Quote Originally Posted by Rafien View Post
After the GoV party of amazing exp, shortly after, you spend 10 hours skilling everything up to what it should be.

In the old days, you spend hours grinding away to obtain a level or two, learning your jobs, meeting new people and never having an issue with finding people to help do missions/quests.

In the new era, you spend hours to obtain 10-20 levels, but spend even greater time skilling the things you neglected, never learning your job and will always be bad at it, and complain no one will help you do WoTG, ASA, etc. because you made no friends.
I won't lie, my immediate response to this was "lolwut." I apologize for that and have prepared a more eloquent reply to make up for it.

Anyway, look. The thing is that playing through the old grind paths didn't "teach you your job." Bad players will be bad players whether they went 30-90 in Abyssea or outside, that's a fact. A moderate or higher player should be able to pick up the basics of a job with ease, and then you really can't learn most of the advanced stuff until you hit harder things that force you to figure them out and implement them with any sort of skill. The old grindfests were simply throwing DDs at a party while the bard sang and pulled and slept. RDM or WHM would keep up haste, Refresh in RDM's case, and cures. None of that required much juggling, and the DDs were merely swinging their weapons. There was no "learning" there, merely throwing bodies at things.

As for recapping your skills? I agree, they fall behind easily. It's why I make it a point at ~70 to be modestly geared even in an Abyssea group and try to land hits, get skillups where I can. It takes less time outside to reskill, and if you're not doing anything in the group at the time anyway it couldn't hurt. Magic is even easier - Need enfeebling? Toss bio or dia. Elemental? Stone, Aero, stone, aero. Dark? Drain/Aspir/Stun. Healing and Enhancing are really the only ones that hurt, and even with the old method my RDM's Enhancing Skill is only in the 250s. Healing's at 190s.

Meeting new people? I agree that the old parties forced you to meet so many people because it would take hours to get a single level, and thus god knows how many parties to get to 75. I meet a lot of people via Abyssea alliances or PUGs too (the ones that don't make me tear out my hair so I can't focus, anyway), so it's not like you go without meeting people unless you only stick to your group of current friends.