Odd question for former XI players?

[Kotemon]

I was one of those making sure a monk does not sub nin.

The irony about Mnk/Nin is that it became a requirement for some hard mode BC's, especially the hard mode AA fights to keep shadows up so the Healer could pace their healing.

Aside from all this there was also a skill system. It was slightly RNG for leveling it up. The bad thing was around lv 20, people started to level faster than the skill ups for each level. Creating a gap that required people to go back and party fight mobs for 0 exp otherwise if your skill cap was to low, tanks and dps could not hit the target mob. Spell casters would get interrupted a lot and cures/heals were not as powerful. Also a lot of the skills crosses jobs and were not important beyond your primary or secondary weapons until Abysea came out. Then you had to have all skills on your job caped so you could weapon skill for red or blue. Mages also had to have all spells skills capped or some spells would not affect the target at all. Do not ask what Bards and Summoners had to go through to get their skills leveled. Then there was Blue Mage whose ability to learn magic was based entirely on their blue magic skill level. Pup automations had their own separate skill set. However even if target levels were met there was always the RNG to getting an actual skill up and by what amount min=0.1 ~max=0.5. This did not include crafting and fishing skills and skill ups. Although it went along a similar path.

Now to make combat even slower. We used to skill up on decent mobs; nerfed to Even Match and up at some point. ToA gave friendly npc's for healers, bards and Rdm to skill up on. The attack interval was 8 hours apart or something and lasted only for so long. Wings of the goddess had Campaign that gave walls and NPC objects to attack that gave skill ups to a lv 50 cap, didn't fight back, and was more frequent than Assault. That got nerfed some time laiter and 75% of campaign participation ended when skill ups stopped.. Then they undid that nerf last year, and its still dead.

Over all while the skill set was ok in concept, it created folks who had little tolerance for folks who didn't meet certain numbers with damage, accuracy, and/or the amount you can heal. Yes Healing magic skill gave a boost to cures, on top of reduced spell interruption, status removal, accuracy and damage of cure on undead. Even the I level sets from Adoulin had to be redone because of how entwined that weapons accuracy/damage was to the skill rating of that weapon. But what I wouldn't give to see something like the original Oatixur for Monk in FFXIV

[Enkidoh]

Some players may no know how lucky they are thatffxiv has universal teleports... I dont know about you all but I made my fortune in the early years as a WHM port-taxi.

Funnily enough that's a recent change in FFXI - home point teleporting like how aetherytes work in FFXIV (extra homepoints have been added in each city and once you've re-attuned to them, you can teleport between them for gil, just like FFXIV). But yeah, I remember doing teleport-taxi services as WHM (I didn't always charge gil either - if it looked like someone needed help, I'd gladly teleport them for free).

[Sapphic]

And this here is the reason I never got past Level 10 Rogue.

THF was pretty much always welcome in parties due to SATA and treasure hunter.

[Sapphic]

To answer your question without getting lost int 13 years of XI: no, there were basically no roles like the ones we have now in XIV. Every job had its specific skills and abilities, but the sheer amount of them and flexibility of combinations thanks to the support job system made you capable of filling a much more dynamic role during a fight.

Yet the players shoehorned many jobs into doing only specific things, SMN as healing, RDM as enfeebler, SCH as stunner, NIN as tank. The flexibility wasn't there because the playerbase didn't allow it. Try going as something that wasn't "accepted" by the community and see how long it took you to get a party that wasnt just more open minded and accepting friends.

Not to mention many encounters dictated what job you used. Magic resist mobs, weak to this, strong to that. You wouldn't use MNK against leeches, but you would against skeletons.

[Shuon]

Not sure if your question was actually answered but I shall try.

Level-ing up
In xi, killing monsters was one of the only ways to get experience points for a long time - there was no quest exp. So players typically party up and kill monsters. Solo was not made possible until many many years later so a party was essential.

Exp Party
A party consisted of 6 players. A generic party would have 1 tank, 1 healer, a support and 3 damage dealers (DPS).

Generally, the party would travel to a an area with the monsters of the appropriate level and can give decent exp per kill and camp at a safe spot. Thereafter, a party member would head out, look for a monster and pull it back to the camp where the party will proceed to slaughter it for experience points, and then it gets rinsed and repeated for a few hours.

Everything takes place in the open world and there was no queuing up for dungeons etc - party-forming is done at the towns or through player search (you have the option of looking for all tanks who are between level 40 to 42, for example).

Roles and jobs
As there was no queue-ing and party formation was based on players' discretion, you could technically go with whatever jobs you fancy. Due to the shortage of certain classes at times, people also got creative with what they could do with different classes - hence the 'flexibility'.

For example, ninjas were designed to deal damage but they had a particular ninjutsu that allowed them to create shadows which was capable for absorbing attacks - players go creative with this and made ninja into a tank specialising at taking 0 damage. ANother example was summonses in its early days - summonses had a lot of mp and their summons weren't very impressive - so players made summonses equip white mage healing spells and go as healers.

However, traditional roles were still in place where jobs like paladin and warrior were designed to tank, and classes like ranger and dark knight were designed to deal damage and jobs like bard and red mage were designed to support.

Anyone can DPS?
Jobs were introduced without the development team really knowing what it was meant to do. Many jobs were given both tanking and DPS ability/utilities.

For example, Samurai was introduced and designed to tank but at the same time was given damage dealing capacity. Overtime, players decided to play it as a DPS more than a tank and the development team followed suit. Similarly, warrior was designed to be a tank but mid-game/end-game it did not have sufficient tanking qualities compared to PLD to warrant its place as the most effective tank, so players were using it as a DPS more often than not.

Furthermore, xi combat was heavily reliant on auto-attacks, which generated a resources for the player to perform a much more powerful weaponskill (think limit break system in ffxiv, except that it fills up faster) and powerful weapon skills were crucial to the damage output of the parties.

HOWEVER, they were not native to jobs but to weapons. This means that if you were a warrior using sword, you had access to sword weapon skills; if you were a warrior using axe, you had axe weapon skills. Furthermore, higher level weapon skills were arguably equally powerful. This means that even if you were a white mage, if you had access to a really powerful weaponskill, you could still dish out a respectable number.

Also, ffxi was not linear progression - there are unique items in the game that had very special qualities. For example, a weapon called kraken club allowed players to attack up to 8 times per swing, making it possible for white mage to be be quite good at dealing damage too.

Anyone can tank?
Yes and no. Tanking entails 2 elements: damage mitigation and hate management. While many classes could deal with damage mitigation, haste management might be an issue. But lets put hate management aside and think about damage mitigation, yes many non-tank classes could do it.

For example, red mage and blue mage had spells that massive increase their defences, plus they could use stoneskin - this means that they were capable of taking very little damages. Also, when things get nasty, you could run away, sleep/bind the monster and use the time to recover. Meanwhile, they could also use the ninjutsu shadow thing mentioned above to absorb damage.


Anyone can heal?
Not really. Healing was almost the exclusive domain of white mage, red mage and later on dancer (not sure about scholar).

Unconventional parties
In xi, since there was no queuing etc, people could form parties with unconventional set ups.

For example, you could form a party of 5 black magi and a bard - the bard could pull the monster to the camp, the black magi would sleep the monster, then focus fire their most power spell on the monster, then sleep it again, then focus fire on it again. In fact, players had done an entire raid with only black magi - 18 black magi (3 parties of 6) focus firing their spells at the same time and it worked.

Another example was monk party - as blunt damage was super effective on skeletons and monk fists were blunt damage, you could have a full party of monks with a healer and burn through skeletons easily.

On hindsight?
As everyone else said, it was a different game - more refined in some areas but less so in others but ffxiv is certainly more deliberated, organised and planned whereas ffxi was more spontaneous.

[Xatsh]

The jobs in XI were taken to fights more or less. Like XIV you could play everything. In XI fights had specific strategies to them and each job changed to fit the roles.

As a guild leader in XI you built your team around the fight, each one had a different optimal strategy.

Mnk such in some fights, but are godly in others.
Rngs were king in some fights, sub par in others.
Sometimes rdm or nin tanks were king, others pld.
Sometime you needed stuns sometimes you didn't.
Some fights required zerging down a mob... others would wipe you in 10secs if you tried and required a more slow drawn out strategy.

XI and XIV are almost polar opposites.

XIV the fights are scripted and all jobs are forced into a playstyle. The fights are purly based on avoiding 1shot mechanics and maintaining the required group dps to avoid dying. Typical endgame fight is 7-12mins. Typical endgame setup uses 8ppl the 8 is forced on us by game design. Typically content is relevant for 6months. Game is designed for ease of gameplay and casual playstyles.

XI the fights were pure random on how the boss reacted. You build the party based on the mob you are fighting, most endgame guild took the optimal setups to make it easier. Your strategy and how you played drastically changed based on the mobs behavior and zone/area you are fighting in. Typical endgame fight was 15mins to 1hr. Typical endgame setup used 18ppl but could be attempted and successful with less if you overgeared the content. Typically content was relevant for 6yrs. Game is designed for long amount of time investment to succeed and designed for the hardcore playstyle.


As for your job each job you had multiple roles they filled. If you were solo/party/allaince/endgame the roles of the jobs completely changed.

A few examples: Each one of these are separate party roles that were utalized in XI.

Rdm: Main Heal, Support Heal, Main Support, Main Tank, Main Enfeeble, Main Stun, Main kite
Mnk: Main Sustained Dps, Range Burst dmg dps
Smn: Main Heal, Support Heal, Main Puller, Burst Dmg dps
Thf: Main hate control, Main Puller, Utility (INcreased drop rate), main kite
Brd: Main Support, Main Crowd Control, Main Puller
Drk: Spike Dmg DPS, Main Tank, Stun
Blm: Main Crowd Control, Stun, Burst DPS
Sam: Primary Skill chain player, Burst DPS on fights were feeding tp is bad.
SCH: Main DOT dps, Main Heal, Main Nuke
and so on.

Sub jobs:
/nin increased survivability
/war increased dmg
/whm increased healing
/thf increased burst dmg, weak version of treasure hunter
/drk ability to stun minor dmg increase
/dnc increased ability to solo
/bst allowed you to solo the whole game (bst had to be = or higher level then main a hidden effect of the job)
/rdm increased spell casting and reduced cooldowns. Access to heals and minor enfeebling
/blm increase in nuke dmg and several dots
/sam increased tp generation (faster weaponskills)
/rng increased rng dmg and access to range weaponskills.
and so on.

The complexity of XI's job system is multitudes more complex then XIV's. It came from the devs in XI making the jobs and the game and saying go for it figure it out. There were so many factors that went into figuring the optimal setup for things even then your guilds gear also factored into which strategy you had to do. IF you were not geared enough for 1 strat fights were still killable utilizing a different setup/strategy. In XIV the devs are forcing us to play the game the way they designed it to be played more or less. Everything is equally good as everything else more or less in XIV the only difference is vanity. Xiv 2 things matter, your ability to dodge and your ability to pump out dps.

[Terrini]

THF was pretty much always welcome in parties due to SATA and treasure hunter.

Yes but you didn't get that til 12 and no one wanted a level 10!

[Kinshou]

I may have missed it skimming through this thread, but I am surprised no one mentioned the gear system that FFXI had. The whole concept of having certain extremely under leveled pieces of gear being BiS for certain actions and having to progress via farming side grades for all of those specific actions, was one of the most unique differences between FFXI and most MMO's. You could change gear mid-combat. People would sometimes collect 10+ sets of gear for one class and either use a 3rd-party program like windower to automatically switch gear at the right moment or make an extensive macro palette and add an extra 2-3 button presses per command. (The manual macro swaps made the game feel a lot more action based, especially when you tried to do Prespell/midspell/idle gear swaps.) To keep it brief, imagine being able to start a spell in 14 on blm with full spell speed. Then swap to another set of CRIT/DET before the spell goes off and retain both the spell speed increase/crit/det buff. There were also items that would specifically enhance abilities,like traits, which you would macro in for Manawall/Fire3/Apocastasis/whatever every single time you used those abilities. It was a chore for some people and fun for others. Either way, it allowed some pieces of gear to still be retained and used long after it would have been tossed away or used for glamour fodder in another MMO.

(YAY! gotta love the 1000 character limit...........)

[Lorielle]

Ballista.

I miss it so much. I miss my SAM/RNG Soboro Sukehiro days.

Meditate > Dap Dap dap > Sidewinder > Dap dap dap > Sidewinder > Reverbation. Dead. <3

[Highwilds]

Don't forget the different stats that we got.

-Fast cast (affected casting and recast times of spells since that game didn't/doesn't have global cool downs for spells). If you were a White Mage, you'd cast cure V and right after you could cast cure IV while you wait Cure V to be available again unless you had enough Fast Cast to spam one spell. It was way more efficient and noticeable than Spell Speed in FFXIV.
-Store TP. This was essential at some point, probably still is going strong. It allows you to get more TP per auto-attack so certain hit-builds were hot so one could use Weaponskills more frequently. When I played Ranger and experience party had a Corsair with Store TP roll/buff on, I could shoot 4 times with bow and WS, rinse and repeat. Sure was fun and if the mob wasn't dead when I got enough for a 2nd WS, I'd tank.

Not to forget attack, magic attack, magic accuracy, accuracy, conserve tp, parry, shield block, evasion, magical crit. hit rate, crit. hit rate, every elemental resistance actually made huge difference when stacked enough, all status debuff resistances, piercing/blunt/slashing damage resistance, damage taken-, magic damage taken-, physical damage taken-, blood pact timer reduction (smn only), pet defense, pet damage taken-, pet accuracy, pet attack, pet ability cooldown timer reductions (mainly Beast Master), enhanced abilities, enhanced traits gear, augmented traits and abilities. And I think I'm forgetting many too!

What it comes to battle, there was no attack indicators (the red damage zones in ffxiv) at all so if you didn't know where to stand beforehand to maybe avoid it, you'd get hit. It was all pure guessing game most of the time.

End game content? Old time Dynamis took 3½ hours at "worst". One zone would take in closer to 60 people. That also meant we'd have 3 alliances of 18 people. Sometimes, depending who showed up, 1 healer had 15 people to keep alive! FUN TIMES! Especially when one MNK enemy with 2h-special ability "Hundred Fists" would slaughter a pile of players in 15 seconds before it went down.

In the end, before I quit just after the release of Seekers of Adoulin, I mainly soloed Abyssea as Beast Master or helped friends get their stuff done. I can say FFXI was a slow game compared to FFXIV, but they are very different games after all. 14 is a lot more simplified, more forgiving, a lot faster (with everything), more holding hands with the player, a lot less cryptic with quests/missions (people had to find answers from dat. files to know what the heck to do next), and prettier! But the last one is only due to FFXIV being newer game with better graphics.

Ps. Level Sync was a heaven's sent! One could level up to 75 (before Abyssea came and increased level cap) in lv 10-20 areas in a few days/weeks if they had outside healer mules. :3 They had to add Level Sync because otherwise it was impossible to find 6 people 1-3 levels around you to exp jobs. I think these days it's still the same leveling: Solo to lv 30, then go to Abyssea as a leech person who opens boost treasure boxes with keys to level up until they could fight the high level mobs themselves. (If they had the skills trained.)