Terrible decisions are terrible.Follow

Hi everyone.

I'm sure at least a few of you fine folks remember me. Well, I'm back at it again thanks to my no-good friends.

I figured I'd make a post while the game updates (only 9 hours to go, yay?) to see how the thief boards are going. Relatively low-population nowadays, it seems. Also, does anyone know a faster way of updating these damnable files? -.- It's not that much data.

Well, I'm sure I'll be posting here more in the future. Hopefully someone was bored enough to be browsing to say hi. :P

Sup.

Welcome back :)

Alla in general has slowed down a lot, but thf boards are one of the 'more' active sections compared to most job forums. Seems a lot of the activity has migrated to FFXIAH/BG/SQEnix official forums. But theres still a little chatter around here.

Hey, it's Aanalaty. I had seen you were still pretty active around these parts. You, Breaze and Mel (to some extent). I haven't seem Shamaya at all, though. Wonder if he moved on.

THF boards always felt like home, anyway. :P I pretty much never posted in =10 if I could help it. This was always the "thief hangout" as it were.

EDIT: Actually, since I am posting and all, any suggestions for where a 3-year hiatus returner should start? I already activated Abyssea, so my traverser stones are now building up. Most of my crafts were pretty high (BC100, LW60, others in the 40 and 50's) but it looks like crafting is pretty dead. Money might be annoying to start, but I'm sure I can convince some of my friends to return some of the 22M worth of stuff I gave them years ago. Or I can just earn it by leveling - money never seemed an issue, honestly. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Edited, Jan 24th 2012 10:39am by ChanchanXI

Step 1 - get Abyssea,
Step 2 - Get CS from Port Jueno, finish quest, start accumulating stones
Step 3 - wait 3 days for 3 stones
Step 4 - Get a friend or to to kill Tonberries in Aby Konschat for 1st Celerity (reduces time between stones from 20 hours to 16)
Step 5 - Get 6k cruor, head to one of the final expansions and get another Celerity ( reduces time from 16 hour to 12 hours)

After this getting 2 stones a day will make your life easier. Eventually spam quests in Abyssea Vunk for the third and final Celerity ( cool down from 12 to 8 hours, giving 3 stones a day)

Did all this for 6 friends who came back after 2-3 year breaks. Now we can relax and start on the fun stuff, in the beginning 1 stone per 20 hours is horrible.

For your 1st job, levels > abyssites/atmas > then gear

On my server its still 75+ for mages and 80+ for DD's to get in most abyssea XP alliances. So really get to 80 and just accept you are in no way going to be competitive with others. Just accept that.

If you follow my previous post and have gotten at least 2 stones per day. You're next goal is Atmas and Abyssites. Hopefully you have decent enough friends who will help you get the following (no particular order)

Atma of the Razed Ruins ( this is pretty much stapled to my Mnk, Nin, Thf) it's that good

1-2 Lunar Abyssites - these let you equip the aforementioned atma. Think of them as Slots and every time you enter abyssea you can attach 1 atma per slot(lunar) You get 1 from beating any Zone Boss and a second is bought with 100,000 cruour
Speaking of Cruor you need ~200k, 100k for lunar, 6k Celerity, and the rest for maps, activating confluxes(short cuts that let you teleport around inside abyssea) and various other things.

If you did endgame activities previously, you will have synthetic atmas awaiting you, Rank 10 in various cities, killing ground kings, Kirin, finishing COP, WOTG etc.

Don't stress over gear, get to 78, buy the horrible pink stuff for your Nin, then get to 99, it's much easier to go get gear after you are much higher in level, than having to leech of friends.

The biggest thing is time/stones in abyssea until you get over the hump and start accumulating more than you use up.

You have to accept that you're a leech and will be for a very, very long time. Even once you have 3 atma and somewhat upgraded gear...there are people that will literally make you feel useless. The main guy that helped me out had the new NIN ws and he could just use that thing and it had the effect of a SA-MS doing double darkness on a target...just about everytime he used the thing. It was just silly how much damage he did solo, and he came with a dualbox whm so he could effectively do almost anything in the game on his own. I spent 2-3 months and got all the abyssites and atma I needed with a few of the gear but still wasn't nearly as impressive as him, though I could still do solid damage.

Really from what I've seen actual damage isn't quite the issue, it's even more about if you can appropriately react to situations, if you know when to stop damage, when to kite, etc. you're generally better than someone who can do 5-15% more damage than you.

LoH and Tepogue,

Thanks again for the responses. It's really just an entirely different game than 3 years ago, huh? I felt that kind of sinking in as I ran through a completely deserted AU Whitegate last night as I picked up a few bronze pieces.

Your comments are greatly appreciate, as are your suggestions. I suppose I'll just have to deal with the fact that I have a lot of catching-up to do before I can be of use in a group setting. Hopefully I can infringe on some of my LS mates and friends to help out.

In other news, I think I found a decent farming item and should be in the clear as far as money goes soon. I'll have to see how it goes.

Progress: DNC 17->23 last night (3 hours in KRT, wow it's so much better than before), some extra gil.
Goals: DNC to 30 (Hopefully!), possibly leech Abyssea with a BLM buddy, maybe farming.

Head to Gusgen Mines and try and join a Field of Valor Exp Alliance. Had a new player get 23-40 in 5-6 hours

LoH,
Yeah, KRT wasn't that great but by the time I figured it out I was committed to just riding it out the rest of that particular night. What killed it was that the bats I was after only spawned at night. :\ I did a little bit of Maze of Shakhrami last night and it was significantly better. Also, you're correct that I'm using Dagger due to merits and higher skill - figured it would be better than sword or H2H.

Tepogue and terto1234,
That's interesting. I had seen Gusgen as an option, but with all the undead I figured it would be terrible as a DNC solo - I was unaware there were groups that leveled like this. I will have to look into what kind of population we have down there this weekend because that sounds like a great option. From the sounds of it, the idea is that XP per mob is not the selling point but how fast you complete the multiple pages and how quickly your XP per completion raises as a result?

Progress: DNC 23->24 (only about 30 min in MoS), NIN38->40 (Abyssea leech - learned a decent amount), extra gil
Weekend Goals: DNC to 37 would be awesome, 49 even better. Maybe start organizing THF for solo stuff for Magian Trials.

Weekend update time. I guess I could use the accomplishments thread, but I'll stick in here for now.

Had a really great weekend thanks to the tips above. Ran through Maze for a little while and got DNC from 24->33, then joined a Gusgen party for 33->35. Gusgen was actually a lot of fun; wound up turning into a puller since I grew frustrated at the RNG who wasn't pulling fast enough to sate my mob appetite.

Then had a friend let me leech an Abyssea alliance. That's where things got incredibly hectic, but a lot of fun. DNC 33->49, NIN 41->49. Subjobs were done in a matter of hours. I actually lost track of my levels at one point and didn't realize that DNC was suddenly level 45. Abyssea is truly incredible.

Started a STR dagger on THF, since I had zero progress on Magian weapons. I'm up to the third trial where I need to kill 50 creatures on Firesday/Weather, and that doesn't look too bad. Some of the future ones are going to be rough (Flan).

All-in-all, it was quite the productive weekend. I even got all the CSs at the Abyssea maws, so I can warp to them all now. Now I just need to gain a few levels and start working on dagger/sword/evasion skills again.

Same Flans inside Abyssea, do as many things in Abyssea as possible. Get 1 credit per kill inside is a lot easier than the 5 points for correct weather outside. Esp since fire weather is so rare.

I'm refering to the OP statement about the flan section of the Magian Str Daqgger.

Waiting for fire weather in Mt Z in my experience is pointless. I've done two of the earth katanas out there, since earth weather is common. I've only observed fire weather 1 time and it only lasted ~1 min. I used to solo the Flans out there on BLM pre Abyssea and while earth is quite common, fire is not.

I guess there's no better place on the forums right now to make a general post. I'm sure as hell not going to post a new topic.

Damn. Chanchan not playing for two years? Seems like way too much time. I'd've never noticed the hiatus. It's been about the same amount of time for myself. To think that LOH is lurking around giving advice to people who have been away from the game.

I myself decided pretty.. decisively to put myself into hibernation, from the moment I heard the Vanafest news announcing level 99 about 2 years ago. I didn't want to waste my time @#%^in' with content and gear that'd just be replaced almost immediately, so I've been waiting for level 99. Now it's finally here so I'm gonna play a lil bit soon. I have spent like 2 months out of these 2 years actually playing. So I actually have like 100's of stones, and all my af3+2. But hell..

It's 2012. Pretty impressive that these forums have continued some respectable semblance of activity up to this point. BG has seemed pretty dead to me for around 2-3 years now, pretty parallel to the activity seen in this forum.

Although it is probably a wise strategy from an economic/marketing standpoint, that is, the changes SE has brought to the game in the past couple years.. I find myself quite disdained that they finally violated the principles that kept people like me (a minority?) devoted to the game for so long. That is, that they finally decided that the level cap and previous age-old gear was no longer sacred. For all the hellish grinding that many of us have subjected ourselves to for nearly a decade, SE has finally deemed it necessary to move on. My Mandau, my full Heca +1, all my absolutely perfect equipment subsets and situational gear, are no longer anything special. I'm sure a lot of us here have had to face that.

And yet it is probably, for most of us, a very inopportune time to be marginalized. I'll be turning 28 here pretty soon. I can't imagine that a very good time to re-commit myself in full-force to a game like this. Especially in an age where it seems like MMO's are becoming an endangered species. Or, at least, MMO's and hybrid-MMO's are becoming totally pluralized to the point that the 'hardcore' is really the aspect that has become endangered.

It's pathetic. That something that matters so much at such a deep (addiction?) level to so many people, is almost entirely run by a meager, fragile, team of a dozen or less incompetents (what we call 'devs'). The spirit of the game is carried through the population that has played the game for years. But it's pretty obvious why the content is lackluster and recycled, and job balance absurdly out-of-order. The people running the show are a handful of middle-aged individuals who no more envision true inspiration in this now very old game. Most likely, they are content with perpetuating their unimaginative M-F lives and just grinding their jobs (as devs working for SE) out so that they can support their families and send their children off to a good college.

We all know that, as thieves, we've drawn the short straw out of the bunch with nearly every update, for the simple fact that the devs I just spoke of could give less than a sh*t. After all, it's just a game. And what does it matter, the thoughts those playing the game (and have been hooked for nearly a decade)? Thoughts of how the game should evolve. In their mind, Thief is just a TH whore, and always has been. The recent adjustments to our items, JA's, and game mechanics, have served to weaken us in other respects and simply reinforce our role as a TH supplier. As usual and more than ever, it doesn't matter that, We need to gather more gear and arrange more swaps than other dd's, and that Our job requires more focus and is harder to execute than other dd's. As devoted thieves, we should feel proud that we play a dynamic, challenging job that requires focus and deep commitment to maximize. We deserve better than the balding devs give us. Yeah, terrible decisions are terrible. But the truth of this rings much moreso for the people that direct the game, than for those playing it.

Hey, a wild Shamaya appeared. Nice to hear from ya.

I can certainly relate to you on some level for all the effort and time spent min/max'ing at Lv75. And, to some extent, it is a shame that they butchered their largest sacred cow.

But it's kind of good, too. I, and a few others I know, just don't have the time to play this game the way we used to, and I would say before it probably did border on obsessive/addictive requirements to really engage yourself and feel like you could make real progress.

I've been back for about a month, and I feel like I've really had a lot more fun in that one month than I remember for the last year or so that I did play. There is still some grinding to be had, but I don't think there's as much as there used to be.

It was rough to realize that most of the gear I had collected was essentially worthless. I don't use most of my Homam gear anymore, Sirroco was retired, I don't use any Hecatomb and I don't even have a use for my signed SH+1 anymore (town gear).

But, all the changes opened up the opportunity for new adventures with old friends. That's really why I came back.