Any ARR 2.0-2.55 players? Tell us your experience during those times.

[ACE135]

It was a good time when you start a game at release and everything was new for everyone. Everything felt dangerous and exciting to explore. Every new dungeon felt like a challenge when everyone was in it for the first time and nobody had a clue about anything that will happen. I remember my first time in Stone Vigil. Everyone was new. We died several times on the bosses. We also wiped 3 times or so on the final boss but we succeeded on the last attempt before the 90 minutes ran out. There were litterally just like 10 seconds left before we would have been kicked. The whole 90 minutes were exciting. Every new dungeon since HW or at least SB can't give that feeling anymore.

Compared to now it was great that the bosses had more mechanics or at least the bosses didn't melt as nowadays so that you had to do all mechanics.

I forgot to mention TP but yeah, I liked TP management. Though personally I liked how TP was handled BEFORE A Realm Reborn more. Building it up from 0 to use TP specific actions to me was a better execution.

I quite miss the TP management as well from ARR. When you had a bit to think and time the use of AoE and single target attacks. Now you hit just one single button the whole dungeon except for the bosses. But I disliked that magic users had an advantage that they could use sprint because they didn't use TP for their actions.

[kpxmanifesto]

When PVP first came out in this game there wasn't any kind of balancing done at all, so CC abilities, like sleep, would last the full 30 seconds on the player. Also, glamour didn't exist back then.

[Rolder50]

I was playing White Mage at the time and I miss boss auto-attacks actually mattering. Also I only had a singular oGCD heal, and it was Benediction.

[Catwho]

I've been playing since 1.0. Participated in 2.0 beta.

The thing I remember most about the 2.0 era was reaching Mor Dhona, which was the end game up of ARR. And it was..... tents! The Domans actually did help build up Mor Dhona over the course of the patches. It's a shame that people post 2.55 never got to experience the wonder of seeing that little town grow from a patch of dirt to the fortress we're all familiar with today.

The only thing people had to do before Coil was released was farm Wanderer's Palace for tomes.

[rainichan]

Demon Wall was a real challenge.

I remember when AK HM came out and everyone was like "so is Demon Wall gonna be how it was back in 2.0 with the bees again?" lmao. It was... just in a different way

It's hard to describe what it was like back then. Everything was new. It was all exciting. Every patch was fun. I still miss the feeling I had when I was raiding Coil. It's something no other raid has given me. People here like to talk about how bad ARR is. It wasn't bad then. It was incredibly fun.

While I've seen the ARR story a BUNCH now because haha alts and whatever, it really was fun to see how the story panned out. I only played briefly in 1.0, but I was so into the 2.0 story. Steps of Faith being real friggin hard made seeing the following cutscenes later at the banquet so much more... not satisfying in the sense of what happened, but working for it was the satisfaction.

I miss going into Labyrinth of the Ancients and Syrcus Tower and actually seeing boss mechanics. ARR is also what made me hate doing Fates so much, because they were the most optimal way to level alt jobs at launch. I was 100% over them by the time 2.1 came around and I continue to hate doing them to this day.

I was just whining about how I miss Glasya's Bouncy Castle when I got ST in AR today haha. Syrcus had so many fun mechanics, but the Glasya fight was my favourite. With you on the FATE farming though... that was hell. Roulettes, then running whatever dungeon was closest in your level however many times before you went insane, FATEs and leves... and that was it.


For myself, I remember when the Waking Sands wasn't instanced and it was fun seeing everyone piling in to talk to Minfilia. I don't miss TP draining to sprint and it being tied to melee/tank actions... that was never very fun when a tank would die and they had 0 TP to use their actions to get packs of mobs back in their aggro table.

I also miss some actions that were removed, like Flaming Arrow on bard or Shadow Flare on summoner. I did, after ShB came out and I saw I could get an amaro with everything on 80, still have some uh... interesting stuff on my bar when I changed to pugilist a few years ago. Still had Featherfoot and... Cure!

PLDs could also cast Raise! It was outside of combat, but useful... sometimes. I also think of the Larryzaur video when I use Bloodbath on a melee class that isn't a tank

[Ransu]

I quite miss the TP management as well from ARR. When you had a bit to think and time the use of AoE and single target attacks. Now you hit just one single button the whole dungeon except for the bosses. But I disliked that magic users had an advantage that they could use sprint because they didn't use TP for their actions.

I both miss and don't miss TP lol. It was a nice element to resource management, but at the same time jobs like MNK just got absolutely wrecked by TP because of their faster GCD. Also ya...sprint....that was stupid how it worked back then.

[DiaDeem]

The game was rather different back then...

We didn't have glamour until 2.2 and you needed specialized glamour prisms, like... Tier 5 Smithing Glamour Prism or some crap like that? I think the NPC that trades them for the new Prisms is still in Mor'Dhona. It was so unnecessarily complicated...

The relics were quite fun to do. You had to go outside of Halatali and to the cave in Coerthas to get a group going for the Chimera and the Hydra, with Chimera being the more difficult fight. We had to bring it outside of the cave, and then make sure it wouldn't drop ice puddles in really bad places because they'd wreck parties. Then came the Atma stage and the relic wasn't fun anymore. People thought the quest was broken because how horribly low the drop rates were. Right now you can get all your atmas in a couple of hours easily. At the time, it could take you several days to get just one. If there's one thing I hope the new Relic doesn't have, is FATE grinding, because I've done my penitence with those... it's probably gonna be FATE grinding again.

Twintania was messed up and they had to fix the arena. Turn 5 was unavailable for a while, if I remember correctly. We fought Twint on Darklight gear! I never raided pass Binding Coil. We did clear Turn 1 for Second Coil, but we were the learning group of the FC and people just didn't wanna continue.

If you wanted to be a Healer, then you needed to level Black Mage as well to get Swiftcast. It was pretty much a requirement. Tanking was really different because aggro was weird... Depending on iLv and party comp you sometimes needed to tell your BLM to not attack for the first two seconds cause they'd steal aggro from how much damage they were making. I remember I had signs 1 and 2 in my Tank bar, and I would constantly ask for the DPS players to... "Please attack my target" because you couldn't keep aggro that well, particularly in the early level dungeons when Shield Oath wasn't available. The PLD's AOE was just Flash... some NPCs still use it. I think the Squadron Gladiators still have it? It doesn't do damage so that was fun too. Aggro managing was a much bigger part of the game, and tbh I'm not sure if I miss it, but wall-to-wall pulls weren't exactly the norm back then. It may be because of this that I literally don't care if tanks nowadays just do single group pulls. Because back in ARR we had to Single-target many of them anyway, so I was mentally trained to be ok with slow clearing.

[DiaDeem]

Praetorium runs were... weird. Anyone playing before 6.1 will remember how it was, but back then we could just skip cutscenes, so the dungeon was amazing for farming Tomestones of Mythology, but horrendous for new players. The boss fights weren't particularly great either, though... Castrum Meridianum was kinda fun. For the Livia fight you'd get a Tank to pull her, a healer to care for said Tank, and everyone else would load up all four canons, then we'd countdown (in chat, there was no actual countdown mechanic) and fire all four canons at once. Whomever picked aggro up would take the place of the Tank in the center of the arena, everyone else would kill ads, and then we'd load all four canons again and repeat. I don't remember if it took two or three rounds to kill her first phase, on the magiteck armor.

I had this really funny interaction once. I was walking around and someone asked "You know you can just use your chocobo, right?" and I replied something to the effect of "Yeah, but I like to take my time walking and enjoy the world".

King Mog was a nightmare. We would give each moogle a number during the first phase so we'd know in which order to kill them. I only ever remembered BLM>WHM and then I don't remember. Bard I think?... The OT would take their tanks off to the side facing outwards so they wouldn't bother anyone else. You can still do this for a few more days before 6.2!

Titan Hard was actually hard, and a bit of a road block on the way to get the Relic. People had little diagrams to remember his rotations depending on the stage of the fight. I was sadly never much of a fan of the primals in the 2.X series after the OG three. Ramuh, Leviathan, Shiva... I never really cared too much for them. Ultima EX was my favorite fight in the game for some time.

I guess I can post more if I remember more things later. I don't think I'd want to go back to that version of the game, and many things we now take for granted were first ironed out back then. It puts into perspective how much the game has improved in many areas.

[Shougun]

I've been playing since 1.0. Participated in 2.0 beta.

The thing I remember most about the 2.0 era was reaching Mor Dhona, which was the end game up of ARR. And it was..... tents! The Domans actually did help build up Mor Dhona over the course of the patches. It's a shame that people post 2.55 never got to experience the wonder of seeing that little town grow from a patch of dirt to the fortress we're all familiar with today.

The only thing people had to do before Coil was released was farm Wanderer's Palace for tomes.

I really liked watching the Ishgard restoration but like Mor Dhona I feel sad that it's essentially cut growth for other players... I hope they can continue such development in the game but bind the progress to the player instead. They can still have community building, by binding the maximum growth to players- like you can't have rank X ishgard without completing the step everyone is working on but later a player joins and each step evolves through their quests or whatever SE sets up as the transitionary moment.

Maybe some people like missed content but personally I do not care for it in any positive terms, both being inflicted by it and inflicting others with it.

[Illmaeran]

I started in 2.3 and was immediately amazed by the game. Since we were grounded the zones were smaller, but more dense and atmospheric. Riding through the Black Shroud really felt like riding through an ancient forest. After having to make a horde of alts in other games, being able to do everything on a single character was mind-blowing! Being a fan of FF:Tactics, having to take secondary classes to get a job hit a sweet spot and made getting that first job really meaningful. It made grinding out 30 levels of all classes actually somewhat fun since it opened up all job options.

The smaller aggro radius and lower leash length relative to other games combined to make the overworld less annoying to explore, but you also had to be very careful to not accidentally aggro things since you had to watch out for TP or risk death. Going into the Beast Tribe zones was actually dangerous and you had to be very careful where you walked and had to kill a lot of things, making progress slower, but more impactful.

Seeing Revenant's Toll go from tents to a legitimate walled city was spectacular. Idyllshire came close, but nothing's matched the experience since.

Crafting individual glamour prisms of various ranks was quite profitable and materials had real value.

Coils of Bahamut was the pinnacle of raid design with both amazing story and challenging combat. I haven't enjoyed raiding in any game more than I did then.

The number one most memorable thing for me was having individualized gathering nodes clustered in a small area. No more circling an entire zone for hours and hoping nobody would get to the node that just spawned before you did.