Combat rebalance: magic, weapon skills and items
Magic and weapon skills at 1.5x (Elemental at a temporary 1.75x for players since September 18, enemies at 1.25x), items at a deliberate 3x, retail-accurate character stats, and a full sub job's worth of MP. Your squad is the power fantasy, not your character sheet.
Combat on DriftwoodXI is snappier than retail without being a different game. Your character's base numbers are retail-accurate, the power you bring to a fight comes from your squad, your gear and your consumables.
Stats
- Player HP, MP, TP gain and base stats are retail-accurate.
- A sub job grants its full max MP instead of half, and remember, your sub job runs at your full main job level.
- The enmity cap is doubled, which makes tanking on a fast server actually possible.
Magic, weapon skills and items
- 1.5x power across the board: Cure, Divine, Ninjutsu, Blue and Dark magic, and weapon skills. One number, every job, no favourites.
- Updated 2026-08-22: Elemental magic now runs at 1.25x. At 1.5x the meta had collapsed to stacked Black Mages, and enemy -aga III was the leading cause of death on the server. Nukes are still ahead of retail — just no longer ahead of every other job.
- Updated 2026-09-18: Elemental magic runs at 1.75x for players and everyone fighting on their side. The August cut went too far, so this is a temporary overshoot on the way back to 1.5x. Enemies stay at 1.25x: the two numbers are no longer tied together.
- 3x item power, deliberately the outlier. Potions, ethers and their cousins are meant to be a real combat consideration on this server, not vendor fodder. Stock up before the hard fight; it's a strategy here.
- 10x weaponskill and skillchain points for breaking latents.
- Stoneskin's cap is tripled.
- Blink grants five shadows.
- Spike effect duration is 4x; elemental debuff duration is 2x.
- Sneak and Invisible last 3x as long, and Aquaveil is improved.
Skills and utility
- Every swing rolls for a skill-up, hit or miss, and every roll under your cap lands. Tick sizes scale with how far behind you are, so a fresh weapon catches up in a session, not a saga. Magic skills climb the same way, every cast. Skill caps stay retail-accurate.
- Parry, Block and Guard skill up in regular combat, not just in the rare situations retail allowed.
- Every job can widescan.
- Level sync is enabled with gear scaling.
- Mission BCNMs have no level caps.