Wednesday 24 December 2008

Obligation

How far is our obligation to others in FFXI?

This is not an unsusual or poor question to ask, after all we are part of a larger community here, this is not World of Warcraft. Final Fantasy has elements that allow the player to progress on their own, even Beastmaster is a job that encourages you to level by your own. It is just that the emphasis is primarily on team work.

How hard is it to work together, communication is vital as well as being willing to pull your own weight. It is facinating watching large scale events, they quite often can be less effective and more chaotic than small scale events where you can't hide your laziness in the group. The need to pull your own weight rather than slack off and expect someone else to do it is much more immediate.

Also I believe a certain level of responsibility comes with your job. You don't level a WHM to be a damage dealer, or a DRG to be the healer of your party. The odd varitations come more into play if you are doing something solo, such as campaign, random bc's or some such other activity in which a more esoteric combination is not really an issue.

Ok admittedly it doesn't hurt to play with conventional wisdom, if we hadn't done that we would never have ended up with NIN/DRK and PLD/RDM. BUT! That doesn't mean that all weird combinations work! You don't show up to events as WHM/WAR there is no point, similarly you won't show up to an exp party as DRK/BLM, its just not relevant to the situation. There is no real application for it.

All this rambling does have a point, inevitably I do get there. I was in an exp party, nothing wrong with that other than its randomness as I did get a blind invite from the COR while lurking in Jeuno as DRG/WHM. LOL trust me, that really doesn't happen that often. I am almost always BRD or WHM in parties so the rare opportunities I get to do something on DRG other than farming I seize (This does not mean that going melee to Einherjar is any less crappy, I need 1 med. that I carry with myself anyway on mage jobs, and about 7 different things on a melee job to be considered well prepared BLEH)

So, blind invite whoohoo, from a corsair, with 2 bards, and a red mage, sooo I was wondering a little here, we seem kind of heavy on the support jobs, but corsair is a decent enough ranger type of job and we ARE going to birds, so ok ok pretty good and I had them scoop up Ringthree on SAM for our final job. You can tell this isn't going to be pretty can't you.

On paper, this looks like a sexy setup, ok you only have 2 dd to do the primary damage BUT, those two dd are a samurai and a dragoon who love playing their jobs and so strive to be efficient and excel at what they bring to the party. Then we had 1 bard who came /whm, another who came /sch. Now admittedly there was a mix-up and they didn't realise that there were 2 bard in the party but it did make pulling very hard work as they were constantly getting slept. A red mage and the corsair came /war.

Ok, slightly peculiar but hey we can swing with it, I've been in odd setups before and they have surprisingly worked. The two buffs the corsair decided to give us were a ranged acc roll, ooookay.... and chaos roll. Fair enough. NEVER cast any rolls on the mages the entire party. Far too preoccupied with how much damage they could do against a Dragoon and a Samurai.

Now, when you know a party is being parsed, you cheat. Hedge the bets so you can stack them in your favour, it is not unexpected. This person, who I don't really want to name, was OUTrageous in their cheating. Using food, but making sure they never pulled hate by only using weapon skills at 5%. Since ranger weaponskills are 1 hit, you get a huge spike damage to assist you on the parser and the kill shot. Now you could call this just general grumbliness on the part of being a dragoon. I am not about to use wheeling thrust in exp, and all my other weaponskills are multi-hit, so if I ws at the end of a fight, I am always going to lose out on damage on a parser, showing up an inherant flaw in these devices. But it is a bit of fun and gives you more a representation of average damage rather than perfect damage. However, I am not the only job with strong end game weaponskills that are multi-hit. ^.^ Haha!

The rolls they cast were beneficial only to themselves really, and not really anyone else in the party, sure they gave us chaos roll, but they didn't bother with anything for the struggling RDM, who was patently not used to this kind of mass carnage exp party. When asked about it, their only response was "What's the point when it isn't needed?"

Indeed what is the point, it WAS necessary and at what point were we just there for them to come 3rd in the parser and try and out damage 2 seasoned melee jobs for the sake of saying "Oh I play corsair different from everyone else". There was no sense of team spirit or co-opreation and while we were making decent exp, it really wasnt a fun party. Just kind of sad that you knew not everyone in the party was pulling together to make it amazing.

So at what point should we be thinking about the other people we are working with as well as our own goals?

2 comments:

  1. And hence, one prime reason I don't have multiple jobs at 75 and more sub jobs. I loathe partying with strangers for fear of people like that or worse. I realize more often than not, this won't be the case. But, bad parties tend to sting longer then good parties tend to make you feel warm and fuzzy.

    I hope you guys really destroyed him on the parser. <3

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  2. They came last at 23% of the parse. Behind Ring in 2nd place and me on DRG first. We were substantially ahead as you would expect, but with all their little tricks they came out far better than you would have expected.

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