FFXI March 11 update for Monks + EASIEST Solo BCNM battles any Monk can do
FFXI March 11 update for Monks + EASIEST Solo BCNM battles any Monk can doI haven't posted in 2 months mostly because I play very little nowadays. Still, there's been an update so I'll make a quickly-put-together post.
Summary and implications of the update: The few hours during maintenance are always full of speculation, because we can all read the update notes but it's not clear what impact they will actually have, and people's imagination can go wild and cry foul at things that are just speculations, while others start calling "huge nerf" this or "broken and overpowered" that without cause. As usual it's much better to just wait a few hours and actually at least try it in game first before making a lot of assumptions.
Having said that, here is a summary of the main changes for monk and job balances I more or less tested out so far:
Also it's not a huge deal for a few reasons: DRK can still do 2hr+souleater+krakenclub or some other multi-hit weapon since those don't rely on stacked source of haste. It only affects special situations like Kirin or Bahamut2 fights where DRKs rely on Bard's 2hr. Unless you have Bards using their 2hr and stack everything else on top of that, you won't see any difference (so even people with relic scythe will still get the most out of everything in normal non-brd2hr mode).
For LSs, it means that DRKs will go back to valuing multihit weapons like kclub or mercurial things more than the very cheap runechopper, although they would still do fairly well with that too (half as good as pre-update unless they use kclub but that means what, people will need 45-60sec to kill Kirin instead of 30sec?)
Now, I am not a DRK or WAR or SAM main so I just briefly covered what I think based on the little we know so far, mainly to address the job balance question. I am sure people can get a better feel for the actual implications in a bit more time and get a better idea than what I can say on day1...
A few other minor things in the rest of the update: new equipment doesn't seem too interesting, two pieces from campaign points that are finally rare ex, if you wear both they give enhance counter but I have a bad feeling that it's something very weak (say counter+3 or something) because the corresponding PLD gear says "enhances all elemental resist" and only gives +5 to all elements which is pretty useless:
DEF:13 Accuracy+4 Enmity-3 "Store TP"+3 Set: Enhances "Counter" effect
DEF:22 Accuracy+4 Enmity-4 "Store TP"+2 Set: Enhances "Counter" effect
Then there's something that could be cool for very rare situations against shock spikes or enthunder:
DEF:7 HP-1% Ranged Accuracy+4 Evasion+4 Lightning damage: TP+10
a single new crafted H2H (gnoles sainti) that's still much worse than destroyers (maybe it's ok for 60cap areas..)
and an interesting club that has drain effect and very good stats but seems like it would be hard to get.
everything else is even more useless from what I can see.
There's a lottery item which could be interesting if it gives otherwise unobtainable items instead of something stupid like currency. NPC fellow changes might be good, should be nice to test out but I didn't get around that (especially if you can now give them aspir samba or at least cure-waltz them).
New MNK/SCH looking good: a few quick tests: So as I mentioned above, the new changes have made /SCH a lot more interesting for monk, still situational but still great to have the option. Specifically as you might remember you could use light arts and dark arts to get the respective magic skills boosted to be on par with lvl75 mages, but there were no interesting spells to use them on aside from say stone2 (which would do less damage than the punches you could throw in the same time interval).
Well that changed with the addition of addendum JAs, the white ones are ok, just all the -na you would get from whm, not a big deal since those wouldn't get resisted anyways. Still no enfeebling or enhancing unfortunately (phalanx and stoneskin with that skill level would have been great), but at least you get 2 black magic spells that are still very useful: SLEEP and DISPEL, with the comfort that they won't be resisted every time a monk casts them because of the high magic skill from the dark arts job ability.
The same is true of Aspir and Drain (although you already had those). On top of that, you can basically get ~150MP back from the new (and safer) convert JA of scholars before you have time to spend that same MP, so you basically have infinite MP even if you are not fighting anything that could be aspir-ed and without having to use staff and spirittaker.
Here are some examples: Drain for 243HP. And then sublimation JA for 154MP. Also note that melee damage doesn't necessarily suffer from using this subjob on easy monsters (see the 1242 dragon kick without any food):
And here's an example of Sleep followed by Aspir for 103 MP and Dispel (sorry for the incredibly ugly turban, I didn't have much time and needed a quick MP gear), and another example of sleep showing the magic skill level given by dark arts (246 instead of the normal 101):
Anyways, I might try to find something interesting to demonstrate what you could use MNK/SCH for in the near future.
Small update: One thing I also tested briefly is vampiric claws added effect drain with dark arts, which went up from 5 normal and 15 with rdm sub to 40 which starts to be a bit more significant, especially if you needed to use vampiric claws anyways for something like slimes. I didn't test if the activation rate changed although it seemed the same as when I previously tested ( 1) so about 20% of attack rounds (or ~1 in 10 punches).
Another thing of note is that now mnk75/sch37 has 2 stratagem charges and they recharge based on the level of the main job instead of the level of the subjob, so every 1 min.
Whether this was intended or not, it doesn't have a big impact on mnk/sch, just because you already have more MP than you can spend with just spells from sub (so parsimony stratagem is not all that useful), and I generally just keep dark arts with addendum black on all the times so I only have to use it up once when I change zone.
On the other hand I guess alacrity (stratagem that makes the next cast time half) could be useful to avoid interruptions on an important spell like sleep.
EASIEST Solo BCNM battles any Monk can do:
In my previous post I showed an example of what you can solo with sharp reactions, skill, a lot of strategy and great gear (e.g., the 6 scorpion BCNM operation desert storm as MNK/DNC).
That's interesting to see but not as practically useful to everyone because it is admittedly a very difficult thing for people to try and imitate or put to practical use in their game.
So in this post I thought I would add a quickly-put-together video showing two very easy BCNM-type battles that ANY monk can do easily without needing good gear, skills or experience.
The first one is "Uninvited Guest", an uncapped BC-like quest rematch of a CoP battle that can be done with as many as 18 people and scales up accordingly. this one is very easy to solo (you need to farm 1 giant scale first but that's soloable too, or just wait by the jump point for people passing through it). It's very easy and can be done with any subjob at 75, and drops useful things like cloud evokers (used as a BCNM orb to fight ouryu and then bahamut2 with an alliance). You can redo it once a week and it gives random rewards including xp scrolls you can use on any job or various random items including things like adaman ores or assault breastplate.
The second fight I show, the 50cap ENM "Pulling the Plug", is more for completeness (since it has been shown in videos many times already by various people) and to test and show that it is doable even with the worst possible gear (although of course it's even easier with better gear). It's an old recording of mine and I was also trying a few other things at the same time (like whether enthunder and shock spikes from charge items were worth using in these types of fights). It can be redone after 5 days. If you die you don't lose any XP so there is nothing to lose in trying (aside for food/items you would use), and if you win you always get 3000XP and a chance at a rare ring (toreador, acc+7).
To try and put myself in the shoes of a new player with less gear and no merits, I tried to use the cheapest possible gear I had around or worse: my body was an aikido gi (only stat a basically useless VIT+4), TMHooks (free from signet points), purple belt (free from quest and people could even have a brown one by this level), and legs/hands that have just low defense and no extra stats on them. Anyways you get the picture (I think I had rajas on though as the only exception of good gear but not enough to make a difference). At first I tried to see if I could do it also without using any anima (again just as another test) but that was pushing it, so I actually ended up trying to use it anyways in the last 10seconds of the fight and won with very little HP left, so I definitely recommend people not do that (I was just trying to test/prove a point, no need to make your life harder on purpose).
Anyways, here is the video:
Btw, people who had their accounts hacked like the Bardok I mentioned in my previous post got it restored (aside from gil and sellable items) so that ended relatively well in the end.
Click to view
