So Empty...Follow

People don't do those kinds of parties anymore. Not because there are not enough players, but because they are obsolete. Most people in game are going to be found in Jeuno, Abyssea or the new expansion lands. You will rarely ever find a low level player because a job can now be taken from 1 to 99 in a single day, easily.

Yeah. You can hit 30 pretty fast with RoE and FoV/GoV with trust npcs and people are still doing worm parties to grind merits for the new Ark Angel fights. Something else to look out for are Morta shouts, that is the other way people are farming merits and could lead to getting a shell.

I just happen to be browsing across to the XI forum to see what's going on in this world -- Been a while since I've played, too. Interesting that capping a character can happen in one single day. When you say 'one day', how many hours exactly are you talking?

Lastly, is this good? Or bad?

Good and bad depending on you as a player. Bad because said capped players (remember the level cap quests) tend to be severely underskilled which means you won't do much if you're a mage or tank or even DD depending. You will however be able to catch up pretty quickly these days because thankfully, Matsui uses foresight when he took over and you can purchase 'instant skill' items for sparks which will help catch your skills up quicker.

So Good-

Fast Leveling

Bad -
If lazy, you'll be worthless.

If you want to join a worm party you need only stand next to one with your flag up. Most of the time you will get in pretty quickly no matter what job. Even getting in as a keyer is easy as long as you have enough keys to keep going for a long time. You can get anywhere between 40k and 500k experience/limit points per hour depending on how efficiently your group can kill the worms. I've had my merits filled from 0 to 30 in about 45 minutes many times.

If you really want to level up the old way, you could try to find like-minded others. Even doing that you will still level up much faster than in the old days.

It's only a single day if you already have the LB's done and you have a solid, active alliance for an entire day. Realistically, this isn't going to happen (when I returned a couple years ago this wasn't too uncommon, but every worm party I've joined since SoA basically fizzles after 2-3 hours). Expect to take 2-4 solid days getting to 99 with LB's done.

Got plenty of Curor (sp?) so do I buy keys from npc?

You can buy up to 50 keys at a time from the Cruor Prospector. I recommend trying to get at least 500 keys on you if you're leveling from 30 to 99 and want to fill merits after. It's even better if you have some decent gear to use at 75+ to help kill the worms with.

Once you have the keys, all you really have to do is go to Abyssea - La-theine and take conflux 8. From there it's just a short jog to the worm camp on the far eastern side of the map where Mega-Maw Mikey spawns. Then just put your flag up. I've never had any trouble getting a party this way, though I like to get their attention using this X3

If you don't want to do the key leeching, SE has made it really easy to party at all the old EXP camps with trust NPCs.

Um... you think the game is too easy, yet you're also complaining about your DD job being worthless? I'll give you a hint: you're not worthless because melee jobs are weak compared to mages... you're worthless because you have woefully outdated gear that has been eclipsed many times over. And you can get better! Just realize that hitting 99 is only scratching the surface, as a stepping stone to a fully realized "max level" character.

The vast majority of your progression now comes after you ding 99 and do events to improve your gear, so that you can take on bigger and more rewarding challenges.There's still some grind (i.e. doing Skirmish or Delve again and again to get their rewards), it's just a different kind of grind than sitting in a 6 person party and mindlessly beating on crawlers or pink birdies for hours to get exp.

There's a concept now of "item level" gear - to grossly simplify it, a 99 with regular old 99 level gear is basically like a player twenty levels below someone fully decked out in high end item level 119 armor and weapons. Some old 99 gear remains useful, but for the most part you'll be upgrading your gear first to lower item level pieces (say, 106-110), then into the item level 113-117 range, then the high end item level 119 gear (currently 119 is the highest level we have).

Very basic outline of progression in the current FFXI is something like:

1) Get level 99, cap skills, work toward capped merits (that's a heck of a lot more exp than simply dinging 99)

2) Get baseline 99+ item level weapons/gear:
- Records of Eminence
- Bayld gear by doing Coalition assignments
- Fill in missing gaps of still useful armor from other pre-Adoulin content like Abyssea, AF/Relic armor (which is step one of upgrading that gear to item level 109 and 119)

3) Do easier endgame events like Skirmish and Wildskeeper Reives to further improve your gear

4) Do more challenging endgame events to improve even more: SKCNMs for item level 109 Artifact gear, Delve, higher level Skirmish content

5) Once you're very well geared, do the difficult content like Delve boss clears, Ark Angel/Zilart "hard mode" battlefields, etc. A fresh level 99 player has zero place in this content, the 75-cap FFXI equivalent would be something like dragging a level 60 player along to content that required level 75 players with good endgame gear.

Edited, Feb 12th 2014 6:05pm by Anza

Samurai and other melee damage dealers are actually extremely powerful, and the recent changes to elemental magic and Summoner's avatar damage output was an attempt to close the gap between melees and mages. Once the level cap increased, outside of situations where you needed a mage (such as in Voidwatch or Abyssea for procs), there was never a need to bring a Black Mage to any event when you could bring a good Warrior or Samurai instead, because they could throw out huge numbers very quickly, whereas BLM had to deal with long cast times and burned MP to do the same.

Nowadays, with BLM able to spam tier I nukes for damage rather than winding up a huge tier V or -aja, they're able to do more than they could before. However, they're still not going to beat a fully geared melee DPS in most fights.

Care to elaborate? Last time I played, campaign was nerfed pretty bad and everyone stopped doing it. You saying it's worth doing again?

How was it nerfed? Unless you are referring to skilling up by participating without tags?

Anyway, its fun but the exp is nothing to brag about. That said, it's a lot more entertaining than mindless exp grinding, but that's a personal preference.

All I can remember was it was next to impossible to get any xp on a mage job, and campaigns were shorter than when it first came out. I liked campaign. I had dedicated myself to permanently doing nothing but that, until SE kept making changes to it.


Edited, Feb 19th 2014 8:38am by TwilightSkye