Morning in Vana'diel: Be Kind to the Wildlife.

Morning in Vana'diel is your daily dose of FFXI and all things Vana'diel. Give us your thoughts on the interesting topics of the day! This morning we consider the problem with focusing all your attention on Greater Colibri.

I will be the first to admit that the Greater Colibri camp is probably the easiest XP camp in the game. The mobs are very easy to kill, they are weak to some of the best equipment in the game and they don't require a lot of skill on the mages part. That being said lets consider some of the fallacies of the Greater Colibri camps. For the most part if you are only killing the Greater Colibri you are looking at capping your XP at about 25K an hour. Don't believe the hype here, anyone that tells you that they are getting more is either lying to also killing Wivre. This is not because of any player skill but because if you kill any faster than that you are going to break your chain, and kill your XP. If you are killing Wivre, you still can't get that much more and you won't even get to 30k/hr. This is still a ton of XP, and is better than most XP camps, but not that much better. The Mamool Ja staging point camps can easily match this and so can the Castle Oztroja [S] if you don't have to deal with the NM that blocks the path.

Dispelling the myth of infinite Greater Colibri XP is rather easy to do, and can be done with simple math or with evidence from XP Watch, the problem is worse and more insidious than that. The real problem is that Greater Colibri feed the double-headed chimera of player hubris, laziness and e-peen. The Greater Colibri camp is very easy to pull, it's very easy to control and it's very easy to heal. This makes players lazy and inattentive, and this problem spills over into other aspects of the game. People stop paying attention to buffs and debuffs, they stop paying attention to other people, and they stop paying attention to what they are doing. This may be partially a problem with any and all melee burn parties, but the pinnacle of the problem can be seen at the Greater Colibri camp. This camp also falsely boosts players egos, which leads to people applying that information to other parts of the game. SAM's provide a great double example of this. The first scenario is the "perfect accuracy on WS" myth, which basically is just that one-hit WS have pretty close to perfect accuracy because of the boost they get. It appears to be completely true that one-hit WS's get a good accuracy boost, but that doesn't mean you have perfect accuracy on mobs that matter. And that is the problem with Greater Colibri, people look at their parse results on some of the weakest XP mobs and believe the situation is universal. This is why many crappy SAM's may look strong in an XP party, but still suck on anything that matters. The second problem is the "Polearm SAM" problem, which is the problem that many SAM's will create an entire Polearm build just so that they can get e-peen numbers on Greater Colibri. To me this is a complete waste, because you are still limited in the amount of XP you can get by the number of mobs in the area (not to mention you will be weaker against Wivre if you want to raise your XP amount at all) and you can still achieve the same effect with a Great Katana. It's a total waste of merits, gear and time to make an entire "build" for one XP camp.

So be kind to the wildlife and head out to some other camps where you can get just as much XP, and not turn into a crappy or myopic player. Do you like the Greater Colibri camp? Do you prefer to have a variety of XP camps? Do you like lazy XP or do you like to be engage the whole time you are trying to get merits? Leave a comment and tell us what you think!