Why no one seems to care about Renkei (weapon skill chain) anymore?

[vanux]

I'm a returning player, quited 4 years ago. I've been in a few exp party so far, seems no one care about weapon skill chain anymore, everyone just use their weapon skill whenever available. Has the game changed on something that make it worthless?

Beside, I've another question, what is Campaign? Does it require a good party/alliance to join, like Dynamic/Assault, etc? Anything good to join a fight in Campaign? It sounds interesting but after reading all related document / web-site description, I still don't get it.

[Armando]

Re: Why no one seems to care about Renkei (weapon skill chain) anymore?

High level players stopped caring about Skillchains because they get resisted too frequently to warrant waiting for a SC partners, and because most WS's don't increase in damage well with TP. Some players will spot SC opportunities and try to SC on the occasions that they happen to have 100 TP at the same time as someone else, but this is rare.

Skillchains are still worth using at lower levels, but low level people are dumb and think that whatever works best at high levels is also best at low levels.

Campaign and Beseiged are new, periodic events that happen in certain zones, where a beastman army attacks that zone and a large number of players have to fight them off. It's level 50+ content. You can participate in Campaign/Beseiged without having a party or for it - in fact, it's quite common.

Refer to FFXIClopedia.org for details.

[Clever Ninja]

Re: Why no one seems to care about Renkei (weapon skill chain) anymore?

Campaign is only useful for higher levels(55-60+), if you want lower level xp then the new Fields of Valor update fills that role. Can be done completely solo which is the best part about it.

And on weapon skills, problem that has happened is majority of the population likes to adopt the philosophies of what people do at level 75 merit parties, i.e. sub NIN for everything, WS whenever, BRD sleeping mobs at the party fight spot at totally unneccessary levels. BLM's after a certain level are almost completely exiled from xp parties, having to turn to soloing/duoing/manaburns for their xp. Frankly I kinda liked the WS days, nothing was more fun then closing a skillchain on my WAR in Kazham in a WAR THF BLM BLM BLM WHM party(not shitting you). Closed the skillchain and a hail of spells all magic bursting was some of the craziest stuff ever.

[Kailea]

Re: Why no one seems to care about Renkei (weapon skill chain) anymore?

simple answer.... people got lazy

[Armando]

Re: Why no one seems to care about Renkei (weapon skill chain) anymore?

It's never been about laziness. We min/max the hell out of things far more than we ever did in the past. It's always been about damage.

Skillchaining requires A) two people having TP at the same time, B) compatible Weapon Skills (which may not be your strongest WSs) and C) the mob having enough HP to survive both WS.

At high levels DDs can easily do 700+ WS, and often there are no jobs that can MB in the party. Thus it's pointless to hold on to your TP 'til you're at 140% waiting for all conditions to be met if the SC is going to end up resisted and doing less than 40% of the closing WS's damage. Holding on to 40% TP over 100 means that if you hadn't skillchained, you'd be 4/10ths of the way in towards letting another 700+ damage WS loose.

The fact that melees can get TP so quickly at high levels further aggravates the problem. Waiting even just 10 seconds for your skillchain partner could mean ending up with as much as 20-30 extra TP for some jobs.

If SCs didn't get resisted or had very high chances of going unresisted people might be singing a different tune.

[Karinya]

Re: Why no one seems to care about Renkei (weapon skill chain) anymore?

SC resist rates are (a) not that high and (b) obviously not the problem, since they haven't changed since RoZ/CoP when SCs were used frequently. Even a half-resisted level 3 SC does 50% of the closing WS damage - more with day/weather bonus - and who wouldn't kill to do 50% more damage with all their WS, sometimes 100%? It's the inefficiency of waiting for a partner, using weaker WS for compatibility reasons, unavailability of MBers, and most of all, wimpy mobs that have caused the death of skillchains. (Wimpy mobs vastly increase the reward of multihit WS, most of which have crappy SC properties; perhaps this was intended partly to create a tradeoff between raw damage and SC potential, but it's not a very fair trade at the moment.)

These factors interact, too - nukers aren't as good against low level enemies, so when you fight them, you probably won't invite one; low level and high reward for multihits increases the damage sacrifice for using a WS with good SC potential; and low relative monster level is the number one reason "melees can get TP so quickly at high levels".

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Why no one seems to care about Renkei (weapon skill chain) anymore?

We min/max the hell out of things far more than we ever did in the past.

I know I do, but I don't know if "we" is as broad as we are really thinking it is. A lot of people still full-time pieces of gear you should never be full-timing.

Short answer though (and you covered it already):

People are dumb and dumb people think high level stuff works at low levels.

Additionally, some dumb people also will carry a low level approach to things, even at high level. Or an approach that is far too conservative.

[Aksannyi]

Re: Why no one seems to care about Renkei (weapon skill chain) anymore?

Not only what others have said, but Colibri (55+ exp mobs) do this fun TP move that wipes your TP down to zero, so you pretty much want to use it as soon as you get it, so you don't end up losing it waiting for your skillchain partner to be ready.

[meSchnitzel]

Re: Why no one seems to care about Renkei (weapon skill chain) anymore?

I recently came back from a long break too and there are lots of changes I've noticed. The one I've noticed more is that most people I've partied with at the lower levels don't even know what a Renkai is, much less how to do it!

I literaly had to teach a Qufim party, full of people with level 75 other jobs, how to do a skillchain... it blew my mind!

I remember playing the day of US release and getting into Valk to try and party, got invited > Learned Renkai order > every successful fast XP party after that included a SC order...

On the other topic, I do remember people gear swapping, but it was FAR less frequent than it is now, sometimes you can barely see the party members as they are blinking constantly changing their gear.

Personaly i play for fun, very casually, and min/maxing is not my thing... I have a feeling I'll be doing a lot of soloing since I really hate swapping gear.

Perhaps I'll find some other soloers that also do not like to conform to the min/maxing and we can set up a good 'ol fashion SC party to gain XP!

HAHA

[Szkol]

Re: Why no one seems to care about Renkei (weapon skill chain) anymore?

While I can see why skillchain isn't good for Colibri (I'm not quite there yet, but I KNow about the TP down move and that magic is a no-no) but even at low levels, SC just is not something that people think about, almost ever. The one party I WAS in that thought about SC, was kind of doing it wrong- no, doing it all wrong.

I forget what the mob was, but they were strong to earth, and weak against almost everything else, and we were able to do both Fusion and Fragmentation skillchains - sop my idea was for us to do both, and let the BLM MB on both. I was overrulled, however, because the BLM's latest greatest spell was earth-based, and MUST do more damage to the earth-based mob than Fire/Light/Wind/Lightning , each of which the mob was weak against, with the possible exception of Light.

Instead we just did Scission, for like no damage, and when I jumped in to try for Fusion or Fragmentation, the BLM got very upset. I was totally making fun of the setup with one of the other DDs in /tell


Moral of the story is: SC , while maybe not appropriate at high levels, is not someting that people think about. And when they do, it' pretty much a forgotten art.

I 100% agree with the hypothesis regarding lazy.

[Elwynn]

Re: Why no one seems to care about Renkei (weapon skill chain) anymore?

On the other topic, I do remember people gear swapping, but it was FAR less frequent than it is now, sometimes you can barely see the party members as they are blinking constantly changing their gear.

You should try healing those jokers in campaign. Some people keep flickering away even as their HP bar goes below 10% while I'm struggling to get a lock on them to fire off a heal macro. And then I just have to cancel out and get ready to drop a Raise on them.

[GreatMno]

Re: Why no one seems to care about Renkei (weapon skill chain) anymore?

Before I started playing, I read about SC and MB and I thought they would be cat's meow. I even read a few guides on how to do it effectively, thinking that SOMEONE would want to do it. Well, not much luck so far. Usually I just try and figure out a SC myself. The problem with that is, so far the highest damage renkai I've see is 21 after the two WS. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like it should be doing more.

[Szkol]

Re: Why no one seems to care about Renkei (weapon skill chain) anymore?

Before I started playing, I read about SC and MB and I thought they would be cat's meow. I even read a few guides on how to do it effectively, thinking that SOMEONE would want to do it. Well, not much luck so far. Usually I just try and figure out a SC myself. The problem with that is, so far the highest damage renkai I've see is 21 after the two WS. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like it should be doing more.

You have to use it right for it to work well. Ideally you'd do a level 2 or 3 skillchain, and the mob would be weak against one or more of the elements of the skillchain. The damage that the two players do also affect the potency of the skillchain. I think i read somewhere that the most damage a skillchain can do is 1/2 the damage of the last WS, so you want to tack your hardest hitting WS last, when possible.

I was partying against beetles in Garlaige, and we were skillchaining on each other w/e possible, though not in an organized manner. We all managed to fire off 4 WS's in sucession once, and I think we ended up with Liquefecation -> Scission -> Liquefecation , and the damage bonuses added up to around 300 points, and I think the BLU and the RDM both managed to Magic Burst as well. It was just a perfect storm, but it wasn't organized at all- but that's a lot of free damage (and it's hate-free too, isn't it?) and that beetle went down in about 1/2 the time.

[The Mauva Syndicate]

Re: Why no one seems to care about Renkei (weapon skill chain) anymore?

Get into JP parties

Most of the JP parties I've been in still SC at least, I've even been asked to MB off of them in Garlaige

It's the NA/EU players who have killed it, the JP players are still SC'ing (at least on Remora)

[Nuriko]

Re: Why no one seems to care about Renkei (weapon skill chain) anymore?

Isn't it great fun to fire off a cure V on ... no, not your target, yourself because they flickered?