Quote Originally Posted by synaesthetic View Post
What.

I played FFXI for four and a half years. The battles did not require that you be smart. They required that you be geared and have friends. FFXI enemies were virtually mechanic-less until you got up to the stronger NMs at the level cap. By that virtue, even the weakest bosses in FFXIV are more challenging than FFXI enemies, which are not difficult to defeat if you meet the conditions for defeating them.

Additionally, about the gear thing--try adding tough endgame content that doesn't actually reward players with anything. Watch how fast this forum goes nuclear.

So then you quit right around the time ToAU was out then, possibly when it ended. Never even saw WotG. I stuck with it for 9 years, right up until level 95 patch. Even Abyssea, "easy mode" as it was with Atma required a surprisingly fun amount of strategy (also a lot of trail and error). We don't have enfeebling magic anywhere near on the level that we did in XI (or protective magic for that matter).

WHM can't AoE Benediction anymore, or actively prevent/reduce elemental damage and status ailments like in XI. The only real debuff we have is Slow from DRG, and it's a complete joke - most NM are outright immune and it doesn't really slow down attacks all that much anyway. By the time I left XI, RDM had a pretty insane arsenal of enfeebling magic available to it, as did BRD & BLU and others (and some of these stacked which was the craziest part - having a RDM & BRD stack Slow 2 and Elegy was ridiculous)


That's another thing, Bard is just so ... weird in this game. It's like the devs couldn't make up their mind if they wanted Ranger or Bard and half-assed the 2 together. Bard may have been fairly weak in XI in terms of damage potential, but it more than made up for it with Minuet & March. Even in 1.23 songs were fairly decent, especially the TP one. Now it drains MP, they have to be in range of the targets and since TP recovers automatically (and DRG & MNK can both use Invigorate) that song's pretty much garbage. I've yet to see an instance where Requiem is worth the dps penalty, which pretty much just leaves Ballad which again only healers really need as BLM & SMN have nigh-infinite MP. That leaves us with ghetto Ranger that can potentially get out DPS by a well-geared WAR. If BRD didn't also have Silence I doubt it'd get used for much besides Ballad. Why doesn't it have a DET/Crit buff song?!