POL News: Synergy! Synthesis enmass.

Further details of how the Evolith system is going to work in terms of the actual nitty gritty on creating the synthesis process to fuse the evo-stones to your weapons, and a hit on how to remove them as well.

No longer will you be able to hide in your moghouse and conceal those horrible critical failures on expensive items, you can now share the joy of it with everyone in your party as well.

Yes, this was my first thought on the whole synergy process when reading about it, sad really isn't it.

A fancy pot-bellied oven in public areas, or a personal one you can summon out into the field via a quest that will most likely come with either a once-summoned it melts, or a recast cooldown of about 3 days allows you to access the new synergy process.

Interestingly enough this new method is something that will promote leveling a crafting skill to effectively manipulate the new synergy process. A great many more elements than the regular synthing process, beyond just the slog of skilling up are required to be successful in just starting the synergy process. Simply heating the oven isn't enough, as with the more familiar crafting process once all the aspects are in place there is no guarantee that you will succeed. At least SE is throwing in the ability to skill up synergy levels to become more proficient at it and reduce the number of breaks.

So what do you need to synergize! Beam me up Scotty!

Each synergy requires a certain skill level before it can be performed, the skill level drawing on two different sources before you can even think about starting.
The first is the basic craft level of the article you want synthing, someone in your party is going to need to have the relevant craft to level X before you can start. In addition you need to fill up your party, to a maximum number of 6 in order to create an elemental balance and fewell, which is the name of the new source of power that fuels the furnaces.

From what I can gather everyone participating needs a fewell crucible, which is a quested item that remains with you till you quit FFXI so you only need to quest it the once and since SE wants this to appeal to everyone, I should imagine that it won't be that hard of a quest to access or complete.

At the moment SE are being kind of vague on who you can invite into your party in order to fill up the maximum amount of fewell needed in order to start the synergy process, merely hinting at certain prerequisits. What these are, are anyone's guess. Could be job type, job level, holding a pumpkin, eating a cheese sandwich, casting a spell or activating a job ability, we don't know. Fortunately the npc guarding the oven will let you know and even give you more fewell for a "nominal fee".

Once you have filled your crucible with fewell, you then need to stake your claim on the oven in public areas, or summon your own private oven if you are out in the field. Depending on how popular this is, I can forsee this being incredibly laggy, just like Moblin Mazemongers was in the first days of it being released with a horde of people trying to click on a single target.

Once you have successfully claimed the oven, now you get the pleasure of claiming inanimate objects as well as that HNM every 24hours, you can shovel all your ingredients in and hope it works... WAIT! Nope, again, SE have taken it a step further.

The implication is that during the process, there will be certain triggers that have to be met in a timely fashion in order to prevent your synergy from just simply detonating. You can't just shove it in the oven and ignore it until it is done, there is more work to be done on top of that. Again, what these conditions are, as of yet are unknown, but it will be interesting to see how complicated they are making this process.


Tada, after all that you either succeed or fail.



Will it be a critical failure every time and all your ingredients are destroyed?
Will it be a little more like conventional crafting and you can retrieve something from the mess of a failed synergy?
How long is the whole process going to take, omitting the actual hunting down of the evo-stones to start with?

There are some fairly big questions overhanging this at the moment, in this modern world of instant gratification, getting 6 strangers to stand around for 30mins while you try and synergy something is going to put people off using the evolith system VERY quickly, unless you can find all the requirements amongst your friends.

They do emphasis leveling up your synergy skill in order to access more complicated recipies and to further ensure you don't ruin the whole synergy in the process. Which sounds suspiciously like a new craft using old tools more than anything else. We will have synergists popping up to specialise in this particular craft.

I really like the overall idea, its combining a lot of different game play elements into something that requires team-work. However, the rewards from the evo-stones has got to be something astoundingly amazing for it to really get off the ground given the level of hassle you have to go through to get anywhere with the evo-stones and synergy. Not everyone comes with a bucket of patience and most people who leveled a craft the first time around know how hard, and how time consuming it is.

I see no reason as to why this would be any less expensive, time consuming and hard work, just even more complicated than crafting on its own. When it comes out in the November update I will definately be taking a gander to see how it pans out in real terms.