To those who played FF11...

[Mhiro]

Too many things are better, but most of them have been mentioned by everyone else.
The top things that I really miss are:

- True Support classes. My favorite class type to play in MMOs and single player games is support. Not healer. Support. I want to be able to control the flow of battle through buffs and debuffs and I find myself feeling more proud from seeing my party do better because of those buffs than actual things like healing numbers and DPS. If the Dev team were able to increase the party size to 5, adjust some core aspects of the battle system and add a straight up support role with all the classes I love in it (a real Bard, Geomancer, Corsair, Dancer, etc) I'd drop healer and DPS for it in an instant.

- Healers being healers and not getting yelled at for it. Healers having real buff skills to support the se. Healers actually having to focus on doing their job because the boss fights were actually difficult. Healers not getting yelled at to spam holy or banish because they "weren't doing enough". Real challenging content that required healers to be healers. I miss that.

- Exploration value. FFXI did not have instanced dungeons. EXPing was a grind in a location against enemies several levels above your own for an extended amount of time. Because there was no queue connected to other servers, players were required to shout for parties or put up their seek icon to get one. EXP parties required more communication and set ups. Players had to travel to their farm spots and know how to get to places without running into too many enemies. On top of that, event LSs had to actually travel to their event areas and not just queue up to savage from a random ass city somewhere. All areas were thoroughly used and explored almost constantly. On top of that, many dungeons had secret paths and short cuts that lead to hidden areas of fields such as Crawler's Nest leading to the secret lake which happens to be the spawn location of the Hyper Notorious level 60 Monster, Simurgh whom you all know as "Simurgh's Strider" in Eureka.

- The ability to solo. At first this didn't exist but after a while, soloing became something easy for most jobs in the game to do in case someone didn't want to party up with other people for a dedicated long amount of time.

- Subjobs. The SJ system is basically the old version of our role action/cross class system in FFXIV except there are no limitations on the skills you can use. If you were level 99 you could use all skills up to level 49 of your subjob with some potency exceptions (BRD and COR being 2 of them. Cards were half potency and songs without an instrument were crap).

- Blue Mage.

- World map activities that gave benefits to the players if they were completed over time.

- Dungeon level variety. Almost every dungeon in FFXI had a series of levels that would increase as you progressed deeper into the content. For example, King Ranperre's Tomb has the appearance of a level 5 low level dungeon that you can access early in the game. However if you explore too much you will eventually run into level 30+ enemies. Then level 60+ enemies. If you make it to the deepest reaches of the dungeon, you will literally run into an actual dragon as well as an army of level 75+ Goblins. Very few dungeons were locked to a certain level of enemies. And many you EXp'd in at a lower level you could return to at a higher level to get more EXP.

and last but not least

- The Wings of the Goddess Expansion Pack. This bonus content allowed the player character to travel to Vana d'iel 20 years in the past during a major conflict known as the Crystal War. This expansion pack allowed the player to see areas in a way they've never seen them before. Places that were in ruins in current day now lively as a bustling fortress. Beastmen strongholds that are weakened and walled off now extremely dangerous with beastmen activity. It's my favorite EXP pack personally as it also brought my two favorite flexible classes, Scholar and Dancer. I constantly hope that we'll get a similar time travel mechanic in FFXIV where we travel to the past before the Calamity and see how the world looked back then as well as seeing currently older characters as young warriors or even children.