Patch 1.15a is now live! All of the changes mentioned in recent days have been implemented, with a focus on improving playability and convenience via a number of system-side adjustments.

View all of the official particulars.

Basically, everything we were already aware was coming. Plus one or two minor adjustments (not sure why they disallow drinking distilled water now -- i know distilled water tastes pretty bleh but?)

Is the update ready to download already? I wanna know if I should run home and download it after work before the gym.

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that kinda sounds like a complete goodbye to solo exping post 20. Majority of stuff above blue kinda rapes me solo.

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Yeah I'm afraid of that.

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I'm not too concerned about the solo, in the grand scheme of things. The monkeys I used to grind on to get to 20 are 15-19 already. And most people do Coblyns instead, which are even higher. Plus they said they are making adjustments up to 24, so who knows what they have in store for that.

Either way, eventually you gotta party up. Even 2-3 player parties. None of us wanted a solo game.

All this is coming from the guy who is R20 in everything, though.

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people are reporting 1500 SP / mob on leves with GA
and all SP on grind mobs seems to be doubled
more info as it becomes available...

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

as long as they keep the SP gain as it is (which I'm not sure they will) this is like the second coming of christ and greatly makes the game much much more fun to play

Update for anyone wondering:

As long as you weren't fighting mobs that gave less than 50sp before, the SP is basically doubled. Stuff that gave 90 yesterday gives 170-180 now. Leves are giving over 500sp per mob. MAdi's getting 1400SP per mob by soloing it 4 star.

Everyone's grinding like crazy incase SE decide to nerf it again tomorrow.

70k SP earned from Broken Water leves tonight. At the time I'm posted this, HHG is crafting up 12 hats, and people are deciding who gets the +1 and +3 versions :P So I may not get a chance at Halatali, but I'm guessing if I did both camps, I'd be looking at close to 90-100k per leve reset (Until you hit yellow fatigue).

I did spend most of BW in yellow fatigue, btw. Definitely very hot SP.

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synths that were regularly giving me 400 sp are giving me up to 672 sp

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

Eating ingredients accidentally kind of sucks. Kind of along the same lines as desynthing one's own pants.

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Some stories can't be told with words, some legends are meant to die

The good news is that it's been over 12 hours and there's been no emergency maintenance announced yet.

If the new "Super SP" is here to stay then that's a pretty massive change. They're going to need to start getting us some Rank 50 content pronto.

I showed up a little later than Ridere, and we ended up doing the Halatali leves with 6-8 of us, but I walked away with about 80k sp from those leve links tonight. Even if we only scheduled one leve link group a week this would be pretty awesome.

Still feels a little crazy though. Even though they haven't decided to fix it yet I won't be surprised if its adjusted. Maybe they'll be nice and let us have a week or two like this and save the fix for the next update.

It was always SE's intention that people would level up by doing guildleves here and there with their friends occasionally.

I don't think they expected that people would start "grinding" them through organised events involving exactly the optimal number of party members, on only the most highly yielding sp/hour leves, scheduled to be repeated every single reset. Of course that's what people had to do if they wanted to get anywhere with any kind of moderate speed.

I'm thinking they won't change it for a minute. Here is why:

Corporate SE will just look at numbers of active people playing. Yoshi-P will show them these figures as everyone will log on to capitalize on this patch and claim positive active player numbers are from his patch. Players are satiated while corporate decides when to start charging us for the game. Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida looks like a hero to both player-base and corporate...for the moment. However, we will need content to curtail boredom once everyone is 50, and now we are gonna definitely need it sooner than later. At least, I hope this is the scenario. People are wary about this new carrot that has been dangled in front of them and what will happen once they finish eating it, but for the most part people are coming out of hiding and regular players are hitting it harder fearing a nerf...good server figures on a sheet of paper for corporate.

It's actually making me want to work on Conjurer. I think there will be many people who will want to use this time to not only get their primary job up to R50, but to also focus on any other subjobs that would also be useful to them down the road.

For mages, it's pretty simple. If you are R45+ CON, it's time to work on THM. If you are R45+ THM, it's time to think about CON.

I still think there is end-game, btw. It's not super awesome, but it's kind of there. There are at least 3 NMs that can be killed for loot that people can craft into gear. On top of that, there are the faction leve NMs that provide the starter gear sets.

I really hope that this SP change becomes cemented in, because we are talking about R50 right now. When they bump the cap up to R55, or R60, the way the SP curve is in this game, imagine trying to ding R55 with SP the way it used to be.

As it is right now, going from 49.0 to 50.0 would probably take a solid day of playing (without red fatigue), or two days of enthusiastic playing. That lines up pretty well with dinging 49 to 50 in FFXI.

Plus, we are only on day two (And hell, not even the first 24 hours have passed) of this patch. I think fatigue will become far more of an issue now than it did before, with people hitting red fatigue and getting only fractions of the SP that non-fatigued people will get. Pretty much everyone hit fatigue in our Leve-link party last night, and that was only day one.

So maybe weekly SP will still be capped at around 200k, given fatigue. And with 2 million needed to ding 50, we're looking at a 10-week schedule for going from 1 to 50.

That isn't that unreasonable. 2.5 months. That doesn't seem -too- fast.

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still trying to decide on GLA or THM for my next job. what do you think is needed more?

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

GLA: Ket, Kotee, Kitty, Fatty, Oni, Niz
THM: Rid, Cor, Kayne, (Zuldane?)
CNJ: Madi, Boba, Black Cat, Creonn, Supa, (Rushal?)

Tough choice. It looks like we're going to have a pretty solid block of tanks. THM doesn't have a ton, but THM and CNJ combiled have quite a lot.

At this point, I'd pick which one interests you the most. A lot less stat reallocations and craft/gear/repair issues going from MRD to GLA, though.

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I honestly think i could get by as a mage with 40-80MND and no int or pie
And the MND helps on Mrd for mdef

I already started reallocating my stats

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

If you're just going to be the healer for the party, then I wouldn't worry too much about it, no. If you're going to try and do spell damage, then you'll probably notice a difference. But THM damage compared to CNJ is piddly, anyway. THM are way better buffers/healers than CNJ are, with our AoE.

I really want to get CNJ up, so when the CNJ does Prot/Shell II and misses half of the 15 people, I can step in and cast it on everyone. lol. I'm always fixing buffs in leve-link parties. haha

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I think the main factor right now is if yarr plays i do GLA and if not i do THM

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

Yeah... I think they need to fix CNJ aoe, it's pretty pathetic.

Depends, Krel.

If you're trying to blast a pack of leve-mobs with an AoE and not hit a bunch of nearby adds, it's perfect. Doing so as THM, and you generally get adds. Just ask Ket about the adds I tend to get when MP draining :D

CNJ AoE seems to be a "BLM AoE" while THM AoE seems to be more of a "WHM AoE". They just have all of the spells for both mixed between the two classes. haha.

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