Legion still sucks.

[Mahoro]

I don't mind some mindless zerging here and there as it is fun in WoE, and a great stress reliever. But yes, it really shows lack of variety in battle strategy when every fight in the game starts to require it. And the worst part of Legion is that you either NEED 3 SCH/BLM's Alacrity Stunblocking the mobs, or else 4-6 SMN's doing Perfect Defense. Legion runs simply will NOT be feasible without 3 SCH/BLM or 4-6 SMN. It's an incredibly limiting event.

[Sparthos]

That statement hit the nails in the coffin, why would anyone wants a long drawn up fight when you can brew/displacer it so that it become a few mnts fight. At the end of the day we all just want to peek at the possibility of loot and could not care less about artificial challenge etc... The first 5-10 times may be ok, after that it's just become a torture.

Yet you omit another 'nature' of the players: The insatiable desire for more and more powerful loot.

Build it and they will come.

Challenge coupled with desirable gear worth the effort equals individuals working out strategies and doing whatever it takes to overcome the challenge presented. Note, I said challenge and not luck-based mechanics because the two are very different and are interpreted as such by the base that evaluates it. For reasons otherwise, SE disagrees.

SE could also create NMs that has alternative damage weakness depending on the state of the mob, which can change from blunt, slashing, piercing depending on the elemental sign (which is random), and also weak to certain SC + MB, and can alternate between taking reduced physical damage or magical damage (ex: Melo melo, Turtle Kindred Seal), or it will be healed with physical in one mode, and magical in another mode. This way people cannot zerg this, and you need a variety of jobs with different weapons, and DOT become important again, so is Paladin as tank, and the group really need to listen and have strategy otherwise the mob will not die. Though as I recall, most people HATE this kind of mob!! HATE it since it takes so much co-ordination that PUG would just heal the NMs to oblivion.

We've seen monsters with unique mechanics before however the problems that plague these monsters has always led to their obscurity rather than SE presenting them with rewards worthy of those willing to undertake the challenges.

Take Yilbegan for instance. He was designed with an anti-zerg mentality as he rotated between taking magical or physical damage (trying to ignore this resulted in a huge damage penalty), positioning and timing came into play regarding what TP moves you'd see and when the best time to launch weaponskills were (encouraging paying attention). His super-attack Chaos Blast came with fair warning (he'd start emiting an aura) and for all practical purposes he was one of SEs best designed HNMs of the period.

And then SE refused to give Yilbegan true drops outside some Voidwatch tier logs/ore shit. Bye, bye any incentive to ever ever EVER EVER run Yilbegans outside the microscopic ring drop that could only drop from one of twenty-five possible Yilbegan spawns. It's the most baffling decision I've ever seen from the dev team since Puking Pandy and Evoliths.

Other notable mentions include floor hazards on Lilith Ascedant that were wasted on a mission BCNM and then revived in Provenence Watcher which was designed as a zerg makig the hazards pointless, visible auras on the Shadowreign BCNMs that were never reused (blinged out Za'Dha Adamantking sup) and the 5 Fomor NMs that had hate mechanics of retaliating against whoever happened to last touch the NM.

These are all tools at SEs disposal to use and reuse to their hearts delight in an event such as Legion yet the best thing we get is 'throw your best DD at the mob", "stun/alexander some shit" and "miss a stun and you lose".

[Mahoro]

Man, I had forgotten about those Fomor fights. Those were truly interesting and fun. I remember mobilizing the LS to Eldieme or Garlaige or Crawler's Nest, and we'd have to actually travel through the zones to where they spawned. They respawned often so competition was at a minimum, and had great AI mechanics. Nowadays, it's just warp automatically to your destination, proc, and zerg.

[Sparthos]

I actually enjoyed the Fomor because even though they had issues with being popular due to Evoliths, it was one of a few times that FFXI had humanoid enemies for an alliance to face.

It's hard to believe in a world as vast as Vana'diel that there aren't members of the five races that are malevolent and want you dead. Giant Dragons or Uberturtles are one thing but getting Vorpal Bladed by some Hume chilling out in a corner, nuked by a Galka or being gutted by a dual wielding Mithra is another thing entirely.

[Zhronne]

Uh... personally I always hated Ylbegan, it was one of those particularly frustrating monsters for Melee, unless you were one of the melees taking turns in tanking it (we had SAMs tanking it).
It was really an annoying mob imho >_>
I mean, I get your example Sparthos, I get what you want to say and I agree wholeheartedly, but no more Ylbegans plz ;_;

[Mystaticromance]

Not quite sure what everyone is getting at. I love legion. It's never a guaranteed win, but its really fun to have that element back after so long. Needing to actually employ strategy behind the just zerging that the melee are in charge of. Drops really aren't that bad. You just must not be doing the right Halls. I've seen a handful of Meteor, Arise, a ton of honors, and not to mention all the abjurations that drop during runs. But, to each his own, continue to complain and never do it or actually attempt to make progress. Legion is beatable.

[Theytak]

That statement hit the nails in the coffin, why would anyone wants a long drawn up fight when you can brew/displacer it so that it become a few mnts fight. At the end of the day we all just want to peek at the possibility of loot and could not care less about artificial challenge etc... The first 5-10 times may be ok, after that it's just become a torture.

SE could also create NMs that has alternative damage weakness depending on the state of the mob, which can change from blunt, slashing, piercing depending on the elemental sign (which is random), and also weak to certain SC + MB, and can alternate between taking reduced physical damage or magical damage (ex: Melo melo, Turtle Kindred Seal), or it will be healed with physical in one mode, and magical in another mode. This way people cannot zerg this, and you need a variety of jobs with different weapons, and DOT become important again, so is Paladin as tank, and the group really need to listen and have strategy otherwise the mob will not die. Though as I recall, most people HATE this kind of mob!! HATE it since it takes so much co-ordination that PUG would just heal the NMs to oblivion.

And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. The stupid "you can pug ANYTHING" state of affairs we have now is a big reason as to why the community feels so... cold. Before, while zerging was viable, doing so required a good bit of coordination and knowing your alliance members, just like everything else. The Endgame LS system we had was a damn good system, no matter how much the whiners say "but everyone was unfair and played favorites, and I never got the gear I wanted" because in my experience, the only people that ever dealt with that shit were the ones who were terrible players, never actually showed up to events to earn their points, or were flat out bullshitting to give someone a bad name. Yea, some LS did play favorites, but the vast bulk of them didn't. It was absolutely outrageous that SE decided that the Endgame system was unfair and that it should die, and even more infuriating that they're still holding this stupid opinion. WoE and VW's drop systems are both functionally horrible, and have been functionally horrible since implementation, and have received nothing but complaints since implementation, but are still touted as "working as intended" and "doing what we think is fair."

SE's attitude about the whole thing just pisses me off.

Uh... personally I always hated Ylbegan, it was one of those particularly frustrating monsters for Melee, unless you were one of the melees taking turns in tanking it (we had SAMs tanking it).
It was really an annoying mob imho >_>
I mean, I get your example Sparthos, I get what you want to say and I agree wholeheartedly, but no more Ylbegans plz ;_;

Honestly, that's the problem. We need monsters that aren't fun for -every- class, but -are- fun for at least some of them. Sure, playing a melee on yilbegan sucks. So what? All you have to do when you play a melee job is fucking engage and hit something, and pay attention as to when to stop hitting, and when to weapon skill. It's not exactly rocket science, nor is it really that engaging after you've finally done a couple zergs with a semi-well geared melee. Everything after that is just "engage and muscle memory to death".

That's the problem. The super-easy melee jobs are far and away the most popular jobs, because they're easy. It's damn near impossible to fuck up when you're playing sam, war, or mnk, and when you do fuck up, every single melee job fucks up in the same way; they're either meleeing when they shouldn't, or wsing at the wrong time. The problem is that SE has taken to designing new monsters with the melee jobs in mind, over the rest of the jobs, because there are just so many melee jobs, you can always guarantee you'll have them.

That doesn't mean they can't design great fights that are absolutely terrible for melee jobs. They've done it many times in the past, and lots of those fights were incredibly challenging, entertaining, or aggravating, but you can never describe them as "The same goddamn fight as every other goddamn fight." Take the final ACP fight. Sure, you could zerg that, but zerging it at 75 cap took a really well geared party of competent players (you can measure melee competence more in knowing how to properly gear themselves than playstyle), and a sizable amount of luck. However, take a couple ranged attackers or a couple smns in, and have a pld who knows how to supertank, and someone to support him, and winning wasn't that hard.

The real problem with the ACP fight was that it was ahead of its time, back when most people didn't have so many jobs available to them, which made the fight obnoxious for its time.

[Byrth]

Not quite sure what everyone is getting at. I love legion. It's never a guaranteed win, but its really fun to have that element back after so long. Needing to actually employ strategy behind the just zerging that the melee are in charge of. Drops really aren't that bad. You just must not be doing the right Halls. I've seen a handful of Meteor, Arise, a ton of honors, and not to mention all the abjurations that drop during runs. But, to each his own, continue to complain and never do it or actually attempt to make progress. Legion is beatable.

I don't think you actually read it. This was two months ago:

Actually, the impression I have is that the content itself isn't very difficult. You need the right jobs using the right abilities/weapons at the right times, and other than that there is very little "difficulty" involved in that your win/loss ratio won't really be determined by player skill.

^ Still applies to Mul where people either rely on their Scholars not resisting or Wild Card. ^

This was Today:

Now that we have figured out some of the tricks, this event isn't quite as bad as it initially seemed (in that we've become more successful with essentially the same strategies).

It's not that the event isn't beatable. It's that there's no substantial variance in the strategy. There are 2.5 different ways to beat every monster in Legion:
1) Buff up the melee, perfect defense, and let them kill it
2) If it's stunnable and not *that* dangerous, buff up the melee and let them kill it while you stun lock it.
2.5) For rare mobs, buff up the melee and let them kill it while you keep them alive.

That's not a strategy; it's an exploitation of game mechanics. All of your damage comes from buffed melees hitting things. All of your defense comes from either Perfect Defense or Stun.
* Is it easy? No. It's a logistical nightmare that requires well-geared players who aren't pants-on-head retarded and must be orchestrated well in order to get the most out of each run.
* Is it super strategic? No. You use fundamentally the same strategy for every NM. The turtles in An are the most variance you get. Maybe it's more strategic than Voidwatch, where you can use literally the same alliance for every single fight, but it's no Salvage. It's not the difference between killing Vrtra and killing Tiamat. It just doesn't take that much strategy. Pick the best way to avoid damage from the monster you're fighting, use it, and kill it.

[saevel]

Another thing missing from FFXI is true dungeon crawls / raids. I'm not talking about the BS known as MMM nor it's apparent successor Meebles. 15 to 30 min is not a dungeon crawl, it's an afternoon picnic. Older limbus was the closest thing FFXI ever had to a true "dungeon delve", you went in and killed murgs and mini boss's while proceeding through the levels. It was lacking in level mechanics and size though, but at least it had diversity.

A true dungeon / raid is a 2hr event and involved you killing 50 ~ 100 monsters, several mini boss's, a powerful dungeon boss all while conserving resources and avoiding traps. It's something you do once or twice per week and has decent loot from the mini boss's and good loot from the mega boss's. At the finale fight (after all dungeons have been cleared) the super mega boss should drop really nice gear after requiring you to go through their own dungeon.

It's the long dungeon part that is important, it emphasizes endurance, resource control, crowd control (a seemingly lost art now), versatility of members, different strategies for the mini boss's / dungeon boss's, and completely ruins zerging. Now doing PD / Embrava zerging on the final dungeon boss would be understandable but you still had to get there and that shouldn't be easy.

Honestly though PD shouldn't exist in the game. There should be no game fight that requires you to be immune to all damage and negative effects or lose. But SE opened that pandora's box and now their having to swim in it.

[Mystaticromance]

I don't think you actually read it. This was two months ago:

^ Still applies to Mul where people either rely on their Scholars not resisting or Wild Card. ^

This was Today:


It's not that the event isn't beatable. It's that there's no substantial variance in the strategy. There are 2.5 different ways to beat every monster in Legion:
1) Buff up the melee, perfect defense, and let them kill it
2) If it's stunnable and not *that* dangerous, buff up the melee and let them kill it while you stun lock it.
2.5) For rare mobs, buff up the melee and let them kill it while you keep them alive.

That's not a strategy; it's an exploitation of game mechanics. All of your damage comes from buffed melees hitting things. All of your defense comes from either Perfect Defense or Stun.
* Is it easy? No. It's a logistical nightmare that requires well-geared players who aren't pants-on-head retarded and must be orchestrated well in order to get the most out of each run.
* Is it super strategic? No. You use fundamentally the same strategy for every NM. The turtles in An are the most variance you get. Maybe it's more strategic than Voidwatch, where you can use literally the same alliance for every single fight, but it's no Salvage. It's not the difference between killing Vrtra and killing Tiamat. It just doesn't take that much strategy. Pick the best way to avoid damage from the monster you're fighting, use it, and kill it.

Nope, not strategy at all. Legion can be whatever you want it to be. Trophy runs are easy and do not require PD if you really don't want to use it. Clears certainly do. Why is that a bad thing? Not necessarily posting this question to you, but others. Should we be able to cruise through everything without needing the aide of abilities like that? That indeed is strategy, and it is unfortunate that people do not realize this. Full clears of chambers require strategy. To say that there is little strategy would be an understatement. The fact that it requires specialized job selection is also not strategy either. How is that an exploitation of game mechanics? Those are the game mechanics! I think some people need to seriously re-examine their scope of exploitation vs. game mechanics. I understand that people have their perspectives on things, but there is a large number of folks on these forums that blow things waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay out of proportion. This is unfortunate. With that said, enjoy the game guys and gals, because it is only a game. Think about that a bit more.