It's a shame how nonchalant your response is to this post, given that you, unwittingly, disagreed completely with what the OP was trying to get across to everyone. If SE was TRYING to make XI-2, then AoE spam, Cure spam, and button-smashing wouldn't be a **core** part of the battle system, as it is now. The problem with this game right now is that there are so many ignorant people, like yourself, out there that refuse to acknowledge how good XI is/was; and because of that community's irrational "hatred" of XIV's predecessor, anything to do with FFXI is considered "taboo" around the SE "drawing table." Sure, they may have made a couple of compromises here and there, but for the most part, SE is trying their best to distinguish XIV from XI.
Unfortunately, all they end up doing is failing at two games, instead of succeeding at one. XI's battle system is the one that requires skill and strategy, not XIV. And it is XIV's battle system that has been an onslaught of endless spam since day 1, not XI. Get your facts straight dude...and please keep your unhelpful, anti-XI bs comments to yourself. Was XI perfect? Hell no...not even close. However, XIV isn't even close to on par with XI, and even, I (a die-hard XI fan), despised a great deal of the XI content. SE needs to embrace the good from XI, and bring it to the table for XIV before they bankrupt their company with this failure of a game.
And, by the way, I never did it much myself, so I don't remember how good the exp/hr was, but I thought it was a really innovative way to solo: in XI, you could find high lvl mobs that "tugged" high-lvl pets around. They had extremely low hp, but were still high lvl mobs, so you could get the same exp from them as normal mobs if you knew which to fight. And it was very challenging trying to pull a pet w/o it's master seeing and following...and a lot of fun. There's nothing challenging about hordes of monsters linking with one another for no reason, sleeping them, and then spamming them in various moves one by one 'til all 3428342 of them are dead....
It feels like halo w/ swords...gotta empty 3 damn "clips" into something just for it to die. WSs should be like "rocket launchers" -massive dmg, "tide-turning" occurrences. No more of this 3000 tp in 5 seconds crap, and then losing it all in less time than it took to gain it. I remember going into fights w/ "300% tp" in XI b/c it could be the difference in winning a fight, or getting owned in one....there's nothing satisfying about battles in XIV.