The importance of job points

[Stompa]

I thought that's what 119 Afterglow RMEs were for. Job Points isn't your answer to being a special snowflake looking down upon the unwashed masses. Eventually SE will stop adding to the system, and/or up the CP rate (much to Protey's chagrin) and even half-assers will cap out just like most people have with merits. If you want to stand out you need something more skill based or something that requires a dedicated group. You need gated content, not a mindless grind.

Yes Afterglow is indeed another advanced long-term project, for most people.

However. You can BUY afterglow with enough gil. And while farming gil does take effort, it is also luck based, you might have a LS which spams high value events and you get lucky on the drops all the time. You might win the mogbonanza and get rich. Many people have.

The point is that you can't buy maxed Job Points. There is no luck involved. It is all effort. Luck only plays a small part in Job Points, relating to the practical issues such as "having a LS that lets you play your main job to Job-point runs." My own LS prefers that I go on Whm, as I have played Whm for them since 2004 and am considered a "safe pair of hands" ie. reliable on Whm. This means in practical terms that I had to go solo my Job-points on my main jobs (Pup and War) because I don't want to tell my LS that they need another Whm when they are relying on me to be their Whm.

And afterglow makes your weapon "complete" while it does not in any way change your actual character. So afterglow is not the same category as Job Points at all. The former can be bought with gil, partly through luck, and does not actually involve your character's personal development.

For many years I and many others have asked for "specialist classes" which are advanced versions of your main job, where you can refine your chosen job qualities to higher levels and to match your unique individual play-style. Merit-points were a little bit too limited and cookie-cutter to actually offer a seriously customised advanced job. Job points offer a very good potential path to creating the advanced job / specialist class.

As for "eventually SE will stop adding to the system" well they kept adding to merit-points for almost a decade, even if it was minor alterations, the point is that merit-points were still an active system for many years, despite merits being very limited in many respects. And so why should we not expect SE to keep adding to Job-points for many years too? When job-points (unlike merits) really does offer the potential to be an 'open-door' type of customisable character development, with greater potential choice and customisability.

And I never said it was skill-based, unless you are farming CAP solely from IT++ mobs, in which case your personal game skills will enable the party to maintain momentum. The option of soloing CAP on EP mobs does not require skill, merely persistence, and allows people on low-pop servers with empty linkshells, to obtain CAP at a slower pace. But it still requires devotion to your job. You can't solo millions of EP mobs for CAP unless you care about advancing your job.

I will ignore the "you look down on other people" because it is not true, and it is also a remarkably cheap shot.

My point, which you missed, was that FFXI in 2015 is largely "box ticking", and that maxing your Job-points represents a "box that can't just be ticked." Less so now, but in later stages I would expect maxing your job points to be a great undertaking, and only something you could do if you really cared about your job and were prepared to work on it for long periods of time.

Get new character, solo it to lvl 30 with trusts ; tick box.
Get lvl 99 and capped merits in Aby, in short time ; tick box.
Get AF set in a few hours, upgrade in a few weeks to 119 ; tick box.
Get Alluvion 119 weaps and augment, in a few weeks ; tick box.
Solo ZM COP TOAU WOTG without breaking a sweat ; tick box.
Get free stuff from login / goblin box / special freeby events ; tick box.
Obtain quadrillions of Capacity Points to customise your character development further ; ti....omg a box I can't just tick. Cry wail weep.