Originally Posted by
Sparthos
"Make your own challenge" is a terrible argument in an online game. Offline? Sure. Plenty of console games are designed to be simplistic and the only way to squeeze out a challenge involves tying one hand behind your back for the sake of amusement.
This isn't an offline game however.
The very fact that such things like brews, atmas and cruor buffs are on the table defeats any point of going without them. What are you going to get without em? The same drops as everyone else.
Perhaps if SE had rewards tied to doing something in "hardmode", you'd see more people doing such things. As it stands right now, you get nothing from fighting Rani from 100% -> 0% w/o a brew other than some personal satisfaction.
Abyssea served its purpose as being a place where people could enjoy being godlike via insane levels of buffs. It also happened to kill off half the jobs in the game and annihilate years worth of old content.
No one is asking that XI goes back to levels of tedium that such events like VNM, Salvage and Fay Augments encouraged but there is a happy medium and it isn't a place where you can 2shot everything under an invincibility drink that isnt even hard to acquire.