Quote Originally Posted by Welsper59 View Post
I stated why already in that late edit earlier you saw. Risk vs Reward. I pointed out, at least to Shippuu, how prevalent that design philosophy was with that game. Is it worth the risk? Go for it... ooh bad timing, died to the breath attack. Or the better outcome, where you did more damage with your majority damage attack.

To say SAM did 40% of their damage from AA is severely overestimating. That'd be closer to true for MNK and other 2h weapon users (and THF maybe), but WS abilities in that game are practically everything about physical DPS. SAM frequented their abilities to quickly gain TP. Even if it were 40%, that's still ignoring the fact that a majority of your damage is coming from WS output thanks to potential to self-chain or do multiple types of SC's with others. Your argument is literally trying to say that because of that trait and how useful it is, the SAM should be standing in front of the mob at all times... you know, cuz getting one-shot by breath attacks wasn't a thing. You either did not play FFXI (much) or you played it poorly.
Frontal attacks were nowhere near as prevalent on XI than they are here. Just about everything has them here. Not so on XI.

That would also make it the only job they gave a frontal attack risk to. Pretty much none of the other jobs had much risk. The only one was DRK.