reconsider exemplar point philosophy

Dear SE: throughout 20 years of FFXI, your philosophy on "experience points" in the broadest sense of the phrase (including job and exemplar points) has always been that they require grinding, i.e. repetitively killing routine, relatively low-level monsters. You never went the other route, allowing people to level up from exp rewards provided for quest and mission completion.

I respect this game design decision; I wouldn't have played for 20 years if I didn't. For many players, leveling was the game.

It would be fair to say though that grinding M levels is not what draws players currently to FFXI.

There was some fun in pure AoE kills of large amounts of monsters in Crawler's Nest [S], but you ended that play style with the introduction of Locus monsters.

Please consider ways of adding diversity and variety to exemplar point acquisition:

- there is much unused virtual real estate in the game. Many zones are ghost towns, used for legacy quests and missions only, and could have apex camps with many monsters, specifically intended for AoE pulls and kills.

- add apex camps that bring back classic job-specific playstyles for m levels, such as manaburn and smn burn:

-- camps where monsters take greatly increased damage from AoE offensive magic, making BLM and BLU AoE sleep/nuke strategies viable for fast progress;

-- camps where one beastman monster will endlessly and quickly respawn a pet that has low HP and can be effectively killed with single target nukes, for a significant exemplar reward;

-- camps where monsters take greatly increased damage (and return greatly increased exemplar rewards) from SMN Astral-Flow only AoE blood pacts.

I agree with the general idea, but I never really agreed with the "manaburn" and such ways of doing things (and most likely the developers never intended people to do that either).

That said, they certainly did put the grind level way up on these, and some help is needed.

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Originally Posted by Dragoy

I agree with the general idea, but I never really agreed with the "manaburn" and such ways of doing things (and most likely the developers never intended people to do that either).

That said, they certainly did put the grind level way up on these, and some help is needed.

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Frankly, "manaburns" were the only way for those jobs to get reliable parties. Most "normal" parties avoid such jobs and we had no choice.

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- there is much unused virtual real estate in the game. Many zones are ghost towns, used for legacy quests and missions only, and could have apex camps with many monsters, specifically intended for AoE pulls and kills.

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There is a lot of risk in doing stuff like this. They can't be in any areas a newcomer is likely to pass through their first time visiting an area. Imagine if you ran into lv120 mobs in the dunes on your way to Selbina to unlock subjob, etc. That would be a real negative experience. I think they've already placed higher level mobs in enough underutilized areas. They could instead make those mobs higher I suppose, but i dont know about new locations.