Quote Originally Posted by Alhanelem View Post
No, you can't guarantee that. The game doesn't tell you or give any indication of the size of the area of effect. You have no way of knowing for sure until you've cast the same spell a million times. And what if you only want to hit 3 of those 4 mobs? With ground-targeted AoE, you can do that. Otherwise all you can do is hope only one of them moves and moves far enough. Also bad is the fact that apparently some spells are radial AoE and others are conal, and the game doesn't even have the courtesy to let you know that before you cast.
So glad finally someone said this, cause I have a final point to make on this exact quote here.

Now, if you were to be learning anything in real life, you learn by doing right? You don't learn by having it done for you each time. If you were (just for arguments sake) a mage in real life, and you had just learned a new spell, you would need to cast it hundreds of times before you mastered its use. Now in FFXI I knew the exact range of every spell ingame (up until the cap rose above 75). I would know EXACTLY how far I needed to be from each player to range in each different bard song (and before you say they all had the same range, they most definately did not, each song had it's own range, and further modified by your choice of instrument). I knew the exact range of aoe's from my Black Mage spells, knowing when it was safe to cast Firaga III on Goblins for example, without worrying about pulling that scarily close Dhalmel or Eft. I also knew the exact effective range of all my aoe heals, and all of my single target spells too.

I also knew the exact range (I should also point out that this is all through testing each spell and many many deaths, not using windower plugins) I would need to be away from monsters or other players to negate enmity, for example when I would run out to do Divine Seal > Convert > Cure IV. Some players would run forever before they did it, I would run to within half a yalm of the effective area that the monster calculates enmity for and then boom, full health, full mana, and 0 enmity acrued. Same for using Summoner abilities and hate free kiting.

The point is, I learned every inch of each spell, I knew the perfect time to cast each spell, and loved the game for this. As with everything out there, it was easy to play, but nigh on impossible to master, and that was a big part of the challenge for me. I loved the feeling that I was connected to my spells, in the fact that I understood their exact mechanics, even down to knowing roughly how much a spell would resist on each monster type per level and weather condition.

There was nothing better than constantly being on a learning path in FFXI, adding a targetted AoE circle for spells kind of takes all of this away, and just brings us back round to more mundane and thoughtless features. It may seem like not much, but all these little subtleties are what made me happy in the pants about XI, and I hope we would never have to start stealing features from the bigger MMo's that would negate these adventures.