Playing FFXI the OLD WAY?Follow

I can't say I agree with this, though to be honestly. There are some cheap and easy things to get to, that you can do it over time and it won't cost you a whole lot.

For example...

How about Garudites and the other avatar rocks? I get a lot of them. A ton of them. They don't really sell well on AH last I checked, they vendor for 200-ish gil.

BUT if you cut them, they vendor for 2,400. That's 10x the value. You need ~Lv70 goldsmithing to be able to do this, though. However, if you're willing to spend a little start-up capital (you'll make it back, easy), you can get up to Lv62. Getting from 62 to 70 is the worst part of it, but with a little patience and lots of Mog Garden use, and/or a little money spent, you should be able to get there especially if you use the 5% skillup foods.

But once you do, those rocks add up rather fast. Every time I go out to fight stuff, I usually end up with 20, 30 of these rocks and at 2400gil a pop, those add up over time. Also, now that my Goldsmith is just shy of Lv95, I can make Rhodium Ingots. These sell on AH for 140k per ingot and I'm still skilling on them as an added bonus. The Rhodium Ore comes from my Mog Garden. You also get Platinum Ore and Orichalcum and 12 O. Ingots go for 400k. Over a month or so of building up materials, I sold 1.5 million gil worth of ingots on the AH.

Also, Woodworking. Some logs don't really sell all that great on the AH, but they are worth more to NPC if you cut them into lumber. Some lumbers aren't too bad either.

You only "bleed lots and lots of money" if you do it stupidly. I have ALL crafts at Veteran, and 3 of those just became Veterans within the last month or so, but I've hardly spent any gil at all (the worst was 500k in Iron Chains for my Leatherworker... annoying. Why'd they make Iron so annoying?). But yet, he'll make a chunk of that back when he vendors the belts he will be making, and he'll make even more back when I vendor the Aetosaur Gloves I'll make when he's high enough.

Also, my Cook got from 100 -> 106 for free. In fact, mild profit. 3 sandy carrots at 28gil each makes 4 jugs that vendor for 76gil each, IIRC. lol. The recipe also calls for verboshroom, but I had 200+ of them from grinding away in Cirdas Caverns.

The game throws a LOT of junk at you, and you can just use the junk you get to level crafts up and/or find cool combos to do to vendor to NPC. But, you can't craft anything if you don't level any crafts.

EDIT: Also, to get my woodworker on... 105? I think? I spent 50k per stack on Kapor Logs. Turned them into Lumber for "meh" skillups, and then combined them with Black Chocobo Feathers to make Wands. Said wands vendored for about 3k, so... ~60k on logs and feathers, ~35k back from vendoring wands. Not too shabby.

Edited, Jan 11th 2017 1:57pm by Lyrailis

I did notice on my 97 Alchemist that there is nothing, I mean nothing, that I can find on any wiki that would get me to 100+ reasonably.

I mean, I suppose I could do those ninja swords with paralyze potions, I forget the name of, but eeew. That recipe caps at like 92 and it would take forever to squeak out those 3 levels. That, and I'd have to fish up those stupid fish just to get the potions.

Or, I could do stat potions, but that's even more eeew. Even if I used mugwort I got from mog gardens, it'd still be a chore, and again, those are over-level.

I've got a few wyvern wings, but ahriman wings are annoying to get because they very rarely drop from what I remember.

I just.... don't see anything good to do there. So I guess my guy might stay at 97 forever, lol.

Well, there are TP wings too that I'm planning on doing during the next double skill gain campaign.... I might, maybe get a .5 out of it. maybe.

Largely because people were tossing the billions they got in VW lol.

Yeah, it was a fairly common stone (still RNG, but it's one of the easier sources.) and Abyssea dropped a decent amount on some NMs, iirc ayravata in vunkerl dropped it when that content was relevant. I have no clue about 'modern XI' as I never went out of my way to hunt them down since my Alchemy is done. I think Abyssea would be a bit easier to do, but I'll actually have to check if anything newer drops these stones now.

Not subbed at the moment, correct. Just can't bring myself to pull the trigger and jump to Asura since most people I know on Sylph had long since quit. Otherwise, not a bad idea. Guessing that was like 48 synths or so? Most sparks I get have been going toward Rem tales. Kinda forget where I left off in that process.

Finding information on systems this new is pretty sketchy. How do the rem's tales upgrades work exactly? I'm at the point now where I have "enough" money to get by and wouldn't mind spending sparks on something useful.

At BG-Wiki, at the top, you'll see "Reforged Armor" and click the 109 or 119 links and you'll see all the items that people will need, generally uncapped BCNM drops (Oxblood, Damascene Cloth, etc) for 109 and then higher up stuff for 119 stuff.

Generally, every armor has a Job Item and the Slot Item (for example, all of a THF's 109 AF requires Gold Thread, while everybody's 119 Helm requires a Malikaleya Orb).

You cannot sell Rem's Tales; they're EX.

If you want to make money with Sparks, I don't really know what to tell you because AFAIK, nothing the Sparks NPC sells is really worth anything gil-wise, because Sparks are so easy to get. You could maybe try the Enhancing and Summoning Skill Books (because those are a still PITA to level, even with skill foods and skill campaigns), but I wouldn't guarantee success. Again, Sparks are so easy to get, everybody has them coming out of their ears.

But yes, take a look at the Reforged Artifact categories over on BG-wiki, they should tell you everything you need to know. It is quite simply "Unlock Monisette with Promathia Missions, Trade her the armor + x Rem's Tales + Job Item + Slot Item, wait 1 game-day, voila. done."

The 119 armors are actually not bad, they're no Ambuscade, but they do offer a pretty easy skip past most of the Adoulin progression path and are good enough to do Ambuscade with, as long as you stick to Vol2. Probably need sushi if you're joining a VD group.

So, I looked the shields up and yeesh. 28.something k?

I wonder if that was intentional, or an oversight on the devs' part... because that is surely a money exploit, lol.

Oh well.

We're still doing Ice Shields which are almost as good because my Alchemist still needs skillups... I worked out the math; Ice Shields give ~997k while the Acheron Shields give 1.08m IIRC if you take 99999 sparks down to as close to 0 as possible.

And, well, my Alchemist today went from 98.5 to 103.5 doing shields. Family member took her sparks from 99999 down to ~27k buying and giving me shields. I made the ice shields and traded them back to her and she made a lot of money lol and I happily made 5 alchemy levels.

Kinda like WoW "classic" private servers.

People hoot and holler about wanting "Classic" servers, but then when they get down to the brass tacks and such a server is set up and they log on and after a couple hours once the nostalgia wears off and they find themselves wishing they had (insert feature here that was added later), they wind up going "Meh..." and they log off and log back on the official servers.

Then they'll go "Yeah, but I want Classic but yet I want you to add the QoL changes that were made over the years!" despite the fact this would be 1). A massive undertaking that simply isn't profitable for the company and 2). Would cause all sorts of balance and dissonance issues as these things slowly came to be over time.

And even if they DID have all of these things, there's still the grind aspect. Pure Grind and Repetition was the way to go 15+ years ago, but it just isn't today.

So many games (including the game's official servers) out there offer far less grindy solutions and what a lot of people don't have, is extra time to waste repeating the same robotic actions over and over again.

Then someone will pop up and say "OK, make it like Classic, but relax the grind a little."

Well.....ok, relax the grind how much? And how many people are going to agree on how much to relax it? What about aforementioned balance and dissonance issues, where you'll see that the game appears to be balanced around one thing, but it was changed without the other thing being changed to suit it?

Well, it goes back and forth until people just pack up and leave and go back to the official servers, because face it: the guys designing the game have degrees in game design otherwise they wouldn't BE a game developer at a Triple-A company. We might not all agree with their game design decisions, but hey. Given how the game has survived all these years and managed to climb and claw itself out of a pit, and several testimonies I've seen online all agree that today's FFXI is a lot more playable than yester-year's FFXI, and I know I personally find myself doing less waiting and repetition and more time playing and enjoying the game.

Edited, Feb 7th 2017 7:59am by Lyrailis

I see we're talking about the same jerkwad. That's good to know.

I didn't notice that when I played there, though. What I did notice, however, is that things were too irreparably broken to be fixed. There are tons of quests that don't work, key rank missions that don't work, BCNMs that don't work, and just overall it feels like a shattered experience. I'm with you on hoping that Enix releases the code, because I actually think that jerkwad, or another jerkwad like him, could do a really great thing if they were given the code to make it a success. The demand is there, that server has been growing pretty steadily since I left and seeing that makes me want to go back a lot, but until more things are fixed, it's hard for me to justify.

It's good to see that you're still around old friend.

Any real man knows he's got an hour's worth of air in the oxygen tanks and simply slips the mask on once the ship is below the waves. You still got an hour! Might as well make the most of it.

Being reborn first requires dying, and I'll pass on that. I plan on becoming the vessel for Cyäegha. So if the utter destruction of all reality doesn't pan out, at least I'll have a place in Japanese porn.