Quote Originally Posted by Physic View Post
warrior monk dragoon ninja dark sam thief, for most of thier ffxi life were all basically the same. They did a lot of retooling of dark, and sam and drg late in the game to give them some type of flavor, but how war and monk are is basically how every DD was.
mp drain was unique, and damage based on hp, but mpdrain was almost never used, who got 4x damage skills?

I dont know what you mean by weapon skill properties, most weaponskills all did the same crap, some were elemental, but those usually underperformed, and were generally ignored.

you may be used to the ffxi jobs that came after the 5 year mark, when they made dark drg and sam more distinctive, orginally sam got, store tp, meditate, third eye (1 dodge at that time) thats it i think. oh yeah warding circle, which was even less useful than it is now. and it got nothing after 30, yup nothing. that was for lets say 3-4 years, because it didnt come out till zilart.
FFXI is not the measure of entertaining battle by far
I started in Jan 2004 and my first job to 75 was SAM (pre-hasso/seigan), so I do know what you're getting at. Ninja and Thief were unique you can't say they were anything like the other jobs but the heavy DDs would be pretty boring if it weren't for the subjob system. MP drain was used often outside of exp parties, Slug shot/sidewinder was low accuracy 4x damage with acc based on TP, and by weapon skill properties I mean they often have different skillchain properties, additional effects, and damage modifiers. You used different equipment for certain weapon skills to increase damage, and many had added effects for example: GA's break lowering evasion, Blade: retsu being the lowest level paralyze WS, leg sweep causing bind, tachi: yukikaze causing blindness, guillotine being heavy damage AND silence, etc. Yeah a lot of weapon skills were the typical stun/elemental/ignores defense at early levels but later on they definitely start to branch out.

FFXI's battle system wasn't fast paced (unless you played COR), but it certainly had depth that XIV's battle system currently lacks. What was detrimental to XI's battle was ToAU's release and the fact that skillchaining became obsolete.