Hello, fellow FFXI fans!

Welcome to my FFXI Skill Cap Calculator.  I created this utility because I felt that the other similar tools out there seemed insufficient.  They were either old and outdated, or lacked some of the functionality that I was looking for.  I wanted to create a skill cap page that was easy to read and use, calculated values automatically as you changed inputs, and accounted for things like skill merits, especially when determining the levels where you get weaponskills.  No other calculator or info page I found did all of these things, so I just decided to make my own.

As for how to use this utility, it's pretty straight-forward...

Instructions:

Choose your Job, Sub-Job, and desired levels (it defaults to 99/49), and it will give you a list of all your available skills, and what they will cap out at for the levels you selected.  Also, for convenience, the skills are listed in the same order that they appear in your skill lists in the game.

There are also a few options you can enable:

Show Letter Grades
This simply displays the community-defined letter grades for skill development for each skill.

Include Merit Bonuses
This is what really sets my calculator apart from all the other similar ones I've seen.  You can enter in the number of merit points you have into all skills, and it will (correctly) incorporate them into the calculations so you can see exactly what your skill caps will be at any level.  Also included is the ability to save and load your entered merits to/from a cookie so you don't have to enter them in every time.

Show Weaponskills
This is the newest functionality of my calculator (added in version 4).  Select a weapon type from the drop-down box, and it will display all of the weaponskills associated with that weapon type.  It will completely gray out ones that cannot be used with the selected job/subjob combo, and show with a darker background ones that you don't have available yet (due to lower level or insufficient merits).  The most useful feature (in my opinion) is the box in front of the weaponskill name, which shows the main-job level where you will get the weaponskill, assuming your skill is capped for that level.  Any entered merits are also taken into consideration when determining that job level.

Known Issues:

First, it doesn't work in Internet Explorer. Basically, IE sucks and doesn't support some aspect of standard Cascading Style Sheets coding that I used.  Since I mainly use FireFox and Chrome, I didn't notice that it was completely non-functional in IE until very late in the development cycle, and I have no interest in starting from scratch trying to figure out exactly where it broke.  With browsers like FireFox and Chrome available, no one should be using Internet Explorer anymore anyway.

Second, the entire thing is coded in JavaScript.  Hence, you need to have JavaScript enabled for it to do anything.  If you are using the "NoScript" plug-in for FireFox, you'll need to tell it to allow the page to run.  Trust me, there's nothing in there that's going to break your PC, and you can freely view all my code if you don't believe me.  You might laugh at some of it, given my relative inexperience with JavaScript, but it's all safe.

Lastly, while I've made a significant effort to ensure that the information my calculator uses to figure stuff out is accurate to how the game actually works, a majority of that info came from the "FFXIclopedia" wiki website, and if there are errors there, they may have been propagated into my code.  [There were errors...  see the update note below.]  If anyone notices anything in the wiki, or in my calculator, that is wrong, please let me know so I can fix it.  For reference, the wiki pages that I primarily used are:

The "Combat Skills" page, for letter grades and skill caps for each level/grade,
The "Merit Points" page, for max merits, and how many merit points are active at lower levels, and
The "Weapon Skills" page, for determining which job/subjob combos could use which weaponskills.

Update:  December 14th, 2011:

With the final level cap increase to 99 finally here, I've updated my calculator to add functionality all the way to level 99.  It will now default to levels 99/49, however the cap values for 96 - 99 are predicted values based on current formulas.  If SE has altered their formulas again for those levels, they will be inaccurate until I can confirm them.

Also, I recently discovered that the info I was using to determine which jobs are allowed to use which Weaponskills was horribly inaccurate.  So now I'm attempting to individually confirm each one, but with 140 applicable Weaponskills, and 400 job/subjob combinations, it's a lot of possibilities to test.  Obviously I don't need to test every possible combination, but I need to check a lot of them.  Thankfully, the new Test Server has given me the ability to have a character with every job leveled with capped skill for all weapon types (and many of the necessary "all jobs" event and trainee weapons needed to test with), so I don't have to rely on others as much to help with the testing.

Even so, anyone who finds that my calculator indicates you should get a Weaponskill that you don't, or indicates that you don't get one that you do, please let me know.  I'm trying to confirm the ones that I most suspect are incorrect, first.

Standard Legal Stuff:

Final Fantasy XI, and all FFXI-related words, names, and abbreviations are copyrighted trademarks of
Square Enix Co., Ltd.

I used the above FFXIclopedia pages (as well as some of the other FFXI resources on the web) as reference when creating this utility, but all of the page design and underlying code was created by me.  I reserve all rights to this work, and do not want to see my hard work copied by others or used without credit to me.
Therefore:

This FFXI Skill Cap Calculator web page may not be reproduced by anyone, under any circumstances.
It may not be placed on any web site or distributed publicly in any way without written permission from me.
Use of this utility on any other web site or as a part of any public display is strictly prohibited, and a violation of copyright.

Final Thoughts:

I hope that there's at least a couple people out there that will find my calculator useful, and will benefit from being able to reference it when leveling other jobs.  I've put an extraordinary amount of effort into making it as clean, easy-to-use, and accurate as possible.  It was a lot of work, but it was also pretty fun to develop as well.  Enjoy.

-Divinius