Does anyone on here actually prefer FFXI to XIV?Follow

SE's intent for CoP as a "do as you level" mission line might've been well-meaning, but the execution turned out pretty bleh. If it came with gear syncing at launch, complaints probably wouldn't have been so bad, but jobs sucking or being outright unwanted at certain caps was still a real thing. RDM was pretty bleh at 40 cap and below (couldn't raise in Promies, Refresh at 41, etc.), while it was also a no-option healer for U/O due to lack of Stona. Heck, I remember a lot of BSTs having to try and do the missions as all-BST groups, too.

I think what people wanted, were missions that were do-able by low-level jobs, not missions capped to low levels, where you were forced to be low-level.

Now, if the missions would have been more forgiving (which they infamously weren't), it wouldn't have been as bad. But Dear God, during the first few weeks? months? of CoP... if you didn't have boss enfeebles, then hopefully you had the "best" job combos especially for those stupid Promvyion Bosses. No SMN? haha, yeah right. Good luck with that.

Hell, even WITH the "best" job combinations, you had such little room for error. If everybody was loaded down with boss enfeeble items, the mission was a lot easier... but farming that sh*t took time. Lots of time.

It was capped at low level with near-Endgame difficulty and time investment requirements.

I think people wanted something more low level and... dare I say it... casual. What we got was forced low level Endgame-type fights. Oh, and the True Sight/Sound Aggro everywhere. Good God. Didn't they think the bosses were annoying enough? lol.

But yeah, CoP... had its problems. lol. I did manage to get my Rajas Ring before ToAU/WotG (which was first again? I keep forgetting), but only by the skin of my teeth and with ridiculous luck.

I loved the locales, and the battlefields though. Promyvion has one of my favorite BGMs in the game (the atmosphere too!), afterall. Riverne is an awesome place, I remember some parts of Uleguerand being cool too. Climbing that mountain in Attohwa was mildly annoying, but once you got to the top you had an awesome view. Sea is a ridiculously awesome place, the music, the atmosphere, the view... when I zoned into that place, I was like "woah..."

And the fight against Promathia, where you saw the world underneath you? That was awesome.

The only blot on that awesome expansion, were the stupid level caps.

EDIT: Good God, are there any words that AREN'T censored these days?

Edited, Aug 8th 2014 9:59pm by Lyrailis

WoTG is on a HUGE, I mean HUGE Pony List of things to do once mom and I are both 99.

We're getting there -- she's 91 IIRC and I'm... 88? Something like that?

Soon we'll be kicking Atori's sorry little b*tt (hopefully lol), and we should be 99 not too long afterwards then we can finally clear some of this **** out.

But yeah, I always thought WotG was a way better expansion, it had content at most levels, and while you didn't get very good rewards out of it, you could do Campaign on a <75 Job (even though you hardly hit anything and you didn't get very good rewards on most jobs, esp after they nerfed buff rewards). That was the huge selling point of WotG -- Campaign... and it was hard to really get anything good out of it unless you were uber. But at least they had more neat stuff. ToAU was similar -- Besieged was about pointless unless you were awesomely powerful (unless you enjoy whiffing and hitting for single digits and dropping dead in one hit to something you can't even see).

But it had other cool stuff and in both of these expansions, the new areas and such weren't gated behind looooooong quest chains that required hard-as-balls (at the time) mission fights.

Edited, Aug 9th 2014 1:20pm by Lyrailis

No, you could do any of them for any of the nations, but since the first dozen of them were solo, you'd get to one of the big battle ones and realized you had no one to do it with unless you started over from scratch with another nation's quests.

My static finally cleared it by saying WE ARE DOING WINDY OKAY SO STFU and using the Windy quests to unlock all the main story missions.

After you finish the main story, it was a hell of a lot easier to go back and do the other nation's quests since there were no main trunk missions blocking the way.

Zilart was for high levels only? I guess that means nobody ever did EXP parties in Kazham, Altepa, Kuftal, or the like.

You're speaking from hindsight. What people wanted was the ability to participate in quests at low levels as opposed to having to wait till higher levels. Since many people were already at level 75, it was logical to sync the levels, else you wouldn't have the people to form the party at a low level. Someone at level 75 wouldn't choose to level a low job just to participate in a quest if s/he had the opportunity to do so at level 75. You would be recreating the exact problem that you are complaining about. The easy solution was "level synch", but let's not pretend that this whole thing hasn't been hypocritical.

I thought Promyvions were actually some of the best CoP content. If you WANTED to make the mission easy, you could, with time. Sacrarium wasn't that bad either. Everything after that though? Yeah...

I think the worst part about CoP was mostly all the traveling through BS zones with little room for error or death. That Snoll Tzar fight? Yeah, walking there was far worse than the actual fight. Running past a level 95 Wyrm HNM and making sure you fall down the ramp at the exact right spot or start all over again. Good times.

I actually liked level capped content. Never really had a problem with it. I leveled BST to 40 specifically to farm JSE stuff from Sacrarium. Good times running around with my VT slime. I feel it didn't trivialize CoP zones, ever, since you would be restricted in them. It was like an endgame at a different level, or something.

IDK, I think CoP was probably my favorite expansion and/or mission/story line. It didn't completely change the game like every other expansion did.

Edited, Aug 10th 2014 3:33pm by Zafire

In Linkshells, sure.

And they don't have to be 75.

It could be a couple 50s, a couple 30s, and a couple 40s deciding "let's do Promyvion". Who knows.

Now, if you're a 30 wanting Promyvion and you wanted a 75 to carry you (assuming it were uncapped), you'd probably have to cough up Gil or something, lol.

EDIT: Anyways, a friend of mine on another server in XIV convinced me to give XIV another try. I forgot how much I loved the early game of XIV -- it is fun! Running around, doing quests, I haven't started crafting yet, but I remember the first 20 or so levels being rather fun. It is a shame I'll probably lose interest once I get 50 and some endgame done, esp once I hit that 'brick wall' with crafting where the only thing you have left to do is grind HQ junk and that whole melding thing. I think Honestly, what XIV really needed was... something more to do than Raid Raid Raid Dungeon Dungeon Dungeon at the "end". Sure there's crafts, but I see that getting old too. There's daily treasure maps, but meh. That lasts what, a few minutes? They got those hunts, but that reminds me of NM camping in old FFXI (IE the thing I hated the most about old XI).

Edited, Aug 10th 2014 9:56pm by Lyrailis

They refused some jobs because of the level caps, and in groups, they cared about the bottom line (XP/hr). They were elitist about jobs, because they needed (in their eyes) the "best performance". It didn't help that there was such a small margin of error in the level-capped fights, too. They obviously wanted SMN for the Promyvions, because trying to kill the bosses without SMN was a real pain in the rear, for example.

However, if the missions were uncapped, when there's almost zero chance of losing the fight (having Lv40s and 50s in there), who cares what jobs are there? Going into the Promvyion fights with Lv50s... as long as you have a healer... you could probably just auto-attack the boss and win. With nearly any job combination.

Edited, Aug 11th 2014 7:40am by Lyrailis

Of course, even if you were there at the start, chances are good you were getting your goddamn *** handed to you over and over, because people were both undergeared and didn't know how to handle the fights.

True, but those are fun and frustrating. I remember when full alliances were fighting the NMs outside and would lose. Then I see a low man party with the right strategy destroy the NM. People ask for an invite just for the win and they would ignore you. So, I refuse to believe that these same people would party with a level 30 when you can't even get an invite as a level 99 just for the KI.

I understood your point just fine. You appear to be misunderstanding my counter point.

In XP groups, the "cap" is XP/hr. That's why they cared about what jobs you had there; "better" jobs = faster XP/hr.
In BCNM, the "cap" is higher chances of success. "Better" jobs = more chance of succeeding (failure was costly)
In Capped Missions, the cap is the level cap. "Better Jobs" = more chances of success, and/or easier fights (Promyvions were 5x easier with a SMN's Astral Flow).

However....

UNCAPPED Missions, where you have almost zero chance of failure, there's no reason to care what jobs you have there present, because you WILL win no matter what. When my Linkshell did Promyvion, we cared about job setup. When we did Sacrarium, we only cared about having "enough" of the "good" jobs there, and anybody else could tag along once we met those requirements; we knew we'd win either way.

With uncapped mission fights that are low-level... there's no XP/hr, no danger of failure, so there's really no reason to care what jobs are there.

You're automatically assuming it is because of your job, and not because... they were Japanese and won't group with English players, or maybe they know your name and have heard bad things about you, true or untrue (note: I am NOT accusing you of anything!), or maybe they didn't really feel they needed any extra help? Maybe they were just being jerks?

Correlation != Causation.



Look at previous Final Fantasy games and tell me how many times you actually died to an average boss battle. A few bosses qualify as ThatOneBoss, but most of them are complete wimps, without any level grinding. When's the last time any FF6 story boss actually killed you, assuming you weren't doing a Low Level Run?



Necessary? No. Foolproof? No.

Greatly increases your chances of success? **** Yes.



You're absolutely right! If you have a partial group with, oh, let's say ToAU style grinding... a Lolibri group. Remember those? Those squishy pink birds everybody loved to murder in droves?

Let's say you had, oh I don't know, a WHM healer (no special weapon), you had a PLD tank, and three DD classes of any sort, let's say you had a RNG, a WAR, and a SAM. Someone left group. You have two classes that are (or, were at the time) horribly dependent upon MP.

Therefore, there was one......and only one job.... that you WANTED for that last slot in your group. I'm sure you know which job I'm referring to.

If you saw one in the list, you grabbed it and FAST. Why? Because this job has abilities that would GREATLY help the WHM and PLD out. Grabbing anybody else might work, but you'd have to rest after every few mobs because of people going OOM.

Certain jobs work well together, and certain party setups require certain jobs to make them work. A SC+MB group doesn't work without at least two people who have compatible skillchains that is of an element the BLM wants, and it obviously doesn't work very well without the BLM (or at least it didn't at the time). WHM+PLD without RDM? You crazy? etc etc etc.

You could go NINx2 or WAR/NINx2 and a WHM... and you wouldn't need the RDM as much, true. But what if you didn't have a couple WARs or NINs around and all you had was this PLD and WHM? You either got a RDM or your XP sucked.

EDIT: Another good example of group synergy (and how it caused pain in some peoples' in-game lives): THF. You almost never invited a 30+ THF into the group unless you had two people with Provoke, because the whole THF thing revolved around a temporary tank provoking the mob first, then the THF doing SATA onto the real tank (preferrably with a skillchain, Distortion was the favorite back then). But with nobody with a 2nd Provoke... and the THF was nigh-useless. I remember they eventually buffed Trick Attack, but it still didn't feel like it was enough even after they buffed it; it was still weak when compared to SA+TA combined.

Edited, Aug 11th 2014 11:59pm by Lyrailis