I remember quite a few suprises in FFXI in exp parties. Like sickleslash on spiders in quicksand caves, thousands needles on cactuars, bombs on goblin muggers, The Stream attack on pugils, etc, etc. In FFXI you learned pretty quickly what mobs to pull for the exp party and what mobs to ignore.

In fact in the launch of FFXI, mobs chased you forever, they never stopped chasing you. So if you were trying to pull a clipper crab and accidently agroed 4 skeletons and a golbin because they spawned on you (night time in valkurm dunes) you had to zone them to get them to go back. And even then, they would hang out at the zone entrance for like 5 minutes before returning so anyone zoning into the zone just fell over dead from agro. I remember getting stuck in rabao once because someone trained a hundred level 50+ shit to the entrance and anyone going out died and caused the mobs to stay there for 5 minutes again.

I miss those days so much.

It seems these days all people care about is endgame content they can burn out on. I mean really the only way this game will keep people interested is if FFXIV keeps popping out expansions. And I fear it will be like wow, where one expansion kills the previous content, where your super awesome weapon becomes worse than trash quest gear in the new XPac.