The Mog Log: Grounded

After last week's column, I mentioned that I was pretty energized to give some of Final Fantasy XI's other additions a try. Chief among them, naturally, was the addition of Grounds of Valor, which is essentially Fields of Valor with special sauce. Said special sauce is a stacking buff for each successful regime completed, meaning that staying in one zone and working your way through training regimes is even more rewarding than it was before.

Well... in theory, anyhow.

Rather than just subsisting on the basis of theory, I decided it was high time for Rhio to continue in the experimental process she had engaged in long ago. So after donning a Destrier Beret and making sure she had her fair supply of grotesquely powerful anniversary rings, I set out into the wilds to try my hands at the new grounds system. The results were... well, I'd like to say they were surprising, but mostly they were just a reminder of a universal truth about Final Fantasy XI.

My first training regime was in Ordelle's Caves, due to several important factors, not the least of which being that I had last parked Rhio in San d'Oria and that's her home nation anyhow. Plus, after taking a gander at the listing of ground regimes, I found that Ordelle's seemed to be the spot with the largest number of regimes that wouldn't require me to head elsewhere in a few levels. That was the first warning sign that something might be a bit off here, but I hopped on a chocobo and headed down to the caves to start punching some goblins and a will-o'-the-wisp.

That last part is where I ran into trouble, however, not because I couldn't kill one of the little bombs, but because as near as I can tell the bloody things occasionally show up seemingly at random through the caves, with no real rhyme or reason that I could discern. And after wandering around the caves for an hour, I had yet to see a single one. I had seen plenty of goblins, yes, and plenty of hognosed bats, and plenty of stink bats that aggroed to me after the hognosed bats decided that I was invading their personal space... but will-o'-the-wisps were in short supply.

Now, to be totally fair, I'm not saying this was an hour of wasted time. Between my Empress Band and the simple level of enemies around me, I was making pretty decent experience the whole way through. But my goal here was not "test whether or not Rhio can level OK as a MNK/WHM," since I've already tested that and it's only gotten easier since then. I would have been leveling faster if I had been out in the dunes smacking crabs, flies, and lizards, and that's an important takeaway from the first run.

So I headed back to San d'Oria to re-evaluate and try a different approach. King Ranperre's Tomb is an area I know like the back of my hand, it has a decent regime, and it's not much of a haul. So that was my next destination, to grab Page 5 and kill six goblins, two of each stripe.

Unfortunately, that was where I ran into a very different problem, and it's one that I didn't realize until I got there. I had a pretty good idea of where these particular goblins were located, but I didn't realize that said goblins had four spawn locations, each of which is a lottery spawn, spaced in such a way that it's very difficult to get just one of the goblins under the right conditions, which meant a lot of fun fights in which Mr. Leecher decided to help Mr. Gambler with a well-placed heal.

It might have been worse if I'd been getting mugged... but then again, that was the least of my concerns. I was far more annoyed at the fact that muggers, which should have logically been popping about a third of the time, seemed to come up far less frequently than that, which meant a lot of casters. And while it sounds like I should have been enjoying punching them directly in their soft, underdeveloped caster brains, it started to get really annoying when I was long past the need to kill more of either.

Oh, and let's not forget that there was someone else there the whole time. So my chances of getting any given goblin were halved from the word go. I'd point out that the prowess boost I finally got was a nice increased crystal drop rate, but by the time I finally managed to finish the regime, I was long past the point of registering that as anything more than trivia.

The problem here isn't that Grounds of Valor doesn't work — it does. The problem is that the system isn't set up to offer rewards that are in any way comparable to Fields of Valor, and while the prowess system should help that, it mostly just winds up offsetting the structure of the thing. It's very possible that some of the later regimes totally make up for this, but at least from what I saw, it was intensely awkward to find my targets and not much more rewarding for time spent killing (in the time it took me to complete the Ranperre regime, I could have completed at least two or three field regimes).

In short, like a lot of FFXI, it's a really good idea whose implementation leaves a lot to be desired. I don't think it's bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not a functional replacement for anything when leveling, and even the tomes in popular leveling spots like Crawler's Nest won't really help adventuring parties out. Maybe in the next few revisions it will improve.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments or via mail to eliot@massively.com. Next week I'm thinking of heading out on a limb again, although I'm going to have to mull over my ideas a bit more.

From Eorzea to Vana'diel, there is a constant: the moogles. And for analysis and opinions about the online portions of the Final Fantasy series, there is also a constant: The Mog Log. Longtime series fan Eliot Lefebvre serves up a new installment of the log every Saturday, covering almost anything related to Square-Enix's vibrant online worlds.