With the April version update to Final Fantasy XI still in its infancy, Square Enix is already looking ahead to the next major changes planned for the game. Introduced in the past version update, a series of new weapons from Delve began to cause quite a stir, easily overthrowing the Relic, Mythic, and Empyrean weapons of the time. To remedy this, changes have been announced to drastically increase the power of these older weapons in their completed form, as well as to allow completed weapons from Walk of Echoes to unlock the weaponskill for use with any weapon of that type.

 Additionally, several planned job adjustments have been announced, including a significant overhaul to the elemental magic system, new equipment for augmenting the abilities of Dragoon's wyverns, Beastmaster's pets, Summoner's avatars, and Puppetmaster's automatons, and Artifact Armor, merits, and limit break quests for the new Geomancer and Rune Fencer jobs.

Feel like talking about these new job adjustments or the upcoming changes to the new weapons? Come join the discussions over on the ZAM forums!

From the official Final Fantasy XI forums:

In the next version update we will be making the job adjustments outlined below.

There are still aspects that have not been finalized, but please look it over as an outline of things to come. Once I have more concrete details I will be sure to share them with you all.

• Elemental magic adjustments
  We will be making the adjustments outlined here.
  
• One-handed weapon status modifier adjustments
  During the version update on March 27th, we performed adjustments so that "The maximum amount of damage dealt based upon the attack-to-defense ratio is now the same for both one-handed and two-handed weapons." As a next step to this, we will be adjusting the way in which status modifiers are applied.
  
• Pet job adjustments
  As long as characters are not increasing in level (fundamentally), pet job levels as well will not increase, so we are making it possible to further enhance pets through the equipment players wear. Below are the different plans we have for each of the pet jobs:
  
  • Beastmaster
    Addition of new familiar pets
    
  • Dragoon
    Addition of polearms that have stats to increase the parameters of wyverns.
    
  • Summoner
    Addition of grips that have stats to increase the parameters of avatars.
    
  • Puppetmaster
    Addition of animators that have stats to increase the parameters of automatons.
• Geomancer and rune fencer adjustments
  Addition of artifact equipment, merit points, and limit break quests.

From the official Final Fantasy XI forums:

Greetings everyone,

Thanks for all of your patience while the development team discussed all the feedback in this thread. Below is a very lengthy post from Producer Akihiko Matsui as a follow-up to the plans for relic, mythic, and empyrean weapons.

---
Matsui here.

Thank you all so much for the feedback on relic, mythic, empyrean, and Walk of Echoes weapons. It has helped out tremendously.

After reading over all of your feedback, instead of continuing the growth of these weapons by unlocking the weapon skills that are tied to each of the weapons, I feel it would be better to perform a revamp on RME weapons. (Regarding Walk of Echoes weapons, I will talk about this below, but they will be involved with unlocking the specialized weapon skills.)

I've been reworking a lot, and writing it all up, but it seems the post turned out rather lengthy, so once you have been able to read through it all and digest it we'd love to hear your feedback.

Content Level
We've received a lot of questions about the stats on Adoulin equipment, and I'd like to once again explain about growth and content levels in Seekers of Adoulin as this is a critical aspect in order to receive feedback on the revamps for RME weapons.

The content in Adoulin has been designed with a repeating play-cycle where you challenge content that you are able to at that moment in time, gather equipment, become stronger, and then take on higher tier content which will allow you to gather even stronger equipment.

It's through the procurement of equipment that will allow players to grow and level up.

We've established content levels for Adoulin content as a means to objectively display difficulty benchmarks. The below is a concrete illustration of these content levels.

Equipment strength is dependent on the level of the content you need to challenge in order to obtain the equipment, not the level in which it can be equipped. With the gear that is released in Adoulin from here on out, they can be equipped at level 99; however, instead of considering these to be level 99 pieces of equipment, it would be better for you to think of their level in terms of the content level (for example, level 110 or level 120).

The strength of the monsters that will be introduced are matched to that of the content level, but since there is somewhat of a solidified hierarchy between content, it's been setup so that the strength can be felt with even one level difference in content level. Oppositely, the parameters on Adoulin equipment have been calculated and set in order to deal with these monsters.

Fundamentally we will be making it so that the content level for content to come in the future continues to become higher, but there may be cases where we fill in areas where there is a large jump in content level as needed.

Also, in order to make it so there are various types of content sprawled across a single content level, we are supplementing it with content variations. We've also designed plans to enable resting periods where we will expand laterally instead of vertically, because players may get burnt out going full steam ahead.

In the next version update we will be adding content focusing on filling in the gaps as well as supplementing with content variation.

In the above chart, please look at the “Next version update (currently adjusting)” column. For content levels 6-9 (Skirmish/Wildskeeper Reives), we will be adding equipment appropriate for these content levels that can be exchanged for Bayld along with new Colonization and Lair Reives. Additionally, we will be filling in content for levels 13 and 17.

For those players who are already able to take on Skirmish, Wildskeeper Reives, and Delve at this point in time, it will not be absolutely necessary to challenge this content, but we will be making the above adjustments in case you want to increase your success rate, or are feeling that the current situation is still a bit tough.

Also, as a plan to resolve the issue where Skirmish is not really connecting the content as was planned, we will be undergoing maintenance at the end of this week and making it so statue segments can be obtained from Colonization and Lair Reives at a set rate. (These adjustments are separate from the rules associated with obtaining these items via Coalition Assignments, HELM, and Soul Pyres.)

By performing these adjustments we envision the below flow:

1. Challenge Colonization and Lair Reives
2. Obtain statue segments by participating in these reives
3. Challenge Skirmish with the parts you have obtained

Weapon Revamps
Sorry, I got off track for a bit, but now I'd like to return to the topic at hand.

To start off, I still need to discuss the implementation period with the rest of the development team, so it will be a bit difficult to address this immediately in the next version update, and we cannot make any promises as to when this will take place.

In regards to the kind of stats that will be added when we revamp these weapons, fundamentally the afterglow and aftermath effects as well as the other special stats will carry over and we'll be setting damage values, attack, and accuracy stats to coincide with the content level.

While the stats will be quite strong, we do not plan on making it possible to continuously enhance them in short intervals like the original method of enhancing via Trial of the Magians.

However, RME weapons have been considered the ultimate weapons up until this point in time, but I feel that this needs to change a bit.

I would like to make a shift so that instead of having it so that other weapons aren't necessary if you have RME weapons, you have a choice. If you are happy with RME, then you can use RME, and for those who want other weapons you can use other weapons.

With that said, there may be players who are worried if these weapons will eventually become unusable, but to give an example we had the lead make some calculations for the stats needed to combat the Delve boss monsters, and the below is what the RME swords would look like:

Excalibur

↓

Burtgang

↓

Almace

↓

In regards to Walk of Echoes weapons, these were implemented with the concept of allowing players to use the specialized empyrean weapon skills, so instead of revamping them we felt it more appropriate to have them serve to unlock the weapons skills (planning to have restrictions based on jobs and level). Also, we are looking into adjustments for the method to create Walk of Echoes weapons.


In conclusion…
Apologies that this post is so long, but based on all of the above we would love to hear your feedback on the revamps to level 99 RME weapons and unlocking weapon skills with Walk of Echoes weapons.

I will be sure to read over each and every comment you all post.

My thoughts and ideas have completely turned around the plans that were originally drawn up, and I had to sit and really discuss the idea with the rest of the development team, including the possibilities of making this happen.

I apologize that this response was late and that I made you all wait.

Thank you all very much.
---