THENECROMANCER'S PROFILE

:3 it truly is a magical thing

just because people don't know about it, doesn't mean it should go to shit(exaggerating). but it's not like i can really do anything about it, except complain once and a while and raise awareness.

imo, it saves so much time. you can follow the activity of the ENTIRE SITE in one place. i can scroll through a few pages in one minute and see everything that has been posted on gamepages and the forum for the entire day. i just open a new tab with anything that i've been following or anything that catches my eye or anything by a certain member. i never click on forums and browse. i don't need to. seems rather inefficient actually.

EDIT:

author=slashphoenix
I use it, but often I'll come back 4 hours later and it hasn't moved, so I wouldn't worry about clogging too much...

haha maybe if you check it during north american night time, or during a holiday. right now it takes about 2 pages to show all activity for the last hour. typically it shows at least 24 hours of content, sometimes more. that timespan used to be 48 hours and greater. during the mafia fad, it was less than 24 hours.

even beyond the timespan, there's the mixing of pointless personal chatter with the stuff some of us come here for. game design and games. that was a problem way before status's with moronic topics. those are down, but now there are status. im not against people socializing and all that, i just wish i could filter it from latest posts, that's all. in terms of 'legitimate rpg content', it has always been clogged.

well you won't get the scholar job for some time. you will start out with the 6 basic jobs; war, thf, mnk, whm, blm, rdm (i think that's right). when you start you only get to pick one job. you need to do a quest at level 15 or 18 to be able to unlock your sub job. get on that quest right away. then you need to main a different job to level it up so it becomes useful as a subjob. your subjob is limited to half of your main job, that's why your subjobs abilities are weak on their own. its like fighting a monster at half it's level.

you'l have to do tonnnnns of walking, chocobo's make it easier but you can only get them in towns and near warp crystals. eventually you will do a quest to get keys, from literally the 4 corners of the world, that allow you get an airship pass. you'l want that, and unless your level 30+ you will need help with it. whm is a very good job to have because of the teleport spells, you can move around quicker instead of taking 10-20 minutes to get to the next town u.u you can raise your own chocobo and get a whistle to call it any time. in my 3-4 years of playing i never bothered to do this haha i kinda wish i had, but it's so much work. you have to log in every day to feed it and take care of the egg til it hatches.

if you want the advanced jobs, you need to do quests. most of them are in the first world map and aren't all that hard to do. scholar is in an expansion world map and is hard as fuck to get. you will need to be super high level or get some help. just get help. in that world map all the monsters are lvl 56+ (aht urgan) and some of the dungeons have monsters you can't sneak by. there's spells to avoid enemy detection(another reason whm is awesome to have leveled) but some monsters aren't fooled.

im not sure what it would be like to start a new game now, but back in the day there were lots of people looking to party. like, a normal exp party where 6 ppl go find a spot and pull enemies in one by one. it seems that method has become obsolete because of a new expansion, i forget what it's called...but people would just go there to level up and i didn't have that expansion :( there is another way to level up, and that is by the floating books that are in every level. they are usually near the zone entrances, sometimes in other places. you talk to the book and it says "go kill 3 of this and 2 of that" and when you do you get a nice chunk of experience. you used to only be able to do that once an hour, but now it's unlimited. so that's the main way ppl level up now. it comes at a price though. you see, the way you get stronger in this game is to fight strong monsters. your skills, like sword skill and evasion, level up as you hit and get hit. they level up more when you fight strong monsters, but if you are fighting weak mosnters you won't see nearly as many skill ups. so what happens is that noobs fight at books all day and have very low skills. then they go to fight in a normal party against something strong and they miss all the time xD the reason it's bad is because of level sync. you can form a party and sync everybody down to the lowest level, that way everyones equal and the exp still goes toward your full level. but you are fighting weak monsters and not skilling up. the whole balance of the game has been thrown out of whack. it's good in some ways, that it doesn't take 3 months to reach level 50, but you end up with a bunch of high level noobs who are weak as shit and don't know how to properly play their job in a tough fight.

sometimes i think about going back, then i remember all that stuff and move on. plus most of the things require huge groups and serious commitment. like, if you want to get the uber gear called artifact gear, you need to do large raids that take hours just to get a small percentage of a drop and then it has to be your turn to be the one in the group to get it. you need to be in a linkshell and treat it like a job. like, "we're doing dynamis on thursday at 7pm. you HAVE to be there". plus all the story missions are hard as fuck and you literraly can't do them on your own. the only way you can do them on your own is to be overleveled. plus everybody..most everybody is going to be done the story missions already. so you wont find a group of ppl to do them with and will have to resort to getting help from high level ppl to basically kill the monster in 3 hits. so someone else will play the game for you, so it's not that great. but the thing is, you need to get those done early for the benefits. you want to raise your rank for various reason.

sigh, so yeah. i don't want to like scare you or anything xD because the battle system is awesome in this game and it can be a lot of fun. it's not a hard game to get into and love. but it takes a long time to get past the initial slowness and you will need big time help if you want to do anything important. i never did anything important, except beseiged. i always just formed a party of 6 and fought, and that was super fun. i also liked forming a group of 2 or 3 and fighting mid level stuff. its still fun and can be difficult, but it feels more like a usual ff game where you fight lots of random encounters of monsters the same level(normally you fight monsters that are like 5-6 levels above that will kill you in 3-4 hits depending on your job). i also loved hunting NMs, notorious monsters. basically rare spawns that drop awesome gear. there isn't a whole lot of standard gear that has good bonus's below level 30. but some of the nm drops do. some of them are so awesome that there seems to be someone camping it at ALL TIMES(i'm looking at you leaping lizzy) so some of them aren't worth the effort.

learn how hate(enmity) works very early on, master it or you will suck at this game. especially as a mage. always be careful NOT to aggro monsters, especially during battle. after a while you will learn to be scared on a map because dying really sucks, so just start off super cautious and stay that way. learn how monsters aggro and learn which types have what aggro; goblins are always by sight, skeletons are always blood aggro, etc. and start by leveling whm first. it's the most instantly useful, because every party needs a healer and you will be able to travel any map without worrying about aggroing monsters(that is important). when you get whm to at least 30, start leveling rdm. that way, you will always have your subjob at full for rdm up to level 60. otherwise, you will have to switch back to level it up. solo is harder as whm, but because of the books you can level up fast against weak monsters. for the books you need to get exp from the kill, so once they become too weak and not give exp you have to move onto another area/book.

edit: no wait, here's a better strategy. pick rdm as your job when you create your character so you start with a sword. then go out and fight as a rdm to get used to targeting and battle. whm is weak so solo even at low level can be more of a chore. learn how to cast cure in battle without being interrupted. normally if your hit while casting its interrupted, but if you start casting at the same moment as the enemy is attacking, he wont attack again soon enough to interrupt you :3 take it to at least 6-7, maybe 10. but then switch to whm and take it to at least 20. you'l need a new weapon for sure, and gear if you can afford it. you want the weapon that will give you a boost to your MND stat for better heals. but now that your whm, if you took rdm to 10, when your whm is 20 your subjob will be maxed. but as you level whm more, your sub job will stay low but at low levels this isn't a big deal. then when you switch to rdm again, your subjob will remain at max until rdm 40. keeping your subjob leveled is a chore. i was annoyed with having low subjobs so i leveled all jobs to 30 xD some to 40 and 50. so i could sub anything and it was maxed. then you get past lvl 75 and it becomes a chore again. and now the level cap is 99! so yeah, you'l be leveling a lot of jobs at the book in the crawler's next xD (you'll see)

haha man, i have so much advice for newbs! i spent a lot of my time helping new players with gear, money, advice, and power leveling. unless someone gives you money, you will always want some and be broke most of the time. making money in this game is hard.(unless they added some new feature i dont know about that changes this) there are a few materials that sell for a lot in the auction house(player trading post). crystals are good, but you need to have signet cast on you to collect crystals from battle. you will ALWAYS want signet on you, look it up cause it's very important. one of the best and easiest ways to make money is to fight the sapling monsters that are very common. they drop seeds, vegetable and grain, and a stack of those used to sell for a lot. again, things might have changed, but people need them for growing so i imagine they will always be in demand. always look at the price history before you sell something, so you know how much to sell it for. never undersell the last seller by much or other people will start underselling and you will end up driving the price down. they will sell eventually, so try to get as much as you can. of course sometimes people will undersell you and they dont sell and get sent back and you have to sell them again...but yeah. stacks of crystals sell for a lot too, but make sure you save a few stacks for yourself because you need them when doing story missions. i would be a good idea to get into crafting early on, because it takes forever to skill up crafting. but that's how ppl make money, kill enemies for drops, use drops to make gear, and sell gear for profits. i never bothered with crafting cause my friends gave me millions xD i was always rolling in dough.

haha and that's my advice to you. oh, and you said something about a 1 hour. so i looked it up and omfg! they made them 1 hours!!! they used to be 3 hours. that's crazy...

oh, and you'l want to have all the mage types leveled up so you can pick different sub jobs for different situations. sometimes you will be the healer, and you'l want /whm(for divine seal and spell choices). or if your going to be using attack magic a lot, be /blm(for elemental seal and spell choices). i've never used sch but it's essentially both whm and blm in one, plus some abilities to regain MP and it takes a "turn" to switch between using black magic and white so it's a little less accessible in a pinch. anyways, you will have convert as rdm, so being /whm or /blm is probably better. btw, /smn is never a good idea heh

damn, man, all this talking about ffxi makes me want to play again hahah but i just signed up for the ffxiv beta, i hope i'm not too late and can get in. otherwise i might have to look at getting back on ffxi for a month or two :P

author=JosephSeraph
I think I'm gonna be a Red Mage with a Bard subclass but I'm not sure =D

that might sound like a good idea in theory, but once you start playing you'll realize that you need to pick things that go together. like /whm or /blm or /sch. you'l want the extra MP and magic related job traits/abilities. ppl won't want to pt with a rdm/brd, either. you'll only be able to use 1 bard buff and it won't be as good as a main bard. main bard can cast 2 buffs. that's how it is when you pick mismatched jobs. like picking /whm on a fighting type. it might sound cool to have a figher that can heal but your heals are so weak and you have such little mp that its pointless.

you can try fun combos when your fighting low-mid level stuff. but most of the game is you fighting hard as fuck enemies. find a linkshell(guild) as fast as possible.

i havent played it in years. i thought about getting it on xbox, but ffxiv is almost out on ps3 so i'm waiting for that.

i liked puppetmaster the best :D i was mithra

if they're all bitches, that makes me a pimp daddy

author=MrChearlie
Actually switches and variables are just that, pretty simple to use, Switches are 0 and 1 and the other is whichever number you want to use so not really an issue. The problem all the time lays in the conditional branches were if there is something wrong you have to check a huge text in order to find the trouble that sometimes you don't even understand why is that happening.

maybe your problem is the order in which the code is running, and not the code itself.

for example;
lets say you have a common event set to run when a switch is turned on.
you have a parallel process on the map that activates with the same switch.
and in the middle of the common event is a branch with a call event command inside(that does a whole bunch of stuff).

there might be problems with the code running in the order you wanted it to. it might seem more efficent to setup the code like that, but if you took all that code and put it in one parallel process on the map, it would be easier to run in order and give the desired effect.