HorizonXI Wiki - User contributions [en]

Horizon Herald Art: Spring Night Konschtat

2023-09-19T00:03:25Z

Zarthanit:

[[Category:Horizon Herald|Spring]]
{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Spring Night Konschtat|Submitted by Kacici 
[[File:HH1 SpringNightKonschtat Kacici.png]]}}

Horizon Herald Art: Rise Of The Zilart

2023-09-19T00:03:06Z

Zarthanit:

[[Category:Horizon Herald|Rise]]
{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Rise of the Zilart|Submitted by Redkitty
 
[[File:HH1 RiseOfTheZilart Redkitty.jpeg]]}}

Horizon Herald Art: Flowery Foray

2023-09-19T00:02:47Z

Zarthanit:

[[Category:Horizon Herald|Flowery]]
{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Flowery Foray|Submitted by Zarthanit 
[[File:HH1 SightsDigest FlowerForay Zarthanit.jpg]]}}

Horizon Herald Art: Crystal Spring

2023-09-19T00:02:31Z

Zarthanit:

[[Category:Horizon Herald|Crystal]]
{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Crystal Spring|Submitted by Zarthanit 
[[File:HH1 CrystalSpring Zarthanit.png]]}}

Horizon Herald Art: Blossoming Zi'tah

2023-09-19T00:02:23Z

Zarthanit:

[[Category:Horizon Herald|Blossoming]]
{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Blossoming Zi'tah|Submitted by Chalk 
[[File:HH1 HorizonSpringArtSubmission_Chalk.gif]]}}

Horizon Herald Art: Crystal Spring

2023-09-18T20:31:35Z

Zarthanit: Created page with "Crystal {{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Crystal Spring|Submitted by Zarthanit File:HH1 CrystalSpring Zarthanit.png}}"

[[Category:Horizon Herald|Crystal]]
{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Crystal Spring|Submitted by Zarthanit
[[File:HH1 CrystalSpring Zarthanit.png]]}}

Horizon Herald Art: Rise Of The Zilart

2023-09-18T20:26:57Z

Zarthanit: Created page with "Rise {{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Rise of the Zilart|Submitted by Redkitty File:HH1 RiseOfTheZilart Redkitty.jpeg}}"

[[Category:Horizon Herald|Rise]]
{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Rise of the Zilart|Submitted by Redkitty
[[File:HH1 RiseOfTheZilart Redkitty.jpeg]]}}

File:HH1 CrystalSpring Zarthanit.png

2023-09-18T20:22:50Z

Zarthanit: Horizon Herald March 2023 -- Crystal Spring -- Zarthanit

== Summary ==
Horizon Herald March 2023 -- Crystal Spring -- Zarthanit

File:HH1 RiseOfTheZilart Redkitty.jpeg

2023-09-18T20:21:52Z

Zarthanit: Horizon Herald March 2023 -- Horizon XI Rise of the Zilart -- 3F1876BE-F205-4A99-B874-A51FE3A19665 -- From Redkitty

== Summary ==
Horizon Herald March 2023 -- Horizon XI Rise of the Zilart -- 3F1876BE-F205-4A99-B874-A51FE3A19665 -- From Redkitty

Horizon Herald Art: Spring Night Konschtat

2023-09-18T07:21:57Z

Zarthanit:

[[Category:Horizon Herald|Spring]]
{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Spring Night Konschtat|Submitted by Kacici
[[File:HH1 SpringNightKonschtat Kacici.png]]}}

Horizon Herald Art: Flowery Foray

2023-09-18T07:21:36Z

Zarthanit:

[[Category:Horizon Herald|Flowery]]
{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Flowery Foray|Submitted by Zarthanit
[[File:HH1 SightsDigest FlowerForay Zarthanit.jpg]]}}

Horizon Herald Art: Blossoming Zi'tah

2023-09-18T07:20:45Z

Zarthanit:

[[Category:Horizon Herald|Blossoming]]
{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Blossoming Zi'tah|Submitted by Chalk
[[File:HH1 HorizonSpringArtSubmission_Chalk.gif]]}}

HorizonXI Exclusives: A Deep Dive into the Shepherd's Armor Set

2023-09-17T21:43:02Z

Zarthanit: novice attempt at putting hyperlinks based on the original document, had some trouble doing it with single square-bracket encapsulation, double brackets worked better but show in the text

[[Category:Herald]][[category:Featured Articles]]
{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=HorizonXI Exclusives: A Deep Dive into the Shepherd's Armor Set|
 
 
[[File:Hume Shepherd's Bonnet.png|left|201x201px]]
[[File:Tarutaru Shepherd's Bonnet.png|right|201x201px]]
 
By Tyler

If you’ve been playing regularly, you’ve probably seen somebody passing by wearing a strange sheep hat that you don’t remember being in FFXI. That’s the Shepherd’s Bonnet, and it’s the headpiece for the pet job focused [[Shepherd's Armor Set]]. This is the only entirely new Era+ armor set on Horizon!

Ok cool, but what are the stats on this? How can I get it?

Every Piece in this set is Rare/EX, and comes from a BCNM. The stats, BCNMs + strategies, and my personal thoughts are as follows:

<div>[[File:Shepherd's bonnet.png|right]]Head: [[Shepherd's Bonnet]] Obtained From: BCNM 20 - [[Shooting Fish]]</div> 

Strategy for Shooting Fish:
This is the cheapest, easiest, and quickest fight out of all of them. With any amount of summoners, summon Ramuh, pop your 2 hour CD (Astral Flow) and a refresh drink, and use (Judgment Bolt) on the fish. If this doesn’t straight up kill the fish, you can have Ramuh auto them afterwards and possibly use (Judgment Bolt) a second time. If you are going with 2-3 SMNs trying to get this together, you don’t all have to use your 2 hour CDs, and just have every Ramuh use their regular AoE BPs (Thunderspark) for a quick set of runs.

Reported Drop Rate: ~21% (21 out of 96 runs)

Thoughts:
Regardless of which pet job you are playing, +5 pet accuracy (and +3 magic accuracy) at level 21 means more hits, which means more dps. There’s a good reason you see people wearing this everywhere. Worth picking up. Really helps on SMN for burn parties later on as well.

<div>[[File:Shepherd's doublet.png|right]]Body: [[Shepherd's Doublet]] Obtained From: BCNM 40 - [[Undying Promise]]</div> 

Strategy for Undying Promise:
With a combo of BSTs & SMN, this is pretty easy and methodical (if a bit long.) A single skeleton waits for you and repeatedly respawns after dying, getting higher damage and less health with each respawn. BSTs just sit back and watch the pets wail on it. SMN can use BPs to help speed things along, and can top up anyone who gets hit by the occasional AoE. My trip to this arena was more annoying than the actual fight. It also has a couple other drops that sell well, like the Elegant Shield.

Reported Drop Rate: ~21% (7 out of 33 runs)

Thoughts:
A little better for BST & DRG than SMN, because +3 accuracy on yourself is nice for a melee DD. SMNs can still pick it up for the magic attack bonus for your avatar to swap in on some of your BPs. Looks pretty cool as a bonus. Will probably be amazing on PUP eventually, since it’ll benefit from every stat on it.

<div>[[File:Shepherd's Bracers.png|right|366px]]Hands: [[Shepherd's Bracers]] Obtained From: BCNM 40 - [[Factory Rejects]]</div> 

Strategy for Factory Rejects:
Factory Rejects is a little more complicated than the rest of these. An enemy called ‘Doll Factory’ sits alone in the arena, and once engaged, will spawn 5 Generic Dolls 1 at a time. Someone kites the factory while the rest of the party deals with each doll as they come up. Then, after all the dolls have been defeated, you can attack and destroy the factory. (clear vid with the item dropping [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc6go8YdF8I here]], courtesy of misterjingles)

Reported Drop Rate: ~33%* (2 out of 6 runs, *low sample size, probably around 20% like the others)

Thoughts:
Regen is 1 HP/tick. Much better for DRG and BST, as a SMN would much rather have their carby mitts on instead. Helps with soloing.

<div>[[File:Shepherd's hose.png|right]]Legs: [[Shepherd's Hose]] Obtained From: BCNM 30 - [[creeping Doom]]</div> 

Strategy for Creeping Doom:
Your best bet is a PLD and a lot of damage. The single crawler you’ll be facing has all the typical crawler moves, AND it likes to spam Cure on itself. Just need to dps it down and the PLD is nice to have for stun capabilities.

Reported Drop Rate: ~40%* (2 out of 5 runs, *but it's a very small sample size so I’d take this with a grain of salt. Its probably around 20% like the other ones)

Thoughts:
This one is probably the weakest of the set, since the bonuses aren’t that great compared with the others. It might be useful for soloing BSTs and DRGs, but I feel like they would rather take the republic subligar instead at that level range. Who knows, maybe it’ll have some usage on a tanking PUP, but this will probably be the last one I end up getting.

<div>[[File:Shepherd's Boots.png|right|366px]]Feet: [[Shepherd's Boots]] Obtained from: BCNM 30 - [[Toadal Recall]]</div> 

Strategy for Toadal Recall:
This one is pretty simple, provided you are only using BST and SMN. There are 6 of you, and 4 enemies. Have 3 people send their pets to tank a different enemy, while the rest of the party wails on the 4th. Simply repeat this process as you make your way through each enemy, and this should be very easy.

Reported Drop Rate: ~20-25%

Thoughts:
As a SMN main, this one screams “FOR SMN”. It’s the only feet slot gear below some 70+ late game gear that has ‘+MP Recovered while healing’ on it, which means you can easily slap this in for your rested MP gear set for a long time. On top of that, it gives your pet/avatar +3 to 2 of the most common base stats used in BP:Rage damage calculations. Finally, it only has a level 25 requirement so you can use it for Promys or pretty much any content outside of low level BCNMs and such. So happy we finally found this one.

Brief [[Beastmen's Seal|seal]] farming guide, because you will probably need it

Normally, [[Beastmen's Seal|seal]] have a chance to drop off of any mob that would give you XP. After one drops, there is a 5 minute cooldown timer that kicks in before you have the chance for another one to drop. If you are in a party, the same rules apply party-wide, which makes Solo-ing a must for decent seal farming.
The other very important note is that this 5 minute cooldown also gets reset upon zoning. If you get a seal, zone, and come back, you can get another seal immediately. Generally, this means your best bet is finding some easy to kill mobs near a zone line and zoning frequently. The most popular spots for this are using a job below level 10 and killing the horde of level 1 mobs outside any of the 3 starting cities. Ronfaure is the best for this, as there is the gate between the east and west zones that has these mobs on both sides, allowing you to get a seal, zone, get another seal, zone, and repeat until you are level 10. Some people will even delete jobs so they can keep farming seals going 1-10 over and over. Logging out and in also counts as zoning, but that’s only useful if it’ll take less time to log out than it does to zone.
Without resetting the timer, you should be able to get 10-12 seals an hour. Using the zoning trick can bring this up past 50 an hour, depending on your luck with the drop rate and speed you can zone. Happy farming!

And finally… a brief Q&A with Jimmayus, the developer who made this set! 
(This interviewed happened way back on March 17th, 2023) 
Q: What was your main reason / inspiration for making this set?

A: Well, Aerec asked us to make custom items for release. I've done so much work with pet job background formula that I have kind of a soft spot for them, which caused me to look at their actual pet-focused options while leveling. Honestly, there aren't many at all so it seemed like a no brainer. There's a pretty constant pressure to make sure we don't let players get too powerful early since the point is to release more content over time, so putting the above 3 things together a mid-level set with some utility that eventually gets replaced made sense.

Q: What part of the set do you think is the most powerful then? My pick is the boots, but I'm a relatively new FFXI player, so maybe I'm missing something lol

A: the way the damage formulae work for pets and with gearing options the chest piece is technically the strongest (the one with MAB right, I don't play personally so I forget that sort of stuff). Other than that my favorite are actually the regen ones mainly for DRG and BSTs.

Q: the gear seems to drop from BCNMs closest to the level of the piece itself. you mentioned as such yourself and it matches with what we have found so far, so if you're willing to humor me here, would the level 25 boots be from a BCNM 20 or a BCNM 30?

A: I'm going to be honest with you I don't remember lol, I'd have to look it up. [brief pause]
Alright I looked it up, let me phrase it as: they should have been level 26

Q: I know it'll probably be over a year or three until PUP is added into Horizon, but how do you think the set would perform on PUP? I feel like it would benefit the most from the set out of all the pet jobs

A: PUP probably gets the best overall use from the set just because automatons themselves are so strong, I suspect it'll be very valuable for them. I hope so anyway

Q: thank you for your time! anything else you wanted to say about the set?

A: Thanks for reaching out, it's fascinating that the Shepard's set has sparked so much interest, I really feel like I did something right. I hope people look out for more interesting gear in the future. Also no one has successfully guessed the hidden effect and the item with it that I changed for summoner, still waiting!
(Note: It has since been discovered that the item is the Evoker’s Boots, and it has the hidden effect of reducing summoning magic cast time. Nice QoL pickup if you have the opportunity to grab it.)

Credits and Thanks:

*job-discussions—Bcnm Drops and Best Jobs for it (thread)
**Main forum for the people trying to track down and document this set as well as some other BCNM drops and strategy discussion. Shoutouts to Comentor for a lot of the searching so far on '[[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yqH-WoWpqeNMT8FXdfGt2-fBJHVDRo7gN7N6cw3iwiA/edit?usp=sharing the search for shepherds]]' google sheet, where I pulled all of the droprate data from on 3/25/23. This also serves as a disclaimer that I do not have the magic power to see every BCNM clear and drop on the server… only those reported lol

*Jimmayus
**HorizonXI Developer and the person responsible for this armor set! Thanks again for responding to my DMs and being willing to answer my questions!

*HorizonXI
**It’s been a treat to be able to play FFXI on a populated server and actually understand and experience what some of my older friends kept telling me about!

*LuckyCharms Linkshell && FunWithJugs Linkshell
**They have picked up the torch in more recent times on continuing the search for the set, as they discovered the gloves, and run BCNMs for this gear a lot. They are also where I got my Factory Rejects and strategy from.
}}

HorizonXI Exclusives: A Deep Dive into the Shepherd's Armor Set

2023-09-17T21:28:25Z

Zarthanit: I broke the newlines on item descriptions, fixed those (sorry), also attempted some spacing above sections

[[Category:Herald]][[category:Featured Articles]]
{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=HorizonXI Exclusives: A Deep Dive into the Shepherd's Armor Set|
 
 
[[File:Hume Shepherd's Bonnet.png|left|201x201px]]
[[File:Tarutaru Shepherd's Bonnet.png|right|201x201px]]
 
By Tyler

If you’ve been playing regularly, you’ve probably seen somebody passing by wearing a strange sheep hat that you don’t remember being in FFXI. That’s the Shepherd’s Bonnet, and it’s the headpiece for the pet job focused [[Shepherd's Armor Set]]. This is the only entirely new Era+ armor set on Horizon!

Ok cool, but what are the stats on this? How can I get it?

Every Piece in this set is Rare/EX, and comes from a BCNM. The stats, BCNMs + strategies, and my personal thoughts are as follows:

<div>[[File:Shepherd's bonnet.png|right]]Head: [[Shepherd's Bonnet]] Obtained From: BCNM 20 - [[Shooting Fish]]</div> 

Strategy for Shooting Fish:
This is the cheapest, easiest, and quickest fight out of all of them. With any amount of summoners, summon Ramuh, pop your 2 hour CD (Astral Flow) and a refresh drink, and use (Judgment Bolt) on the fish. If this doesn’t straight up kill the fish, you can have Ramuh auto them afterwards and possibly use (Judgment Bolt) a second time. If you are going with 2-3 SMNs trying to get this together, you don’t all have to use your 2 hour CDs, and just have every Ramuh use their regular AoE BPs (Thunderspark) for a quick set of runs.

Reported Drop Rate: ~21% (21 out of 96 runs)

Thoughts:
Regardless of which pet job you are playing, +5 pet accuracy (and +3 magic accuracy) at level 21 means more hits, which means more dps. There’s a good reason you see people wearing this everywhere. Worth picking up. Really helps on SMN for burn parties later on as well.

<div>[[File:Shepherd's doublet.png|right]]Body: [[Shepherd's Doublet]] Obtained From: BCNM 40 - [[Undying Promise]]</div> 

Strategy for Undying Promise:
With a combo of BSTs & SMN, this is pretty easy and methodical (if a bit long.) A single skeleton waits for you and repeatedly respawns after dying, getting higher damage and less health with each respawn. BSTs just sit back and watch the pets wail on it. SMN can use BPs to help speed things along, and can top up anyone who gets hit by the occasional AoE. My trip to this arena was more annoying than the actual fight. It also has a couple other drops that sell well, like the Elegant Shield.

Reported Drop Rate: ~21% (7 out of 33 runs)

Thoughts:
A little better for BST & DRG than SMN, because +3 accuracy on yourself is nice for a melee DD. SMNs can still pick it up for the magic attack bonus for your avatar to swap in on some of your BPs. Looks pretty cool as a bonus. Will probably be amazing on PUP eventually, since it’ll benefit from every stat on it.

<div>[[File:Shepherd's Bracers.png|right|366px]]Hands: [[Shepherd's Bracers]] Obtained From: BCNM 40 - [[Factory Rejects]]</div> 

Strategy for Factory Rejects:
Factory Rejects is a little more complicated than the rest of these. An enemy called ‘Doll Factory’ sits alone in the arena, and once engaged, will spawn 5 Generic Dolls 1 at a time. Someone kites the factory while the rest of the party deals with each doll as they come up. Then, after all the dolls have been defeated, you can attack and destroy the factory. (clear vid with the item dropping here, courtesy of misterjingles)

Reported Drop Rate: ~33%* (2 out of 6 runs, *low sample size, probably around 20% like the others)

Thoughts:
Regen is 1 HP/tick. Much better for DRG and BST, as a SMN would much rather have their carby mitts on instead. Helps with soloing.

<div>[[File:Shepherd's hose.png|right]]Legs: [[Shepherd's Hose]] Obtained From: BCNM 30 - [[creeping Doom]]</div> 

Strategy for Creeping Doom:
Your best bet is a PLD and a lot of damage. The single crawler you’ll be facing has all the typical crawler moves, AND it likes to spam Cure on itself. Just need to dps it down and the PLD is nice to have for stun capabilities.

Reported Drop Rate: ~40%* (2 out of 5 runs, *but it's a very small sample size so I’d take this with a grain of salt. Its probably around 20% like the other ones)

Thoughts:
This one is probably the weakest of the set, since the bonuses aren’t that great compared with the others. It might be useful for soloing BSTs and DRGs, but I feel like they would rather take the republic subligar instead at that level range. Who knows, maybe it’ll have some usage on a tanking PUP, but this will probably be the last one I end up getting.

<div>[[File:Shepherd's Boots.png|right|366px]]Feet: [[Shepherd's Boots]] Obtained from: BCNM 30 - [[Toadal Recall]]</div> 

Strategy for Toadal Recall:
This one is pretty simple, provided you are only using BST and SMN. There are 6 of you, and 4 enemies. Have 3 people send their pets to tank a different enemy, while the rest of the party wails on the 4th. Simply repeat this process as you make your way through each enemy, and this should be very easy.

Reported Drop Rate: ~20-25%

Thoughts:
As a SMN main, this one screams “FOR SMN”. It’s the only feet slot gear below some 70+ late game gear that has ‘+MP Recovered while healing’ on it, which means you can easily slap this in for your rested MP gear set for a long time. On top of that, it gives your pet/avatar +3 to 2 of the most common base stats used in BP:Rage damage calculations. Finally, it only has a level 25 requirement so you can use it for Promys or pretty much any content outside of low level BCNMs and such. So happy we finally found this one.

Brief [[Beastmen's Seal|seal]] farming guide, because you will probably need it

Normally, [[Beastmen's Seal|seal]] have a chance to drop off of any mob that would give you XP. After one drops, there is a 5 minute cooldown timer that kicks in before you have the chance for another one to drop. If you are in a party, the same rules apply party-wide, which makes Solo-ing a must for decent seal farming.
The other very important note is that this 5 minute cooldown also gets reset upon zoning. If you get a seal, zone, and come back, you can get another seal immediately. Generally, this means your best bet is finding some easy to kill mobs near a zone line and zoning frequently. The most popular spots for this are using a job below level 10 and killing the horde of level 1 mobs outside any of the 3 starting cities. Ronfaure is the best for this, as there is the gate between the east and west zones that has these mobs on both sides, allowing you to get a seal, zone, get another seal, zone, and repeat until you are level 10. Some people will even delete jobs so they can keep farming seals going 1-10 over and over. Logging out and in also counts as zoning, but that’s only useful if it’ll take less time to log out than it does to zone.
Without resetting the timer, you should be able to get 10-12 seals an hour. Using the zoning trick can bring this up past 50 an hour, depending on your luck with the drop rate and speed you can zone. Happy farming!

And finally… a brief Q&A with Jimmayus, the developer who made this set!
(This interviewed happened way back on March 17th, 2023)
Q: What was your main reason / inspiration for making this set?

A: Well, Aerec asked us to make custom items for release. I've done so much work with pet job background formula that I have kind of a soft spot for them, which caused me to look at their actual pet-focused options while leveling. Honestly, there aren't many at all so it seemed like a no brainer. There's a pretty constant pressure to make sure we don't let players get too powerful early since the point is to release more content over time, so putting the above 3 things together a mid-level set with some utility that eventually gets replaced made sense.

Q: What part of the set do you think is the most powerful then? My pick is the boots, but I'm a relatively new FFXI player, so maybe I'm missing something lol

A: the way the damage formulae work for pets and with gearing options the chest piece is technically the strongest (the one with MAB right, I don't play personally so I forget that sort of stuff). Other than that my favorite are actually the regen ones mainly for DRG and BSTs.

Q: the gear seems to drop from BCNMs closest to the level of the piece itself. you mentioned as such yourself and it matches with what we have found so far, so if you're willing to humor me here, would the level 25 boots be from a BCNM 20 or a BCNM 30?

A: I'm going to be honest with you I don't remember lol, I'd have to look it up. [brief pause]
Alright I looked it up, let me phrase it as: they should have been level 26

Q: I know it'll probably be over a year or three until PUP is added into Horizon, but how do you think the set would perform on PUP? I feel like it would benefit the most from the set out of all the pet jobs

A: PUP probably gets the best overall use from the set just because automatons themselves are so strong, I suspect it'll be very valuable for them. I hope so anyway

Q: thank you for your time! anything else you wanted to say about the set?

A: Thanks for reaching out, it's fascinating that the Shepard's set has sparked so much interest, I really feel like I did something right. I hope people look out for more interesting gear in the future. Also no one has successfully guessed the hidden effect and the item with it that I changed for summoner, still waiting!
(Note: It has since been discovered that the item is the Evoker’s Boots, and it has the hidden effect of reducing summoning magic cast time. Nice QoL pickup if you have the opportunity to grab it.)

Credits and Thanks:

*job-discussions—Bcnm Drops and Best Jobs for it (thread)
**Main forum for the people trying to track down and document this set as well as some other BCNM drops and strategy discussion. Shoutouts to Comentor for a lot of the searching so far on ‘the search for shepherds’ google sheet, where I pulled all of the droprate data from on 3/25/23. This also serves as a disclaimer that I do not have the magic power to see every BCNM clear and drop on the server… only those reported lol

*Jimmayus
**HorizonXI Developer and the person responsible for this armor set! Thanks again for responding to my DMs and being willing to answer my questions!

*HorizonXI
**It’s been a treat to be able to play FFXI on a populated server and actually understand and experience what some of my older friends kept telling me about!

*LuckyCharms Linkshell && FunWithJugs Linkshell
**They have picked up the torch in more recent times on continuing the search for the set, as they discovered the gloves, and run BCNMs for this gear a lot. They are also where I got my Factory Rejects and strategy from.
}}

HorizonXI Exclusives: A Deep Dive into the Shepherd's Armor Set

2023-09-17T21:22:22Z

Zarthanit: set image size for some images to match others (366px I think)

[[Category:Herald]][[category:Featured Articles]]
{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=HorizonXI Exclusives: A Deep Dive into the Shepherd's Armor Set|
 
 
[[File:Hume Shepherd's Bonnet.png|left|201x201px]]
[[File:Tarutaru Shepherd's Bonnet.png|right|201x201px]]
 
By Tyler

If you’ve been playing regularly, you’ve probably seen somebody passing by wearing a strange sheep hat that you don’t remember being in FFXI. That’s the Shepherd’s Bonnet, and it’s the headpiece for the pet job focused [[Shepherd's Armor Set]]. This is the only entirely new Era+ armor set on Horizon!

Ok cool, but what are the stats on this? How can I get it?

Every Piece in this set is Rare/EX, and comes from a BCNM. The stats, BCNMs + strategies, and my personal thoughts are as follows:

<div>[[File:Shepherd's bonnet.png|right]]Head: [[Shepherd's Bonnet]]Obtained From: BCNM 20 - [[Shooting Fish]]</div> 

Strategy for Shooting Fish:
This is the cheapest, easiest, and quickest fight out of all of them. With any amount of summoners, summon Ramuh, pop your 2 hour CD (Astral Flow) and a refresh drink, and use (Judgment Bolt) on the fish. If this doesn’t straight up kill the fish, you can have Ramuh auto them afterwards and possibly use (Judgment Bolt) a second time. If you are going with 2-3 SMNs trying to get this together, you don’t all have to use your 2 hour CDs, and just have every Ramuh use their regular AoE BPs (Thunderspark) for a quick set of runs.

Reported Drop Rate: ~21% (21 out of 96 runs)

Thoughts:
Regardless of which pet job you are playing, +5 pet accuracy (and +3 magic accuracy) at level 21 means more hits, which means more dps. There’s a good reason you see people wearing this everywhere. Worth picking up. Really helps on SMN for burn parties later on as well.

<div>[[File:Shepherd's doublet.png|right]]Body: [[Shepherd's Doublet]]Obtained From: BCNM 40 - [[Undying Promise]]</div> 

Strategy for Undying Promise:
With a combo of BSTs & SMN, this is pretty easy and methodical (if a bit long.) A single skeleton waits for you and repeatedly respawns after dying, getting higher damage and less health with each respawn. BSTs just sit back and watch the pets wail on it. SMN can use BPs to help speed things along, and can top up anyone who gets hit by the occasional AoE. My trip to this arena was more annoying than the actual fight. It also has a couple other drops that sell well, like the Elegant Shield.

Reported Drop Rate: ~21% (7 out of 33 runs)

Thoughts:
A little better for BST & DRG than SMN, because +3 accuracy on yourself is nice for a melee DD. SMNs can still pick it up for the magic attack bonus for your avatar to swap in on some of your BPs. Looks pretty cool as a bonus. Will probably be amazing on PUP eventually, since it’ll benefit from every stat on it.

<div>[[File:Shepherd's Bracers.png|right|366px]]Hands: [[Shepherd's Bracers]]Obtained From: BCNM 40 - [[Factory Rejects]]</div> 

Strategy for Factory Rejects:
Factory Rejects is a little more complicated than the rest of these. An enemy called ‘Doll Factory’ sits alone in the arena, and once engaged, will spawn 5 Generic Dolls 1 at a time. Someone kites the factory while the rest of the party deals with each doll as they come up. Then, after all the dolls have been defeated, you can attack and destroy the factory. (clear vid with the item dropping here, courtesy of misterjingles)

Reported Drop Rate: ~33%* (2 out of 6 runs, *low sample size, probably around 20% like the others)

Thoughts:
Regen is 1 HP/tick. Much better for DRG and BST, as a SMN would much rather have their carby mitts on instead. Helps with soloing.

<div>[[File:Shepherd's hose.png|right]]Legs: [[Shepherd's Hose]]Obtained From: BCNM 30 - [[creeping Doom]]</div> 

Strategy for Creeping Doom:
Your best bet is a PLD and a lot of damage. The single crawler you’ll be facing has all the typical crawler moves, AND it likes to spam Cure on itself. Just need to dps it down and the PLD is nice to have for stun capabilities.

Reported Drop Rate: ~40%* (2 out of 5 runs, *but it's a very small sample size so I’d take this with a grain of salt. Its probably around 20% like the other ones)

Thoughts:
This one is probably the weakest of the set, since the bonuses aren’t that great compared with the others. It might be useful for soloing BSTs and DRGs, but I feel like they would rather take the republic subligar instead at that level range. Who knows, maybe it’ll have some usage on a tanking PUP, but this will probably be the last one I end up getting.

<div>[[File:Shepherd's Boots.png|right|366px]]Feet: [[Shepherd's Boots]]Obtained from: BCNM 30 - [[Toadal Recall]]</div> 

Strategy for Toadal Recall:
This one is pretty simple, provided you are only using BST and SMN. There are 6 of you, and 4 enemies. Have 3 people send their pets to tank a different enemy, while the rest of the party wails on the 4th. Simply repeat this process as you make your way through each enemy, and this should be very easy.

Reported Drop Rate: ~20-25%

Thoughts:
As a SMN main, this one screams “FOR SMN”. It’s the only feet slot gear below some 70+ late game gear that has ‘+MP Recovered while healing’ on it, which means you can easily slap this in for your rested MP gear set for a long time. On top of that, it gives your pet/avatar +3 to 2 of the most common base stats used in BP:Rage damage calculations. Finally, it only has a level 25 requirement so you can use it for Promys or pretty much any content outside of low level BCNMs and such. So happy we finally found this one.

Brief [[Beastmen's Seal|seal]] farming guide, because you will probably need it

Normally, [[Beastmen's Seal|seal]] have a chance to drop off of any mob that would give you XP. After one drops, there is a 5 minute cooldown timer that kicks in before you have the chance for another one to drop. If you are in a party, the same rules apply party-wide, which makes Solo-ing a must for decent seal farming.
The other very important note is that this 5 minute cooldown also gets reset upon zoning. If you get a seal, zone, and come back, you can get another seal immediately. Generally, this means your best bet is finding some easy to kill mobs near a zone line and zoning frequently. The most popular spots for this are using a job below level 10 and killing the horde of level 1 mobs outside any of the 3 starting cities. Ronfaure is the best for this, as there is the gate between the east and west zones that has these mobs on both sides, allowing you to get a seal, zone, get another seal, zone, and repeat until you are level 10. Some people will even delete jobs so they can keep farming seals going 1-10 over and over. Logging out and in also counts as zoning, but that’s only useful if it’ll take less time to log out than it does to zone.
Without resetting the timer, you should be able to get 10-12 seals an hour. Using the zoning trick can bring this up past 50 an hour, depending on your luck with the drop rate and speed you can zone. Happy farming!

And finally… a brief Q&A with Jimmayus, the developer who made this set!
(This interviewed happened way back on March 17th, 2023)
Q: What was your main reason / inspiration for making this set?

A: Well, Aerec asked us to make custom items for release. I've done so much work with pet job background formula that I have kind of a soft spot for them, which caused me to look at their actual pet-focused options while leveling. Honestly, there aren't many at all so it seemed like a no brainer. There's a pretty constant pressure to make sure we don't let players get too powerful early since the point is to release more content over time, so putting the above 3 things together a mid-level set with some utility that eventually gets replaced made sense.

Q: What part of the set do you think is the most powerful then? My pick is the boots, but I'm a relatively new FFXI player, so maybe I'm missing something lol

A: the way the damage formulae work for pets and with gearing options the chest piece is technically the strongest (the one with MAB right, I don't play personally so I forget that sort of stuff). Other than that my favorite are actually the regen ones mainly for DRG and BSTs.

Q: the gear seems to drop from BCNMs closest to the level of the piece itself. you mentioned as such yourself and it matches with what we have found so far, so if you're willing to humor me here, would the level 25 boots be from a BCNM 20 or a BCNM 30?

A: I'm going to be honest with you I don't remember lol, I'd have to look it up. [brief pause]
Alright I looked it up, let me phrase it as: they should have been level 26

Q: I know it'll probably be over a year or three until PUP is added into Horizon, but how do you think the set would perform on PUP? I feel like it would benefit the most from the set out of all the pet jobs

A: PUP probably gets the best overall use from the set just because automatons themselves are so strong, I suspect it'll be very valuable for them. I hope so anyway

Q: thank you for your time! anything else you wanted to say about the set?

A: Thanks for reaching out, it's fascinating that the Shepard's set has sparked so much interest, I really feel like I did something right. I hope people look out for more interesting gear in the future. Also no one has successfully guessed the hidden effect and the item with it that I changed for summoner, still waiting!
(Note: It has since been discovered that the item is the Evoker’s Boots, and it has the hidden effect of reducing summoning magic cast time. Nice QoL pickup if you have the opportunity to grab it.)

Credits and Thanks:

*job-discussions—Bcnm Drops and Best Jobs for it (thread)
**Main forum for the people trying to track down and document this set as well as some other BCNM drops and strategy discussion. Shoutouts to Comentor for a lot of the searching so far on ‘the search for shepherds’ google sheet, where I pulled all of the droprate data from on 3/25/23. This also serves as a disclaimer that I do not have the magic power to see every BCNM clear and drop on the server… only those reported lol

*Jimmayus
**HorizonXI Developer and the person responsible for this armor set! Thanks again for responding to my DMs and being willing to answer my questions!

*HorizonXI
**It’s been a treat to be able to play FFXI on a populated server and actually understand and experience what some of my older friends kept telling me about!

*LuckyCharms Linkshell && FunWithJugs Linkshell
**They have picked up the torch in more recent times on continuing the search for the set, as they discovered the gloves, and run BCNMs for this gear a lot. They are also where I got my Factory Rejects and strategy from.
}}

HorizonXI Exclusives: A Deep Dive into the Shepherd's Armor Set

2023-09-17T21:17:35Z

Zarthanit: added pictures from the corresponding item pages

[[Category:Herald]][[category:Featured Articles]]
{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=HorizonXI Exclusives: A Deep Dive into the Shepherd's Armor Set|
 
 
[[File:Hume Shepherd's Bonnet.png|left|201x201px]]
[[File:Tarutaru Shepherd's Bonnet.png|right|201x201px]]
 
By Tyler

If you’ve been playing regularly, you’ve probably seen somebody passing by wearing a strange sheep hat that you don’t remember being in FFXI. That’s the Shepherd’s Bonnet, and it’s the headpiece for the pet job focused [[Shepherd's Armor Set]]. This is the only entirely new Era+ armor set on Horizon!

Ok cool, but what are the stats on this? How can I get it?

Every Piece in this set is Rare/EX, and comes from a BCNM. The stats, BCNMs + strategies, and my personal thoughts are as follows:

<div>[[File:Shepherd's bonnet.png|right]]Head: [[Shepherd's Bonnet]]Obtained From: BCNM 20 - [[Shooting Fish]]</div> 

Strategy for Shooting Fish:
This is the cheapest, easiest, and quickest fight out of all of them. With any amount of summoners, summon Ramuh, pop your 2 hour CD (Astral Flow) and a refresh drink, and use (Judgment Bolt) on the fish. If this doesn’t straight up kill the fish, you can have Ramuh auto them afterwards and possibly use (Judgment Bolt) a second time. If you are going with 2-3 SMNs trying to get this together, you don’t all have to use your 2 hour CDs, and just have every Ramuh use their regular AoE BPs (Thunderspark) for a quick set of runs.

Reported Drop Rate: ~21% (21 out of 96 runs)

Thoughts:
Regardless of which pet job you are playing, +5 pet accuracy (and +3 magic accuracy) at level 21 means more hits, which means more dps. There’s a good reason you see people wearing this everywhere. Worth picking up. Really helps on SMN for burn parties later on as well.

<div>[[File:Shepherd's doublet.png|right]]Body: [[Shepherd's Doublet]]Obtained From: BCNM 40 - [[Undying Promise]]</div> 

Strategy for Undying Promise:
With a combo of BSTs & SMN, this is pretty easy and methodical (if a bit long.) A single skeleton waits for you and repeatedly respawns after dying, getting higher damage and less health with each respawn. BSTs just sit back and watch the pets wail on it. SMN can use BPs to help speed things along, and can top up anyone who gets hit by the occasional AoE. My trip to this arena was more annoying than the actual fight. It also has a couple other drops that sell well, like the Elegant Shield.

Reported Drop Rate: ~21% (7 out of 33 runs)

Thoughts:
A little better for BST & DRG than SMN, because +3 accuracy on yourself is nice for a melee DD. SMNs can still pick it up for the magic attack bonus for your avatar to swap in on some of your BPs. Looks pretty cool as a bonus. Will probably be amazing on PUP eventually, since it’ll benefit from every stat on it.

<div>[[File:Shepherd's Bracers.png|right]]Hands: [[Shepherd's Bracers]]Obtained From: BCNM 40 - [[Factory Rejects]]</div> 

Strategy for Factory Rejects:
Factory Rejects is a little more complicated than the rest of these. An enemy called ‘Doll Factory’ sits alone in the arena, and once engaged, will spawn 5 Generic Dolls 1 at a time. Someone kites the factory while the rest of the party deals with each doll as they come up. Then, after all the dolls have been defeated, you can attack and destroy the factory. (clear vid with the item dropping here, courtesy of misterjingles)

Reported Drop Rate: ~33%* (2 out of 6 runs, *low sample size, probably around 20% like the others)

Thoughts:
Regen is 1 HP/tick. Much better for DRG and BST, as a SMN would much rather have their carby mitts on instead. Helps with soloing.

<div>[[File:Shepherd's hose.png|right]]Legs: [[Shepherd's Hose]]Obtained From: BCNM 30 - [[creeping Doom]]</div> 

Strategy for Creeping Doom:
Your best bet is a PLD and a lot of damage. The single crawler you’ll be facing has all the typical crawler moves, AND it likes to spam Cure on itself. Just need to dps it down and the PLD is nice to have for stun capabilities.

Reported Drop Rate: ~40%* (2 out of 5 runs, *but it's a very small sample size so I’d take this with a grain of salt. Its probably around 20% like the other ones)

Thoughts:
This one is probably the weakest of the set, since the bonuses aren’t that great compared with the others. It might be useful for soloing BSTs and DRGs, but I feel like they would rather take the republic subligar instead at that level range. Who knows, maybe it’ll have some usage on a tanking PUP, but this will probably be the last one I end up getting.

<div>[[File:Shepherd's Boots.png|right]]Feet: [[Shepherd's Boots]]Obtained from: BCNM 30 - [[Toadal Recall]]</div> 

Strategy for Toadal Recall:
This one is pretty simple, provided you are only using BST and SMN. There are 6 of you, and 4 enemies. Have 3 people send their pets to tank a different enemy, while the rest of the party wails on the 4th. Simply repeat this process as you make your way through each enemy, and this should be very easy.

Reported Drop Rate: ~20-25%

Thoughts:
As a SMN main, this one screams “FOR SMN”. It’s the only feet slot gear below some 70+ late game gear that has ‘+MP Recovered while healing’ on it, which means you can easily slap this in for your rested MP gear set for a long time. On top of that, it gives your pet/avatar +3 to 2 of the most common base stats used in BP:Rage damage calculations. Finally, it only has a level 25 requirement so you can use it for Promys or pretty much any content outside of low level BCNMs and such. So happy we finally found this one.

Brief [[Beastmen's Seal|seal]] farming guide, because you will probably need it

Normally, [[Beastmen's Seal|seal]] have a chance to drop off of any mob that would give you XP. After one drops, there is a 5 minute cooldown timer that kicks in before you have the chance for another one to drop. If you are in a party, the same rules apply party-wide, which makes Solo-ing a must for decent seal farming.
The other very important note is that this 5 minute cooldown also gets reset upon zoning. If you get a seal, zone, and come back, you can get another seal immediately. Generally, this means your best bet is finding some easy to kill mobs near a zone line and zoning frequently. The most popular spots for this are using a job below level 10 and killing the horde of level 1 mobs outside any of the 3 starting cities. Ronfaure is the best for this, as there is the gate between the east and west zones that has these mobs on both sides, allowing you to get a seal, zone, get another seal, zone, and repeat until you are level 10. Some people will even delete jobs so they can keep farming seals going 1-10 over and over. Logging out and in also counts as zoning, but that’s only useful if it’ll take less time to log out than it does to zone.
Without resetting the timer, you should be able to get 10-12 seals an hour. Using the zoning trick can bring this up past 50 an hour, depending on your luck with the drop rate and speed you can zone. Happy farming!

And finally… a brief Q&A with Jimmayus, the developer who made this set!
(This interviewed happened way back on March 17th, 2023)
Q: What was your main reason / inspiration for making this set?

A: Well, Aerec asked us to make custom items for release. I've done so much work with pet job background formula that I have kind of a soft spot for them, which caused me to look at their actual pet-focused options while leveling. Honestly, there aren't many at all so it seemed like a no brainer. There's a pretty constant pressure to make sure we don't let players get too powerful early since the point is to release more content over time, so putting the above 3 things together a mid-level set with some utility that eventually gets replaced made sense.

Q: What part of the set do you think is the most powerful then? My pick is the boots, but I'm a relatively new FFXI player, so maybe I'm missing something lol

A: the way the damage formulae work for pets and with gearing options the chest piece is technically the strongest (the one with MAB right, I don't play personally so I forget that sort of stuff). Other than that my favorite are actually the regen ones mainly for DRG and BSTs.

Q: the gear seems to drop from BCNMs closest to the level of the piece itself. you mentioned as such yourself and it matches with what we have found so far, so if you're willing to humor me here, would the level 25 boots be from a BCNM 20 or a BCNM 30?

A: I'm going to be honest with you I don't remember lol, I'd have to look it up. [brief pause]
Alright I looked it up, let me phrase it as: they should have been level 26

Q: I know it'll probably be over a year or three until PUP is added into Horizon, but how do you think the set would perform on PUP? I feel like it would benefit the most from the set out of all the pet jobs

A: PUP probably gets the best overall use from the set just because automatons themselves are so strong, I suspect it'll be very valuable for them. I hope so anyway

Q: thank you for your time! anything else you wanted to say about the set?

A: Thanks for reaching out, it's fascinating that the Shepard's set has sparked so much interest, I really feel like I did something right. I hope people look out for more interesting gear in the future. Also no one has successfully guessed the hidden effect and the item with it that I changed for summoner, still waiting!
(Note: It has since been discovered that the item is the Evoker’s Boots, and it has the hidden effect of reducing summoning magic cast time. Nice QoL pickup if you have the opportunity to grab it.)

Credits and Thanks:

*job-discussions—Bcnm Drops and Best Jobs for it (thread)
**Main forum for the people trying to track down and document this set as well as some other BCNM drops and strategy discussion. Shoutouts to Comentor for a lot of the searching so far on ‘the search for shepherds’ google sheet, where I pulled all of the droprate data from on 3/25/23. This also serves as a disclaimer that I do not have the magic power to see every BCNM clear and drop on the server… only those reported lol

*Jimmayus
**HorizonXI Developer and the person responsible for this armor set! Thanks again for responding to my DMs and being willing to answer my questions!

*HorizonXI
**It’s been a treat to be able to play FFXI on a populated server and actually understand and experience what some of my older friends kept telling me about!

*LuckyCharms Linkshell && FunWithJugs Linkshell
**They have picked up the torch in more recent times on continuing the search for the set, as they discovered the gloves, and run BCNMs for this gear a lot. They are also where I got my Factory Rejects and strategy from.
}}

HorizonXI Exclusives: A Deep Dive into the Shepherd's Armor Set

2023-09-17T20:18:42Z

Zarthanit: attempt at taking some of the formatting from the .docx

[[Category:Herald]][[category:Featured Articles]]
{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=HorizonXI Exclusives: A Deep Dive into the Shepherd's Armor Set|
 
 
[[File:Hume Shepherd's Bonnet.png|left|201x201px]]
[[File:Tarutaru Shepherd's Bonnet.png|right|201x201px]]
 
By Tyler

If you’ve been playing regularly, you’ve probably seen somebody passing by wearing a strange sheep hat that you don’t remember being in FFXI. That’s the Shepherd’s Bonnet, and it’s the headpiece for the pet job focused [[Shepherd's Armor Set]]. This is the only entirely new Era+ armor set on Horizon!

Ok cool, but what are the stats on this? How can I get it?

Every Piece in this set is Rare/EX, and comes from a BCNM. The stats, BCNMs + strategies, and my personal thoughts are as follows:

Head: [[Shepherd's Bonnet]]
Obtained From: BCNM 20 - [[Shooting Fish]]

Strategy for Shooting Fish:
This is the cheapest, easiest, and quickest fight out of all of them. With any amount of summoners, summon Ramuh, pop your 2 hour CD (Astral Flow) and a refresh drink, and use (Judgment Bolt) on the fish. If this doesn’t straight up kill the fish, you can have Ramuh auto them afterwards and possibly use (Judgment Bolt) a second time. If you are going with 2-3 SMNs trying to get this together, you don’t all have to use your 2 hour CDs, and just have every Ramuh use their regular AoE BPs (Thunderspark) for a quick set of runs.

Reported Drop Rate: ~21% (21 out of 96 runs)

Thoughts:
Regardless of which pet job you are playing, +5 pet accuracy (and +3 magic accuracy) at level 21 means more hits, which means more dps. There’s a good reason you see people wearing this everywhere. Worth picking up. Really helps on SMN for burn parties later on as well.

Body: [[Shepherd's Doublet]]
Obtained From: BCNM 40 - [[Undying Promise]]

Strategy for Undying Promise:
With a combo of BSTs & SMN, this is pretty easy and methodical (if a bit long.) A single skeleton waits for you and repeatedly respawns after dying, getting higher damage and less health with each respawn. BSTs just sit back and watch the pets wail on it. SMN can use BPs to help speed things along, and can top up anyone who gets hit by the occasional AoE. My trip to this arena was more annoying than the actual fight. It also has a couple other drops that sell well, like the Elegant Shield.

Reported Drop Rate: ~21% (7 out of 33 runs)

Thoughts:
A little better for BST & DRG than SMN, because +3 accuracy on yourself is nice for a melee DD. SMNs can still pick it up for the magic attack bonus for your avatar to swap in on some of your BPs. Looks pretty cool as a bonus. Will probably be amazing on PUP eventually, since it’ll benefit from every stat on it.

Hands: [[Shepherd's Bracers]]
Obtained From: BCNM 40 - [[Factory Rejects]]

Strategy for Factory Rejects:
Factory Rejects is a little more complicated than the rest of these. An enemy called ‘Doll Factory’ sits alone in the arena, and once engaged, will spawn 5 Generic Dolls 1 at a time. Someone kites the factory while the rest of the party deals with each doll as they come up. Then, after all the dolls have been defeated, you can attack and destroy the factory. (clear vid with the item dropping here, courtesy of misterjingles)

Reported Drop Rate: ~33%* (2 out of 6 runs, *low sample size, probably around 20% like the others)

Thoughts:
Regen is 1 HP/tick. Much better for DRG and BST, as a SMN would much rather have their carby mitts on instead. Helps with soloing.

Legs: [[Shepherd's Hose]]
Obtained From: BCNM 30 - [[creeping Doom]]

Strategy for Creeping Doom:
Your best bet is a PLD and a lot of damage. The single crawler you’ll be facing has all the typical crawler moves, AND it likes to spam Cure on itself. Just need to dps it down and the PLD is nice to have for stun capabilities.

Reported Drop Rate: ~40%* (2 out of 5 runs, *but it's a very small sample size so I’d take this with a grain of salt. Its probably around 20% like the other ones)

Thoughts:
This one is probably the weakest of the set, since the bonuses aren’t that great compared with the others. It might be useful for soloing BSTs and DRGs, but I feel like they would rather take the republic subligar instead at that level range. Who knows, maybe it’ll have some usage on a tanking PUP, but this will probably be the last one I end up getting.

Feet: [[Shepherd's Boots]]
Obtained from: BCNM 30 - [[Toadal Recall]]

Strategy for Toadal Recall:
This one is pretty simple, provided you are only using BST and SMN. There are 6 of you, and 4 enemies. Have 3 people send their pets to tank a different enemy, while the rest of the party wails on the 4th. Simply repeat this process as you make your way through each enemy, and this should be very easy.

Reported Drop Rate: ~20-25%

Thoughts:
As a SMN main, this one screams “FOR SMN”. It’s the only feet slot gear below some 70+ late game gear that has ‘+MP Recovered while healing’ on it, which means you can easily slap this in for your rested MP gear set for a long time. On top of that, it gives your pet/avatar +3 to 2 of the most common base stats used in BP:Rage damage calculations. Finally, it only has a level 25 requirement so you can use it for Promys or pretty much any content outside of low level BCNMs and such. So happy we finally found this one.

Brief [[Beastmen's Seal|seal]] farming guide, because you will probably need it

Normally, [[Beastmen's Seal|seal]] have a chance to drop off of any mob that would give you XP. After one drops, there is a 5 minute cooldown timer that kicks in before you have the chance for another one to drop. If you are in a party, the same rules apply party-wide, which makes Solo-ing a must for decent seal farming.
The other very important note is that this 5 minute cooldown also gets reset upon zoning. If you get a seal, zone, and come back, you can get another seal immediately. Generally, this means your best bet is finding some easy to kill mobs near a zone line and zoning frequently. The most popular spots for this are using a job below level 10 and killing the horde of level 1 mobs outside any of the 3 starting cities. Ronfaure is the best for this, as there is the gate between the east and west zones that has these mobs on both sides, allowing you to get a seal, zone, get another seal, zone, and repeat until you are level 10. Some people will even delete jobs so they can keep farming seals going 1-10 over and over. Logging out and in also counts as zoning, but that’s only useful if it’ll take less time to log out than it does to zone.
Without resetting the timer, you should be able to get 10-12 seals an hour. Using the zoning trick can bring this up past 50 an hour, depending on your luck with the drop rate and speed you can zone. Happy farming!

And finally… a brief Q&A with Jimmayus, the developer who made this set!
(This interviewed happened way back on March 17th, 2023)
Q: What was your main reason / inspiration for making this set?

A: Well, Aerec asked us to make custom items for release. I've done so much work with pet job background formula that I have kind of a soft spot for them, which caused me to look at their actual pet-focused options while leveling. Honestly, there aren't many at all so it seemed like a no brainer. There's a pretty constant pressure to make sure we don't let players get too powerful early since the point is to release more content over time, so putting the above 3 things together a mid-level set with some utility that eventually gets replaced made sense.

Q: What part of the set do you think is the most powerful then? My pick is the boots, but I'm a relatively new FFXI player, so maybe I'm missing something lol

A: the way the damage formulae work for pets and with gearing options the chest piece is technically the strongest (the one with MAB right, I don't play personally so I forget that sort of stuff). Other than that my favorite are actually the regen ones mainly for DRG and BSTs.

Q: the gear seems to drop from BCNMs closest to the level of the piece itself. you mentioned as such yourself and it matches with what we have found so far, so if you're willing to humor me here, would the level 25 boots be from a BCNM 20 or a BCNM 30?

A: I'm going to be honest with you I don't remember lol, I'd have to look it up. [brief pause]
Alright I looked it up, let me phrase it as: they should have been level 26

Q: I know it'll probably be over a year or three until PUP is added into Horizon, but how do you think the set would perform on PUP? I feel like it would benefit the most from the set out of all the pet jobs

A: PUP probably gets the best overall use from the set just because automatons themselves are so strong, I suspect it'll be very valuable for them. I hope so anyway

Q: thank you for your time! anything else you wanted to say about the set?

A: Thanks for reaching out, it's fascinating that the Shepard's set has sparked so much interest, I really feel like I did something right. I hope people look out for more interesting gear in the future. Also no one has successfully guessed the hidden effect and the item with it that I changed for summoner, still waiting!
(Note: It has since been discovered that the item is the Evoker’s Boots, and it has the hidden effect of reducing summoning magic cast time. Nice QoL pickup if you have the opportunity to grab it.)

Credits and Thanks:

*job-discussions—Bcnm Drops and Best Jobs for it (thread)
**Main forum for the people trying to track down and document this set as well as some other BCNM drops and strategy discussion. Shoutouts to Comentor for a lot of the searching so far on ‘the search for shepherds’ google sheet, where I pulled all of the droprate data from on 3/25/23. This also serves as a disclaimer that I do not have the magic power to see every BCNM clear and drop on the server… only those reported lol

*Jimmayus
**HorizonXI Developer and the person responsible for this armor set! Thanks again for responding to my DMs and being willing to answer my questions!

*HorizonXI
**It’s been a treat to be able to play FFXI on a populated server and actually understand and experience what some of my older friends kept telling me about!

*LuckyCharms Linkshell && FunWithJugs Linkshell
**They have picked up the torch in more recent times on continuing the search for the set, as they discovered the gloves, and run BCNMs for this gear a lot. They are also where I got my Factory Rejects and strategy from.
}}

Horizon Herald Art: Flowery Foray

2023-09-17T18:40:46Z

Zarthanit: custom category sort key test

[[Category:Herald|Flowery]]
{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Flowery Foray|Submitted by Zarthanit
[[File:HH1 SightsDigest FlowerForay Zarthanit.jpg]]}}

Horizon Herald Art: Spring Night Konschtat

2023-09-17T18:40:22Z

Zarthanit: custom category sort key test

[[Category:Herald|Spring]]
{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Spring Night Konschtat|Submitted by Kacici
[[File:HH1 SpringNightKonschtat Kacici.png]]}}

Horizon Herald Art: Blossoming Zi'tah

2023-09-17T18:38:51Z

Zarthanit:

[[Category:Herald|Blossoming]]
{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Blossoming Zi'tah|Submitted by Chalk
[[File:HH1 HorizonSpringArtSubmission_Chalk.gif]]}}

Horizon Herald Art: Blossoming Zi'tah

2023-09-17T18:36:10Z

Zarthanit: looks like can add custom sorting for categories, but this would involve re-including the category specifically on each page possibly?

[[Category:Horizon Herald|Blossoming Zi'tah]]
{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Blossoming Zi'tah|Submitted by Chalk
[[File:HH1 HorizonSpringArtSubmission_Chalk.gif]]}}

Horizon Herald Art: Flowery Foray

2023-09-17T18:33:50Z

Zarthanit: Created page with "{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Flowery Foray|Submitted by Zarthanit File:HH1 SightsDigest FlowerForay Zarthanit.jpg}}"

{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Flowery Foray|Submitted by Zarthanit
[[File:HH1 SightsDigest FlowerForay Zarthanit.jpg]]}}

User:Zarthanit

2023-09-17T18:29:56Z

Zarthanit: Blanked the page

Horizon Herald Art: Blossoming Zi'tah

2023-09-17T18:29:05Z

Zarthanit: Created page with "{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Blossoming Zi'tah|Submitted by Chalk File:HH1 HorizonSpringArtSubmission_Chalk.gif}}"

{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Blossoming Zi'tah|Submitted by Chalk
[[File:HH1 HorizonSpringArtSubmission_Chalk.gif]]}}

Horizon Herald Art: Spring Night Konschtat

2023-09-16T23:04:36Z

Zarthanit: removed categories as the template will categorize (I think?)

{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Spring Night Konschtat|Submitted by Kacici
[[File:HH1 SpringNightKonschtat Kacici.png]]}}

User:Zarthanit

2023-09-16T20:18:44Z

Zarthanit:

{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Flowery Foray|Submitted by Zarthanit
[[File:HH1 SightsDigest_FlowerForay_Zarthanit.jpg]]}}

Horizon Herald Art: Spring Night Konschtat

2023-09-16T20:11:51Z

Zarthanit: spacing tweak, newline in edit was increasing bottom padding

[[Category:Herald]][[category:Featured Articles]]
{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Spring Night Konschtat|Submitted by Kacici
[[File:HH1 SpringNightKonschtat Kacici.png]]}}

User:Zarthanit

2023-09-16T20:06:47Z

Zarthanit:

Horizon Herald Art: Spring Night Konschtat

2023-09-16T07:55:00Z

Zarthanit: Attempt at putting together a Herald page for an artwork submission using the Horizon Herald Frame

[[Category:Herald]][[category:Featured Articles]]
{{HorizonHeraldFrame|title=Spring Night Konschtat|Submitted by Kacici
[[File:HH1 SpringNightKonschtat Kacici.png]]
}}

File:HH1 SightsDigest FlowerForay Zarthanit.jpg

2023-09-15T22:16:55Z

Zarthanit: Horizon Herald March 2023 -- Sights Digest Flower Foray -- From Zarthanit

== Summary ==
Horizon Herald March 2023 -- Sights Digest Flower Foray -- From Zarthanit

File:HH1 SpringNightKonschtat Kacici.png

2023-09-15T22:05:16Z

Zarthanit: Horizon Herald March 2023 -- Spring Night Konschtat -- From Kacici

== Summary ==
Horizon Herald March 2023 -- Spring Night Konschtat -- From Kacici

User:Zarthanit

2023-09-15T21:31:03Z

Zarthanit:

<div class="hh-outer-container" style="width:fit-content; max-width: 1200px"><div class="hh-inner-container"><div class="hh-horizon-signature-container"><div class="hh-horizon-signature-text-container">[[File:Changes.png|64px]]Horizon XI</div></div><div class="hh-content-container"><div>[[File:HH1 shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE Page1.png]]</div></div></div></div><div class="hh-mandy-svg-container">[[File:horizon_mandy_ornament.svg|400px]]</div>

<div class="hh-outer-container" style="width:fit-content; max-width: 1200px"><div class="hh-inner-container"><div class="hh-horizon-signature-container"><div class="hh-horizon-signature-text-container">[[File:Changes.png|64px]]Horizon XI</div></div><div class="hh-content-container"><div style="height: 72px"></div><div>[[File:HH1 HorizonSpringArtSubmission Chalk.gif]]</div></div></div></div><div class="hh-mandy-svg-container">[[File:horizon_mandy_ornament.svg|400px]]</div>

== Referenced External Links ==
#Link 1: Horizon FFXI - Factory Rejects BCNM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc6go8YdF8I
#Link 2:

File:HH1 HorizonSpringArtSubmission Chalk.gif

2023-09-15T21:28:49Z

Zarthanit: Horizon Herald March 2023 -- Horizon Spring Art Submission -- From Chalk

== Summary ==
Horizon Herald March 2023 -- Horizon Spring Art Submission -- From Chalk

File:HH1 shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE Page1.png

2023-09-15T21:25:00Z

Zarthanit:

== Summary ==
Horizon Herald March 2023 -- shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE -- PNG from Microsoft Word -- From Tyler -- Page 1

User:Zarthanit

2023-09-15T17:06:28Z

Zarthanit:

User:Zarthanit

2023-09-15T17:03:06Z

Zarthanit: testing using the template by Aramachus with width/maxwidth/height tweaks

File:HH1 Horizon ad LevelSync.png

2023-09-15T07:05:18Z

Zarthanit: Horizon Herald March 2023 -- Horizon ad -- PNG from Dropbox Viewer

== Summary ==
Horizon Herald March 2023 -- Horizon ad -- PNG from Dropbox Viewer

File:HH1 shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE Page2.png

2023-09-15T06:41:12Z

Zarthanit:

== Summary ==
Horizon Herald March 2023 -- shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE -- PNG from Microsoft Word -- Page 2

This page also includes a hyperlink to a youtube - consider adding to the Herald article as some kind of addendum if using this PNG.

File:HH1 shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE Page1.png

2023-09-15T06:30:23Z

Zarthanit:

== Summary ==
Horizon Herald March 2023 -- shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE -- PNG from Microsoft Word -- Page 1

File:HH1 shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE Page6.png

2023-09-15T06:29:06Z

Zarthanit: Horizon Herald March 2023 -- shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE -- PNG from Microsoft Word -- Page 6

== Summary ==
Horizon Herald March 2023 -- shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE -- PNG from Microsoft Word -- Page 6

File:HH1 shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE Page5.png

2023-09-15T06:22:46Z

Zarthanit: Horizon Herald March 2023 -- shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE -- PNG from Microsoft Word -- Page 5

== Summary ==
Horizon Herald March 2023 -- shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE -- PNG from Microsoft Word -- Page 5

File:HH1 shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE Page4.png

2023-09-15T06:17:57Z

Zarthanit: Horizon Herald March 2023 -- shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE -- PNG from Microsoft Word -- Page 4

== Summary ==
Horizon Herald March 2023 -- shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE -- PNG from Microsoft Word -- Page 4

File:HH1 shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE Page3.png

2023-09-15T05:48:02Z

Zarthanit: Horizon Herald March 2023 -- shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE -- PNG from Microsoft Word -- Page 3

== Summary ==
Horizon Herald March 2023 -- shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE -- PNG from Microsoft Word -- Page 3

File:HH1 shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE Page2.png

2023-09-15T05:36:46Z

Zarthanit: Horizon Herald March 2023 -- shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE -- PNG from Microsoft Word -- Page 2

== Summary ==
Horizon Herald March 2023 -- shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE -- PNG from Microsoft Word -- Page 2

User:Zarthanit

2023-09-15T05:32:29Z

Zarthanit: Attempt to use the TestThisTemplate template by Aramachus and Spiffly to encapsulate a PNG of a Horizon Submission

{{TestThisTemplate|

[[File:HH1 shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE Page1.png]]

}}

File:HH1 shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE Page1.png

2023-09-15T05:30:12Z

Zarthanit:

== Summary ==
Horizon Herald March 2023 --
shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE --
PNG from Microsoft Word --
Page 1

File:HH1 shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE Page1.png

2023-09-15T05:29:25Z

Zarthanit: Horizon Herald March 2023 shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE PNG from Microsoft Word Page 1

== Summary ==
Horizon Herald March 2023
shepherds acrticle FINAL COMPLETE
PNG from Microsoft Word
Page 1

User:Zarthanit/common.css

2023-09-14T04:29:36Z

Zarthanit:

/* Box with image border */
.zbordert {
border: 12px solid;
}

User:Zarthanit/common.css

2023-09-14T04:14:15Z

Zarthanit:

/* Box with image border */
.ffxi-border-box {
border: 8px solid transparent;
}

User:Zarthanit/common.css

2023-09-14T03:55:07Z

Zarthanit: testing user specific css page to test how to apply css through templates (without needing changes yet committed to MediaWiki:Common.css

/* Box with image border */
.ffxi-border-box {
border: 32px solid transparent;
border-image: url(https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/ffxi/images/f/f8/FFXIbox.png) 8 repeat;
}