/rant
I'm going to rant about the piss poor drop rate with ZNM pop items.
On retail, if you kill the znm, then the pop item for the next stage is supposed to be 100%. It's not 100% here. It's far, far from that.
We have to spend 100k just to pop one Tier one, and hope that it drops the pop item. Then, after you've done all Tier 1 ZNM for that branch and if you're lucky to get all the drops, you can pop one Tier 2. So, if everything goes well, you have to spend 900k in total by doing Tier 1 nine times and Tier 2 three times, just to be able to pop one Tier 3 ZNM. If the pop item doesn't drop, then all the effort you did before goes right into the trash, and you have to start all over from the very beginning. Now multiply this by 18 since it's a LS effort/marathon.
You have to do this 3 times to be able to pop one Tier 4. And trust me, it's VERY common to get no pop items to drop, even at Tier 3. I've gotten countless no drops at Tier 1 and 2, and even twice during Tier 3
. It costs millions of gil and many hours/days/weeks to do this and it's very demoralizing and frustrating when it doesn't drop. This is the kind of stuff that makes people want to quit the game for good. Yeah, I get that a HQ (also called +1) sometimes drops, letting you skip ahead to the next tier, but I would much rather have a regular 100% drop, with no HQ drops, than gamble with this absurd drop chance.
/rant finish for now