Game is in a desperate need of challenge.

[Ecks007]

Very detailed response. Much appreciated.

I asked because I have noticed in the past month the increase of "Add this thing from XI's glory days" when XI itself doesn't really do it anymore, at least as far as I could gather. Which led me to believe that since XI moved to more casual friendly, people want to add XI's more hardcore features to XIV.

I could very well be wrong, but that's what its starting to seem like to me.

That is the general idea, yeah, whenever one of those threads pop up. It's typically because people do actually want that kind of challenge. Maybe not the camp X mob 100 times and still haven't gotten drop Y kind of "challenge". That I am kind of glad is done away with. But honestly, the zones in XI were alive and dangerous. You could never just go exploring without being fully prepared with the needed items to keep yourself safe from the wary eyes and ears of monsters that were more than happy to kill you if they noticed you, or without a group of your buddies willing to fight off said monsters with you. Boss fights were hard, but not impossible if you had the gear, skill and a strategy.

They also developed a genius way for different jobs to work together in a fight to combo 1 class's weaponskill with a second classes weaponskill to create a skillchain that generated added damage (and visual flare) to combat, in which even casters could participate with a well timed magic spell for even more added damage. This form of combat eventually became obsolete as the gear stats and player levels raised beyond 75 (long after I quit), but man what a system. It really was something special that hasn't even been close to replicated successfully in any other MMO. When Skillchains and Magic Bursts were the prime combination for adding extra damage on ...pretty much everything, combat was much more coordinated, no longer was it just a zerg fest for who could dish out the biggest numbers as fast and often as they could, no, dps players talked with each other chose a combo, and stuck with it until a new combination was available or a new combination was more preferable. Good times.