Any ARR 2.0-2.55 players? Tell us your experience during those times.

One thing I do miss is having a raise on gladiator. Mercy Stroke on Warrior. Titan tanking adds on SMN. Seeing how Revenants toll go from nothing to a vibrant location.

The pure frustation of Titan EX.

There were ups and downs back in the 2.1 days but it was an enjoyable experience.

During ARR crafting was still very much a challenge. While you could macro normal stuff mastercraft stuff usually needed to be done by hand.

- We used to have glamour prisms for every crafting specialty, so leather, clothcraft, alchemy, etc. It was a pain with already stretched-thin inventory space

- Every crafting class had its own abilities (some were the same) and if you wanted to master crafting you had to have them all.

- Having to level a sub-class to get your job skills.

I don't miss any of those things.

I was disappointed that when I ran roulette, it had to be with strangers. I couldn't queue up with my spouse. I don't recall when they changed it. It could have been late ARR or early HW. But, it made playing the game not as enjoyable as it should have been . Glad they fixed it though.

It was a pretty exciting time. Everything felt new and patches were plentiful with new things to do and experimental content that basically were hit or miss. PF wasn't a thing, at least for a good amount of time since launch, so shout chat was a lot more active and livelier than it is now. And jobs actually felt different from one another with a central identity and wasn't just different because their weapon and skill names were different.

With that being said, there's a lot of QoL that we have now that wasn't in ARR, and the game is in a much better state because of it. But I do miss the earlier days since it felt like people were more social, and generally content was also more difficult (not extremely, but not faceroll level either). It definitely feels like a whole other game when compared to what FFXIV is now.

-Yoshi P wasn't burned at the stake for making a joke.

-Before 2.1 there was no barber and only the 1 fantasia so you only had 2 chances to nail the look you wanted without starting a new character.

-The lightning returns event was fun when it first launched. The weapons it gave were pretty useful for their level as well.

-The har modes of the origenal 3 primals were actually a decent challange. You needed a properly placed caster LB3 to safely clear Ifrit. You needed to actually care about the pillers in Garuda and LoS her shreik. Titan littered the floor with dead adventurers due to killing the gaol too quickly while landslide was over it.

-Summoners in Levithan could break the entire trial by full dotting both head and tail and forcing the enrage. Scholars could to since they had all their DoTs as well.

-People sucked just as badly, if not worse, at Thornmarch and caused many a wipe by ignoring the small moogles in phase 2.

-Steps of Faith(Vishap) was nerfed like 2 or 3 times. Origenally it needed to be hit by at least 2 of the 3 dragonkillers. If you get it in trials roulette now then you know people don't even bother with the cannons anymore lol.

I remember having to tab around and single target mobs when I was leveling GLD/PLD so I didn't burn through all of my MP spamming flash to hold AoE aggro. Fun times. Having actual mechanics you had to do in CT alliance raids was also fun too.

Titan Hard was obnoxious because of server ticks killing you even if you were out of the AoEs when they went off. Glad that has been fixed

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Originally Posted by DiaDeem

King Mog was a nightmare. We would give each moogle a number during the first phase so we'd know in which order to kill them. I only ever remembered BLM>WHM and then I don't remember. Bard I think?... The OT would take their tanks off to the side facing outwards so they wouldn't bother anyone else. You can still do this for a few more days before 6.2!

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Tier 5 Smithing Glamour Prism or some crap like that? I think the NPC that trades them for the new Prisms is still in Mor'Dhona. It was so unnecessarily complicated...

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If you wanted to be a Healer, then you needed to level Black Mage as well to get Swiftcast. It was pretty much a requirement. Tanking was really different because aggro was weird... I remember I had signs 1 and 2 in my Tank bar, and I would constantly ask for the DPS players to... "Please attack my target" because you couldn't keep aggro that well, particularly in the early level dungeons when Shield Oath wasn't available. The PLD's AOE was just Flash... some NPCs still use it. It may be because of this that I literally don't care if tanks nowadays just do single group pulls. Because back in ARR we had to Single-target many of them anyway, so I was mentally trained to be ok with slow clearing.

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BLM > WHM > BRD > THF > RNG > PLD > WAR > King, though most groups ignored the PLD and WAR and just killed the first 4 or 5 while the OT kept the aggro of whatever tank one the MT didn't have. I still, uh, mark them out of habit when I get the trial, but that (probably) changes in 7 days :D

Pretty sure I still have some of the old prisms on one of my characters for funsies, but having tiers of glam prisms before they overhauled the system was a pain, I'm honestly glad they changed it so it wasn't just "oh you need a T4 Woodworking one for this accessory" or whatever.

Crossclass skills were fun, but god I hated grinding for them. If you wanted to be the best dang healer you'd also level SCH to get Eye For An Eye and really get the tank candy going, tanks loved you for that one lol. I do remember marking targets or if I was playing BLM or something, just slapping sleep on everything (because early on everything hit like a truck even in just one pack!) and my old tanking rotation was one part of my 1-2-3 combo on each target in front of me with Flash sprinkled in every 3 or 4 rotations. It was mitigation since it also smacked things with Blind! :D I'm with you on not particularly minding if someone single pulls, it doesn't bother me much because that's how we did dungeons back in the day lol. "Back in the day," I say, as I lean back in my rocking chair on the porch, shaking my cane... been playing this game for too dang long lol.

Back then when the Crystal Braves were cool and the good guys, people wanted the uniform and the salute so badly, they started wearing blue as well.

It didn't lasted long, once they stabbed us in the back.

People were quickly quiet afterwards about it.

I remember FATE farming in Thanalan, the one with multiple stages with the Dalamud fanatics or the giant Ahriman? At least it wasn't Sastasha roulette.
Cross class skills were fun and being forced to level multiple classes could give you a different perspective on things and I wish it was still a thing, this is a hill I'm willing to die on.
SCH was so much fun, much much more than WHM for me, but using the Hymn item (iirc) to change stats between MND and INT to play SMN not so much.