Playing FFXI the OLD WAY?Follow

Today's FFXI is different, I think.

You don't have to dualbox to get stuff done, and I've seen enough people running around doing Endgame stuff, that if you got into a decent linkshell and had the time, you could do decently well.

Though, to get up to Lv99+119, takes a bit of solo work which might get boring after awhile, but hey... I think JUST being able to make good steady progress while solo is awesome.

And to be honest... at least from XP group perspective, there's not much difference between Trusts and human players in the old XP groups of yesteryear, except...

1). The Trusts perform better half of the time
2). Trusts don't complain about your gear/subjob choices
3). They're willing to sacrifice themselves to save your rear end (stupid ZAM filter...)
4). You don't have to wait hours LFG
5). Trusts and old XP groups talked about as much on average (one line when entering the party and ~5% chance of saying something when using a WS)
6). Trusts on average seem to be better at Skillchains than XP groups from what I remember.
7). Trusts never leave your group too early.
8). Trusts rest MP much faster.
9). Trusts won't aggro mobs.

So......total win? Trusts are better for XPing.

Edited, Feb 12th 2017 3:38pm by Lyrailis

I played for a few months mid to late 2014, according to FFAH. I know I don't need to dual box, I just do because it's more efficient. I run with a pocket bard, so I always have buffs. I had a good chunk of Trust NPCs.

I was leveling jobs, doing missions I couldn't do before, etc. I don't think I talked to much of anyone the whole time, though. It felt too much like a single player game, and I got bored. Not to mention the catch 22 of "You need to do a tough battle to get 119 weapons but you will never find anyone to do them with because you don't have 119 weapons".


Edited, Feb 12th 2017 4:21pm by Zafire

Somehow missed this earlier....

I'm just happy to HAVE heals in my group and unless you're doing 119+ content, the WHM trusts are more than good enough to keep you alive. Not perfect, no, but I've never died on anything <119 'cept for the occasional mob that has Doom (mostly Voidwatch and WoE).

Now, once you get to 119, then Trust problems start becoming rather apparent. Thankfully, Apururu is a monster with MP longevity... with Convert and Nott, she very rarely runs out of MP unless you're too low for her to have those, or you're fighting stuff that's too strong, OR you need an actual tank instead of trying to "tank" as a DPS, lol.

Otherwise, she almost never runs out of MP. Even moreso if you happen to have someone like Koru-Moru casting Refresh II, lol.

But yes, her status removal spam does get annoying, especially when you've got something like an Acuex with Indi-Poison up and she repeatedly casts Poisona trying to get it off of you, lol.

Ah well. The silly mobs usually die fast enough that it isn't THAT big of a deal anyways.

As far as Trusts and WS's, they can be finicky at times. They usually try to skillchain but every so often it seems like their scripts lock up. I've also seen Kupipi let me go into orange before finally deciding to heal me if I'm not the party leader (she wasn't silenced/stunned/slept/etc either).

At least they are intelligent enough to know who they should be casting Silena on, at least usually. Every so often they'll Silena a melee, but that seems to be pretty rare. They usually skip non-mages.

All-in-all, Trusts are very comparable to your average human player back in the day, and I'm more than glad to use them and have them around.

And then you got Kupofried. Best thing ever, lol. Nothing like turning a 1400 CAP Porxie into an 1680 one.

Honestly the "2005 retail" server has an alright population, it's just the guy who actually owns the server thinks he's a lot cooler than he is and he's a narcissist. :( The people who play there were great, I just couldn't stand the constant negative changes, and any time you tried to bring something to his attention you'd be met with rudeness from him and he doesn't have any other moderators or admins so he's the only person you can speak to. It was awful.

If you REALLY want to play at 75 cap though, you can do it still.

Eeew.

Pre-ToAU?

To each their own, I guess, but I really don't understand how anybody found the game fun back then. Doing the same repetitive activity for hours and hours and hours and hours like some kind of robot... even if you could find groups quickly and easily, the content itself was insanely boring.

You were either camping NMs (THE most boring activity I could ever think of to do), or you were doing XP groups (again, boring boring boring, doing the same thing over and over again, killing the same mobs that keep repopping for hours). This is, of course, not counting the countless hours of wasted time LFG or shouting for help for junk.

The few activities that were different, were Dynamis (which was so laggy on our older computers back then and probably still is, that you had to disable most animations and effects just to see what the bleep was going on) and popping the Sky HNMs (though you had to camp NMs to get the pop items, lol).

And when you DID get a reward (most of the time, you did endgame events and got nothing for weeks in a row, hoping your DKP or whatever your group used made it your turn to get something), it was a side-grade piece that gave +1 to this, or +5% to that. A piece of gear you might wear for a split second before doing a WS and then take it right back off for that extra 10% damage on a WS.

The rest of it was as much of a bore as possible.

No offense to you, if you actually like doing the same thing over and over again, but I do curiously have to ask... just what exactly did Pre-ToAU FFXI have that today's FFXI does not? Other than maybe the level-capped Promathia missions (that most players hated and loathed)?

What did they add in ToAU that you don't like? (since you said Pre-ToAU)?

EDIT: I want to make it clear I am not attacking the game, its devs, or even people who enjoyed said content back then. We are talking years back, not too long after WoW came out. Back then, MMO = Grind. That's what MMOs were. Even WoW back then was grindy (though not as bad). It was just the accepted standard back then.

However, rose-colored glasses do not work today with that kind of thing. I'm willing to bet that most players, mayhaps even those in this thread, would log on for a few days, maybe a week or two and quit rather fast because.... face it, that kind of thing just isn't fun anymore, once we've got a taste of much better ways to do MMOs.

Back in the day, Pong was a fun and awesome game that people would play for hours. Try loading up Pong today and see how long it keeps you entertained.

Edited, Feb 14th 2017 6:38pm by Lyrailis

Well, XI's crafting suffered for a lot of reasons, really.

1) No bind on equip mechanism.
2) Some items were absolutely worthless if not HQ'd, and some actually unwanted IF HQ'd.
3) RNG failures and material loss. (At least XIV let you control the crafting process to mitigate this possibility)
4) NM drops grossly outshining crafted counterparts, sometimes for dozens of levels after the fact.
5) Little incentive to craft non-popular goods like quest rewards or deepening the craft equipment system.
6) HQs drastically affecting consumable quantity. (33/66/99 Shihei, for example)
7) lolAlchemy and medicines being largely an afterthought to players. (non-stackable, long use time, poor performance, medicated effects, etc.)
8) No enchantment/enhancement system to further bolster durables via consumables.
9) Not a big sense of conformity to level tiers across all jobs/classes.
10) Clunky UI, particularly for repeat synths with lots of ingredients.

And there are probably some things I'm just forgetting due to time. Nonetheless, I was one of those people who maxed a main/subs, partially because I hoped there might be a patch to better things, or at least some recipes that let me take advantage of the Gotta Have It Now Tax.

I made millions of gil off of selling Kurayami and Jubaku tools on the AH. Alchemy was probably the most profitable craft that I found. I didn't even get it that high. 52, I think?

I admit I farmed a lot of my own materials, but the cost of selling the materials vs crafting the tools was a noticeable difference.

Edited, Feb 15th 2017 3:07pm by Zafire

That's the sweet thing about the world - not everyone has to enjoy the same things that you do.

The server population speaks for itself. There's a fairly healthy chunk of people there, so obviously there's a demand.

The chief complaint I remember about how ToAU changed the game was the rise of tp burn parties for exp/meriting. Suddenly everyone had to sub NIN and spam ws, and if you couldn't do that (because, for instance, you were a DRK or a BLM or something) you were just sol.

It became too easy to level after 55, almost every party began to develop the TP burn mentality after that point. All the other pre-TOAU exp-areas post-55 were obsolete. Colibri's were squishy and easy to destroy. Endgame merit parties became so efficient that only about 4-5 classes were allowed to participate.

I actually liked ToAU, this didn't really make the game "bad" for me in any way, I just liked Pre-ToAU a LITTLE better. ToAU was actually the expansion RDM melee became somewhat viable (Death Blossom, Composure, G.Saio, W.Turban for all, etc), so I have fond memories of it.

Edited, Feb 16th 2017 3:13pm by Zafire

How good do you need to be able to do Apex mobs?

By the point you get there, I'd imagine that XP is useless and you'd ONLY do it for the CAP.

I mean, I'm rather intro-to-endgame and I'm careening towards capping on Merits. Everything I touch gives me Merit Points left-and-right and soon I won't have anything left to spend them on (I don't have the potpourri goblin unlocked yet).

What I need badly, though, is CAP. I can do "meh" CAP on my own, but the idea of trying to grind out 2,100 JP that way is... eeew. It takes me the better part of an hour to get one JP so I imagine that JP is the new XP Levels, where you can get them solo, but it takes absolutely forever.

Yeah, I don't have the answer to that, I liked Treasures of Aht Urghan.