Quote Originally Posted by Exni View Post
Screenie of you in a group at chain 200+ (which was an everyday thing for groups that had 'skill'..) or your just talking BS here.
Really? Well that's unfortunate then since I quit playing FFXI about 2 years ago and have since formatted my HD on my old laptop which means all my pics are gone. And besides, I really didn't find getting chain 200+ to be anything worth taking an SS of, it was just how merit parties were meant to be played. Often times I would get chain 500+ as long as other parties didn't try to take over our camp. (Yeah, I had a lot of free time back then.)

The class that took the most skill was definitely the BRD, however I didn't play BRD in XI, so I can't comment there. I guess I was just extremely fortunate to always have good BRDs? I don't know.. Other than that, not much skill was required.

RDMs just had to Haste, Refresh and Cure, nothing new for them really. And if you happened to be meriting on something other than birds then they would also Slow and Sleep the mobs (Usually BRD would take care of this on birds).

Melee just had to spam WS when they had tp while always facing the next target before the current target died, letting auto-target do the work for them. Sadly, this likely won't work in XIV because we still won't be able to hold claim on multiple mobs unless they're linked or in a party. And even if we could, the auto-target system doesn't auto-target the next claimed mob anyways.

Sure, it was definitely easier with good players, and even easier with good players that were geared well, but I think some of you are missing my point. Meripo parties post AU took much less strategy than the SC/MB parties that came before them. It didn't matter what family of mob you were fighting, the basic strategy was always the same.

You never had to worry about a DD taking hate from a big WS because they died so fast. You didn't have to coordinate SCs and MBs, again because they died too fast. The only debuffs you really needed were Slow/Elegy. There was rarely ever any "oh shit" moments where you had to quickly counter with a Cure/Silena/Flash/Stun/whatever. And this is all with a time limit of 30 seconds.

Now, in FFXIV, the limit will be 10 seconds. 10 seconds.. How much strategy can you fit into 10 seconds, realistically? Not to mention the time between mobs. Keep in mind that auto-target doesn't work the same way here so you can't just position yourself correctly and automatically change target after each kill. People are already complaining how they don't even get a chance to hit mobs before the ARC kills them.

I see 2 outcomes:

1) Seeing chain 6+ will be extremely rare unless you're fighting a group of equal level mobs that are very close together and have a quick respawn.

2) Mobs ~10 levels above your parties level die within 5-10 seconds allowing us to keep the chain going. In other words, you barely get one attack in before they die, IF you're even that lucky.

When SE said that they wanted to focus on making battles require teamwork and strategy I just assumed they meant all battles, not just instanced boss fights.

When SE said that they were shooting for 30-45 second fights when soloing an equal level mob I just assumed the same would hold true for a party fighting mobs ~10 levels above them.

I apologize if anyone took any of my comments as insults, that's not what I intended. I'd just prefer to see combat in this game require teamwork, coordination and strategy. Zerging enemies in under 10 seconds a piece doesn't count.