The official Final Fantasy XI Test Server has just been updated! In today's addition to testable content, several adjustments have been made to the soon to be implemented merit point-unlocked weaponskills, addressing some desired changes to their damage capabilities to balance them out in relation to existing weaponskills.

A full list of planned weaponskill changes can be found below the break.

Want the full details on what is slated for the new weaponskills, as well as somewhere to give your opinion on the changes? The ZAM forums is just the spot!

From Playonline.com:

Today, various adjustments and updates have been implemented on the FINAL FANTASY XI Test Server.

We encourage players to give all the in-development content a thorough testing, and look forward to receiving your feedback!

Proceed on to peruse the test details.
Read on to find out how you can access the FINAL FANTASY XI Test Server!

From the Official Final Fantasy XI Forums:

Howdy all!

I wanted to share some information on adjustments that will be made to some of the new weapon skills.

• Great Sword Weapon Skill “Resolution”
We’re currently making adjustments so this weapon skill deals more damage to higher level enemies. We will be slightly weakening the effects of the TP damage modifier, but making it so the modifier won’t only be for the first hit as we’ll be changing it so that it’s for all 5 hits.

• Scythe Weapon Skill “Entropy”
We will be making adjustments so that the amount of MP recovered will be within a range.
There will be cases where the MP recovered will be higher or possibly lower than now, but we are planning to adjust this so that the average will not change by much.

• Katana Weapon Skill “Blade: Shun”
We will be making adjustments to this weapon skill in the same way as those listed for “Resolution.”

Also, as a side note, we don’t have any plans of adding these new weapon skills to the arsenal of enemy weakness exploits, so don’t not worry about picking which ones you would like to upgrade based on that.

From the Official Final Fantasy XI Forums:

Hey everyone, we’ve been looking over your feedback and wanted to give more details in the thought process behind our changes and some of the weapon skills themselves.

Axe Weapon Skill “Ruinator”
We will be lowering the attack modifier value and changing it so it’s half of the current value. The amount of damage dealt to high level enemies (those that have high defense) will be reduced, however, being able to deal damage easier than other axe weapon skills will remain unchanged.

We are making it so that the amount of damage will be around the same as Rampage if you have full accuracy and get 2-3 criticals. (This is when both of them are executed at 100 TP. There is of course more damage that can be dealt depending on gear and food.)

We are making adjustments so that you can pick Ruinator if you want to deal more consistent damage, or Rampage if you want to try and deal large amounts of damage.

Club Weapon Skill “Realm Razer”
The idea behind the adjustment is the same as Ruinator.

We are making it so that the amount of damage will be around the same as Hexa Strike if you have full accuracy and get 2-3 criticals. Again, this is for 100 TP and more damage can be dealt depending on gear and food.

We ultimately decided to adjust this weapon skill due to the fact that a non-critical hit modifier weapon skill would easily surpass the maximum damage dealt by Hexa Strike in stable conditions, and the result would cause a rapid increase in damage inflation.

Sword Weapon Skill “Requiescat”
Since Spirits Within’s damage varies based on your amount of HP and TP, we are adjusting Requiescat so that it will be easier to use than Spirits Within once you have 300 TP and also so that jobs that cannot boost their HP as high as paladins will be able to deal damage.

Also, Atonement is an easy to use weapon skill for paladins, which has a special feature, so the idea behind Requiescat was to give jobs other than paladin, specifically red mage and blue mage, a good weapon skill choice.


Hand-to-Hand Weapon Skill “Shijin Spiral”
There have been requests saying that this is weaker than Stringing Pummel and Victory Smite, so please make it stronger than both of those, but we cannot do this for the same reasons listed for our adjustments to Ruinator and Realm Razer.

We have also received some comments saying that the damage of Shijin Spiral is no different than Asuran Fists, or perhaps lower.

We took a look at the conditions of the players who performed weapon skill tests, but there are differences in attack power when executing each weapon skill, and because of this the result was that Asuran Fists and Victory Smite was higher.

Shijin Spiral is stronger than Asuran Fists and when boosting your stats using the appropriate equipment and food, the differences between Asuran Fists and Shijin Spiral will become more apparent, and the gap between Victory Smite and Shijin Spiral will also become smaller.