Final Fantasy XIFinal Fantasy News

I have heard many people talk about how they get only slightly better experience while in groups. Even I have been known to be an advocate of solo play; until the other day. I was in dunes looking for one or two people to go hunting with (not wanting a big group) and I ended up getting into a group with some Japanese players. I later found out that these weren't even power gamers or anything, but rather just some casual players. So, using broken Japanese all from the translator, we managed to get started on the killing. The amount of experience I got while it that group was amazing. In the 1-2 hours I was grouped with them I got a level and a half (17-18.5) and we definitely were not moving at full speed.

Being the power gamer that I am I watched everything each of them did in order to learn how we were getting such good experience (normally I would get 1/4-1/2 a level in an hour of solid grouping). There were a number of things that they were doing better than American groups did, and these are the things I am going to go over in this guide.

Support Jobs

I think the first thing that every group over level 20 needs is to have all it’s members with maxed out sub-jobs. Even if your sub-job and main job don’t work well together (i.e.: Galka WAR / WHM) it is still way better than not having a sub-job. With a support job that compliments your main job well, you can become as powerful as someone 1-2 levels above you which, by itself, is a 20-50 point xp gain when soloing and possibly more when grouping.

Many people say they don’t want to bother leveling a sub-job when they are just going to drop it for an advanced job at 30. The problem with this will become apparent as you approach level 30. You will find yourself getting fewer and fewer group invites and possibly even group rejections because of your lack of sub-job. At the higher levels you are more or less asking people to level you because you will not be fully contributing to the party but you will still be taking away experience.

Finding a Party

The first step to a good party is finding and/or forming it. Many people will tell you that you can party with people many levels above or below you and not suffer an experience penalty. This is only true on the surface. In reality partying outside your level can have severe penalties that are not apparent at first.

Do not party with people outside your level!
Here is a summary, followed by a more in depth look, at why it is bad to party outside your level:
The number one problem with American xp parties in FFXI is partying outside their level. People don’t realize how much it will hurt everyone’s experience gain. Partying with a group of players all within 1 level of each other isn’t so bad, but once you have a range of 2 levels you will start to encounter reduced experience gain over time. At a 3 level range you will be making noticeably less and at a 4 level range you will be making downright poor experience.

When you party with someone that is the same level as you, you will generally both contribute equally to the battle. As an example, two level 20 WAR will both deal about the same amount of damage over time and can both take about the same amount of damage. If a level 19 WAR is grouped with a level 20 WAR though, the level 19 will miss noticeably more than the level 20, get hit harder and more often, and also be missing out on a job ability that the level 20 has. So in this scenario the level 20 WAR is contributing more than the level 19. If we were to take this to an extreme and say a level 15 WAR was grouped with a level 20 WAR you will find that the level 15 WAR can hardly ever hit the creatures you are fighting and will die in only a few shots if they take the hate. So in the end the level 20 WAR is doing 90% of the work, but they are only getting 60% of the experience.

At first glance this looks like it would be a good way to twink lower level characters. It’s not. The reason is because in FFXI the experience system is based on level difference, not base level. So if a level 20 WAR kills a level 20 creature, they get the same experience as a level 1 WAR killing a level 1 creature. If the level 1 were to go out and level on his own he would be killing even monsters and getting 100xp / kill. If the level 20 WAR were to kill even monsters they would get 100xp / kill. If they were to group up together and kill level 20 monsters they would get 60xp / kill each but the level 1 would not be contributing to the battle at all.

This leads to the next factor, how experience awards are determined. When experience for combat is calculated, the highest level player in the party is what it’s based on. So if you have a group full of level 15 players partied with one level 20, your experience gain would be based on what the level 20 would get if they were to solo that creature. This means that instead of getting hundreds of experience each for killing a level 20 creature, they would get 100 experience divided up amongst them, just because they had that one level 20 player in their group.

Party Layout

Now that you know who not to invite into your parties, it is equally important to know who should be invited? The following is assuming that you can find anyone you need. We all know that this is not always the case, but it is a good template to go off of. A good party should always have at least 2 healers. They can be WHM or RDM but WHM is preferred. By having multiple healers the party is able to chain monsters non stop by having the healers take turns resting and healing. Along with the two primary healers it is also beneficial to have a couple of backup healers. This usually consists of a BLM or RDM who has WHM subbed or even a fighter with WHM subbed.

Almost as important as having two healers is having two warriors. The warriors can be primary or subbed but they must have provoke. Having a party with two provokers is essential to survivability because it will mean that all the damage is being dealt to the party members who can take hits. If you try to form a party without any healers you will find that the mages are constantly taking the hate and therefore taking a lot of unnecessary damage. The reason you want two warriors is for a couple reasons. In order to split the damage between both warriors and to keep the hate always off the mages. In some cases the white mages will be unable to keep up on the healing. When this happens it is good to have a second warrior to draw the monster away from the first, allowing the white mages time to catch up. Also, there will be plenty of times when the BLM and WHM get a ton of hate at once, and because of the 30 second timer on provoke, the warrior can not keep up.

Once you have these core group members you want to take on some damage dealers. BLM and Thieves are good choices for this. BLM can dish out a ton of elemental damage directed at the monster’s weakness and Thieves can use sneak attack for a nice 75 damage hit once a minute. MNK can also be a good damage dealer and if you have WAR subbed they can double as one of the tanks if needed.

Skill Chains

Skill chains are the bread and butter of a warrior based party. I have noticed that many American players choose to play as warriors and monks. This is probably because they are looked at as “easy to play” and a good way to get a grasp of the game. Because of this, many times you will find yourself in a party full of warriors with perhaps a single healer. Not only will you find yourself with a lot of down time, but you also will find yourself risking death because the creature you are fighting is out damaging you. The best way to avoid the latter is to use skill chains.

A skill chain is performed by doing a series of weapon skills in a certain order. Once you have formed your party the first thing you will want to do is find a good skill chain that your party can execute. To do this you will need to find out what weapon skills your party has available to them and then consult this chart:
http://www.ffxionline.com/~upload/StarvingArtist/SArenkei2.jpg
Basically just follow the arrows around and find a path that utilizes as many weapon skills of party members as possible. A sample path would be Fast Blade -> Burning Blade.

After you have decided what skill chain to try for and everyone in the party knows what position they hold in the chain, get to fighting. As you fight you build up tactical points (TP). You gain 2 TP when you are hit and 3-12 TP when you hit something (depends on the weapon you are using and some SAM abilities). Continue fighting until everyone is at 100%. If one person is not at 100% then keep attacking normally or else you will just be wasting your TP.

Once everyone is at 100% TP the first person in the chain will execute their weapon skill macro. NOTE: it is highly recommended that everyone in the party create the following macro:

/p Skill chaining with <weaponskill>
/wait 1
/ws “<weaponskill>”

and replace <weaponskill> with the name of the weapon skill you will be using. By creating this macro you are able to inform the party when you are about to do a weapon skill as well as let them know what weapon skill you are doing (so they know who is next to go).

After the first person executes their macro everyone should see it in chat and know to be ready. 1 second after the message is displayed the player will begin preparing their weapon skill. After 1-2 seconds more that player will actually execute the weapon skill (you will see the animation and special effects). When the second player in the chain sees these effects go off they will wait about 1 second and then execute their macro. Continue to repeat this process until everyone in the party has used their weapon skill.

With a successful skill chain a very tough, or even incredibly tough monster will become easily manageable.

Elemental Weakness

One thing that many players fail to work with is elemental weakness. Every creature is weak to one or more elements and strong against some as well. For example, if you are using stone spell to do damage to a stone worm you will find that the worm is constantly resisting your damage. But if you were to use aero on them you would start doing critical damage with your spells. It is a good idea to experiment early on in the fights to find out what kind of damage your targets are weak to and exploit that.

Once a monster weakness is established it is a good idea to try and build skill chains around it if possible. For example, if you are fighting a creature that is weak to fire it would be better to do Fast Blade -> Burning Blade instead of Burning Blade to Fast Blade. This is because the former does fire damage while the latter does stone damage. This is not always possible however so just work with what you are given.

Maximizing Experience Gain

There are a few methods to getting more experience from your party than what you would get fighting / resting normally. One way is to EXP CHAIN, another way is to kill incredibly tough monsters, and the third is to do a combination of the two.

1) The easiest way to get lots of experience is to exp chain. You do this by killing creatures that are the same level as you or higher in a short amount of time. Each creature you kill after the first will give more experience than normal but the time you have to kill the next one shortens as well.

2) The second method, which is also fairly easy to execute if everyone knows what they are doing, is to kill creatures way above your level. In this method you go for the big kills that net a lot of experience each. These kills usually result in an extended downtime afterwards due to a number of factors but can sometimes get more xp/hour than exp chaining.

3) The third method is both the hardest and the most fruitful. What you do is exp chain two creatures that are relatively easy for the group to drop and then you follow them with a creature that is very difficult. During the first two fights the WHM have it easy and can rest while the warriors build up TP. In a perfect scenario, the WHM should be just about full on mana and the warriors over 100% TP at the end of the second fight which leaves them completely ready for the big monster.

Once you pull the large monster you will want to go in to the party’s skill chain as soon as possible so you can start building up TP again. Meanwhile the mages should throw everything they have at the creature. If all goes well you will get an exp chain #2 on this creature which will net you a big bonus on top of the already large amount of experience you would receive normally.

If everything is still going perfectly the warriors should be able to jump right in to another 3 creature chain. The mages can continue to rest for the most part while the fighters build up TP and exp chain bonuses.

In the end you should be fighting almost non stop, killing incredibly tough monsters every third fight, and getting #2 exp chains.