Quote Originally Posted by Theodric View Post
So FFXI is a lot like Eureka and Bozja but with much more depth?
Kind of. I mean, the Lost Actions and Pnmemes or whatever in Eureka are somewhat similar / give similar feelings to certain spells and Job Abilities in FFXI, but FFXI's gameplay is a tad simpler in execution. Example: Double Edge is more or less Souleater from XI. You take damage to deal more damage.

It's front loaded with the depth. Learning what something does precisely is very key to playing well, as well as knowing the timings and things for Skillchains and Magic Bursts. There's a lot of tiny optimizations and distance checks for monster moves.

A lot of planning for the more complex fights goes into entirely denying a monster part of its arsenal either through TP denial, spellcasting denial, or both.

But you can brute force a large portion of the game with just knowing the Attack Delay reduction cap is 80%, and that you get there through 25% gear haste, 45% magical haste, and 10% job ability haste or any combination of the three (and JA haste can come from traits like Martial Arts or Dual Wield).

You get yourself attacking as fast as possible = build TP as fast as possible = Weaponskill as fast as possible = skillchain as fast as possible = kill monster asap.

The meta comes in from gear being able to be swapped mid combat, so this allows players to modify their stats in real time (with server latency delay/input delay of course). Real players swapping gear can realistically swap pretty well, but nowadays optimizers make LUAs and program their swaps to be automated, sometimes even their weaponskills*, and this leads to fight performance "vanilla" players can't match.

Example: You can begin casting a spell in gear that will make you cast it faster. Then mid cast you can swap into gear that will make it deal more damage. Then you can swap right near the end back into the Fast Cast gear to get a recast reduction as well. For lengthy spells a vanilla player can do this NP. For faster spells, it takes automation to do reliably.

* - I've read multiple times that automated WSes actually WS more slowly than real player input for some reason.