I've recently quit (this isn't a farewell or anything). I was killing everything I wanted to kill (I never tried Master Trials, had no interest), I wanted to leave some final thoughts. Maybe they'll be taken into consideration, or maybe they'll slide into oblivion.
- I was "at the top of the game". I had killed everything I wanted to except Fu (hadn't tried yet). This may sound silly but I felt no motivation to improve. I didn't need more accuracy vorseals as I could hit anything I needed to and I didn't need more gear. I guess more refresh vorseals are always nice, especially for BLMs but I never really thought highly of regen for anything but GEO. It's unlikely to be the reason you recover from an aoe or survive the next hit.
Most of the Aeonic weapons aren't impressive, either because they're outclassed by (at first) harder (edit: tedious)/expensive to obtain RME or their use is questionable in the first place (PLD shield)
- The fun of Ambuscade never improved, the chore that it became only improved with Frog month when we could take almost any group and win. Doing content dozens or a hundred times isn't fun but it's the only way to farm some frustrating materials (unless you quad-box+). I could take my idris and mythic friends or I could take my Dunna and Taming Sari friends. In place of geo, especially since geo-debuffs didn't work), I could take corsair. I didn't have access to any Bards at the time, honestly.
And yes, absolutely, 100%, I liked frog because it was easy. I have no shame in admitting that. Ambuscade's fights are fun for the first round or two but then it's just the same grind. I'm really well geared on anything I'll bring, but what about people who aren't?
We presented some good ideas to improve the grind, like varying the content (you could choose what you went into) and some sort of daily that rewarded you 1000 points. They never got replies.
- Some of the strangest disparity was never addressed. In older content, content in certain zones, enmity produced is too high. Especially by melee.
I can produce enough enmity that will hold Warder of Courage (AV2) off insane melee doing insane DPS, but I can't hold a tier 1 off an unbuffed good dps' first, maybe second, weapon skill.
We had some timeouts on WoC (gotta love benediction) in Death-setups and mages would never pull enmity off me. In hate-loss situations (say charm got off), popping something like Flash >> Palisade >> Shield Bash (I prefer to save Sentinel, just in case) would glue enmity back to me. Flash alone was usually enough to draw it but I like to cement hate. When we had the long ones, I'd sometimes ask the BLMs to Enmity Douse preemptively because surely all those 99k Deaths had to mean something (probably not)
HTBF? Don't even bother bringing a tank to melee setups unless you're strictly using THF. I never did try it but DD RUN doesn't count.
I love the complexities of XI's enmity system but I will say that with no enmity meter, it can be frustrating: You either have hate or you don't (you have no idea what your lead is). Emnity on gear is supposed to slow the decay of Cumulative Enmity loss when getting hit but I never noticed a difference tanking in my "casual" set (1k less hp, dt-capped, 0 enmity, swaps to enmity for tanking actions). I did notice a difference in my survivability, but that's it. If my tanking set could hold hate, my casual set could. In content where it couldn't, my casual set couldn't. Once something has turned from a PLD, his TP gain crumbles.
I do understand that an enmity meter would probably add bloat to the game's client<>server communications and would be a problem. I understand why it's not there, I just miss it.
In Avatar setups (PLD, SCH, COR, BLMx3 was my preference), Cor would pull hate after a hate reset before the sch and the sch would get it before the BLMs, even if the SCH wasn't nuking and the BLMs were doing the lion's share of the damage.
In short: Why the incredible disparity? Why does level of the enemy actually matter? If you want to take a turtled Paladin to 75 Behemoth (lol), why not?
Two friends and I did a test just as Kaeko used to, just to illustrate this disparity. We went outside Adoulin to level 99 mandragoras. WHM slept the mandragora. PLD Provoke > Flash, naked SCH (just staff) nuked for 500~. According to Libra, SCH had 5% of PLD's enmity
We went to level 40 crawlers, did the exact same thing (nuke landed for 700~) PLD had 25% of SCH's enmity (or SCH had 400% of PLD's).
Obviously I don't care about tanking level 40 crawlers. Just an illustration for the unaware. It's easier to test these numbers on something that can't actually hurt you.
Omen was a breaking point for me. Floor 3's random boss was a real problem for certain setups especially if your group was weak in that setup. It's preferable to mana-burn Kei but getting to him can be an issue I guess I could have sat people in my static, because their jobs weren't ideal, or well enough geared that others couldn't at least compensate. I have to say that floor 3 boss should have been selectable too.
Omen's other significant problem, the most significant actually, is the sheer number of cards needed to obtain improved JSE for one job (I think it's 239 for one job for 5/5 pieces). That's 80 runs if you get 3 cards a run and always succeed. Hopefully you want to gear a preferential job. I believe card-trading should be universal and 1:1. I believe the cost of items should be lowered.
Yeah SE is adding the trash route so that the monks get some love, but if you're in a static, everyone has to skip bosses to take people's non-ideal jobs.
Certain content, like Omen, rewards versatility in jobs, but certain content, like Omen, makes you pick your favorite job. Doesn't that seem flawed? What about content after omen? My off-jobs are certainly never coming to that, and neither are anyone else's. I had no delusions that my very good BLU or pretty good DNC would ever get cards, not if I wanted to keep my static. We had no other real tanks and I'm fine with that because I like to tank.
Bead farming This was the worst. I always talk about how Valefor is dead (which really only affects me at the auction house), but all 200 of the active people online seemed to show up for dragons during dragon week and so the dragons were dead in 30 seconds. Why did they do this? Because outside of campaign, dragon and bead farming is terrible. The easy solution, just like the CP campaigns, is to make the accelerated rates full-time and just leave it at that.
The other simple fact is, while /hidetrust helps, this game cannot handle mass battles. It just can't and without some major updates, it never will. I think part of the problem is, and this isn't easily remedied, even if you have it filtered, your client is still receiving log data of every other person and trust in the vicinity. As a programmer, I respect that this might be a difficult thing to fix.
Give me a scaled dragon that caps at 3 or 6 parties (whether in alliance or not) and I'm all for that.
Naga Raja (Ru'Aun) is usually pretty calm but to this day Azi Dahaka and Quetz can be all but impossible for one or two people to take down. Especially when you're terrored or slept so much of the time. I only tried twice but I wasn't able to resist Quetz' terror, with pflug, on RUN.
It's probably hard to get a read on what campaigns people consider good but it's frustrating when there's 2 or 3 great campaigns going on at the same time and then, the next period, there's nothing worth doing.
Thank you for the AGI nerfs and thank you for the AOE nerfs but the very next content you gave us were still doing strong AOEs. I feel like there were never any plans to address the tremendous advantages that a mana burn setup brings (which, by the way, can be done without nerfing ANY of those jobs--and certainly without significant nerfs).
Lastly, I love XI and that's why I wrote this. Thanks for keeping probably the best MMO online.