Oh dear lord 4 hours!Follow

To level my SAM sub from 37 to nearly 51. That's just disgusting...

Yeah, CN.

It's rather ridiculous. Used to be gear mattered, you had to put effort in to learn your job, skill chains etc. I'm not liking this IWIN button crap. I like that I no longer have to level my sub of course, but frankly I don't know the job as well as I should for a level 50.

I commend you for making me think this was someone parodying your first thread.

I disagree. Familiarity comes with repetition, yes, and from experience, but not necessarily the same experience you get in XP parties. I personally have burned up all of my jobs because I started after Aby came out. Once I have the job leveled, I concentrate on gear and then I go out and solo to get a feel for the job and the macros I will need. Then and only then, will I actually bring the job out of the dark and play it with friends, in XP parties, or in endgame events. XP are typically only about doing a few things over and over, whereas in endgame, you have to think on your feet and react quickly to different situations. These types of things rarely happen in XP parties, so no matter how much grinding you do to get to max level, you will only be able to react accordingly through the proper experience in the right situations.

In HS, our choreographer told us the old saying "Practice makes perfect" is actually a lie, that only perfect practice can make perfect. If you practice something wrong every time, you will continue to do it wrong in the end.

Yeah, you weren't around for old school FFXI xp parties, there were plenty of "Think on your feet moments" :). We used to xp off IT and IT+ with no depop because EM-T just didn't give enough xp. There's nothing quite like the world falling down around you in an XP party because a gobby decided to walk through camp and everybody is screaming "2hr!" or "CHOOO CHOOOOOOO". How many people know how to WS effectively now a days? You used to have to know your job to get anywhere, now you need to know how to hit enter and tab until endgame. You'd stop and get that AJ so you could effectively party for the next few levels because you were just sub par without it. You CARED about your job because you had to work so hard to get it to where it was. Now it's all a cakewalk then you start the gear grind...

I'm certainly still enjoying myself, but something magical has definitely been lost.

Oh, I'm well aware of that. Leveling jobs was always an adventure before, now it's trivial. It took me a couple of years to get DRG to 75, but I did (most of) it right, Colibri parties were the start of the downward spiral I think.

See this actually makes more sense then most of the QQ going on. If you enjoy leveling, then yes, a HUGE portion of the game is missing for you. I can totally get why you would have issues coming back to a game that is endgame heavy.

I personally enjoy endgame, so to me, leveling is just a step to get there. I am glad I didn't start back in the day where it took a year to get to 75, because I probably would have never played the game. I like to have different jobs available should the need arise. I have my "preferred jobs", I have my "yeah I have it" jobs, and I have my "I love this job, but only get to use it solo or duo with my BF" job.

Yes I was. I was the Thief pulling for SATAVB Skillchain parties. They were awful. Most people did not demonstrate they were capable of thinking on their feet.
In fact, all evidence points to the contrary.

I did learn things, but they were not useful. For example, I learned how to avoid aggro in one specific area of Crawler's Nest while pulling as a Thief with a crossbow. But that was my only time as a puller with a crossbow on Thief in that particular zone.




This system changed around end of CoP, e.g., parties started to chain quicker kills sacrificing the paltry extra exp they got from an IT mob for faster exp/hour.

The logical reason of course is that most people hated to exp and wanted to get onto the good content.



I beg to differ. Obtaining 2 empyrean weapons was quite like it. It was actually much better than all of the wipes that I've ever participated in and/or caused.

If you like to simply die, just join a PUG Botulus Rex party and you'll quickly get your fill. Failure still happens. It has just moved to a different part of the game timeline.



About 98% of them.



There's a game besides level 99?




You can still level those ways, it's not as if the content was removed from the game. The problem is you won't find hardly anyone else that wants to.

There are workarounds however. I personally do care very much about being able to know my jobs, even if they are subjobs. So I soloed each one to 37 when Abyssea came out, using Fields of Valor. I don't know how the system has gotten better but I used one page per game day and supplemented it with easy prey-decent challenge or when I could handle them solo (e.g., on Monk for example), I would solo even match. This is still there for you to do. You can do it and you will likely learn more about your job than you would in an exp party. This approach gave me a very good perspective on certain essential abilities and skills for other jobs so I could appreciate what they could and couldn't do more than I knew simply by reading up on them.

As CatWho pointed out there is also a wealth of sideline content to do. Taking personal responsibility for keeping your skills capped is nearly as time consuming as exping originally was, since you won't naturally be performing the same total number of those functions.

Edited, Mar 21st 2012 2:05pm by TheBarrister

If that is your definition of hard core then you are losing before you even started. Familiarity is the last step in the road to being a good player. Like I said you can wear all the same clothes, eat the same food, do the same things, but unless you know why you are doing it you are not a good player you are a decent player. Your job is not simply mindlessly memorizing a macro order, or getting the gear because its what ive seen other jobs do. Did you know that at certain points it is actually more beneficial to add INT over MAB, or ACC over Haste. These 4 traits in conjunction for a good player, missing one or more makes you decent.

See I think I am a decent player, I know why stuff is worn, and what stuff can do, but I don't wear the same clothes, because I do not like the new content gear acquisition methods. I want to fight something awesome in a real fight, endgame gear is meaningless to me because the means to the end just is not fun for me to do.

Thus I am a decent player.

I could say I was a good player because I can perform what is expected of me in a group, but that is only 1/4 of the scenario. You can call me an elitist if you want, but I know I am not a good player, because I ignore half of what being good is about. I understand mechanics, and perform the actions that best work for my job at that moment. I ignore gear and food.

Decent player.

Understanding Mechanics, Gearing according to those mechanics, Eating food to enhance those mechanics, Preform Actions that use those mechanics.

That is a good player.


(when I say I, I actually mean me, no foolin, I am a decent player and proud of it.)



Edited, Mar 21st 2012 3:31pm by rdmcandie

It was a joke bro :).

This is what happens in a 10 year old game though. Everyone is level 99 on multiple characters and hardly anyone bothered to party up for leveling subs and such. There's just not enough new players coming in to keep exp as it was in the old days (even then, it wasn't that great at times). The majority of people coming into a mature MMO don't want to spend 1 year leveling up a char to 99 while everyone else and their dog is doing whatever end game activity they want during that time. When FFXI was in it's infant stages, you didn't care because there were thousands of other players at the same stage as you so the game felt alive and well.

Prior to level sync, and even afterwards before all the GoV, parties were hard to come by and you'd just get frustrated and quit unless you wanted to solo to 75. Trying to find an MMO like XI of old nowadays where leveling isn't a gift to get to cap, is getting hard too. Sure there's a few Korean/Asian MMO's where the grind is ridiculous, but it's just that, ridiculous with nothing else to do. I want to say, FFXI of old was better for the community and fun, but then again I was 18 with a ton of time on my hands. Trying to pick up this game now at my age, and playing it like it was 2002? I would of lasted 1-2 months cause my playtime is so limited.

On a positive note though, if you're new to the game, even with fast leveling, there's a TON of stuff for you to do. The amount of stuff people forget about when it comes to choco quest, airship pass (even though it's useless now), genkai's, entire Zilart, CoP, ToAU, WoTG expansion, etc, etc. Sure, the stuff is easier to do now, but most people have done this over years time and it would still take you a long time to complete most of it, especially solo. If people are going to casually play XI and want to get through all that content, it's going to take them awhile and imo is stilll worth the experience.

I've been playing this game since 2004.

EXP parties do not teach you a damn thing. Oh hey, you got to hit crabs a lot and it took a really long time because everyone sucked and didn't know how mechanics worked. So much teaching!

What did you learn? Hate management? Completely different animal once you got endgame numbers and long fights (rather than a 60 second mob.) Skillchains? If you can't figure out 'wait 3 seconds, then hit macro', you might be a parakeet who is hopping randomly across a keyboard. In that case, why are you on this forum at all?

In fact, 'leeching' in abyssea (the absolute laziest and fastest way to level) will teach you more about modern content than grinding forever on crabs ever will. At least you'll learn something relevant, like procs and lights and how to deal with chests, yknow, things which actually matter these days.

---

Was the old leveling system more satisfying? YES! That's because it was an adventure. Everyone else was along for the ride, you were seeing the world, there was content at every level range, and you always felt like you were getting a little stronger.

Now, the game is top-heavy, everyone is 99. Being a newbie means being alone and without relevant content to do. All you can do is grind and hope to catch up to your friends.

Would you really want to grind all by yourself for a few years (It'd take that long to solo up, in old FFXI, if not longer. It took me a year to hit 75 in parties ffs.) before you caught up?

Or do you just expect the game to be exactly as it was in 2005? It's not possible. The low-level community no longer exists. That's why these changes occurred, because there was no one to level with and it was miserable, so they made it fast.

tl;dr: You're just one in a long line of whiners. First it was "Manaburns are killing FFXI, what happened to SKILL!" then it was "TPburns are killing FFXI, remember when you had to skillchain?" then it was "ToAU is killing FFXI, what happened to hard mobs?" then it was "Level Sync is killing FFXI!" then it was "Fields of Valor is killing FFXI!" then it was "Abyssea is killing FFXI!" and "GoV is killing FFXI!" and y'know what? FFXI still isn't dead.

Every time we've hit a new paradigm people have harped about how the old days were so much harder, when it's almost never been the case, and when every change is remembered FONDLY after the next new paradigm comes. Take off your nostalgia glasses. If FFXI survives a few more years people will be lamenting about how, back in the abyssea/GoV days, it used to take SKILL and EFFORT and now everyone has it easy!



Explain why it's broken. Because you progress through the boring midlevel doldrums faster?

What beneficial change would come from spending a month leveling 30-75 as opposed to a week or a couple days? You'd feel more 'elite' or something for spending more of your life doing a mind-numbing grind?

Edited, Mar 21st 2012 4:03pm by ItsAMyri

Just because the means to the end have changed doesn't mean you still can't enjoy the fruits of old exp leveling style. You just need to convince 5 other people the worth of talking a month or two to level instead of only a few days.

Id play some old style EXP with you, I used to love pulling EXP groups on my BRD (id wager it would work similarly with cor.) I remember when I pulled 17K on birds bugs at level 40ish (2 pls <3) non stop pulling with BRD COR DRGs WARs SAMs (forget which exactly but they all used spears). That was fun fun fun.

Id do that again in a heartbeat. Would probably end up being faster EXP in the end as well. But it still doesn't make you any better or worse of a player.

Edited, Mar 21st 2012 5:56pm by rdmcandie

There's a level 75 WAR on my server who shouts constantly to buy stuff from 75 cap. Ridill, Faf/Nid pops, what have you. Even making a -DT set based off of level 75 gear. I guess it's fun for him, but I don't think he has been doing anything... His level hasn't budged since he started shouting.

I finished a relic the "hard" way and I do not, for one minute, begrudge the fact that a person can finish a relic in a few months of serious farming now. For me, finishing it the "hard" way was a personal goal, made even more precious by the fact that I did it with the help of so many people, people whom I've now turned around to help with my bard to get their relics and empyreans, too. (You ever see a quad march Varathrugna MNK go up against Chloris? Silly plant kills herself with all the crazy counters.)

It's also nice, in the case of leveling up new jobs, to be able to toss on red or silver and orange gear instead of pink or white gear. The years I spent on Limbus did not entirely go to waste, in that respect.

Yeah, I was grumpy as hell earlier, sorry about that.

For what it's worth, I find abyssea leveling a lot more fun, it's just over very quickly. It'd be nice if they'd provided something similar for low-mid level players. GoV is kinda like abyssea EXP without actually having to fight mobs that matter.

I kinda miss the adventure of the old game, but it's not coming back unless they make a 'fresh' server where everyone starts over with abyssea/GoV disabled for the first X-months.

But, I strongly dislike the age-old argument that everything should be a tedious grind so that we can be 'elite'. When ToAU came out people were complaining that now everyone could have good merits and even a haste set, which was supposed to be reserved for the 'elite' players... as if someone else having an item somehow diminishes the one you have.

Basically, if you wanna level slow, you still can. If you wanna stop everyone else from doing so, so that you can 'stand out' by leveling more jobs... well, you're asking for an underclass to be arbitrarily created so you can be in the upper class. It's like being rich and being unsatisfied unless someone else makes your neighbors poor, so that you can be better than they are.

Would fighting 1000 crabs using dispel, erase for str down, cure, while meleeing doing a few SC's to burst give you enough knowledge on your job to fight let's say, Tiamat. I'm gonna go with no on that one. The good shells at 75 were always able to low-man and efficiently take down the kings and whatever other big NM's very smoothly. The crappier shells were always the same thing, dying over and over and barely emerging victorious. Both the bad and good shells I'm sure had vast knowledge on fighting the crabs, but the good ones didn't have morons in their shell.

Leveling gave you a general idea of what your job could do, but in the grand scheme of things, it was very limited what you learned. I think that's where Abyssea kind of took a wrong turn with the whole level Nin or Mnk and have a pocket WHM and take down the entire expansion with cure bombs and atmas! That though, is for another discussion. That being said though, the retarded duo's of NIN/MNK and WHM's still had a hard time doing the most basic of things, while the non-dolt ones would breeze through everything.

How does enjoying the leveling process make one terrible? It is the same thing as saying not grinding levels makes one terrible. EXP has minimal impact on the ability of a player to perform the duties of the job.




This is hardly the case, it wasn't until ToAU that SE gave us mobs we could steam roll with minimal support and a lot of offense. IMPs were probably the most annoying for healers with silencega, and the occaissional ga getting through. But they absolutely melted to any kind of offenseive melee pressure. Colibri were a joke.

TOAU ushered in a new area that required 1 lone healer, that is really all you needed (RDM excelled here because of convert). We also added a perma BRD or COR spot to the group. You did not need a WHM and a RDM and a BRD, you also did not need a tank.

EXP in ToAU changed not because the community pulled their head out of IT ass, the mechanics changed in the options for EXP. Why fights crabs and weapons, and goblins, and crawlers, and spiders all of which had a pile of sh*tty AoE moves when you can pick on monsters that melt, have no real AoE threats and require no tanking and minimal support.

ToAU EXP was different because the mobs allowed it to be, SE could have just kept throwing crabs and beetles, and other strong (regardless of IT or VT because of their job alignments) annoying mobs, instead they gave us a pile of very squishy targets, that didn't have a lot of offensive power.


(Blunt DMG KRT camps back in the day were probably the closest thing to ToAU style EXP but usually consisted of WHM RDM BRD MNK MNK MNK)

Edited, Mar 22nd 2012 1:02pm by rdmcandie

To add to what rdmcandie said, it's also important to remember that ToAU was also full of areas with a lot of mobs that repopped very quickly. 'Chaining VT' didn't mean anything if you killed the whole camp and had to wait several minutes for repops, and back in the day places were packed to the brim. Seriously, I remember sharing the Kazham zoneline with 5 parties at once. Fighting IT was more efficient for EXP because the limiting factor was not how many hp bars you could blitz through, but how many mobs the game was willing to spawn for you.

So, without camps that fed you constant squishy mobs, killing VT was faster, but there weren't enough mobs and no job had the offensive power to -really- blitz until endgame. And what was the paradigm for pre-ToAU endgame exp? Oh, right. It was TPburns in sky and MNKburns in KRT.

High-rate killing could be done in ye olde days, in -some- camps (others had 16m respawns or lots of competing parties-- remember most of the game was leveling back then. It wasn't top-heavy. Camps were packed.), but you pretty much needed a bard to pull it off. Bards were not dreadfully common and they tended to get invites before flagging up: just taking off /anon was enough to get invite spam, most bards didn't know how to pull, most camps didn't allow for efficient pulls anyway...

You get the idea. Further, just because you 'totally knew' that EXP was better blitzing doesn't mean you'd be allowed to do it. You had to convince the rest of the people in your party. As an example, I was mass pulling T-VT mobs in Valkurm Dunes and we were clocking 10k/hour exp. Back in the old 4k/hour days, with valkurm a notorious hellhole, this was -amazing- exp. Alas, every single party member bitched and moaned that we were only getting 70-100 exp per mob, and that we should totally go do crabs instead.

Eventually, people were going to leave if we didn't fight crabs, so despite my protests the party moved. And clocked like 3k an hour fighting crabs for several minutes each. 'omg amazing exp', though.

tl;dr: Fast kills were always better, but not always viable. A lot of the time IT was more efficient due to competition or lack of mobs. When fast kills WERE more efficient, you still had to convince everyone else, and most people don't know how math works and assume 200 > 100*3. Unless you had a static party, there'd always be some 13 year old elvaan dark knight named XxSefferoothxx who would immediately bitch if a kill was worth less than 200 exp, and his 'internet girlfriend' white mage would threaten to leave the party if you didn't go fight IT @#%^ing crabs without dispel so it took forever.

Exp would had been better if you didn't fight 90% of the mob types you were going to fight all the way to the cap in the starter zones. Really a beetle looks the same outside of sandy as it does in atlepa same with the crabs, bats so on. Before ToAU it was worse with meriting and leveling in Moon and sky. Seeing new places was fun but once you were at camp and settled in on killing the same mobs you had been killing the newness of being in a new zone wore off.

Edited, Mar 22nd 2012 7:13pm by RavennofTitan

Zafire has it pretty down pat. Simply because one personally didn't bother to find the areas in which you could chain VTs doesn't mean those areas didn't exist.

My first job was a BLM during NA launch and I did the entire PUG thing with 3K being average and 4K being "good". SATA, Distortion, Blizzard II/Freeze, etc and all that goodness. It tooks *months* because of camp overcrowding. All this was going on I was without a linkshell since I got kicked out of my first one: I wished everyone "Merry Xmas guys" and the Christian leader kicked me out because he didn't want me "polluting his pure shell with my Satanic worshipping and refusing to say Christ's name. Frankly, I was ready to quit because the quests were throwaway and worthless and the few missions were the typical JP plotlines I've seen in previous Final Fantasy titles, not to mention that BLM in FFXI is the most boring incarnation of an offensive caster I had ever (and still) seen in any game to me. I simply couldn't keep going even though I was near the level cap.

Then, someone I ended up pugging with multiple times asked me if I would be interested in forming a static group with a few of his friends from his shell and if I would play Bard for him. I figured it was either see if this would keep me around for some more cheap entertainment (bless you MMOs...) or I'd quit. I demanded, though, that if we do this we're going to figure out alternate areas to level so we don't have to fight over monsters. They had to wait on me to get Bard to 14 (when we agreed to start it), but we also took almost two weeks to look around and attempt to figure out places we could level in (pre-CoP) so that there would be minimal amount of time needed level but also take into consideration the fact that we also needed to find ways to make money for gear. (Luckily, I had a decent fishing skill, the faux-fatigue-zone system wasn't in yet, and bard's cheap).

Our method of "discovering" VT chaining for ourselves was accident since we were simply roaming in Buburimu at the time, but quickly realized that after napkin math pulling in close to 8-9K~ was infinitely better than the normal means and had to completely redo our plans for leveling (i.e. find some new camps to supplement, etc.). I loved leveling in that group not because of the monsters (leveling has always been boring) but because we could just relax and shoot the sh*t on Vent (ZOMG WE'RE GONNA GET BANNED GUYS FOR 3RD PARTY PROGRAMS!) and the minutes flowed into hours. I find it funny that their linkshell was shocked as hell when our group ended up hitting 75 within a month after starting and was then conscripted into their raiding force as the only Bard (my wrists hurt simply remembering raiding as the only bard and group bouncing...).

TLDR: the best way to level in the game, has always existed in the game. It isn't the the more intrepid players' fault if the path of least resistance is the worst and you chose to follow it.

When I was leveling bard old school style, we managed to get to chain #13 down in the basement of crawler's nest at level 40ish. We were just trying to get the last couple hundred exp to bring someone to the next level, so we wanted to see how much we could chain the EMs and Ts that surrounded us.

Back then, a party was "good" if they could get to chain 6+ - getting to chain 1 is easy, chain 2 still easy, chain 3 not hard, chain 4 not too hard, and chain 5 was doable by a competent group. But it took a fairly good group to break past the chain 5 barrier (since the kill speed dropped to lowest requirement past that) and if you got beyond 6 you were in a very good party.

How quickly we forget.

A nifty trick I learned during GoV book burning: If you are plugged into the book menu to keep your sneak on at a very low level, you will show your kills as an infinichain, because the kill speed timer stops, just like your status timers. You're getting only a handful of exp per kill from the actual mobs, of course, but it's still amusing to see chain 30-40 since you're already in the book menu when it's time to get a fresh page so the downtime is very minimal.

Edited, Mar 23rd 2012 10:14am by catwho

I recall Yhoator Jungle parties taking longer to put together and recover from the first trains that would wipe the zone parties than some of my level to level increases post 75.

Leveling back really required a great deal of patience, especially if you were leveling some of the more "undesirable" jobs (like Dragoon for example). If you lacked patience back then, you really didn't get anywhere in the game.



Back then though it kind of was. I won't argue that Maze parties weren't better (because they were indeed far faster and better), but because Valkurm was between San d'Oria and Bastok vs. the Maze being relatively out of the way for anyone not based in Windurst, Selbina became like the central hub for activity in that level range.

Edited, Mar 23rd 2012 8:40pm by Vlorsutes