Has anyone quit healing?

[Vinal211]

It's much more an attrition model yeah. Stand up, do a big burst of healing then get right back to meditating. Healing itself generally wasn't hard, you just had to tread on eggshells and respect the content, doubly so if you were a Taru.

FFXI did a far better job of making everyone feel important even in merit or exp grinds though. I was a BRD main and on paper you'd look at the job and think it was entirely useless, I did so little personal damage that it'd take me some 10 minutes to solo some random fluff mob for a sliver exp at the level cap even though I was one of the best geared EU bards on the server. Yet many groups wouldn't even leave town without someone like myself for the support role. A good healer that could keep their MP going for a long chain was also absolutely cherished.

as someone who never played XI I'm assuming that the idea was that even stepping outside of a haven was akin to queuing up for a dungeon with how much could kill you. wasn't there also something like using loopholes in the system to have someone lure mobs to a central locale and everyone else bursting them to high hell or something? cause i could have sworn seeing a few videos of that.

[Sebazy]

as someone who never played XI I'm assuming that the idea was that even stepping outside of a haven was akin to queuing up for a dungeon with how much could kill you.

Sort of, at the endgame for merit farms you'd generally form a PT in town and then head out to camp as a group to make things safer. At lower levels it was more common to have people waiting at a zone line or safe spot for a spot to open and groups would just replace people as such, this practice gradually falls out of favour as typical camps get more dangerous, widespread and expensive to travel to (through travel reagents use like Silencing Oils).

Wasn't there also something like using loopholes in the system to have someone lure mobs to a central locale and everyone else bursting them to high hell or something? cause i could have sworn seeing a few videos of that.

It wasn't so much of a loophole, more just how leveling was done back then. Camps were generally safe spots that were mostly agro free and safe for the casters to stay sat as long as possible. Having something pop within agro range was at worst, highly dangerous and potentially caused deaths, or at best would prevent your casters from medding (aka regenerating MP) thus breaking your EXP chain. Thus you'd have a puller that would tag mobs and bring them back to your camp to be tackled in a safer manner than roaming around. Many other MMOs of the same period followed the same concept, Everquest probably being the best example.

One thing that is quite surprising to people that never played FFXI is just how dangerous simple leveling trash was. As a Taru caster and bard main, a typical IT rated EXP farm trash mob hitting me whilst I was sat down would generally one shot me with an auto attack. Tanks would fare much better at taking hits from them but would deal very little damage, certainly not enough to tackle them solo. Even with the better survivability, it wasn't exactly uncommon for entirely innocuous looking mobs to have enough firepower to have your tank fearing for their life and potentially even getting one shot from full. Corkscrew says hi.

In many ways, the game's brutality was what forced it's player base to be much more tight knit even if rather cliquey. There was only so much you could do solo and even then you were pretty much forced onto the pet jobs to get anywhere at that point.