Odd question for former XI players?

So I never played XI, this is my first MMO, so I have no idea how XI worked. Ive heard a few things, like how it was a drop down menu action system; which is whynthe cool downs were so long, maybe. People can explain that if they want to but what I am really curious about is the role system. In XIV we have 3 roles Tank, DPS, and Healer, and there is no "switching" between them; ie a tank can't queue as a DPS. And from what I've heard XI had a similar system. But here is what I'm not understanding. I've seen several things that indicate roles could be switched, like Ninjas or dances tanking, summoners and red mages healing, warriors and palidins dpsing. Som can someone explain how XI's system worked? Could you choose which you you wanted to play as? Or was the game more lenient in terms of party makeup? Any info would be helpfull thank you.

The thing is in FFXI a lot of content could be done without a tank due to the fact a lot of monsters could not do enough damage to kill a non tank. For awhile people liked throwing monks at everything because they did high damage and could not easily be killed. The combat in FFXI was also slow paced. Most damage increasing cool downs were on a 3-5 min sometimes 10+ timer, with the ultimate abilities being a 2 hour cooldown. Basic combat was auto attacking like 15-30 seconds then hitting a button to do a weapon skill which was a strong attack.

All the abilities were in a menu to get around that people made macros for everything they did in the game so they wouldn't have to use the drop down menu.

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Originally Posted by Zumi

The thing is in FFXI a lot of content could be done without a tank due to the fact a lot of monsters could not do enough damage to kill a non tank. For awhile people liked throwing monks at everything because they did high damage and could not easily be killed. The combat in FFXI was also slow paced. Most damage increasing cool downs were on a 3-5 min sometimes 10+ timer, with the ultimate abilities being a 2 hour cooldown. Basic combat was auto attacking like 15-30 seconds then hitting a button to do a weapon skill which was a strong attack.

All the abilities were in a menu to get around that people made macros for everything they did in the game so they wouldn't have to use the drop down menu.

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I'll admit, for as highly as people talk about FFXI, that sounds really boring. And don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed some really slow combat in games, but that doesn't sound very enjoyable.....

XI was very much an open world game. Nothing was instanced, though the world was broken up into many large zones. Combat was slower, more tactical and in some ways less forgiving as there were no AoE markers. You couldn't change Jobs whenever you wanted, you had to visit a moogle who would pirouette and change your Job for you. As such, you had to prepare accordingly well before partaking in any of the content. You could, however, change gear at any time and many Jobs often required you macro gear changes in with ability usage, like Bards (who were strictly support roles with little combat ability). Parties were a bit more lenient on roles but, like here, players weren't. Jobs were expected to behave certain ways or you're out (like Ninjas tanking...).

I loved FFXI, best thing I played since EQ IMO, that said it was very slow combat wise and did have a lot of problems. With the exception of missing a few jobs I'm sure will be added in the future, FFXIV is more then a worthy successor to 11. Hands down an improvement on all levels, especially controls and combat. And from my point of view that's saying a lot.

First, FFXI is a very different game, and it was very unforgiving, and it was much slower paced. Most of your DPS came from physical melee strikes that generated TP to use on Weapon Skills. So imagine that you can only use one of your combo actions for every 10 melee strikes, and you have to rely on other party members to perform a combo (A skill chain which did extra damage and boosted the power of corresponding elemental attacks for about 3 seconds after).

FFXI was also very early in the MMORPG genre, and at that time, the Tanaka lead team was more interested in preserving the image and feel of the classic FF jobs than making the game functional. So you end up with a horrendous imbalance that wasn't fixed for many many years. Of the original 15 jobs (Base 12+3 from RoZ), only 2 could heals (White Mage and Red Mage) and on initial release, Red Mage actually had LESS MP than a Paladin, and was the most worthless job in the game. However it was fixed pretty early and ended up becoming a powerhouse job that could solo anything. By that same line of thought, initially only Warrior could tank because of provoke, though the team technically kind of expected all the melee classes to share tanking like in earlier FFs.

Originally, the intention to overcome this limitation of 1 tank, 2 healers, 12 DPS was the subjob system. You could equip a second job on your character but it was capped to half of whatever your main job was. This is what allowed people to Experiment and make jobs tanks or healers. However... therein lies the flaw. You were capped at half your main job. This made it impossible to actually achieve full customization of your character and forced you into only combinations that made sense. A 75 Warrior would get maybe 170 MP from White Mage sub, compared to the 800 a 75 WHM should have. This made Summoner a popular healer in xp parties due to it having the largest MP pool, and the fact summons were not good DPS outside of a single attack and release strategy (I'll detail this later).

Originally /WAR was the most popular melee subjob, and the mandatory Tank one for provoke. However, When Ninja became a tank, it became a mandatory Sub. The fact Ninja was an effective tank was an accidental discovery. Originally, Utsusemi gave you 3-4 shadows that took a hit, and you lost no enmity, and Ninjas would pull hate from elemental wheeling. After a bit of ingenuity, Ninjas figured out they were a VERY effective tank as NOT tanking damage is a better way to kill things than having to heal it. This allowed healers to DPS in parties and speed up get higher xp chains.

This was also brought about by the fact that despite the intention to allow anyone to tank early on... Everything hit like a truck. It was not wise to fight more than 1 monster at a time because everything just hit so hard. That's why /NIN became a popular Sub. You wanted your DPS to not take AoE damage. However, it was nerfed so that AoE attacks wiped off Shadows, but it still was more effective as it still blocked moves.

One of the other major problems in XI was the TP system. Much as you got TP for every hit, so too did the monsters. Therefore it became discouraged for anyone that didn't have enough TP generation lowering traits or who didn't meet certain DPS standards to attack an enemy. The more people fighting a monster, the more frequently it did big attacks. This is what lead to discrimination against many job. You didn't want Pets meleeing monsters as they did pitiful damage and were free TP for the monster. Certain jobs also became useless against most popular XP mobs. Crabs were very popular for XP because they were easy and had weak TP moves, but they had resistance against piercing damage. This made things rough on Dragoons, especially after the Player TP nerfs. Thieves got around this because of their Sneak Atack/Trick Attack combination that allowed them to get a powerful critical hit and manage enmity, however Dragoon didn't have the utility to overcome.

Anyway... That's a BRIEF explanation. There's a lot more that involves changes over patches and innovation. Tanaka was a huge fan of nerfing all the things. If players were having fun, there was a 90% chance he was gonna nerf it in an emergency patch. He left the team during Wings of the Goddess to ruin FFXIV, at which point things started flying towards the realm of easier, and a lot of the challenge that made the game fun was removed along with all the stuff that made the game infuriatingly difficult.

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Originally Posted by Gamer3427

I'll admit, for as highly as people talk about FFXI, that sounds really boring. And don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed some really slow combat in games, but that doesn't sound very enjoyable.....

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It sadly isn't anymore, it was good for it's time, if you played from the start, if you were in the game before abyssea and everything changed the way the game felt. I tried playing the game during the free time and first thing that hit me was how cumberstone the camera felt, and the thing is, I never recalled how unresponsive the camera was, I use to be able to move the camera effortlessly but I felt so frustrated trying to move it.

XI was a game that was fun based on the friends you had to play with, if you tried to just play solo and by yourself with no one else then it was moreso a glorified chatroom while waiting on events to occur. This is why I like 14 so much better because there aren't a multitude of events that are time based, you don't have to wait 3 days til Dynamis, a day to do sea instances, pretty much there was just so much content that you had to wait to do, so let's say you could do it all in one day IF they didn't put hard time restrictions on the game so for some people they feel like that "waiting period" added to the games "playability" when all it did was just waste time that could of been spent doing content like 14 currently does.

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Originally Posted by Gamer3427

I'll admit, for as highly as people talk about FFXI, that sounds really boring. And don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed some really slow combat in games, but that doesn't sound very enjoyable.....

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They talk highly because FFXI was easier. it did not require much in terms of thinking and strats, in fact a few years back, FFXI simply turned into "zerg this down" where all you needed was Buffs from Bard and corsair and then you mash your TP/WS button untill it was dead, which usually took around 30 seconds to a minute. this was the "best strat" as it was known as for almost everything endgame. it was a slower paced game.

Hell healing bots were a common thing, you just needed a healing bot to stand in the background and heal through attacks automaticly. so it's only natrual to question those who highly praise it, especially over 14. i did love the game, but you cannot deny what it was.

I wouldn't ask anybody on this forum their opinions about XI. It's almost always a race to say as much negative garbage as fast as possible and to remind people that this isn't XI.

After all, It's not like XIV has bots or fights that are just zergs, right?

XI is very old and it had good times to for people who got that experiance at 2004 to 2007 ish. game community where very good to.
XI have the thing XIV don't! an open world dungeons!! Where we took our team's and zoned in to a cave with full of suprises!! and try to find good spots for leveling up and even sometimes we got stomped by a raged HNM..
Class system are the same. You could swop to any class once you unlocked them ofc in a moogle house.
:) In XIV you can swop w/e ofc not inside a dungeon or in a battle.

Pre 75 was good time beacuse all classes where balanced enought to people use them ..but when they raised the cap to 99 even a whm are able to tank.
most content in that game was designed for 75 anyway. New expansion that came bring some hope back for it but doubt it..