Quote Originally Posted by Zfz View Post
*snipping for length* *About old MMOs*
Thing is, most old MMO encounters, the really difficult stuff, gave you a lot of time to react to it. This game is faster paced than that. If for instance Absolute Virtue in all it's glory were in this game, it would be giving us better indications of how to beat it than it ever did in FFXI. It took word of god to figure it out because of how... different it was. Nobody thought 'Hey let me use Benediction after it does and it never can again!' or 'Turns out if I hit it with Stone I it's weaker to Stone II and then Stone III and then Stone IV, etc.' mechanics that were unique and nowhere else in the game prior to that.

This game at least gives the player data they can use and learn, rather than letting a full Alliance fight something for nearly 60+ hours and then wipe because the boss has infinite access to 2 hours and undid all of their work without giving them any indications to build up a strategy. In a game where you gathered Key Items to fight a fight a specific way to ensure victory, and if you screwed up, you'd need to spend weeks getting those Key Items back as you fought with bots and other guilds to claim the specific monsters that had a chance at dropping them.

But at the end of the day the 'random' nature of those fights boiled down to figuring out how to reduce the number of times a target had a chance to say, cast spells, or use any of their skills. Or having someone on standby to stun that one horrible skill nobody wanted to deal with the consequences of. Those games favored either massive zergfests or having preventative measures on hand, and were in fact more strategy oriented for that reason. They were also built in a way to force you to be part of the community to even get to see things like our T5, T9, and/or T13. Whether that's for better or worse is up to you.