the core of the FFXI experience at this time is centered on Abyssea, though we're now branching out into other content again -- it has the fastest EXP available right now, as well as a plethora of great equipment that is available to hardcore and casual alike. Abyssea contains a massive amount of content, and you don't need to learn it all immediately, but skim over the pages at least.

At level 75+ you're going to want to familiarize yourself with Trial of the Magians.

You may also want to read over the new jobs that have been released since your departure:

Blue Mage
Puppetmaster
Corsair
Dancer
Scholar

Dancer, in particular, is quite helpful as a subjob.

A lot of things have changed, so be prepared to re-learn the entire game from scratch.

Edited, Dec 12th 2011 2:17pm by Calessa

Edited, Dec 12th 2011 2:17pm by Calessa

Whoa... I am almost in tears right now lol. That SUCKS...

And why did they take away the parties? What the heck is a white mage supposed to do if all you do is solo?

So... Is everybody becoming Rdms now or something? As i recall they were fairly good at soloing...

And if the whole game is about soloing, what is the point of having it online??? Be honest with me guys, I loved the FFXI i left. Does it even resemble that game anymore? And if it doesnt, is there even any point in returning?

For those of you who remember, is it as fun as the old FFXI (The one with freakin parties)???

I play in parties every day - just not EXP parties. FFXI is now about lowman content for "endgame" activities, and huge HNMLSes are a thing of the past (for the time being, it seems SE may be forcing us to join 18 man+ groups again for stuff). To be the most effective, its best to group with 3-5 other people. Grouping is still alive and well.

As for exp...its a bit different, but its still most effective to join a group - specifically an exp alliance. EXP in an alliance may sound foreign, but it was fun in my experience when I did it.

If you are coming back from a 6-7 year break.....you will like it more. I am assuming in the 6-7 year period, your adult life picked up responsibilities (mortgage, rent, kids, wife, job, higher education, etc). Currently (keep your fingers crossed) the game is geared to the aging crowd that wants to accomplish things, yet dont have the 40+ hours a week to dedicate to ffxi. (Currently) You arent "forced" to do content with people you REALLY dislike but cant leave due to having points in a system, instead you can grab 3-5 of your friends you do like and go out and get things done. Its much better.

TLDR - fear not, group activities still exist, and when its in a lowman setting, you depend on the other people MORE and you have to be more attentive yourself.

Edited, Dec 12th 2011 2:44pm by ManifestOfKujata

not sure about the HNMs - I still dont do them, 20 levels later. The best armor currently comes from abyssea and voidwatch (but the droprate / drop mechanics in voidwatch totally suck balls, imo stick to completing everythign in abyssea and give SE time to fix the voidwatch system).

Someone mentioned it in an earlier post, but to get EXP you do something called Grounds of Valor now. Basically you get instructions to kill X number of mobs, and when you do, you get bonus exp of roughly 2k exp. Since exp isnt centered around number of people in your party/chain anymore - its centered around number of monsters killed - this opened the door to killing x number of mobs in an alliance, as the entire alliance gets credit and an alliance can slaughter x mobs in about 2 mins. You get no less than 89k exp/hour now in an alliance party.

FFXI is no longer about EXP - its about content at the cap, and you will be busy with it for years on end unless you dont have a life outside of ffxi.

Hey this is Primal. PM me and I'll help you get back on your feet and catch you up with all the changes. Welcome back, and tell Proto I said hi!

Edited, Dec 12th 2011 3:30pm by Prim

Primal-

For some reason my stupid computer is not letting me send a PM. I will keep trying, but if i cant, do you want me to just post what i was gonna say on here?

OK, thanx.

Here was the PM i tried to send 100 times:

Hey Primal.

I never got to meet you in game with my character but i saw you plenty of times from Proto's PC and Ive heard a lot about you.

Thanks for the offer to help. Im sure we are going to need as much as we need bc by the sound of it, FFXI is a completely different game than when we left it...

Right now we are working on getting internet hooked up at our house (out in the boondocks) so we can start playing again. The worst part is, almost no one offers high speed internet where we live. In fact, Dial up is the only thing we have found so far. Do you know if a person would be able to run two PS2's playing FFXI at the same time on Dial Up?

Anyways, I will let Proto get on here when I get back to her house (Won't be until sometime next week Im on a trip) but until then, any amount of bringing-me-up-to-date would be greatly appreciated!!

Thanx again

Back in the day, you could run 3 PCs playing FFXI on a single dialup. I have no idea if PS2s can even manage a dialup connection, but for smaller events, a dialup should be fine, bandwidth-wise.

I'm not sure how well extremely large events will fare, though.

Honestly, though, your biggest problem will be patching. Even the most recent disc releases will require about a gigabyte of patch data, and 1 GB takes approximately 60 hours non-stop on a 56k dialup. If the releases you have are older, it may require significantly more.

At the very least, I would see if there's a friend or something you could visit to get the patching process finished on a high-bandwidth line.

I never knew either of you, I am on Phoenix, but just a warning for a fellow PS2 user. I dual-box with PC and PS2, and 20% of the time when you talk to warp NPCs, or some quest NPCs, or even the choco stable NPC, the screen will freeze not allowing you to move of interact at all. It is very annoying and has been a problem for awhile now. I have gotten to the point where I just use teleport spells if they will get me anywhere close to where I want to be. I still enjoy playing, but it can be very annoying shutting of the power switch to the PS2 and re-logging in just to play.

Thanx so much for all the help guys.

Sorry it took me so long to get back on here, like i said im on a business trip with limited free time...

I did find someone else who could provide us with internet but everyone i have talked to has cautioned me against it... Hugh's Net. It is satellite based and a lot of people have told me that it doesnt work for most online games, like Call of Duty and others. But does anyone know how it would work with FFXI?

And if it would work, in a situation where i would be running two PS2s at the same time, would i be better to go with Hugh's Net of Dialup???

Now a couple more Q's on the game...

1.) Ok so no more HNMs... Are there any single mobs in the game now that would give an 18 party alliance at lvl 95 a decent challenge?

2.) For those of you who remember how the game was seven years ago... which is more fun for a low lvl character (1-60)? And which way is more fun for a high lvl character?

There are mobs like that, but they are mostly reserved for the event called "Voidwatch". I actually just tried my hand at Voidwatch the other night in a pickup group and it was pretty fun. All the other old HNMs have pretty much gone by the wayside. Why? Abyssea, that's why. For the most part the new AF (we call it AF3) you get from Abyssea blows everything else out of the water. SE really outdid themselves with that stuff. For YEARS it was sidegrade after sidegrade, but Abyssea put that trend to rest quite handidly.

For your #2- what are you asking? What job is more fun? I dunno they're all pretty fun. Leveling has become much easier so it's not like you have to pick and choose which job you'll spend the next few months bringing up to cap. I'd focus on getting your current 75s up to 99 or maybe getting subjobs up to 50. There really is an amazing amount of freedom now so you can do whatever you please.
As long as you can manage to get a stable connection, I'm sure you'll all have a blast!

Great stuff Primal and Manifest- Thank you. Im getting excited now cuz the way its sounding, the game is now funner than ever, even tho im gonna have to learn some new stuff...

Primal, on #2 I worded it weird for some reason lol... didnt mean to. I was meaning, For a high lvl character like yourself, which way do (did) you enjoy FFXI more? The way it is now or the way it was when I left, when a big part of the game was fighting HNMs and Nudawn LS still existed?

Manifest- Thanx for the info on Hugh's Net. Im now trying my best to get some other ISP but its not looking promising- we may have to settle for dialup. Im trying local Cable ISPs but nothing so far. if anyone else has some info on it, id appreciate it.

By your all's descriptions, i can wait to get back on the game. Abyssea sounds great. The only problem is, my character was lost for sure and we think Proto was lost as well, not positive though. But we will have quite a bit of time to play and we are both experienced so it shouldnt be long until we can go to Abyssea...

Again, anyone with more info on the Dialup thing, please post it on here or PM me. Thanx in advance!!

I liked it all, which is pretty much the reason I'm still around. Definitely for different reasons though.

Old FFXI- Yea the time sinks, 21-23h camps, and slow progression/infinite sidegrading was irritating. However at that time in my life I had the spare hours to do stuff like that. If I didn't have at least 2 hours free it was hard to justify logging on since everything took at least that long to organize, travel, camp/kill/whatever. Our LS was always extremely friendly and I looked forward to logging on each day not only for events but to talk with and hang out with everyone. HNMLSs were necessary to make progression in any sort of timely manner in endgame stuff. That's the way the game was designed at the time.

New FFXI- Now, like we've said, Abyssea turned all that on its head. You can make incremental upgrades to your character in very short times (1+ hours) with much smaller groups (2-5 people). I'm finishing up grad school so on a good day I may only have a few hours to devote to FFXI, yet it's still worth logging on. This change, coupled with the incredible armor and weapons available in Abyssea, completely negated the need for old-school style HNMLSs. Every time you go into Abyssea (well... almost every time) everyone usually gets some piece of armor upgrade, a new abyssite or atma (huge semi-permanent stat boosts), or something to make you feel like that time spent was worthwhile. Compare that to old HNMs where after 3 hours of camping and a half-hour fight, 1 or 2 good items might drop, and then only 1 or 2 people benefit from it. It's easy to see why people are singing Abyssea's praises.

LSs are primarily social now. There are a few event-specific LSs floating around for things like Einherjar and Voidwatch. I saw a shout the other day for an Abyssea LS, but I find that rather redundant as pretty much every LS does Abyssea in some form or another.

On the topic of your old characters- are you sure they're lost? Unless you manually deleted them it's pretty difficult to permanently lose them. I've heard plenty of stories from people reactivating characters much older than your's. So unless you've already talked to SE and they told you to bug off, I'd give them a call and see what they can do for you. If you do have to start over, that's still ok. I have a bunch of jobs below 20 that I wouldn't mind exping a bit. :)

When I find myself feeling like this, and I occasionally do, I just grab a friend or two and try to take down a mob like Rani. Same "OHsh*t PLEASE STUN HATE RESET RUN AWAY CHARMGA!" exhilaration as before, but with less emotional overhead.


SquareEnix- keeping Hexa Strike relevant since 2004. XD

Edited, Dec 13th 2011 4:12pm by Prim

Eh I am not sure, tbh - your best bet may be to just plug a dialup connection into a traditional router (is that possible?) and then plug both ps2s into that router.

Well a ps2 may not be able to take a direct phone line from a dialup, but maybe it WOULD take a network cable from a router? What you could do (check with someone that knows for sure though) is ahve the dialup come into a router, then have a network wire connecting your router to the ps2.

As far as Hughes is concerned, I dont remember too much of it - just that there was a great deal of lag for them.

Its because of the uplink. you SENDING data across dialup is much more efficient than your satellite sending a signal off into space.

It sounds funny, but its true.

I dug around a bit and found this thread: http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=10&mid=127437800271981999&h=50
Doesn't look very promising for HughesNet.

Hey Rock! Good to hear from you. How r ya? Whose still around?