Item Levels... and vertical progressionFollow

And things would get out of hand because of it. My bst alone was running around with 4 sets of gear, ONE job. Had the charm gear, then the tp build/acc gear, followed by WS and finally an evasion or def set in case you stole hate from your pet. That being said, there was a certain fun about collecting all this gear and having a use for absolutely every single piece. Wasn't until Abyssea came out that I really felt I could focus on more than one job (to make that job top notch), then it felt every job could easily get decked out.

I just remember seeing Lizzie Boots and Emp pin's on level 75 chars until they got O-Hat's or whatever other piece of sky gear. Always seemed off to me.

Not everybody finds swapping in 4 gear sets fun, though.

I certainly didn't, especially not with XI's (at the time) atrocious inventory management system (or lackthereof).

When you've got 50-60 inventory slots, MAX, you don't really want to be carrying around 40 pieces of gear on you. You can't pick up anything at all whatsoever, and it takes forever to get ready to do anything, especially back then where mules were all but required to actually play the game (and cost extra) unless you gimped yourself and used less gear in purpose to avoid these issues.

And then, a lot of this gear, was gotten either by blowing huge amounts of gil on the AH... or waiting for mobs that spawn once an hour (at best; most had even worse spawn times) and dropped their item, maybe 10% of the time.

There's spending time in an MMORPG, and then there's spending 10 hours+ on a single piece of gear, while 99% of that time is spent doing absolutely nothing. I don't rightly know of anybody who actually enjoyed standing there and doing nothing waiting on a specific mob to pop because some of those windows were 15min+ and you couldn't look away from the screen for a split second because there were always 3-5 people camping the same mob.

So, to summarize:

1). Inventory system did not support having so much freaking gear on you
2). Getting said gear took ridiculous amounts of time for some of the most boring activities a game could possibly offer (standing there doing absolutely nothing for 15 minutes at a time)

And to add a #3, The mechanic of swapping gear itself is kinda silly when you think about it. Swapping armor in the middle of combat makes no sense lore-wise. It looked silly when people were blinking in and out every few seconds with different outfits every time they casted a different spell, or every time they were about to use a weaponskill, or what-not. Most of it was automated through 3rd-party programs to expand macros (since the official in-game system at the time didn't support it very well either), so there was no real "skill" element involved in swapping all of this gear.

So, the gear swaps only added huge timesinks, and Inventory Management H*ll (a personal pet peeve in any game that has an item inventory), as well as yet more time spent doing boring cr*p (muling equipment for long periods of time to get ready to do something).

Don't know about anybody else in this thread, but when I play a game, I want to play a game to have fun, not spend 90% of my in-game time doing mundane tasks that make me fall asleep at the keyboard and/or feel forced to do stuff like read books/play handheld games/alt-tab the game and do something else. I have minor sleep apnea IRL; I couldn't afford to be sitting there doing absolutely nothing for 15min at a time. That's why I eventually wound up quitting XI until March of this year.

Thankfully they fixed a lot of this stuff in XI (or made it nowhere near as important), otherwise I wouldn't be playing it right now.

Also with the economy the way it is IRL, my time is far more valuable to me. I need to work more hours to keep enough money to live, which means I have less hours to spend on myself. Sitting there staring at the screen bored is just not the way to do that.

Thankfully, outside of DPS Duty Roulette, there's nothing in XIV that makes you wait long periods of time (at least nothing I've found thusfar) and that's a good thing. I can take 15-30min once a day; I can alt-tab and browse forums (since the official game supports Borderless Window without 3rd party addons) until I hear that "SHING!" sound in the background and I have 45sec to react to it (it takes 3-5 to alt tab and click the commence button).

EDIT: And even then, I can even do things like fish the daily GC fish, or do batch material crafting, etc while waiting on the DR.

Edited, Sep 12th 2014 11:13am by Lyrailis

Tbh, Im rather happy with the rate of progression in ffxiv compared to the older times in FFXI.

This is just my opinion, I can understand why others say the exact opposite, everybody has their own opinions and ppl are simply too unique to lump into a couple of categories.

It took me years to finally achieve some things in ffxi , years @@ as it has many many players, in fact I have more to do in there still.. to this very day then I probably ever will have in wow or ffxiv combined.

But that does not mean I get more satisfaction from finally achieving a goal in ffxi, in fact its no more then any other goal in ffxiv or wow.

Extended/excessive time to gain an item used to be a bit more exciting 7-8 years ago but not so much now.

It took me years and years in wow to finally get my ashes of alar mount (it was almost an obsession near the end not a fun goal anymore) and in all honesty when it finally dropped ...it was quite anticlimactic. So so soooo much time passed that to finally achieve it, all my hype and excitement about getting one was literally all used up years ago, I was actually emotionless lol Same thing in ffxi when finally reaching a set goal from years ago.

As for ffxi I much prefer what ffxi is today then what it was years ago. I never believed in making any game a lifes' accomplishment, and should not require zillions of hours to get ahead, games have always been simple entertainment to me.

At any rate im totally ok with ffxiv style atm, as well as ffxi, wow, and rifts. I don't try to over analyze any game as it tends to do strange things to people and can somewhat limit peoples view of reality O.o

Then Spellcast and then Gearswap made so you'd flash one gear set prior to the action being started, then switch to a different set while the action was actually being completed so you could take advantage of BOTH sets of gear.

Pre-cast and mid-cast, I think are the terms. So your fast cast set goes in pre-cast, then you stat heavy set (e.g. INT set or MND set) went into mid-cast.

Super efficient in squeezing every single bit of DPS or curing out of the time you had. Incredibly inefficient for your inventory. Also totally not what the developers ever intended anyone to do, but just a byproduct of sloppy coding.

XIV ARR said right from the start "You cannot change gear in battle." This was a good decision in terms of simplifying abilities, but forces people to min-max based on only one stat instead of all the stats.

Now my inventory is just completely clogged up with vanity gear.

I worked four years on Gjallarhorn. FOUR YEARS. I agree, the day I unlocked it was kind of anti-climactic. I just wanted to be done.

I rated you up for making some valid points. But as much as I abhor the insane amount of mid-battle gear swapping in FFXI, I still think there should be some situational gear changes allowed in FFXIV. Rather than locking you into your gear set for the entire battle, I think they might consider allowing a gear swap cooldown (you can switch a set instantly, but you have to wait a minute to change again, for example) for when things get crazy and you need to adapt to the situation.

I'm thinking of those times where the healer is down or disconnected, but you still have a mage or even a paladin who, if they were allowed to swap to a healing set, could stabilize the situation instead of flailing uselessly with their normal low mind build. Or maybe a Warrior could switch from a DPS set to a main tank set if the Paladin MT drops.

I think allowing players a little more adaptability in battle to use the abilities they have but can't normally pump up could make tough scrapes a little more fun than just wiping and starting over.

I like both of your points, especially the point about areas being dangerous.

One thing I'm torn on with FFXIV is zone sizes. On one hand, I love that they're not giant expanses of wasted space, and I love that they're packed with so much uniqueness. On the other hand, I do miss those feelings I'd have in XI, of being off farming in my own corner of Vana'diel. Currently, Eorzea is too small to ever really be off on your own... there are almost always people running by (which, I know, is a very first-world MMO problem, lol). I'm thinking this will be at least partially solved though (if not substantially solved) when the first expansion launches.

The only thing I really liked about the horizontal gear progression of FFXI was how there were certain hallowed pieces of gear that you just couldn't wait to get... like the joyeuse or the Duelist's Chapeau. To get one of those pieces was a HUGE accomplishment, and stuff like that really nailed down job identity/pride. That feeling is lacking in FFXIV... but, as I said earlier, I also enjoy not having to grind the same event for two or three years just to get one of those imaginary gear pieces.... so there's a healthy give-and-take.

That said, FFXIV does have the zodiac weapon chain, and those weapons will become increasingly valuable as time goes on. I'd personally love the ability to be able to rename our upgraded relics as a way to be more connected to them. Shouldn't every epic weapon be given its own name?

Meanwhile, I gave up fishing in XI because it made my RSI problems worse, even when I tried to use a gamepad. Tried it a few times, but my wrist always felt sore afterwards, so I decided to stop fishing.

Now, I heard that they changed it so you don't have to constantly mash the buttons, so maybe I'll try it again, but way back when when you had to mash the buttons (unless you used some kind of controller program with a turbo feature, but even then that could do more harm than good if you didn't switch directions fast enough), it just wasn't worth it.

The idea was decent at the time, but I rather like XIV's relaxing fishing style, even if 90% of the fish are worthless desynth/GC/vendor fodder.

You could hold the button down, but if the rod changed direction and you missed but a split second, the fish regained more than half of its health in the blink of an eye. It was very unforgiving.

If you mashed the button, you had a slightly better margin of error (the fish wouldn't regain as much health) and since your finger was rapidly tapping the button, your finger was already in motion and could respond to the change faster.

But, tapping the button rapidly made RSI problems worse.

Are you talking about using the directional buttons to counter the rod movements? Depending on what you were fishing, you could just briefly hold the button for about a half second and release. Especially with ferry fishing, this was the preferred technique. Ryugu Titan fish did gain their stamina back quickly, but they also lost it quickly. The fish had a bit of a pattern where every few sways the rod would stay for about 2 seconds. You'd want to wait til you saw that and press the button for about half a second and release then wait for the next big pause.

The stamina decreased at a constant rate based on your skill. There was no real benefit to mashing as you stop draining stamina each time your finger comes off the button and you increased the stamina of the fish with incorrect presses. It only took about 6-7 times to catch the fish if you used the short hold technique.

Rapidly tapping a button != total button presses at a here-and-there pace. Lots of button presses do not hurt the wrists; rapidly tapping a button can.



Some of the spammy AoE moves (esp if you aggro more than 1 mob) is a little excessive at times. Just earlier today doing the Sahagin Tribe quests... I accidentally got 3 pugils on me. I'm a WHM. You seriously cannot get a single spellcast out without having to dodge yet another screwdriver. One fish does it, then another does it 2 seconds later, then another 2 seconds later, you're constantly dodging. It gets annoying sometimes, and sometimes you aggro MORE mobs trying to get out of the AoE and they pack so stinking many mobs in an area (the Slyph Tribe quests are lousy for this too, esp trying to get that Proto Armor FATE required for one of the quests).



The Global Cooldown (at least for PLD) in XIV is twice as slow as the Global Cooldown on slow classes in WoW. Take a fast class like a Rogue or Feral Druid... and you can do 4 abilities in WoW before an XIV PLD can do 2. The people who are saying XIV's is "Slow" are probably WoW players.

There was only one fish I came across that regained stamina as quickly as you're saying. Perhaps you were trying to fish a zone that was far higher than your level range, but I still don't think that 'the blink of an eye' is accurate. Again, tapping the button rapidly was going about it the wrong way. Only a few fish fought furiously enough that you wouldn't fight in a direction for less than a second or two. For those that did, the technique was to tap and hold for a short period every few seconds as I stated about Ryugu.

I logged into FFXI this weekend for the first time in a while for the free log in...
I never though it looked too bad for a older game, but after playing FFXIV for a while now FFXI looks really bad. The colors and textures are bad. I had completely forgot how to do things in the game too.... But the music I like so much better still.. Brings back lots of memories.

I logged into FFXI last night just to reminisce and ride an airship. Nothing changed...I still got to the dock just in time to see the airship fly away.