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

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

-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 seal farming guide, because you will probably need it

Normally, 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.