Starting City Pros & Cons

[Icemage]

Re: Starting City Pros & Cons

Being able to Outpost to Sarutabaruta and Ronfaure as a Bastokan is pretty useful, it's true. It does, however, require one of those concerted "conquer enemy territory" campaigns that players occasionally wage to "swap" outposts.

Truth be told, if you level WHM to 58+ and BLM to 29+, there's no such thing as an Outpost that's far away: You can usually just Teleport-Vahzl and outpost back home (or in the case of Bastok, you can Teleport-Altep, then Escape from Korroloka Tunnel to reach Bastok).


Icemage

[Mhurron]

Re: Starting City Pros & Cons

I would add that in terms of outpost teleportation, a Bastokan has a couple advantages worth noting:
1) Once you get your newbie zone teleports, if you do, Sarutabaruta and Ronfaure outposts are easy walking distance from their respective cities. Gustaberg is a bit more of a pain. As a Bastokan, you'll have immediate access to the Metalworks, and if you're lucky enough to get newbie outposts, you can teleport pretty close to the other nations.

Since your oppertunities for getting the Outpost warp to the other cities starting zones are quite rare, this isn't any more of a benifit to starting in Bastok over any other city. Also, IIRC everyone has immediate access to the Metalworks.

2) Easy access to Bastok means easy access to not only Korroloka tunnel, a nice but not always popular leveling ground suitable for full xp parties in about the 15-22 range or so, but easy access to Eastern Altepa Desert, the level ground of choice come 30. Western Altepa and Quicksand Caves figure in later on in levels as well; for a while, you're going to have your xp parties be either near Jeuno or near Korroloka. While you can get an Altepa Gate Crystal to allow teleporting here, you may not always be able to get a teleport; chances are that you can get back to your home nation quickly, though, and if that nation is Bastok you're a relatively short run away from the desert.

By the time your EXPing in Korroloka or need access to Altepa getting their is pretty much easy for everyone no matter where you're from. Especially since so many Korroloka parties form in the Dunes then all go to Bastok together.

[Lunaryn]

Re: Starting City Pros & Cons

Since your oppertunities for getting the Outpost warp to the other cities starting zones are quite rare, this isn't any more of a benifit to starting in Bastok over any other city. Also, IIRC everyone has immediate access to the Metalworks.
By the time your EXPing in Korroloka or need access to Altepa getting their is pretty much easy for everyone no matter where you're from. Especially since so many Korroloka parties form in the Dunes then all go to Bastok together.

By immediate access, I mean that you can teleport there directly, rather than merely within 5 minutes walk or so.

As for conquering newbie regions, I actually helped Windurst take Gustaberg on Midgardsormr, then helped Bastok take Sarutabaruta the following week. Later Bastok managed to take Ronfaure. Sadly for my San d'Orian friend, Sandy didn't react much to this.

Newbie regions fall occasionally on Midgardsormr, but it can take a long time. Particularly now that the hyper-inflationary economy is gone, it's no longer trivial to farm up a couple hundred thousand gil and blow it all on cheap ammo from NPCs.

[Sabaron]

Re: Starting City Pros & Cons

I was looking over the mining guides and ended up going to Yughott Grotto (for the first time to mine) because I wanted to see if it was any good... It appeared to be from the list of things--Iron being the most frequent acquisition, and since I like mining for some odd reason and I'm trying to skill up on Iron Chains without paying for it, I went.

There were no people mining in Yughott other than myself afaik (I didn't see anyone mining nor wearing gear for mining). I made one full pass of the mine and found that among the 18 mining spawn points that there were.... 2 active points--2. Now, this does not take into account the possibility of a mining point respawn ahead of me and if mining points can pop on the same spot (thus allowing you to dig up more than one thing), then there was one point with 3 points on it. The 18 mining points yielded 3 iron ore and 1 pebble, so there are as few as 1 mining point and as many as 4 depending on how mining spawns work.

This mine has to be the pinnacle of crapulence among mines. Do not go there--no one else does for a reason.

Obviously, however if you take 6 people, you can easily mine all 18 points and each get a nice bit of usage out of the mine, but since there's no one there, it's pointless. Mining becomes -better- the more people are doing it up to the point at which there is one miner for each spawn which is optimal.

[Icemage]

Re: Starting City Pros & Cons

I spent a lot of time at Yughott Grotto. It's not nearly as bad as you make it sound, though I should note that the optimal number of miners here is about 2-3. Once you get used to where the points spawn, it's not hard to check them all.

In its defense, it's one of the only minable zones in the game that can be reasonably effectively mined solo and without fear of getting aggro. It's not effecient, but you can at least hit all the points without bending over backwards (something which is not true at all in Gusgen, Ifrit's, Palborough, Oldton, Newton, or Halvung). The only other zone that is minable solo is Zeruhn Mines, really. Gusgen is borderline possible solo, but it's slower than Yughott and yields about the same quality of ores while being less accessible unless you happen to be WHM58/BLM29+.


Icemage

[Sabaron]

Re: Starting City Pros & Cons

I guess I'm just used to Zeruhn... It's really easy to mine Zeruhn, but Zinc, Bronze, Brass, and Copper aren't as nice as they used to be. Zeruhn always has a few a couple miners in it.. I might have to try Yughott again on a weekend when there's likely to be more people there (and do a search in advance to look for /anon's).

In other news... I just did survey's of Newton and Halvung... Deadly mines... I noted that most of the MP spawns were guarded, though Halvung looked a bit more accessible than Newton because the passage points only have Magmatic Erucas (that Zzz between 2100 and 0600). A couple points, however, are guarded by trolls (and a nasty Truesight NM troll named Dorgerwor the Astute who Zarbzaned me twice as I was Warping...