Wasabisoft

So in what I assume to be a last hurrah for Final Fantasy XI, SE is releasing both a new add-on (conveniently split into three parts for your wallet squeezing pleasure) and increasing the level cap to the Final Fantasy staple of 99. I can assume this means two things. It will take about a billion xp to get that far and someone will do it within a week.

Those who know me know I’ve had this on again off again love affair with FFXI. Most people have no clue why, or rather, they DO but just aren’t connecting the dots. I’ve been playing FFXI since the US beta and in that time met a lot of really cool people, exploring the new worlds together and such through the last 8 years or so. The exact same thing could be said for my buddies that have played Warcraft since it came out.

Seeing Square also evolve in their story telling was also neat over the past few years. Wings of the Goddess really nailed character animation in cutscenes. The Shantotto add-on really drove home the humor of the taru’s.

Getting back on track, level 99 I assume will be quite the ordeal to achieve. Most mobs give about 200-300 xp a kill and to reach level 75 alone required 801,350 xp. Currently, at 75 you can max out your xp at 44,000. To get from 74 to 75 required 42,000. So let’s assume that each level will require 2000 more xp to level again (more likely it will be 3000 but humor me), it will take 2,088,000 xp to reach max level. Hopefully SE will also see this as mildly absurd. Somehow I doubt it though. They will probably milk it until the population dies off and ff14 takes over.  But let’s say they have a heart. I think the best way to do is from 76-51, have it sit at 45,000 and every five levels after that, increase it by 5k. Yeah, I know, wishful thinking but a man can dream can’t he?

Also touched upon are what new skills will that have for you on your sub jobs. SE’s already touched on that. Skills that define a job will be thrown out when it’s your sub. That means all the mages, your dreams of refresh will most likely be shattered. I know, I know heart breaking. And what about level cap quests? Please, no. I’m sure there will be at least one or two though. Probably one to allow you to go beyond 75 and then one that will probably be ridiculous to complete to go from 98 to 99.

The other thing I’m excited about is summoners are getting two new summons that we have been waiting on forever. Alexander and Odin. Both will require astral flow to summon and both will automatically activate astral flow if it’s not already active. This is interesting in the fact that this means you can only summon them once every two hours unless they are changing how astral flow works. Alexander will give a rather large defense and status immunity buff to the party and Odin will of course brandish Zantetsuken, his sword that allows one hit kills unless it’s a boss where it will just deal damage instead. The amount of defense given by Alexander and the accuracy of Odin’s Zantetsuken depends on how much MP the summoner has at the time of casting. This is also interesting. I’m curious to find out how long Alexander’s buff will last seeing as a 2-hour ability is required to cast it. Odin is pretty self-explanatory. They also already figured Zantetsuken would be abused by summoner burn parties and have made it so the more mobs in its area of effect, the less accurate it is.

There are a few other updates being listed such as a rewiring of some job’s abilities but there’s nothing really to talk about there until they release some new information. The really big thing was the level cap increase.

Things should be pretty interesting in the coming months for FFXI. It’s really up to SE to decide whether it’s a good or bad sort of interesting.