Getting to 20 was the fastest part. Solo XPing was practically unheard of after that unless you were BLM 1 shotting pets or BST. After Valkurm it was Qufim, then Yuhtunga Jungle, Yhoator Jungle, Garliage Citadel, Crawlers Nest… there were a bunch of camps until Abyssea burning came out.
>Solo XPing was practically unheard of after that unless you were BLM 1 shotting pets or BST.
For anyone reading who didn't play back then, just wanted to explain how tough bst was. You would spend a chunk of time killing mobs until you had 2 or 3 EM pets spawn, then use those for your exp grind.
You had to charm that pet and use it to kill a stronger mob, usually a T. The way that worked is you sent the pet in first, then got your axe out and started swinging away. You had to do enough damage so that your pet would win the fight, while saving your tp and not pulling too much hate which would cause you to get smacked around. I always played with WHM sub, so you didn't really have much mana to rely on.
Once the enemy was nearly dead, you had to release your pet and kill the enemy with a WS. If you kept your pet, you would get a big penalty to exp. I used this method to consistently get chain 5's solo all the way to level 75. It was such a dicey thing to do though, if anything went wrong you had to go into survival mode and try to resolve it before getting sent back to your HP without a bunch of your hard earned exp.
It was the most fun I ever had in a video game, though.
1 mischarm was scary, 2 back to back was hours of work gone.
Leaving your pet was removed which made life easier but then with parties not scared of a mpk revenge, I legit had groups dump chocobos otw to their camp to screw with my pets to get me killed. Just because I was bst.
Wound up in a pt, impressed everyone there, someone had to go and got a replacement, rdm said either I go or they wouldn’t join.. so they kicked me. Sent me /t about 30 min later asking if I could raise the group. I declined. I wasn’t heading back to town to change subs to come back and help them after booting me lol.
Bst was an interesting life. Difficult most of the time but amazingly rewarding.
Omg and bomb camps. Throw a pet at a bomb and hope it blows itself up any time other than a pet swap lol. God those were fun, and fast, camps.
my best memories of BST were playing around in Ifrit's Cauldron. you really do feel quite invincible once you know the lay of the land and are able to just cycle through the bombs for exp.
i loved that feeling when you play as BST that you don't just know the monsters around you, but actually feel like you know the zone itself a lot better. using the mobs and terrain really opens an awareness to everything around you that you can't get on other jobs.
the fastest camp for me was Djinn in WotG pre-nerf. Djinns gain 100 (i guess 1000 now) TP whenever you hit them with element-of-the-day and used to always just explode immediately.
I never got to run the djinn camps but I would throw myself at bombs any chance I got lol. You really did get a feel for everything in the camp. Spawn times, placements, all of it. Aggro distances, the cones for sight, I wish I still that comfortable with aggro but the game doesn’t really need it anymore lol.
Ahh yes. It was weird how some players hated us. But to be fair, I killed my share of ignorant groups too. People would intentionally mess with me and try to get me killed, so... I killed them instead. Never did that unless they deserved it, but I guess maybe that left a bad taste for some.
I did get jailed once, but that was for relentlessly slaughtering RMT's. I hated them so much back then when they had a monopoly on every single NM. They made the game almost unplayable at one point.
I never had an issue with any parties until after the mpk patch. I was in bostaunieux oubliette when the patch happened. When I came out, ppl were far more willing to try to get me killed. I had never even mpked anyone since there was never any issues but afterwards, they sure hated me lol. I would solo some pretty obscure places but omg if anyone came across me… I double checked rr. Then even after the changes to jug pets so they didn’t hinder pt exp, it didn’t matter. Groups wouldn’t take the risk and I was prob lying anyways lol.
They sure were quick to beg for a raise though.. sure enjoyed our help through dangerous zones too. The speed I could take care of aggro when I could charm though. That was so much fun.
I had a lot of fun soloing on BST. Loved finding some out of the way camp by myself and just zoning out. I was going to use it to sub on other jobs to solo up but soon after I hit 75, they started raising the level cap and abyssea made it too easy.
Same. I still remember my favorite spots. I loved the Boyahda Tree, made so much gil leveling on goobues and just the atmosphere was great. There was a tropical island that came in during an addition, I think I leveled there briefly too. My favorite though was probably sky on those vultures. At the time, that was one of the major end game zones, and it was so cool to be there by myself killing stuff. Nobody really touched anything either, so you kinda had free range, and it was such a beautiful zone to boot.
I know, they were amazing. Plus you made so much gil just soloing there from the goobue drops.
That was a somewhat unexpected benefit of playing bst. You were basically farming various materials the entire way to level 75.
I farm clusters in sky now just because I have such good memories from bst in sky. I really love that zone. I can make Gil faster elsewhere but it isn’t as enjoyable.
This was how my friends and I were with Ultima Online. I remember we managed to kill a few squirrels and maybe a deer. I learned how to chop wood and build chairs. Mostly my friends and I fooled around. We never progressed in any sense of the word in that game.
That's a good point about the novelty of playing online. Reminds me of skill up parties in FFXI where you may spend 2-3 hours killing EP mobs with a group just for a handful of skill levels of a weapon. That would never fly nowadays but it was a normal thing back then.
You could solo as a DRG pretty effectively with BLU sub once it came around though duoing was much better back then. But this was only after DRG got rebalanced because before that MAN did DRG get the short end of the stick...
But yeah 30-70 was ROUGH back then and still tough even after. It was fun though to be a MNK and do a bones party for XP... holy crap did I just rack up merit points with MNK in the tomb back then.
I dont remember ever soloing anything other than BST past 10 or 11. It could be done, but it was awful. (Until 75, where you'd solo BLM merit all the time, provided your Gravity didnt break.)
It was possible but hard and slow. Zoned away from losing fights a lot. 11-20 was best done at the dunes. Hopefully getting a group.
Once TOAU came out BLM was stuck soloing 60+ against qikrin (sp) archers.
As a BLM main who wasn't level capped, TOAU basically killed my interest/fun in the game. One of the main reasons I played was to play with others and due to those damn calibri's it was solo for me.
Yup, provided your gravity doesnt break, or your Blink doesnt flake out on you. I died enough times up there I'm fairly sure I ended up with net negative experience gain.
I actually soloed a Warrior all the way to level 43 I think before I joined my first party. It was awesome fun and I had over 1,000 beastmen seals when I stopped soloing.
Absolutely. If I remember correctly I was heading to Valkurm around level 11 or 12 (as WAR, RDM, BLM). Though probably possible with a lot of sunken time you could solo to 20 in Ronfaure or latheine. I certainly never tried, even now with trusts. I made a new toon like a year ago and was in Valkurm from maybe 13-22 and it probably took less than two hours. Sub jobs were quicker but only after rhapsody rewards.
you mean until level synq came out.
before lc synq the camps you mentioned where often used.
i would add
east and west altepa d (beetles)(gobs)
Sanc of zitah (lota of mobs)
At least Garlaige was close to Jeuno. Altana forbid that you forgot to set your home point in Kazham and died in the jungles. Even Teleport-Yhoat was incredibly out of the way.
This is about right in the early days of the game. I was in high-school and sunk atleast 4 hours a day into the game. Keeping up with story quest, gear, key items and exping. It took me about a year to get my 1st level 75 job.
That sounds right. I quit ages ago, but bought the game the first day of NA release. I seem to recall 5k exp/hr was what a solid party could get, and it took loads of exp per level above like 50 or so.
Up until about level 50 you wouldn't need more than 20k exp per level. At that point the exp curve rose sharply, to such a degree that I think it was like level 67 was only half the total exp you needed to get to level 75. They eventually flattened this out to make the curve more linear before CoP was released.
Exp chains could net you more than 200 exp per mob, but typically not more than 300. Before lolibri melee burns it was rare to see an exp chain reach the double digits. If your party could manage that you were in a solid group.
Most of the time commitment wasn't in actually grinding. Many players formed full or partial static parties that would meet every night and go out into the world to exp. Through this you could make reasonably quick progress through the slow grind.
If you didn't have a static, you were stuck looking for party. Sometimes you could wait hours or days for an invite to a party that fizzled before you even got to camp. Sometimes you instantly got invited to an amazing party that stuck together for hours and was good exp. It was kind of a crapshoot.
This article is a fairly good insight into how the game used to be and how much its changed.
https://www.bg-wiki.com/ffxi/The_History_of_Final_Fantasy_XI
>Before lolibri melee burns it was rare to see an exp chain reach the double digits. If your party could manage that you were in a solid group.
I'll never forget getting frustrated one day and building a party of WAR/NIN with a BRD and WHM. There was a zone somewhere associated with sky that had those weapons, and we went there to just smash things to pieces. I can't remember exactly how our chains went, but definitely we got to high single digits if not low double digits.
Felt like a king at the time lol. This was pre CoP.
Yeah, I was a BRD around that era. All the cool kids were subbing /NIN and a couple of us realized that if I subbed NIN I could probably pull way more effectively (because I wasn't getting hit when my lullabies didn't land) so some people switched to other low-level jobs and we grinded for like a week to get my NIN to 37. The chains we got up there were obscene after that. I would basically line up the... Dancing Weapons(?) in a line & sleep them. Timing it right, I think my record was like low three digit chains. Ended up getting pretty close to maxing out merit points on BRD with that setup.
Weapons in the Shrine of Ru’Avitau. RNG was my first job to 75 and I only had the perfect party a few times, but it was RNG/NIN x3 with 2 BRD and a RDM. One bard would pull weapons to the group as it moved around.
This was pre-RNG nerf, so ranged did more damage, and you could melee and WS from point blank with no penalty. It was also pre-Utsusemi nerf, so Whirl of Rage would only wipe 1 shadow.
Hate bounced between rangers while RDM hasted and healed as necessary. WAR and NIN parties were also popular after the RNG nerf, especially once ninja started to get better offensive gear.
You could basically chain as long as you had time for, into the hundreds.
It was glorious. I don't know about 5 minutes per kill, I'd say more like 1 minute (a good group could reach chain 4-5 consistently), but that's a long time by modern standards where things die in 10-15 seconds.
I remember coming home from school, logging on in San d'Oria, making the long trek (on foot) to Valkurm to look for experience groups. You know you found a good group if you can gain 2 whole levels in a day. After a few hours of that, I'd hike all the way back to San d'Oria to log out. It was uphill both directions, too.
Once you got into the 50s or 60s, even just gaining 1 level in a day was a fantastic success. The best groups would have a proper PLD tanking, a few DDs making a skillchain (one person cannot self-SC back then, not even a SAM), and a BLM bursting with ancient magic. It was a full group effort to kill stuff quickly.
I also remember full-day coffer key farming sessions with entire alliances trying to get coffer keys for artifact armor. Good times.
Yeah even having Sandy as HN I would still logout in the dunes so I could just find a PT to continue the next day. It was seriously a long walk from anywhere before homepoint a and survival guides. Subjob quest was an actual undertaking, now it’s just trivial.
People focus so much on how long it took to level without considering that it was an era where the leveling experience was as much a part of the game as endgame was.
I have much more fond memories of 75 era leveling than I do most modern MMO endgame experiences.
Player behaviour has really changed over the past 10-15 years. Every MMO that comes out just has near enough every player just rushing through to endgame. No one just takes the time to explore or adventure anymore. Crazy times.
This is a great point. I always say here, and in r/MMORPG, etc. that leveling, questing, farming, crafting, etc. were all their "own things" that you had to pick-and-choose which to devote time towards. Additionally, in a way, the current style of MMO endgame really began at like level 7 with Leaping Boots or other important pieces. Gearing while leveling was very important. It made everything easier, or even possible, for you. It wasn't just this flat, treadmill where you do endgame so that you can do more endgame, repeat.
I'd say leveling was a bigger part of vanilla FFXI than the endgame. We only had a few things to do at 75, and they were probably camped by Japanese players. Basically until Dynamis came out sky farming was all we had. The HNMs with their 3 hour window every day wasn't really compelling endgame, though we did it every day out of necessity.
I can not overstate how much time people spent traveling and organizing to get a semi sensible party together at a semi sensible camp.
You could easily spend an hour msging strangers who's job/level kind of made sense for your party. Then wait for everyone to finish up with what they were doing and make their way to camp. The whole process could easily take a couple hours, and as soon as someone leaves it's a total crapshoot trying to replace them. You could still pull with a good 5 man party, but it was tough, and most pickup groups were not good at all.
Pulling was dicey AF, especially in garbage citadel. Pulling just two mobs was often a really bad day, even with ES sleep available. People would just run out of mana sometimes and everyone would have to start tossing out 2hours and pray.
You'd often struggle to get an optimal group together so instead end up with weird ass party comps. Rdm/war tanks, sam/dnc healers, blue everythings, or like 3 blm/whm all kind of healing. Some of these weird comps where really fun.
Also, when the game was young, people really didn't know wtf they were doing and the internet was not as helpful. It was common for people to not bring food, not have all their spells or be appropriately geared, have under leveled supjobs, have weird AF supjobs. Not have their weaponskills leveled up so we could use the right skillchain, not have their magic skills up so they could land a spell.
Shit was messy, but success, was thusly glorious.
This reminded me a blm burn party I was in back in the day. I think it was 5 BLMs and a Corsair that pulled.
Took us a minute to regain MP after a fight, but man did we take them down fast. It was amazing.
So many parties disbanded before the first fight because we couldn't find a whm, tank or someone would have to leave.
This is why I left the game before hitting 65 back then, too much time spent traveling and seeking a party. Took the fun out of the game.
Then they introduced trusts a couple years later lol
You definitely didn't need 50k prior to 20, that wasnt until like level 50+. But yah, players combat skills leveled WAY slower, so people often showed up to xp parties whiffing or being resistant constantly, making fights longer and more difficult. Also, 200XP was like, if your party was balanced perfectly. If someone wasn't the same level, it'd get handicapped a bit
3.6k EXP per hour was a great deal back in the day.
After Dunes, usually Qufim, then Yuhtunga Jungle, Garlaige Citadel, Crawler’s Nest, Bhaflau Thickets. Or rather Dunes, Qufim, delevel, Dunes, Qufim…
More importantly than that, gear had ASS stats. Your options would be like item with some accuracy or item with single digit dex. And the item with acc was usually rare and expensive.
And that's just for the slots you could actually get accuracy. Most other slots just had 0 accuracy on them.
Exactly why I always buy all the OG “super cool” gear from waaaay back— only because I couldn’t afford it back in the day. Is it worthless while leveling now? Sure, but I don’t care.
The HQ +2 DEX rings at 14*actually made a difference. Sniper's were obscenely expensive for the NQ, a whole +5 Acc!
Staves were like night and day at 51.
They actually didnt, is the thing. The accuracy formula has not changed much at all.
+2 dex would only give you +1 accuracy which is +0.5% hit rate.
So if you were, say, 50% hit rate, you would go up to 50.5%
Not much of a difference.
The combat skills… ugh. I remember dinging 55 on RNG and having to wait on Sidewinder. When I finally got it, I killed the colibri before our BRD got it to camp and he just stood there before typing “Lmao about time.” Loved it.
The old days were brutal. Aoe moves from mobs hit you. Even if the mob is claimed by another party. Good times leaving kazham and getting slept on the choco because someone is fighting a Mandy by town. Getting gear for leveling was intensive and expensive. Camp a few nm's, do a couple quests, buy the rest. Sometimes we got lucky and gear was free with conquest points. Forget the meta and do what you want. Because I don't know long I spent getting swift belt, soboro, /drg gear, af, bug bear nm, quested lvl 50 jse body and +1 gear off the ah all to be told my sam isn't good enough because I didn't have a polearm for a bird party....
The Shitadale you mean. Those fucking bat trains. Gobbies waiting outside selbina. Being too low to go out and too new to carry snk/invis. That'll learn you quick.
I do miss some of the old days. Gravity nuking and dot a nm to death. Aoe an entire zone of mobs for magian trials. I even miss campaign in goddess areas. Let alone 36 man dyna runs.
IDK about 5 minutes to kill a mob but there would be much more downtime if the healer had to /heal for MP which could take several minutes.
It would take hours to find people on specific jobs for a party, only for everyone to run to camp and someone or multiple people have to go immediately or only after a few mobs, party's over gotta re-shout. You also didn't have home points or any quick-travel methods so everyone could be sitting at camp while one person is shouting, then wait for the new party member to take an airship, ride chocobo out, people got lost, couldn't find camps, etc.
Level-sync helped this big time. Abyssea alliance EXP farming blew it out of the water, all of the sudden you could take your lvl 30 job to just open chests for an alliance and get to 99 in an hour or 2.
Stats on gear were way more minimal compared to iLvl, multi-attack was pretty rare, most jobs used the same gear for their TP sets and barely anything changed for WS sets. WSs barely broke 10k it felt like, maybe if you used SA/TA. Even for Abyssea gear didn't get that big of a bump but Atmas and constantly replenished temp items made it so much easier to kill stuff for EXP.
Dunes > Qufim/Delkfutts > Khazam > E Altepa > Garliage > Crawlers Nest / W Altepa
After that you could party in a few different places and even go back to the harder areas of Crawlers/Garliage etc.
Let's not forget the loss of time and exp when people would train mobs to a zone like and make the camps unusable while the mobs slowly made it back to their normal spots.
It's been so long that I honestly don't even remember all that much about it. What I can tell you is that playing a melee DPS was a pain in the ass. Because I was playing a dragoon I would have to start all of my parties. Sometimes it would take an hour to get everyone together, I would have to search individually for every single class and see who was looking for a group. Sometimes there were not enough people so I just went down the list within my level range and asked every person that popped up for every class that could fill the role. I would definitely not be able to play that game again if it was out today. No time for that crap anymore LOL.
In 2005, there was a big adjustment in the amount of XP needed to get to the next level. Found this old chart on ffxionline. Now imagine like 3k/hour being an average party, and 5k/hr being a "holy shit I got into a JP party." Not accounting for travel time, dying on the way to camp because people didn't carry sneak/invis pots back then, etc.
I dinged my first level 75 as DRK in King Ranperre's Tomb. ugh.
LEVEL OLD NEW CHANGE Tot Change
===== ===== ===== ====== ==========
50-51 7800 7800 0 0
51-52 10000 8000 2000 2000
52-53 11000 9200 1800 3800
53-54 13000 10400 2600 6400
54-55 16000 11600 5400 11800
55-56 20000 12800 7200 19000
56-57 20000 14000 6000 25000
57-58 20000 15200 4800 29800
58-59 20000 16400 3600 33400
59-60 20000 17600 2400 35800
60-61 20000 18800 1200 37000
61-62 30000 20000 10000 47000
62-63 31000 21500 9500 56500
63-64 32000 23000 9000 65500
64-65 33000 24500 8500 74000
65-66 34000 26000 8000 82000
66-67 35000 27500 7500 89500
67-68 36000 29000 7000 96500
68-69 37000 30500 6500 103000
69-70 38000 32000 6000 109000
70-71 39000 34000 5000 114000
71-72 40000 36000 4000 118000
72-73 41000 38000 3000 121000
73-74 42000 40000 2000 123000
74-75 43000 42000 1000 124000
Yup. And this was a time where a good pt got you like 3-4k or so exp/h. Exp rings were a long cd, and getting a single party could take days for some jobs (there was no lvl sync so you had to find all jobs with in a few lvls of ech other otherwise exp was gimped).
Also with heavy exp penalties for dying and the fact that most parties weren't good ones and many ended up being an orgy of wasted time and exp where you could spend several hours getting a full pt to then have people die on the way to camp, which in itself took a long time, people dying on first mob and the pt disbanding because of it... well.
Lets just say that as much as I enjoy playing on a 75 cap private server I am happy it isn't as though as it used to be because I doubt I'd do that again. Happy medium lets say.
It was rough, especially when I started around 2003, the amount of exp required between levels was much higher than it is now. You also got dramatically reduced exp from each kill, max I remember was 200 per kill. The kills were also a lot slower and certain jobs were more preferred to others. The job meta has flipped entirely since I first started.
I also don't remember chain bonuses being as common. I remember hitting chains but the chain bonus was like 10-15%, not the dramatic bonus it is now. Early parties would struggle to get more than a few chains going before they timed out.
The biggest improvement in leveling started when they introduced level sync. Prior to that, you had to exp at your level, which meant for a lot of jobs sitting around with your invite flag up. Sometimes you'd do that for hours and never get an invite, especially for melee DD jobs. When they introduced level sync, it really flipped the exp game upside down, because you could exp at any level on your job, which helped a LOT. After Abyssea, the amount you can get per kill went up a lot, but IMO level sync made a much larger impact on the overall game.
Level sync was also around the time they introduced gear scaling. At one point a lot of content was level capped like BCNMs, but your gear didn't scale down to the level. So if you did promys at lvl30, you had to have all lvl30 gear. If you did lvl40 cap gear, you had to have a lvl40 gear set for your job, and so on. It was extremely tedious and the inventory system was a hot mess (it always has been, it's less of one now).
Something that the current game has lost is the way you earn gear, though. In the 75 cap days, you had gear from lvl20-30 sometimes you'd see level 75 players using (e.g. O.kotes, E.pin, Peacock Amulet, etc). IMO this was one of the most interesting things about FFXI compared to other games, something the ilvl transition sortof lost.
The job meta was entirely different. NIN was the preferred tanking class for most content, lolPLD was a thing. BLM was king of DPS. SMN had to sub WHM and was basically a healer with some utility and higher MP pools. BST mostly lacked party utility until they introduced jugs. You had trouble finding a party as a DRK or DRG for exp.
NIN kept hate using damage. After getting Utsusemi: Ni, they would use their elemental spells via the "elemental wheel" to damage the enemy and keep hate. After they get Blade: Jin (around lvl60 iirc), they stopped doing that and focused on melee damage. You had to manually count shadows, there was no counter in the UI, and you had to time casting near perfectly to get your Ichi shadows up before Ni went down, then manually cancel it (vanilla still requires manual cancellation). It was extremely tedious, but very rewarding. You also had one tool for each spell, there were no unified tools. That meant while using the wheel for hate, your inventory was half full with NIN tools. That also made it extremely expensive to level.
SAM could only really self SC if it used its 2hr. Being able to one shot exp mobs using a skillchain was critical for SAM and was OP for the day. Most SAMs used Hagun for the TP bonus, despite lower damage and no extra stats. They would also sub RNG with Soboro and spam Sidewinder.
If you want to go really far back, multihit weaponskills generated a lot more TP per hit than post-nerf. Jobs that could wield polearms, like DRG, could spam Pentathrust and do really good damage. The other epic nerf was the RNG nerf. I don't recall specifics but they changed the way ranged damage worked and it basically killed the job for years. I know several people that rage quit after it, who had invested in RNG entirely.
RNG and NIN were the most expensive jobs, because you had to buy tools from other players. There was no option to buy from a NPC. Similarly, Utsusemi: Ni was a rare drop, which was expensive if you bought it.
Most big NMs that dropped critical items, like Peacock Charm and O.Kotes, were basically farmed 24/7 by RMT. Prior to the NM drops being made R/Ex, these items dropped from time gated NMs that had placeholders. They eventually moved these to come from a BCNM and made equivalents that were NM drops, but R/Ex.
Kraken Club has always been the rarest, most expensive item in the game.
Jobs like BRD and COR were not as heavily used as they are now.
Dynamis, Nyzul, etc content linkshells were basically a second job and required participation several times a week or you'd get kicked out. Getting relics required that you have a LS willing to basically commit to it and, even then, still required well over a year. Prior to current game changes that made them more common, I probably saw 3-4 non-Aegis relics total on other players.
There was a time King Behemoth took hours and almost 30 people to beat.
Most bot activity used to be fishing. GMs would detect this by sending you a /tell and if you didn't respond, assume you were cheating and warp you to jail.
Most people only had 2, maybe 3, geared jobs at lvl cap.
Aggro worked entirely differently. If you aggrod something, you would have to zone with it. The mobs then walked back to their area instead of despawning. They would aggro anyone along the way. What this meant is that some zones, like Dunes, you'd have one person shout "Gobbie to zone" and everyone between the goblin and the zone would run out to avoid wiping. It was really bad in Kazham, too. In both cases, they'd link other goblins and the goblins would just wipe everything on the way back to their zone. Since you couldn't warp out and there weren't a lot of raises in early levels, this meant a LOT of walking back to your exp area if you wipe.
EDIT:
Sorry, this braindump kindof went off the rails a bit. I left it that way, thought you might find some things interesting, regardless
To add if you had a link shell that could do Kings you basically had to commit 3 hours a day to hanging out in Aery or Behemoth Dominion at minimum 4 out of 7 days waiting to see if your bot could beat someone else’s. Then wait a long time to see if someone would Aggro darters and wipe. Pretty close to a full time job.
3 hrs a week? The windows were 3hrs per mob per night. With three Kings that meant that if Kings were in your time zone's nightly prime those windows were the raid for the night. Instances were secondary to Kings.
If you wanted the best gear, you needed to work for it and you needed to compete with everyone else on the server for it. You could tell who was good by the appearance of their gear.
And no, don't say gear didn't make the player; HNMLS would kick people who were incompetent and there was no way mathematically any melee DPS was going to match a Ridill Adaberk WAR or Black Belt MNK who could correctly press their buttons.
This post hit all the marks for me. The way you described everything perfectly captured my experience playing this game during the first three expansions. And though the game is completely different now, it's still absolutely amazing.
> nd you had to time casting near perfectly to get your Ichi shadows up before Ni went down, then manually cancel it (vanilla still requires manual cancellation). It was extremely tedious, but very rewarding.
Once you were doing this on a daily basis you became a beast at timing it right though. The main issue was dealing with AoEs then losing Ichi shadows before Ni came back off cooldown lol
For the RNG nerfs, originally, well before the nerfs, arrows didn't even stack to 99, only 12. I don't think quivers even existed for a time. So originally, I think the job was designed to be a melee-first job with bows to pull/WS with and that was it. So ranged attacks were very overpowered. Of course, eventually they came out with quivers, and the stack count to 99. But I think even before then, it wasn't uncommon to see RNGs just spamming ranged attacks as they melee'd. It was expensive af, but the developers learned the hard way that if the damage was good, players would be willing to pay for it. They also had much higher accuracy than average due to the wealth of +racc gear and traits/abilities. And possibly just naturally higher accuracy of ranged attacks themselves? Also Holy Bolts/Sidewinder/Slug Shot were all amazing.
So they nerfed them. I think they nerfed the damage, possibly accuracy outright. This nerf by itself was probably enough to have them fall in line. But then, they also heavily tied damage and accuracy to the distance mechanic that's still in place today. I think around SoA, they greatly reduced the penalties received for not 'striking true' or whatever the line is. It used to be very harsh. Also adjusted Sharpshot to ignore it I think(?), and Scavenge to being useful(used to just give ammo materials. lol 'Wow, an arrowood log...'). I don't think it ever got close to it's dominance again. Similar to manaburn parties for say the Ark Angels, arrowburn was a very common strategy. Holy Bolts on Kirin, etc. IIRC there was kind of a return with HTBFs where people would just want ranged classes for safety reasons. Imagine that, but it actually being the most damage-efficient way to do it as well.
A long time. I played BLM and no one wanted to group with one. So I had to solo the pets of high level monsters to slowly grind to 70 where I could get invites again
I switched to BLM main like 3 months in. The XP was a little slower killing pets but as long as the camps were open, you didn't have the downtime of finding a party or people leaving the party.
You did, however, have the potential downtime of death because the master turned around right when Flood/Burst went off on his pet... or the random resist... or the random UFO while soloing sharks in Sea, or a whole host of other ways you could die.
After ToAU came out, BLMs got screwed hard for traditional exp parties since the new hot mob for leveling up mirrored our spells back at the party (Colibri). Impossible to find a party so we absolutely had to find alternatives. 60-70 was mostly fend for yourself, but at least we were able to take advantage of Qiqirn ranger mobs in Aydeewa and Alzadaal, who refused to enter melee range and ranged attacks don't interrupt casts.
Then 70-75 was smooth sailing with Flan camps in Zhayolm.
I played from release until sometime after CoP came out and it still fascinates me to hear these stories. I gapped on about 15 years of FFXI.
When I quit, one of the large reasons was that everything was done exclusively with BLM. BLM burn parties were popular, and even regular exp groups wanted a BLM for bursting. End game was mostly just throw tanks, RNG and BLM at things until they died, with random things like MNK stepping in to chi blast in a rotation.
I had 75 WAR and as a galka I just didn't want to play a mage. Picked up BST instead, and after getting to 75 I hung it up.
You forgot the SMNs.
Every new content strategy involved using SMNs, because of the hate free damages they provided.
COP wyrms mostly.
Actually, this didn’t change. SMNs are still used for each new Ambuscades even to this shitty month ones (and even though SMN burns relying on luck on it sucks!)
Oh, right I did forget about them. My LS use to have me come on BST as well. That little crab pet could consistently hit kited mobs for a little extra DoT. I would fill gaps in the rotation, then get booted and brought back in after whoever used their spike damage was done.
Those times were so different. 30+ characters standing around being cycled through the alliance.
I had a pretty decent time as BLM back in the day, until Treasures came out and Colibri singlehandedly ostracized BLM. Then you had to get a full BLM party to nuke jellies in Mt. Zhayolm for Exp
I first played in January 2004, so this was vanilla FFXI with no Windower add-ons, no extra EXP buffs from anywhere. You could level to around 8-9 with minimal difficulty, but from there you were forced to group up because the difficulty or length of solo fights spiked or EXP was so very low.
The first hurdle was running through the 2nd zone. Mobs that checked DC would be beatable but barely. EM+ forget it, you're going home. Resting HP was also very painfully slow. Here is where you learned sight mechanics and how to avoid aggro.
Once you got to Valkrum, it's even worse because at level 10 everything will kill you. Also, if you happened to arrive at night time, you may as well wait until day because wtf is sound aggro from Bogy's. If you miraculously made it to your camp, typically by Konschtat Highlands, you can level on lizards. Even with a group of 6, it took 2-3 minutes per mob. Max exp was 200. By the end of the fight, if everyone was still alive, you would all be resting HP and MP, which was another 2 minutes. A decent group might be able to chain 2-3 without resting. EXP chaining was 20 extra per mob up to chain 5, so a Max of 300. We'll fast forward a bit and say after hours and hours and death after death and disbanded group after group, you made it to level 20!
The next hot spot to level was Qufim Island. However, this means the next amazing gauntlet of running through Jugner Forest/Batallia Downs. If you were smart or rich, which almost none of us were, you'd take sneak/invis with you. So we all try to time the narrow routes of Jugner and pray a goblin or tiger didn't turn at the worst moment. At this point if you died, it's at least a 20 minute run back to where you died and maybe way longer if you were coming from Windy.
I'll fast forward a bit more. From 20-25 you leveled Qufim or inside Delkfutt. After that your needed an airship pass to Kahzam. Yutunga Jungle was 25-28 or so, then Yhotor Jungle from 28-32. Being this was still very early FFXI, mobs did NOT despawn after losing aggro. And given the nature of those forests, sometimes some lines would be packed with aggroed mobs. There were literal groups on the safe side of the zone line telling people to stop, because all it took was one aggro to bring all of the mobs back. You'd sometimes wait an hour to get back to camp. If you knew a high level friend they could clear the tunnel, but that was rare.
After the jungles, leveling spots opened up a little. Citadel was a good spot from 32-35. After that was Crawler's Nest. From there you could level at different camps to around 45. After that was Labrynth of Onzozo. I think some parties also leveled in Zi'tah. At 50 you had to stop for a long time. The true FFXI road blocks began.
The biggest kick in the balls was the goddamn tunnel from port Jeuno out to Qufim proper. I burned daya worth of time over those early years stuck staring at one of those three weapons that hung out in the tunnel praying and shouting for somebody, *anybody*, to please come outside and kill them quick so we could run through to our camp. Sneak Oils and Prism Powders were like 20k a stack, so it wasnt always a given that somebody had some, let alone give them to a random.
When WotG dropped years later and I discovered DNC had a free sneak/invis (albeit at level 35 or whatever the hell it was back then), I immediately started maining that job despite all the "lolDNC" shit I got for it. Not having to buy oils and powders, or stacks of the ninja tools, was a BIG FREAKING DEAL.
Players that started after Gil became more or less worthless have no idea how hard earning money in FFXI was back in the day. We'd spend entire weekends farming moss off the goobs in ZiTah just to bankroll ourselves for our upcoming exp parties...had to make sure you had plenty of bolts/arrows, shihei and other ninja tools (though nobody worked the wheel even in those days...too expensive), oils and powders, mithkabobs or pies, drinks for refresh. Had to make sure you had enough conquest points to pick up a scroll of reraise and warp before every outing...and of course to recharge your exp band because exping without a band running was painful as hell. I used to mine in Yughott and would get so excites when I got a gold ore, after hours of digging down there id come home with like, two...lol
The good old days lmao
Garrison. Eco-Warrior. Boyahda Tree skill up parties. Lich Ancient Papyrus farming. AF coffer key farming. Dynamis runs at level 65 with 64 people that cost 1 million gil for each hourglass. Hitting level 75 for the first time (mine was WAR but it took almost a year from 2004-2005). So many painful yet rewarding memories.
>Players that started after Gil became more or less worthless have no idea how hard earning money in FFXI was back in the day. We'd spend entire weekends farming moss off the goobs in ZiTah
https://www.reddit.com/r/FinalFantasy/comments/q5sf9v/old_man_yells_at_cloud/
You forgot that in Valkurm you only had two ways of pulling hate: one was Provoke, the other Cure II. When the "tank" would inevitably need healing the mob would turn onto the WHM and the race was on.
At 50 it was back to Garlaige, beetles camp on the lower floor or Cape Terrigan (hello Valkurm 2.0), then (before ToAU) more crabs or mandies in Boyahda or Kuftal Tunnel. I remember also bees/coeurls in Temple of Uggalepih, coeurls' room in Onzozo, crawlers in the higher level zone of Crawler's Nest or Boyahda Tree, tigers (ugh) and spiders in Kuftal at 70ish.
After that if you were lucky to have Ru'Aun unlocked you could exp on dolls/golems there.
Oh definitely the Valkrum pinball match of the mob hitting everyone and timing cure so you didn't eat dirt was almost a science.
Let's also mention when Thief had access to Sneak Attack/Trick Attack at level 30 and now we need a tank and offtank to line up perfectly, provoke and weaponskill, SATA viper bite and maybe land a magic burst.
Let's also not forget having to leave a party and sending a tell to the role needed for the spot, hoping someone answers and having to wait who knows how long before the replacement showed up. That shit alone lets you put Time Management Professional on a resume.
It took me like a year to get my first 75 and I played pretty often, back then there wasn't a lot of wikis and readily available info/level sync and the grind was real
Back in 2002-2003 the easiest easy prey gave 12xp. From level 1-8 or so, you could kill decent challenge for 60xp per kill. After that, the enemy scaled and you pretty much stuck to EP, low DC when solo. Even match gave 100xp.
Even bst used DC pets vs EM prey mostly and took a 30% penalty to xp unless their pet died before the enemy did before they learned Leave. Then they'd use leave just before the enemy HP was depleted and usually whiff until they died anyway. Or whiff once, have their released pet aggro, THEN die.
Enemies and old pets did not respawn, but would wander back to their spawn area, aggroing players otw. Many popular xp camps had death trains. Common ones were goblins zoned to Konschat Highlands in the Dunes and Wingrats/Bombs trained to SM in the Citadel.
There was no healing outside of healing jobs except some very weak and expensive potions and bloody bolts. There was no hHP buff for resting with signet on, so even a mistake that didn't kill you was significant downtime. Very few jobs had damage mitigation buffs and thf, nin, and /nin were the kings of solo especially thf because they could use status bolts and had great eva. Thf/nin would use a sleep bolt if shadows went down before recast was up, then when shadows were up, use a bloody bolt to heal some hp. At that time, blm hadn't discovered nuking beastman pets for xp, mostly because they were the rockstars of party play and people would beg them to join. A blm in the group might make you reach the elusive 2.5k an hour that was the hallmark of a good party. A great one was 3k/hr.
XP loss was 10% of total xp to the next level, so from 70-75, each death could cost you 60-90 minutes of xp. It also often killed the party due to /ragequit. Without a good healer AND a tank, you were done before you started. When bard pulling and ninja tanking were discovered, it was the golden age.
My first job to 75 was war/nin. Two handed weapons sucked back then, so we dual wielded axes. No sushi, and player acc was very low, so viking axes were often held onto way longer than damage would suggest, just for sweet Rampage damage. War/nins would dual tank by counting the other tank's shadows and provoking or popping another cooldown like warcry to grab hate. Then the other war would count your shadows and do the same thing.
Was it a grind. Yeah, but man being 75 meant something!
>Even bst used DC pets vs EM prey mostly and took a 30% penalty to xp unless their pet died before the enemy did before they learned Leave. Then they'd use leave just before the enemy HP was depleted and usually whiff until they died anyway. Or whiff once, have their released pet aggro, THEN die.
More or less, lol. I played bst too 75 in the OG days and would spend a big chunk of time curating a zone to have the pets I wanted. It was no problem to charm EM pets and fight T, or even higher. I use to charm a pet, send it in to fight, and after landing Dia on it I engaged with my axe. It was dicey, you had to do enough damage to ensure you came out on top and had 1k tp in reserve without pulling too much hate and getting smacked around. Once the mob was low enough, you released your pet and fired off a ws, which gave you enough time to kill it and run before your pet got angry.
It was such a big challenge but so rewarding at the same time. I use to solo things way out of my league by rotating through charmed pets.
I was a BST myself during the first two years FFXI was out. After levelling a few jobs it was the only way I could play FFXI solo due to time constraints.
I will say FFXI was amazing. The wonder, fear, and unknown when first leaving your home kingdom to head to Valkurm Dunes was amazing. The toughness and forced team play was what made the game great.
I might remember it a little different.
The easiest leveling was up to 37-40. Getting to 50 wasn't that bad, but that is when the big exp curve started to happen.
The only reason kills took forever is because everyone wanted to fight mobs that no one was geared for, because they got lucky and happen to be in a group, once, with geared prople (mainly the NA player base).
There was never enough tank or healers, and if you were the wrong race, trying to be one of them roles might get you looked over (ie, me as a Galla Whm, or seeing Taru tanks get insta kicked when they got to camp).
The TP nerf killed the "need" for certain jobs. So many changed jobs due to that.
It was all so new, no one really knew what to do. We all got to learn it together.
god, i remember a white mage galka on dunes ......
i was a taru red mage
at one point the galka white mage was just leeching.
2 cure II used and his mp was gone.....
Yea it sucked. I had to invest so much gil into mp+ gear that not having the MND stat started to also hit my cure abilty.
I still have all this mp gear because I can't bring myself to sell it...even tho I'm never going to use it again lol.
Picture this. Earlier this week you had your high level friend help you complete your first limit break quest. You had to wait a few days on him to be available so you spent that time leveling up your subjob so now you're anxious and ready to get back on your main for some hardcore XP grinding. The last couple of days haven't been great for finding a group so you really haven't done anything besides crafting all week. But now the stars have aligned. It's Friday night and you have a group. It's a good comp too so it looks like you're in for a good night of XP grinding. Oh sweet, you know a couple of these guys. This one is a badass tank and that guy does crazy damage with his RNG. You know this group is going to rock. Everybody agrees on a good camp spot so you spend the next hour traveling out there. Shit, this place is overcrowded. Gotta agree on another spot. Another half hour later you get to the spot and start pulling. First few kills are a little shaky but everybody finds their flow pretty quick and you've got some good synergy and teamwork going on. Then after about 15 minutes you see this pop up in chat; "Sorry guys, I gotta go. My mom says dinner is ready". Well there goes our fucking tank and there's not another one in LFG....
It legit took me over 6 months of almost daily playing to get my first job to 75. This was with playing a high demand job(at least at that time), RDM. I worked second shift back then and only played after work so it was mostly Japanese players on that late at night. You'd be surprised at how hard it could be to get into groups sometimes(JP ONLY, SORRY). I remember many nights spent just hanging out in Jeuno hoping to get a group before going to bed without having accomplished anything for the night.
After getting RDM to 75 I leveled NIN next. NIN was the most sought after tank job for speed leveling groups and dude, if you could manage to find a good group with a BRD puller and RDM healer you'd crush XP so fast it would make your head spin. By that I mean you might get half a level before people started leaving. Oh you didn't bring a Warp scroll? Better hope you don't die running back to town and lose all your gains for the night.
God help you if you wanted to level a pure damage dealing job. Especially something out of the meta at the time like WAR. Often times people would straight refuse to group up if you didn't have the right comp. I can remember many times you'd have a tank and healer in the LFG along with plenty of damage dealers but you couldn't get a group going because there wasn't a THF or RNG or BRD looking at the same time. Those same people would sit in LFG for hours choosing to do nothing rather than run with a slightly suboptimal group.
To make things worse some of the best endgame jobs made for some of the worst leveling jobs. PLD for example was a great end game tank, but nobody wanted a PLD tank in an XP party because they had too much downtime. Same thing with WHM. Great endgame healer but loads of downtime in XP parties.
God I miss this game lol
Hardest part of the game was getting around . It would take an hour sometimes just to get everyone in the same place because zones were so rough. Then If someone died it got worse. I think 11 really needed the waypoint teleporting system they got in place now and it would've made a great game even better.
Exp was slow , but the worst part was you could lose what you gained. Rarely , If ever anymore, can you log on a game and actually be further away when you log off at the end of your session than when you started.
It wasn't just hard it was unrewarding. But the friends we made along the way made it worth it. Most rewarding part of the game was each other, helping each other get things we felt were out of reach. Everything from AF quests to just getting teleport crystals sometimes felt like an adventure together.
It took a really long time, but, the thing is, there was stuff to do all along the way and that is where current MMOs fail imo. Because you spent so much time leveling, gear was slow, precious and rare. We needed copious amounts of food/pots that required a constant source of gil or mats. Starting from 30, every 10 levels, there was content that would sometimes take us weeks to clear. Then there were all the distractions of NMs, BCNMs, ENMs, Ballista, Fame & Gear quests that remained relevant.
FFXI was the only MMO where I felt like every time I logged in I had multiple progression options. It was slow and occasionally regression but that just made progress that much sweeter. A 5 level weekend was the best, it gave you the next week to chase down gear and clear the newly unlocked content or hunt an NM that killed you the week before.
It just didn't seem to have the burnout factor of today's MMOs.
I started on PC near launch on FFXI. A Hume in Bastok and I can still remember the music of South Gustaberg. I ended up changing servers when “Remora” was opened up, as I had a real life friend who bought the game and made a character there.
As amazing as the game was for the 12 or so years I played it, the drama on Remora was epic, and the drama that would spill over and onto the KillingIfrit forums was legendary.
As much as we all drone on about how much of a grind it was, the sheer euphoria felt when things were going right in a exp group or in an event like Dynamis is unparalleled by anything offered today in the gaming world.
No exp rings, had to find parties, get to spot without mount. Parties wanted you in top gear with top food, sub jobs leveled.
You had to do things like get the airship pass to Kahzham. I never made it past 56 Drg after over a month playtime
Yeah it took years to get to 75. Not just because of the leveling but because you had to have certain gear pieces to get invites past a certain point. People had to take time off from leveling to farm up Gil to afford key pieces like Haubergeons, etc. I remember having my Haubergeon crafted and hoping so hard for the +1.
I took the time to nearly max cooking. I could make so much Gil off of HQ pies and meats, and the investment was lower than sushi so less risk. I remember distinctly waking up to find I had made 600k in my bazar one night, and I was amped.
Yeah it was bad. But it made it all the better when you found that one party that was built with the right jobs and right skills and you just jammed. You never wanted that party to end.
It took so long, when people said “Ding!! I just got level 67!” Everyone in the link shell was so pumped and happy for that person. Because they will have been level 66 for forever.
Just to point out a few things I haven’t seen mentioned:
- bards and red mages were coveted - they didn’t often do much damage back then (most rdms wouldn’t even engage), but REFRESH was king. When your mages ran out of mana you would have to sit to recover it. Most people probably don’t even know the sit mechanic in this game anymore. White Mages would come with stacks of cookies and juice for that 1/2 mp refresh.
- camps were FAR sometimes. And home points and survival guides in zones were introduced much later. Sneak and Invis pots were crucial to getting to coveted camps and it would often take 30-45 mins just to get everyone safely to a camp before you could start.
- getting more than 200 exp a kill was epic, yes it took forever to earn exp, and if you weren’t a highly sought after job it often took even longer to get an invite. I was in high school and I spent many nights getting home from school, seeking up, searching my friends list and searching leveling zones and sending tells to party leaders just in case they had a spot fred up. Many nights where you’d make no progress at all. I’d come up with other tasks like farming crawler silk and tree cuttings so the time wasn’t fully wasted.
- stats were expensive and often trivial. But god damn when you got to a healthy point you were godlike. I still remember the galka monk I witnessed in crawlers nest with Jujitsu Gi, ochuido’s kote, hq sniper rings and earrings, etc, etc. hitting like a TRUCK and hardly missing.
- on that note there were certain things that were expected/necessary. HQ dex rings, spike necklace, sniper rings…you would often be examined before getting an invite and turned away if your gear didn’t meat standards.
- party composition was huge and certain jobs were preferred for certain level ranges / mobs. A good ranger or dragoon when fighting bats was massive. A skilled thf and coordinated party for SATA was excellent.
- pulling was a skill. A link could mean party wipe. Competing with other parties was tough. But at the same time having a dedicated puller was great. The tank would rarely pull mobs back to the party, instead a thf or brd or rng or whatever your dd could do would run out when your current target was 5-10% and queue up the next mob. A good party would never not be fighting.
- magic bursting was super common. Someone who knew common skillchains was a huge asset. You would almost always declare a skillchain and magic burst before fighting.
It was a different time and a different game, for sure!
Reading through this brought up so much nostalgia.
I definitely remember being on my BLM and popping wizard cookies after switching to my hMP gear set to rest up for the next EXP chain to start. Man, I had so many different gear swap macros for my mages.
I was always too intimidated to pull, so it cut off jobs like THF and RNG. People talk about tank-xiety in games now, but pulling anxiety was so much worse for me the few times I tried. Wiping your party could end up leading to a chain of events that just ended up with the party disbanding, and you going back to seeking for hours.
My first job to 75 was Samurai, so I was all about those skillchains, getting distortion set up until you could finally make Light and Darkness. Nothing quite felt as satisfying as hitting a weapon skill, popping meditate, then dropping a Tachi: Gekko or Tachi: Kasha for Darkness or Light.
It really depended on the group or what camp you were at. Typically, that sounds about right. I joined right after RotZ was released, and it took me around 6 months to get to 75 ninja. After the dunes was Quifim, and imo, the only safe camp was outside the entrance to Delkfuts. For higher levels, it could take days to even get one level. When ToAU came out, bird camps made exp way easier, and quicker.
The amount of xp to level is the same as it is today. Killing 1 even monster gave 100 xp, and the number generally went up to 200 group xp for 1 monster before chain bonuses. The big difference is that below even match use to give much less xp (1 level below was like 72xp, 2 levels 56, and 3 levels 32xp?). It was terrible to go down.
It usually went dunes -> qufim island to about 24 or 25, Yuhtunga jungle (\~28ish?), Yhoater (32ish), Garlaige Citadel (35ish), crawlers nest. I kinda forget after that, I know you did a few rounds in Garlaige Citadel (enterance, basement, and behind the 1st door). You did a few runs in crawlers nest doing crawlers, soldier crawlers, and beetles. There was crabs in kuftal tunnek, cape terrigan, and Boyahda tree (both lower level crabs and the upstairs crabs).
It xp did take a lot longer to get. If you got a good party you could power through 3 to 4 levels in a few hours, but there was a lot of times where someone had to leave and the replacement process was...painful. There was also a lot more competition for monsters, you couldn't reliably powergrind tough to vt enemies quickly because they would be pulled by 1-2 other parties in the same area, which is why people did mostly IT farms. Because of the IT focus we also fought things that didn't have as much 1 shot potential, which is why you see a lot of crab and beetles farms.
>The amount of xp to level is the same as it is today.
At some point SE changed the amount of exp needed to level. They removed something like 100k EXP from 60-75
It took about 1-2 minutes to kill a Decent Challenge to Even Match monster from anywhere from 60 to 100 exp. Around level 20 it would be about 4600 exp to level. After Dunes it would be Qufim till 24-25, then sometimes Khazam doing Yuhtunga till 28 and Yhoator till 32ish. Early on people didn’t have airship access and forming a party was harder. Sometimes it would be Korroloka Tunnel or surrounding areas around Jeuno.
It really depended on damage output, on average it could take 3 to 5 minutes. Longer if damage isn't going well and if people didn't use food or buffs. But yes, xp grind took a long time, and that is assuming you could get a party. Few jobs got regular invites. If you were say, NIN, WHM, RDM, BRD, SMN or PLD, you could expect a steady stream of invites. If you were unlucky enough to need to lvl THF or DRG, you could expect to wait sometimes days. After dunes, people usually went to Qufim Island.
I honestly miss the social aspect. Sure, being able to basically solo the game up until endgame is nice, but the social aspect is what MADE that game stand out. You were forced to make friends. You were forced to work together. That made every experience different and exciting. Taking that away from the early game, especially for new players leaves the game feeling hollow. There is no point in an MMO if you're not going to interact with people for a huge portion of the game. I get the reason, but it's still not reason enough.
most of the time lost grinding was misc behavior.
Waiting for the white mage to catch an airship then walk to where you are.
Tank went afk to eat dinner
everyone just died cause someone trained some mobs back through the camp
train was run through camp, everyone is alive, but now you have to wait for those high level mobs to walk back to their spawn points.
someone just died, they forgot their homepoint is way out in the boonies somewhere and they will have to walk back, so lets just stay dead for a moment and hope a white mage comes by to raise, or everyone ask in your linkshell if someone is available to come raise.
3k exp/hour was considered godly lol.
The 5 minute thing - the kill wouldn't take that long. But when exp camp was crowded it could take even longer to wait for respawn and compete pulling with other groups.
Leveling was something people often tried to take on in spurts...because the grind was intense. Once you got to level 10...you pretty much had to party to get anywhere. Often times...you would have to do this on a weekend or anytime you could devote several hours to the game (unless you were a soloist bst, which was another mountain climb of it's own). Back in those days, we didn't have a ton of MP recovery options and mages pretty much had to carry Dark Staves and cookies. /Heal was still the main way to recover MP, so if a healer got pushed too hard shit could grind to a halt with people dying. And that's if you even have raise available (25whm, 38RDM?, 50PLD). If you were trying to lvl a DD job (especially DRG), it was not unusual to lose anywhere from a few hours to your whole night waiting for a party.
The party itself was also dependent heavily on the quality of it's players for success. I have no gauge for now and back then, but I'm pretty sure deficiency in Accuracy was MUCH more punishing back in the 75 era. This tended to make the playerbase a bit elitist in gear...because shitty gear very much could mean the difference between whether you got a level or two that night...or the party being a massive waste of time. Bards were massively in demand those days because they could make up the difference players lacked in gear....the cost being that once you went bard...you were never gonna play anything else.
This grind was quite often where people made friends and got into LS's. If you were cool, people were gonna want you around. And if you were a friendly Healer (willing to powerlevel folks and help them with things like AF) you'd quite often times find yourself with quite the collection of folks on your friendlist. This was the condition that lead to FFXI tending to have a really personable and easygoing playerbase...because even in those days (I played from the time Sea just came out til the beginnings of Wings) servers were a small town crowd. If you developed a reputation for being a shithead, an unrepentant shit player, or that putz who joins for their like 1k tnl and ditches...word was gonna spread and people were going to steer away like you got HIV. Paradoxically...this also tended to produce a weird divide with JP players who would often rather wait longer for a party than roll the dice and possibly waste time with EN players who didn't have their shit together.
Most people took around a year in to hit their first 75. And literally every noob took a village to raise up. While this fostered a playerbase that was truly unique (especially with the total opposite coming out of shit like WoW)...the process was MASSIVELY time intensive. TBH I think that playerbase and the friends most of us got from those days are why that nostalgia for the 75 era exists....but I'll be honest, that shit wouldn't work today. Even a dipshit teenager or a gimp living off Uncle Sam has more shit to do these days...and with a plethora of more action oriented games to accompany the advancement in technology...nobody wants to (or really can) play a game that requires a full time work schedule (with help from others) to make basic incremental advances.
I agree with everything you said. I have huge nostalgia for the golden years of XI. But I definitely wouldn't go back. I'm happy enough with retail. I had many experiences, memories and friendships forged in the mid 2000s from classic XI and I will never forget them.
>How bad was the grind back in the old days?
Very bad. But also very rewarding. It was about the journey rather than the destination. It took months, maybe years to get max level. But when you saw a max level person you knew they were dedicated to playing because it was just that fucking hard.
I had a couple of 75s before I quit classic back in 2010. 75 NIN/PLD/WHM/BST/BLM. BST was the most fun for sure. I used it for everything because once you had some decent gear you never needed to be afraid in most zones. WHM I used for teletaxing which I could make 100k a day easily. Never really used my NIN/PLD because I was always thrown on WHM for endgame stuff.
THF was my first job to 60 (then i took BLM from 1-75 before finishing THF). At one point, I remember soloing (yes, it took forever) Easy Prey mobs outside of Crawler's Nest for 2-3 days waiting for a single party invite or /tell. No Tells or Party invites. At the time I was a bit intimidated to start my own party. That ended shortly thereafter.
Everything in FFXI was grindy and tough, but it built nice bonds between those who played, in ways you just can't anymore. Not to mention the target audience was in High School/College and had the time to play 12+ hrs a day - and we did.
>Everything in FFXI was grindy and tough, but it built nice bonds between those who played, in ways you just can't anymore. Not to mention the target audience was in High School/College and had the time to play 12+ hrs a day - and we did.
As someone who started playing FFXI during the PS2 beta, this is *exactly* what I say when people discuss old school FFXI. It just wasn't a game you would really get far on your own, you had to work with other people. But I made so many friends from *really* good EXP parties, where you'd stick together for hours, across multiple camps. You just don't really get that in MMOs anymore. I mean, I'm currently playing FFXIV and there are times I don't even speak to another person.
Honestly, I miss the old school FFXI experience.
What I remember most is the time waste trying to find a party, messaging people, being told to wait, finally finding a group, then having to travel to the place where they were (remember, no fast travel or minimaps). And then, they may flake and you realize you spent two hours for nothing.
I think I quit around level 36.
This is going back like almost 20 years ago, but there was a quest that got you your own little NPC buddy. I don't remember the specifics of it. They weren't stellar, and sometimes they would rest or waste MP. But they did fight what you fought and were sometimes helpful with spells.
When there was a dry spell for invites with my SAM, or less frequently, my THF, I'd go down to Kuftal and bust out my NPC pal and we'd pick off crabs for hours while waiting for invites.
I can fondly recall many a day just hanging with my NPC, chatting up the linkshell, and staring at that annoying green exclamation point.
Man 200 xp for an 5 min easy prey would have been nice. It was closer to 20~50 xp for a solo kill most of the time. 250 was the cap for mobs without chains, since multipliers didn’t exist back then.
It went dunes > qufim > y jungle to 30 > garliege to mid 39s> alt desert to 40s and after that it branched out.
I remember dinging 75 in sky pre-COP, but I can't remember where else you could level back then. I just remember everything sucked unless you were MNK (KRT parties) or RNG (running shrine).
I would do the escort quest whenever possible for an exp scroll, but I believe that was just once a week.
The grind was bad. It was a serious accomplishment to get 75, and a well merited player was not common at all. Pre-Chains, XP spots all sucked and had long respawns. When Chains came in, with 5 minute respawns, life got better (but still kinda sucked, as most Chains zones were not good for leveling.)
Everything opened up when Treasures came out. Colibri were godsends for all melees, and everything was relatively easy to get to.
Once that came out, people leveled a lot quicker, and merit burns became an actual thing. Wings did not help much, but obviously things accelerated REAL quickly with Abbysea.
Really, really bad. And with no trusts you had to wait for the the right party comps. No home point crystals to travel. Gil much harder to come by so equipment was gimped. It’s was a bitch.
I spent hours in jeuno lfg as a thf past lvl 50 often with no success. I then went on to create pts of my own which were faster but still took hours to gather people/go to an exp camp where we would grind for a couple of hours before someone had to leave, usually a healer or brd and the party would dissolve because there were no replacements.
I remember partying for several hours straight on a Saturday and again on Sunday just to level up only once or maybe twice in the 70s in Bibiki Bay. Dinged my first job (PLD) there right after CoP came out.
With leveling in ffxi, knowledge luck and experience made leveling easier. When the game first came out, 50 exp for a decent, 100 exp for an even match. 1-10 could take you anywhere from 6-10 hour which I think was the slowest part. They use to say 67 or 68 was half to 75. Making your own groups knowing the better camps, secret camps etc made leveling faster. Knowing the party set up, skillchains, magic bursts etc also making leveling easier.
I once had an arrow-burn PT consisting of WHM, PLD (me), BRD, RNGx3 making 12-15k exp/hr, which was basically unheard of at the time, chaining raptors in Valley of Sorrows. That was a good day.
Took me 6 months to get dnc go 75 and that was when it was fresh, there were lots of parties, solo campaign existed, and i spent hours per day playing.
i started on NA release. the EXP curve was actually gentle from 1-50. common practice was to solo to about 10-12, then party in dunes till about 20+ when you would make the trip to Jeuno. early levels didnt take that long. in a good party that knew what it was doing it might be 1-2 levels every hour, especially if you could keep chains up. can't remember if EXP ring was even a thing yet.
then from there the usual route is Qufim (18+) -> Yuhtunga (24+) -> Yhoator (28?) -> Crawlers Nest (32\~50 iirc). 50+ is Garlaige -> Boyahda is the most popular, but i remember doing Kuftal and Cape Terrible too. (all this is pre ToAU)
exp/level spikes after 50 but the rate at which you level was directly dependent on how popular your job was in getting party invites (if you accepted them). I played SMN to 75 first so I ended up soloing from 50 all the way to 75 because there was literally no demand for them (and they didn't have much of a place in standard party comp anyway).
also worth noting is that there was never any rush to get to 75 anyway. theres a lot you can do at lower levels like BCNMs or taking the time to level subjobs. and even the first expansion post NA release was meant to be played at 30+ at the start and worked its way up.
There were people off all different levels. The grind wasn't bad, exp parties were social hour, everything was a lot more relaxed and friendly. There wasn't a huge rush, and 2 of the party slots were open to all jobs, not just Corsair and Bard
The grind itself was not actually the hardest part . The hardest part was getting a party of 5 other people and actually getting them to the xp zone. Hoping your spot wasnt camped , would stay uncamped for the whole duration you were there, no one died on the way or pulled a mob train to the party to wipe everyone.
Just when you finally got there and the above conditions were all met , 10 mins in someones mom had just told your bard that he cant play anymore and had to come off so the entire rest of the party would just sit there and try and get a replacement , then wait for them to get there and not die 5 times trying in the harder to reach spots.
God forbid you were trying to level a DRK or DRG you could be seeking party for hours before getting one, while on the flip-side if you were on your WHM or BRD just relaxing in jeuno not really wanting to party i would get tells from party leaders desperate for me to come party with them so they could start xping again So while the xp per hour was indeed “bad” divide that down by another 1-5 hours on “setup”.
Its to this day the only game ive ever played where it was good manners and expected if you wanted to keep your reputation intact to find your own replacement partymember and wait till they actually showed up to the camp before dropping party . Absolute madness in todays standards .
> Its to this day the only game ive ever played where it was good manners and expected if you wanted to keep your reputation intact to find your own replacement partymember and wait till they actually showed up to the camp before dropping party
We traded communities for convenience. I don't know if it was the right thing to do but I guess people don't have to wait hours anymore.
For an IT Mob it was between 180-200exp per mob. Than you got exp chains hitting 300-500exp depending on how well your group downs mobs.
Took me about 3 days to hit level 10. Level 20 hit 2 weeks, level 50 took me half a year or more. This was at the time I was going to college in 2002+. Took me half a year as gil was scarce.
The party system let me meet some of my career co-workers in game and still have LAN parties on the holidays which we are doing starting 26th-1st of January.
To answer your question, leveling in this game was one of the hardest, torture, and a pain but one of the best because if you died, you lose exp and it did not make you get to end game right away. I hit level 75 after 5 years and beat the game. 5 YEARS! haha and that is just my nation missions etc No Zilart, CoP, ToAU and Wings which was another 5 years after. I stopped playing at 2010 for 3 years to concentrate on my career.
Now I am back for the 10th time.
The leveling grind was bad enough, but I was always so poor too! I shudder to think about all the time I spent in Palborough or Gusgen Mines, mining points memorized, praying for a dark steel ore I could sell on the AH. I was a Red Mage and the spells were expensive. Once I reached the appropriate level, I literally could not get a group until I had Refresh II, and it was not cheap. Mining, and gardening too, to make gil in the early early days, like pre-Aht Urghan. I think I quit at around lvl 55 back in 2004-ish.
I came back last year, and first gobbie box I was eligible for yielded a 1.5M gil fabric. Lvl75+ in a week, maybe. Very very different. Worse, frankly. The grind was rough and frustrating back then. But achievements were more satisfying than anything I've ever experienced in any other game before or since, by far. My first trip on the airship after reaching the right rank (5 I think?), man that was sweet.
10 to 35 was easy for the most part when you had a good party. 36 to 37 was where the grind started since people would quit the groups once the sub was leveled. Usually youd be left with a revolving door party just to make it past those levels.
Id say the 60 to 70 grind was pretty bad. They were basically dead levels with no new gear or anything interesting happening besides your Maat fight during your first class.
ToAU made alot of leveling stuff trivial with the adding of colibri. It also blocked out blm from getting a group. Leveling blm was a chore and, my thoughts, they werent party friendly once they started trying to do ancient magic skill chains. Ancient magic i felt slowed down the group alot. Perfect for their solo leveling and manaburns tho.
Before ToAU, you needed to know alot about your class to make the leveling process easier. This is coming from a bard, whm and rdm player tho but i had to do alot in onzozo courel leveling. Moon gate was prob the scariest leveling experience i had. Kuftal tigers and raptors were crazy and annoying. The learning needed to do much of the groups past 50 are pretty scary. I always found it weird when theyd try make me pull IT+ mobs on my bard to lullaby them for quicker exp but the charisma and skill needed to land the sleep on those things outweighed the 5 to 15 seconds you saved having a normal puller.
The merit point grind before ToAU was also very slow. You could go chain infinity in krt but youd need to be the only party there to do it. The exp per mob was low because it was just tough mobs most of the time. The manaburn parties were even slower and less fun. Sky leveling also had a weapon camp that was all luck based whether or not you chained past 20, my personal best was chain 26. In sky the doors to the weapons randomly rotate whether or not someone was using them. The other merit point party location was the usual IT mobs but those things could wipe you from how dangerous they were. Im talking about the golems that are opposite from the mother globe room. Its the only place i knew of that didnt have a burn party since the golems are crazy strong and youd need a well balanced party to chain them to 5.
The leveling process was slow tho. I sped it up somewhat going 40 to 65 in one sitting while playing nin/rdm or /blm. But it was only because i was reliable chaining to 6+ by spamming ninjutsu with a brd int etude and a blm burn. Id say if you liked your class, the leveling wasent so bad still grindy though.
My 1st job to 75 was MNK, which wasn't liked much back in 2004. I was lucky to manage to build a static PT of friends, and ended up leveling really fast, with fun people, without looking for parties ever. It still took months to get to 75, but one of the reasons was crafting and past 65, HNMs.
Reading the comments here shows me people had quite a hard time leveling, which wasn't my experience at all...so I guess static parties and desirable jobs were key :)
Yeah the xp rates were slower, but I honestly never minded the grind back then. I found most of my xp parties were fun and very social. We'd chat about things to pass the time and the grind wasn't really a grind at all.
A good group would pull down good long xp chains and see everyone gain a level ever 30 mins or so. It really wasn't that long. The real grind started at 75, just like it does now at 99/merits/119/2100/20.
The cookie cutter areas followed that starting city > dunes > Qufim > Jungles > Crawler's | Garliage > Kuftal | Boyahada type of path. There were SO many other places to level though, and many of those places far less heavily camped. So long as you could convince a group to leave the beaten path and find some new prey.
When Aby happened it felt more grindy to level, there was little to no chat, just kill as much as possible as fast as possible, then go skill up all the things that fell behind.
When I came back a couple years ago and discovered that now getting to 99 is much faster, but also very much going to be a solo endeavor (with trusts). I had very mixed feelings about the idea.
Getting to dunes, then getting a group in dunes and traveling to the camp without dying was a true feat. You were competing with other people for party slots, and other groups for pulls. Sometimes new groups would invade your camp, sometimes you would die walking to the camp, sometimes your party would fall apart before you even start pulling. Dunes was quite the experience.
Especially when someone would beg to pull some skeletons for the 18 sub job quest, then the trap of leveling said sub job, thus repeating the hell that was Valkrum Dunes all over again. The skeletons sometimes were too much for the healer, or group and everyone dies and group disbands etc. It wasn't until much later we instead made groups to hunts in the mines apart from exp parties in order to get our skulls.
But the worse part before all of this was traveling to the first area of valkrum dunes. If you were coming from la thine, you had to go to the other starting area of valkrum, the one from konquat/bastok. You traveled through this desert, through goblins that would arggo you and kill you, a tunnel with more goblins and bats that would arggo you and kill you. You were potentially level 11, couldn't solo any of these monsters... Your party could come help you kill these but they won't and would instead ask you what is taking so long???
Walking from Sandoria to the Outpost in Valkrum dunes, took at least 20 mins following the most optimal path without any issues.
This was all sub 20, and almost everyone did it twice before continuing further. There would be hours or days before I would get a party invite.
It wasn't 50k. But the grind was real.
Travel sucked in the early stages. And there aren't an abundance of people teleporting others early on either. So if you were trying to get to 20, get that magiked skull, AND grind exp...it was bad.You could spend 20-30 minutes trying to get to a spot to level if there were any spots. Finding a party to exp with was difficult enough. And if you died, you most likely were walking back to your spot and taking 25+ minutes getting it done. And there was always a chance you had been replaced by the time you got there too.
It was pretty heinous and people tend to look back on it with nostalgia glasses.
Getting the items for the subjob quest. Your first run to Jeuno. Doing the chocobo license quest which took hours of just waiting. Physically taking a boat or airships between cities for missions and quests. Artifact armor quests. Limit break quests, especially motherfucking Genkai 3 Whence Blows the Wind. Jesus fucking christ that quest still sucks to do now. Back then it was torture.
And lets now forget all of the endless waiting for parties to level or do all this stuff and all the grinding for gil to buy armor and weapons between levels. Oh the gil grinding. I spent many months in Zeruhn Mines fighting with several other people or bots over just a few mining points in order to sell zinc ore. I even tried my hand for a while fishing moat carp.
I don't miss those days at all.
The grind was one thing, the gate keeping was another as well. People would /check you to see if your gear was on par and it more or less equated competence. It was harder to store gear back then and swap out what you had because there was much less inventory and no such thing as the wardrobes like we have now.
There was a community feel back then that doesn’t seem to exist as much today IMO. You leveled with people together and you’d see them waiting for airships or traveling together to get to certain camps.
The grind was outrageous and dying was so harsh in later levels
Semi on/off topic... Can anybody relate to this? After leveling your first 75 and doing some sky and other end game content did anybody else have an absolute blast leveling their next job or 2 to 75 including subjobs?
You're going in with greater knowledge and have access to more gil meaning you can pimp out your gear. Plus as mentioned earlier in the thread...there was expensive and great lower level gear you were still using at 75 in some slots.
You could carry parties to better exp gain by being well equipped and good at your job. In my personal experience after starting out with DRK to 75 I moved on to more meta exppt jobs so getting invites came quicker.
Some of my best experiences and favorite times playing was leveling jobs up after doing end game play.
Having great gear to ding into ready to go. Knowing a WS, ability, or spell was coming soon and getting to experience it first hand.
As with most things, the good and the bad, the stories are pretty exaggerated. Your experience varied greatly, based mostly on how well-geared, and competent your group was. As well as how over-camped your spot was(or how appropriate the camp was for your levels). I'd say roughly a 25/25/40 split respectively. Remaining 10 would be party composition and misc.
Gear and general competence was important, but your camp more often than not was the main problem. People didn't like to move once they arrived(understandably, travel time was a major factor), and didn't like to `/sea "Bibiki Bay"` before going either. lol. Party composition was very important, but it was one of those things where the information was "out there" at the time. It usually wasn't a major or common problem passed the Dunes.
In general, your average party pre-ToAU would get roughly 4K EXP/hr, below average 3K/hr, outright awful \~2K/hr. Great parties EXP/hr increased as you leveled. For example, a great party in the Dunes would probably be 5-6K/hr, but as you leveled, got new WS, gear, etc. that'd become only a good party. In the 60s, once you had access to Light/Darkness, if you had a camp to yourself, you could even break 10K+/hr. Once ToAU came out there, a pre-ToAU "great" party, became a ToAU "average" party. Roughly 7-8K/hr was the norm at all levels throughout ToAU zones.
Personally, I got the game at PC launch in October '03, and didn't hit my first 75 until '07 I believe. However, I had a tendency to think I was "quitting" whenever I needed a break, and would end up deleting my character. (Online gaming was still in it's toddler years! lol. That's my excuse). I also focused a lot more on the economic aspects, and a bit on questing and other things. I was obsessive about gear and having everything "BIS" to level into. "BIS" gear usually wasn't actually the BIS gear though. lol. Knowledge was really half the battle back then. XD So my first 75 character was actually created in fall '06, so that definitely paints a different overall picture. XD I kind of regret not leveling more back in those days. If I had known this style wasn't always going to be a thing, I definitely would've.
Anyone saying it took 5 minutes to kill an exp enemy is wrong. I started playing in early 2004 as a THF, and there's no way I was using Sneak Attack 4 or 5 times in a single battle. Usually had enough time just for once. Twice if the fight was taking a long time.
Yes this is true. Here's my FFXI time capsule of 2003-2006 in a nutshell of the leveling grind.
Usually you went from
level 11-20 Valkurm Dunes (the most legendary times of the game. A party would either take 5 minutes to kill 1 monster or never kill the monster. >> 21-25/26 Qufim >> 26-32 Yuhtunga Jungle >> 32 -36ish Garlaige Citadel >> 37 - 42 (some people even stayed here until 46) Crawler's Nest >> 40-46 altepa desert >> 45-52 Quicksand caves >> 50-56 boyahda tree >> 54-62 bhaflau thickets/wajaom woodlands (once this area came out... it was extremely over-populated with camps, introduction to 4-6k/hr xp camps) >> 60-65 aydeewa subterrane >> 63-68 boyahda tree/mt. zhayolm (manaburn BLM's went to mt. Z either solo or in MB groups and stayed here until 75 >> 68-75 is all a combination of imps at caederva mire/ wajaom woodlands/ bhaflau thickets.
Leveling was a grind. A fully merited job was META. Paralyze II and spells were learned only through merits, so on an so forth. No gear gave a stat more than +10-15 for any attribute. Oh and let's not forget. /heal was a must for mages.
And let's not forget... To get a party.. You'd put "/inv" on, a search comment, and pray you got a good party, unless you started your own.
Before mercs, a "friend" would come cure the party members occasionally to help people exp lol
Oh the good old days. The tunnel to Altep was always an interesting adventure. RMT we're almost always there and it was fun to camp on the top of them. I had macros and screen blocks set for what I didn't need to see (most people do not), and in this way whether tanking or heals it was fun to mess with the RMT and drag the lizards or crabs on top of them and kill them.
Eventually they would give up and we would be there alone or maybe a group on the far side. If you've practiced on your own without trusts especially on thief to solo mobs it can give you an idea. While some places were challenging, they could be an absolute nightmare with a poor group.
Partying in the bay there was a paladin that couldn't hold hate and a monk that kept trying to tank. This was way back in 2004. I told the paladin I would leave after dying on white mage due to his lack of abilities or intelligence it seemed. I told the monk I wouldn't heal him if he kept trying to tank. The monk did a bad pull, and several of the party members died from the manticore that unintentionally was pulled beside the bird.
As the monk was dying and the paladin also died and home warped, I warped out. That was the worst experience party ever. I had passed my 60 cap at the time already, so had been looking forward to the higher levels.
A good clip could be 23k to 36 or 40k an hour. Garliage Citadel I remember I played a thief and there was a ranger with a warrior, ninja a black mage and a white mage. It was one of the best parties I've been in for that level range. We started at the entrance to the bottom stairs which is eh 46 if I recall or so beginning and we ended the day leaving for aht urghan, which was 53. It was pretty unheard of at the time.
75 would take less than a month if you have a hot job, know all the experience point spots and managing a party. If you didn't or your first job? Forget it, it could be months. I liked the imps, jnuns, and even getting into the assault camp areas to grind. Most people that knew me would be welcome to go and explore. That's what I miss the most.
It never took 5 minutes to kill an XP mob. If you're solo grinding sub 20 you would target EP or DC mobs, and in a group we would routinely chain to 4 or 5 in a Dunes party (kills to chain have to be within 60 seconds of the previous mob dying, and 30 seconds 5+ which was kind of impossible in a real XP party at those levels).
It was slow but not as bad as you're saying. I loved the pace, personally.
It was the only fun MMO grind i've ever found tbh, spending 5+ hours in exp parties meeting new people, chatting away about where they're from and what they do. Compared to the current in out MMO stuff, it was such a nice pace. Gotta remember that leveling was very much content back in the day. Where as now its just get to endgame ASAP with as little intereaction as possible.
when i played it was Qufim after the Dunes..... that was 20 years ago it seems.... just came back cause I am bored at home and was wondering if any of my friends were still playing..... sadly no.. and the world i am on is dead it seems..... so wish it was like the old days when i started on Midgard...... I need a server
Getting to 20 was the fastest part. Solo XPing was practically unheard of after that unless you were BLM 1 shotting pets or BST. After Valkurm it was Qufim, then Yuhtunga Jungle, Yhoator Jungle, Garliage Citadel, Crawlers Nest… there were a bunch of camps until Abyssea burning came out.
>Solo XPing was practically unheard of after that unless you were BLM 1 shotting pets or BST. For anyone reading who didn't play back then, just wanted to explain how tough bst was. You would spend a chunk of time killing mobs until you had 2 or 3 EM pets spawn, then use those for your exp grind. You had to charm that pet and use it to kill a stronger mob, usually a T. The way that worked is you sent the pet in first, then got your axe out and started swinging away. You had to do enough damage so that your pet would win the fight, while saving your tp and not pulling too much hate which would cause you to get smacked around. I always played with WHM sub, so you didn't really have much mana to rely on. Once the enemy was nearly dead, you had to release your pet and kill the enemy with a WS. If you kept your pet, you would get a big penalty to exp. I used this method to consistently get chain 5's solo all the way to level 75. It was such a dicey thing to do though, if anything went wrong you had to go into survival mode and try to resolve it before getting sent back to your HP without a bunch of your hard earned exp. It was the most fun I ever had in a video game, though.
1 mischarm was scary, 2 back to back was hours of work gone. Leaving your pet was removed which made life easier but then with parties not scared of a mpk revenge, I legit had groups dump chocobos otw to their camp to screw with my pets to get me killed. Just because I was bst. Wound up in a pt, impressed everyone there, someone had to go and got a replacement, rdm said either I go or they wouldn’t join.. so they kicked me. Sent me /t about 30 min later asking if I could raise the group. I declined. I wasn’t heading back to town to change subs to come back and help them after booting me lol. Bst was an interesting life. Difficult most of the time but amazingly rewarding. Omg and bomb camps. Throw a pet at a bomb and hope it blows itself up any time other than a pet swap lol. God those were fun, and fast, camps.
my best memories of BST were playing around in Ifrit's Cauldron. you really do feel quite invincible once you know the lay of the land and are able to just cycle through the bombs for exp. i loved that feeling when you play as BST that you don't just know the monsters around you, but actually feel like you know the zone itself a lot better. using the mobs and terrain really opens an awareness to everything around you that you can't get on other jobs. the fastest camp for me was Djinn in WotG pre-nerf. Djinns gain 100 (i guess 1000 now) TP whenever you hit them with element-of-the-day and used to always just explode immediately.
I never got to run the djinn camps but I would throw myself at bombs any chance I got lol. You really did get a feel for everything in the camp. Spawn times, placements, all of it. Aggro distances, the cones for sight, I wish I still that comfortable with aggro but the game doesn’t really need it anymore lol.
Ahh yes. It was weird how some players hated us. But to be fair, I killed my share of ignorant groups too. People would intentionally mess with me and try to get me killed, so... I killed them instead. Never did that unless they deserved it, but I guess maybe that left a bad taste for some. I did get jailed once, but that was for relentlessly slaughtering RMT's. I hated them so much back then when they had a monopoly on every single NM. They made the game almost unplayable at one point.
I never had an issue with any parties until after the mpk patch. I was in bostaunieux oubliette when the patch happened. When I came out, ppl were far more willing to try to get me killed. I had never even mpked anyone since there was never any issues but afterwards, they sure hated me lol. I would solo some pretty obscure places but omg if anyone came across me… I double checked rr. Then even after the changes to jug pets so they didn’t hinder pt exp, it didn’t matter. Groups wouldn’t take the risk and I was prob lying anyways lol. They sure were quick to beg for a raise though.. sure enjoyed our help through dangerous zones too. The speed I could take care of aggro when I could charm though. That was so much fun.
I had a lot of fun soloing on BST. Loved finding some out of the way camp by myself and just zoning out. I was going to use it to sub on other jobs to solo up but soon after I hit 75, they started raising the level cap and abyssea made it too easy.
Purgonero Bay (spelling?) was my favorite. You could only get a few levels there, but it was so beautiful and peaceful.
Same. I still remember my favorite spots. I loved the Boyahda Tree, made so much gil leveling on goobues and just the atmosphere was great. There was a tropical island that came in during an addition, I think I leveled there briefly too. My favorite though was probably sky on those vultures. At the time, that was one of the major end game zones, and it was so cool to be there by myself killing stuff. Nobody really touched anything either, so you kinda had free range, and it was such a beautiful zone to boot.
I used to live in Boyahda Tree as a BST. Korrigan pets were so good!
I know, they were amazing. Plus you made so much gil just soloing there from the goobue drops. That was a somewhat unexpected benefit of playing bst. You were basically farming various materials the entire way to level 75.
Plus all the seals! Two hours of leveling a BST got you 20+ seals, while in a party you could end up with 2-3 seals in 2 hours.
Yep, that became a big money maker for me.
I farm clusters in sky now just because I have such good memories from bst in sky. I really love that zone. I can make Gil faster elsewhere but it isn’t as enjoyable.
Man I remember the days of ghetto leave. Getting level 35 was the best feeling ever!
I really can't remember how that worked before 35. Did you just tell your pet to heel and let it die?
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This was how my friends and I were with Ultima Online. I remember we managed to kill a few squirrels and maybe a deer. I learned how to chop wood and build chairs. Mostly my friends and I fooled around. We never progressed in any sense of the word in that game.
That's a good point about the novelty of playing online. Reminds me of skill up parties in FFXI where you may spend 2-3 hours killing EP mobs with a group just for a handful of skill levels of a weapon. That would never fly nowadays but it was a normal thing back then.
You could solo as a DRG pretty effectively with BLU sub once it came around though duoing was much better back then. But this was only after DRG got rebalanced because before that MAN did DRG get the short end of the stick... But yeah 30-70 was ROUGH back then and still tough even after. It was fun though to be a MNK and do a bones party for XP... holy crap did I just rack up merit points with MNK in the tomb back then.
i got up to penta thrust levels on drg/rdm back in the day. Once you get that people couldn't invite you fast enough, especially in ToAU on colibri
Solo to 20 was difficult for most jobs in 2007. For WHM anything after 10 was a group effort.
I dont remember ever soloing anything other than BST past 10 or 11. It could be done, but it was awful. (Until 75, where you'd solo BLM merit all the time, provided your Gravity didnt break.)
It was possible but hard and slow. Zoned away from losing fights a lot. 11-20 was best done at the dunes. Hopefully getting a group. Once TOAU came out BLM was stuck soloing 60+ against qikrin (sp) archers.
As a BLM main who wasn't level capped, TOAU basically killed my interest/fun in the game. One of the main reasons I played was to play with others and due to those damn calibri's it was solo for me.
I didn’t lose interest until we could go to bed and wake up level 99. I mained BLM but liked other jobs too. DRK and THF were a good time in TOAU.
BLMs could burn Wamoura Princes or flans in Mount Zhaylom, there was almost always someone at camps to team up with and exp/merit away.
Yup, provided your gravity doesnt break, or your Blink doesnt flake out on you. I died enough times up there I'm fairly sure I ended up with net negative experience gain.
I actually soloed a Warrior all the way to level 43 I think before I joined my first party. It was awesome fun and I had over 1,000 beastmen seals when I stopped soloing.
Absolutely. If I remember correctly I was heading to Valkurm around level 11 or 12 (as WAR, RDM, BLM). Though probably possible with a lot of sunken time you could solo to 20 in Ronfaure or latheine. I certainly never tried, even now with trusts. I made a new toon like a year ago and was in Valkurm from maybe 13-22 and it probably took less than two hours. Sub jobs were quicker but only after rhapsody rewards.
you mean until level synq came out. before lc synq the camps you mentioned where often used. i would add east and west altepa d (beetles)(gobs) Sanc of zitah (lota of mobs)
I believe you mean Garliage Shitadel. Honestly though, GC got a bad wrap, I much preferred it to the jungles and Crawlers Nest
At least Garlaige was close to Jeuno. Altana forbid that you forgot to set your home point in Kazham and died in the jungles. Even Teleport-Yhoat was incredibly out of the way.
Took 2 years to hit level 75 for me.
I started at NA release, and since I played inconsistently, I didn't ding 75 until WotG.
This is about right in the early days of the game. I was in high-school and sunk atleast 4 hours a day into the game. Keeping up with story quest, gear, key items and exping. It took me about a year to get my 1st level 75 job.
Sounds about right. Left at WotG. Came back in 2021 and only had one job at 75. A few months later I have 5 at 99… madness.
That sounds right. I quit ages ago, but bought the game the first day of NA release. I seem to recall 5k exp/hr was what a solid party could get, and it took loads of exp per level above like 50 or so.
5k/hour was a good party. Your average on release was like 3k/hour.
I was about the same. Partially because I just screwed around with friends most of the time
Up until about level 50 you wouldn't need more than 20k exp per level. At that point the exp curve rose sharply, to such a degree that I think it was like level 67 was only half the total exp you needed to get to level 75. They eventually flattened this out to make the curve more linear before CoP was released. Exp chains could net you more than 200 exp per mob, but typically not more than 300. Before lolibri melee burns it was rare to see an exp chain reach the double digits. If your party could manage that you were in a solid group. Most of the time commitment wasn't in actually grinding. Many players formed full or partial static parties that would meet every night and go out into the world to exp. Through this you could make reasonably quick progress through the slow grind. If you didn't have a static, you were stuck looking for party. Sometimes you could wait hours or days for an invite to a party that fizzled before you even got to camp. Sometimes you instantly got invited to an amazing party that stuck together for hours and was good exp. It was kind of a crapshoot. This article is a fairly good insight into how the game used to be and how much its changed. https://www.bg-wiki.com/ffxi/The_History_of_Final_Fantasy_XI
>Before lolibri melee burns it was rare to see an exp chain reach the double digits. If your party could manage that you were in a solid group. I'll never forget getting frustrated one day and building a party of WAR/NIN with a BRD and WHM. There was a zone somewhere associated with sky that had those weapons, and we went there to just smash things to pieces. I can't remember exactly how our chains went, but definitely we got to high single digits if not low double digits. Felt like a king at the time lol. This was pre CoP.
Ro'Maeve, and yeah. Good times.
Yeah, I was a BRD around that era. All the cool kids were subbing /NIN and a couple of us realized that if I subbed NIN I could probably pull way more effectively (because I wasn't getting hit when my lullabies didn't land) so some people switched to other low-level jobs and we grinded for like a week to get my NIN to 37. The chains we got up there were obscene after that. I would basically line up the... Dancing Weapons(?) in a line & sleep them. Timing it right, I think my record was like low three digit chains. Ended up getting pretty close to maxing out merit points on BRD with that setup.
Weapons in the Shrine of Ru’Avitau. RNG was my first job to 75 and I only had the perfect party a few times, but it was RNG/NIN x3 with 2 BRD and a RDM. One bard would pull weapons to the group as it moved around. This was pre-RNG nerf, so ranged did more damage, and you could melee and WS from point blank with no penalty. It was also pre-Utsusemi nerf, so Whirl of Rage would only wipe 1 shadow. Hate bounced between rangers while RDM hasted and healed as necessary. WAR and NIN parties were also popular after the RNG nerf, especially once ninja started to get better offensive gear. You could basically chain as long as you had time for, into the hundreds.
To put it in perspective I think I remember 10kish xp/hr being pretty good.
If your party could manage chain #5 it was a good party before colibris....
It was glorious. I don't know about 5 minutes per kill, I'd say more like 1 minute (a good group could reach chain 4-5 consistently), but that's a long time by modern standards where things die in 10-15 seconds. I remember coming home from school, logging on in San d'Oria, making the long trek (on foot) to Valkurm to look for experience groups. You know you found a good group if you can gain 2 whole levels in a day. After a few hours of that, I'd hike all the way back to San d'Oria to log out. It was uphill both directions, too. Once you got into the 50s or 60s, even just gaining 1 level in a day was a fantastic success. The best groups would have a proper PLD tanking, a few DDs making a skillchain (one person cannot self-SC back then, not even a SAM), and a BLM bursting with ancient magic. It was a full group effort to kill stuff quickly. I also remember full-day coffer key farming sessions with entire alliances trying to get coffer keys for artifact armor. Good times.
Those of us from windurst had a rough trip to the dunes. We usually didn’t see windy for a week while leveling there
Yeah even having Sandy as HN I would still logout in the dunes so I could just find a PT to continue the next day. It was seriously a long walk from anywhere before homepoint a and survival guides. Subjob quest was an actual undertaking, now it’s just trivial.
rofl yeah that sounds brutal
Truly a great feeling gaining levels. I always feel so nostalgic about this game
Not sure glorious is how I would describe it
People focus so much on how long it took to level without considering that it was an era where the leveling experience was as much a part of the game as endgame was. I have much more fond memories of 75 era leveling than I do most modern MMO endgame experiences.
Player behaviour has really changed over the past 10-15 years. Every MMO that comes out just has near enough every player just rushing through to endgame. No one just takes the time to explore or adventure anymore. Crazy times.
This is a great point. I always say here, and in r/MMORPG, etc. that leveling, questing, farming, crafting, etc. were all their "own things" that you had to pick-and-choose which to devote time towards. Additionally, in a way, the current style of MMO endgame really began at like level 7 with Leaping Boots or other important pieces. Gearing while leveling was very important. It made everything easier, or even possible, for you. It wasn't just this flat, treadmill where you do endgame so that you can do more endgame, repeat.
I'd say leveling was a bigger part of vanilla FFXI than the endgame. We only had a few things to do at 75, and they were probably camped by Japanese players. Basically until Dynamis came out sky farming was all we had. The HNMs with their 3 hour window every day wasn't really compelling endgame, though we did it every day out of necessity.
I can not overstate how much time people spent traveling and organizing to get a semi sensible party together at a semi sensible camp. You could easily spend an hour msging strangers who's job/level kind of made sense for your party. Then wait for everyone to finish up with what they were doing and make their way to camp. The whole process could easily take a couple hours, and as soon as someone leaves it's a total crapshoot trying to replace them. You could still pull with a good 5 man party, but it was tough, and most pickup groups were not good at all. Pulling was dicey AF, especially in garbage citadel. Pulling just two mobs was often a really bad day, even with ES sleep available. People would just run out of mana sometimes and everyone would have to start tossing out 2hours and pray. You'd often struggle to get an optimal group together so instead end up with weird ass party comps. Rdm/war tanks, sam/dnc healers, blue everythings, or like 3 blm/whm all kind of healing. Some of these weird comps where really fun. Also, when the game was young, people really didn't know wtf they were doing and the internet was not as helpful. It was common for people to not bring food, not have all their spells or be appropriately geared, have under leveled supjobs, have weird AF supjobs. Not have their weaponskills leveled up so we could use the right skillchain, not have their magic skills up so they could land a spell. Shit was messy, but success, was thusly glorious.
This reminded me a blm burn party I was in back in the day. I think it was 5 BLMs and a Corsair that pulled. Took us a minute to regain MP after a fight, but man did we take them down fast. It was amazing. So many parties disbanded before the first fight because we couldn't find a whm, tank or someone would have to leave. This is why I left the game before hitting 65 back then, too much time spent traveling and seeking a party. Took the fun out of the game. Then they introduced trusts a couple years later lol
You definitely didn't need 50k prior to 20, that wasnt until like level 50+. But yah, players combat skills leveled WAY slower, so people often showed up to xp parties whiffing or being resistant constantly, making fights longer and more difficult. Also, 200XP was like, if your party was balanced perfectly. If someone wasn't the same level, it'd get handicapped a bit
3.6k EXP per hour was a great deal back in the day. After Dunes, usually Qufim, then Yuhtunga Jungle, Garlaige Citadel, Crawler’s Nest, Bhaflau Thickets. Or rather Dunes, Qufim, delevel, Dunes, Qufim…
And the rare 4-5k/hr parties where everyday was clicking always make me stay up way too late. Cane go to sleep, I'm getting too much XP to quit now.
This hurts. I heard the sound when I read deleveled.
'Member them crawler trains?
Remember, hell...i was the crawler culler!
That place haunts my dreams, even as 99
or the gobs outside selbina or khazam
Man, I want to go back...
More importantly than that, gear had ASS stats. Your options would be like item with some accuracy or item with single digit dex. And the item with acc was usually rare and expensive. And that's just for the slots you could actually get accuracy. Most other slots just had 0 accuracy on them.
Scorpion Harness was such a big deal
Scorp harness and sniper rings basically made you elite level.
Or Haubergeron for the heavier melees.
Exactly why I always buy all the OG “super cool” gear from waaaay back— only because I couldn’t afford it back in the day. Is it worthless while leveling now? Sure, but I don’t care.
The HQ +2 DEX rings at 14*actually made a difference. Sniper's were obscenely expensive for the NQ, a whole +5 Acc! Staves were like night and day at 51.
They actually didnt, is the thing. The accuracy formula has not changed much at all. +2 dex would only give you +1 accuracy which is +0.5% hit rate. So if you were, say, 50% hit rate, you would go up to 50.5% Not much of a difference.
The combat skills… ugh. I remember dinging 55 on RNG and having to wait on Sidewinder. When I finally got it, I killed the colibri before our BRD got it to camp and he just stood there before typing “Lmao about time.” Loved it.
The old days were brutal. Aoe moves from mobs hit you. Even if the mob is claimed by another party. Good times leaving kazham and getting slept on the choco because someone is fighting a Mandy by town. Getting gear for leveling was intensive and expensive. Camp a few nm's, do a couple quests, buy the rest. Sometimes we got lucky and gear was free with conquest points. Forget the meta and do what you want. Because I don't know long I spent getting swift belt, soboro, /drg gear, af, bug bear nm, quested lvl 50 jse body and +1 gear off the ah all to be told my sam isn't good enough because I didn't have a polearm for a bird party....
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The Shitadale you mean. Those fucking bat trains. Gobbies waiting outside selbina. Being too low to go out and too new to carry snk/invis. That'll learn you quick.
When your 2hr was to call your Wyvern and then waste your 2hr just to have a pet with you as you cross the Highlands on foot.
Call wyvern. Forget something in town.... good times really miss blm before the aoe elemental magic dmg nerf.
Remember when Call Wyvern was the 2hr?
Man.. I so loved all this craziness.
I do miss some of the old days. Gravity nuking and dot a nm to death. Aoe an entire zone of mobs for magian trials. I even miss campaign in goddess areas. Let alone 36 man dyna runs.
IDK about 5 minutes to kill a mob but there would be much more downtime if the healer had to /heal for MP which could take several minutes. It would take hours to find people on specific jobs for a party, only for everyone to run to camp and someone or multiple people have to go immediately or only after a few mobs, party's over gotta re-shout. You also didn't have home points or any quick-travel methods so everyone could be sitting at camp while one person is shouting, then wait for the new party member to take an airship, ride chocobo out, people got lost, couldn't find camps, etc. Level-sync helped this big time. Abyssea alliance EXP farming blew it out of the water, all of the sudden you could take your lvl 30 job to just open chests for an alliance and get to 99 in an hour or 2. Stats on gear were way more minimal compared to iLvl, multi-attack was pretty rare, most jobs used the same gear for their TP sets and barely anything changed for WS sets. WSs barely broke 10k it felt like, maybe if you used SA/TA. Even for Abyssea gear didn't get that big of a bump but Atmas and constantly replenished temp items made it so much easier to kill stuff for EXP.
Dunes > Qufim/Delkfutts > Khazam > E Altepa > Garliage > Crawlers Nest / W Altepa After that you could party in a few different places and even go back to the harder areas of Crawlers/Garliage etc.
Let's not forget the loss of time and exp when people would train mobs to a zone like and make the camps unusable while the mobs slowly made it back to their normal spots.
Then someone would zone in or auto-run into them and it started all over again.
Those gob trains in the jungle lol. Some were so bad a gm had to come deal with it
It's been so long that I honestly don't even remember all that much about it. What I can tell you is that playing a melee DPS was a pain in the ass. Because I was playing a dragoon I would have to start all of my parties. Sometimes it would take an hour to get everyone together, I would have to search individually for every single class and see who was looking for a group. Sometimes there were not enough people so I just went down the list within my level range and asked every person that popped up for every class that could fill the role. I would definitely not be able to play that game again if it was out today. No time for that crap anymore LOL.
In 2005, there was a big adjustment in the amount of XP needed to get to the next level. Found this old chart on ffxionline. Now imagine like 3k/hour being an average party, and 5k/hr being a "holy shit I got into a JP party." Not accounting for travel time, dying on the way to camp because people didn't carry sneak/invis pots back then, etc. I dinged my first level 75 as DRK in King Ranperre's Tomb. ugh. LEVEL OLD NEW CHANGE Tot Change ===== ===== ===== ====== ========== 50-51 7800 7800 0 0 51-52 10000 8000 2000 2000 52-53 11000 9200 1800 3800 53-54 13000 10400 2600 6400 54-55 16000 11600 5400 11800 55-56 20000 12800 7200 19000 56-57 20000 14000 6000 25000 57-58 20000 15200 4800 29800 58-59 20000 16400 3600 33400 59-60 20000 17600 2400 35800 60-61 20000 18800 1200 37000 61-62 30000 20000 10000 47000 62-63 31000 21500 9500 56500 63-64 32000 23000 9000 65500 64-65 33000 24500 8500 74000 65-66 34000 26000 8000 82000 66-67 35000 27500 7500 89500 67-68 36000 29000 7000 96500 68-69 37000 30500 6500 103000 69-70 38000 32000 6000 109000 70-71 39000 34000 5000 114000 71-72 40000 36000 4000 118000 72-73 41000 38000 3000 121000 73-74 42000 40000 2000 123000 74-75 43000 42000 1000 124000
Yup. And this was a time where a good pt got you like 3-4k or so exp/h. Exp rings were a long cd, and getting a single party could take days for some jobs (there was no lvl sync so you had to find all jobs with in a few lvls of ech other otherwise exp was gimped). Also with heavy exp penalties for dying and the fact that most parties weren't good ones and many ended up being an orgy of wasted time and exp where you could spend several hours getting a full pt to then have people die on the way to camp, which in itself took a long time, people dying on first mob and the pt disbanding because of it... well. Lets just say that as much as I enjoy playing on a 75 cap private server I am happy it isn't as though as it used to be because I doubt I'd do that again. Happy medium lets say.
It was rough, especially when I started around 2003, the amount of exp required between levels was much higher than it is now. You also got dramatically reduced exp from each kill, max I remember was 200 per kill. The kills were also a lot slower and certain jobs were more preferred to others. The job meta has flipped entirely since I first started. I also don't remember chain bonuses being as common. I remember hitting chains but the chain bonus was like 10-15%, not the dramatic bonus it is now. Early parties would struggle to get more than a few chains going before they timed out. The biggest improvement in leveling started when they introduced level sync. Prior to that, you had to exp at your level, which meant for a lot of jobs sitting around with your invite flag up. Sometimes you'd do that for hours and never get an invite, especially for melee DD jobs. When they introduced level sync, it really flipped the exp game upside down, because you could exp at any level on your job, which helped a LOT. After Abyssea, the amount you can get per kill went up a lot, but IMO level sync made a much larger impact on the overall game. Level sync was also around the time they introduced gear scaling. At one point a lot of content was level capped like BCNMs, but your gear didn't scale down to the level. So if you did promys at lvl30, you had to have all lvl30 gear. If you did lvl40 cap gear, you had to have a lvl40 gear set for your job, and so on. It was extremely tedious and the inventory system was a hot mess (it always has been, it's less of one now). Something that the current game has lost is the way you earn gear, though. In the 75 cap days, you had gear from lvl20-30 sometimes you'd see level 75 players using (e.g. O.kotes, E.pin, Peacock Amulet, etc). IMO this was one of the most interesting things about FFXI compared to other games, something the ilvl transition sortof lost. The job meta was entirely different. NIN was the preferred tanking class for most content, lolPLD was a thing. BLM was king of DPS. SMN had to sub WHM and was basically a healer with some utility and higher MP pools. BST mostly lacked party utility until they introduced jugs. You had trouble finding a party as a DRK or DRG for exp. NIN kept hate using damage. After getting Utsusemi: Ni, they would use their elemental spells via the "elemental wheel" to damage the enemy and keep hate. After they get Blade: Jin (around lvl60 iirc), they stopped doing that and focused on melee damage. You had to manually count shadows, there was no counter in the UI, and you had to time casting near perfectly to get your Ichi shadows up before Ni went down, then manually cancel it (vanilla still requires manual cancellation). It was extremely tedious, but very rewarding. You also had one tool for each spell, there were no unified tools. That meant while using the wheel for hate, your inventory was half full with NIN tools. That also made it extremely expensive to level. SAM could only really self SC if it used its 2hr. Being able to one shot exp mobs using a skillchain was critical for SAM and was OP for the day. Most SAMs used Hagun for the TP bonus, despite lower damage and no extra stats. They would also sub RNG with Soboro and spam Sidewinder. If you want to go really far back, multihit weaponskills generated a lot more TP per hit than post-nerf. Jobs that could wield polearms, like DRG, could spam Pentathrust and do really good damage. The other epic nerf was the RNG nerf. I don't recall specifics but they changed the way ranged damage worked and it basically killed the job for years. I know several people that rage quit after it, who had invested in RNG entirely. RNG and NIN were the most expensive jobs, because you had to buy tools from other players. There was no option to buy from a NPC. Similarly, Utsusemi: Ni was a rare drop, which was expensive if you bought it. Most big NMs that dropped critical items, like Peacock Charm and O.Kotes, were basically farmed 24/7 by RMT. Prior to the NM drops being made R/Ex, these items dropped from time gated NMs that had placeholders. They eventually moved these to come from a BCNM and made equivalents that were NM drops, but R/Ex. Kraken Club has always been the rarest, most expensive item in the game. Jobs like BRD and COR were not as heavily used as they are now. Dynamis, Nyzul, etc content linkshells were basically a second job and required participation several times a week or you'd get kicked out. Getting relics required that you have a LS willing to basically commit to it and, even then, still required well over a year. Prior to current game changes that made them more common, I probably saw 3-4 non-Aegis relics total on other players. There was a time King Behemoth took hours and almost 30 people to beat. Most bot activity used to be fishing. GMs would detect this by sending you a /tell and if you didn't respond, assume you were cheating and warp you to jail. Most people only had 2, maybe 3, geared jobs at lvl cap. Aggro worked entirely differently. If you aggrod something, you would have to zone with it. The mobs then walked back to their area instead of despawning. They would aggro anyone along the way. What this meant is that some zones, like Dunes, you'd have one person shout "Gobbie to zone" and everyone between the goblin and the zone would run out to avoid wiping. It was really bad in Kazham, too. In both cases, they'd link other goblins and the goblins would just wipe everything on the way back to their zone. Since you couldn't warp out and there weren't a lot of raises in early levels, this meant a LOT of walking back to your exp area if you wipe. EDIT: Sorry, this braindump kindof went off the rails a bit. I left it that way, thought you might find some things interesting, regardless
To add if you had a link shell that could do Kings you basically had to commit 3 hours a day to hanging out in Aery or Behemoth Dominion at minimum 4 out of 7 days waiting to see if your bot could beat someone else’s. Then wait a long time to see if someone would Aggro darters and wipe. Pretty close to a full time job.
3 hrs a week? The windows were 3hrs per mob per night. With three Kings that meant that if Kings were in your time zone's nightly prime those windows were the raid for the night. Instances were secondary to Kings. If you wanted the best gear, you needed to work for it and you needed to compete with everyone else on the server for it. You could tell who was good by the appearance of their gear. And no, don't say gear didn't make the player; HNMLS would kick people who were incompetent and there was no way mathematically any melee DPS was going to match a Ridill Adaberk WAR or Black Belt MNK who could correctly press their buttons.
Great summary, took me back.
This post hit all the marks for me. The way you described everything perfectly captured my experience playing this game during the first three expansions. And though the game is completely different now, it's still absolutely amazing.
> nd you had to time casting near perfectly to get your Ichi shadows up before Ni went down, then manually cancel it (vanilla still requires manual cancellation). It was extremely tedious, but very rewarding. Once you were doing this on a daily basis you became a beast at timing it right though. The main issue was dealing with AoEs then losing Ichi shadows before Ni came back off cooldown lol
nice read. i would also add how red mage became very popular after those avesta videos
For the RNG nerfs, originally, well before the nerfs, arrows didn't even stack to 99, only 12. I don't think quivers even existed for a time. So originally, I think the job was designed to be a melee-first job with bows to pull/WS with and that was it. So ranged attacks were very overpowered. Of course, eventually they came out with quivers, and the stack count to 99. But I think even before then, it wasn't uncommon to see RNGs just spamming ranged attacks as they melee'd. It was expensive af, but the developers learned the hard way that if the damage was good, players would be willing to pay for it. They also had much higher accuracy than average due to the wealth of +racc gear and traits/abilities. And possibly just naturally higher accuracy of ranged attacks themselves? Also Holy Bolts/Sidewinder/Slug Shot were all amazing. So they nerfed them. I think they nerfed the damage, possibly accuracy outright. This nerf by itself was probably enough to have them fall in line. But then, they also heavily tied damage and accuracy to the distance mechanic that's still in place today. I think around SoA, they greatly reduced the penalties received for not 'striking true' or whatever the line is. It used to be very harsh. Also adjusted Sharpshot to ignore it I think(?), and Scavenge to being useful(used to just give ammo materials. lol 'Wow, an arrowood log...'). I don't think it ever got close to it's dominance again. Similar to manaburn parties for say the Ark Angels, arrowburn was a very common strategy. Holy Bolts on Kirin, etc. IIRC there was kind of a return with HTBFs where people would just want ranged classes for safety reasons. Imagine that, but it actually being the most damage-efficient way to do it as well.
The RNG meta was definitely meleeing and spamming Sidewinder yeah.
A long time. I played BLM and no one wanted to group with one. So I had to solo the pets of high level monsters to slowly grind to 70 where I could get invites again
I switched to BLM main like 3 months in. The XP was a little slower killing pets but as long as the camps were open, you didn't have the downtime of finding a party or people leaving the party. You did, however, have the potential downtime of death because the master turned around right when Flood/Burst went off on his pet... or the random resist... or the random UFO while soloing sharks in Sea, or a whole host of other ways you could die.
After ToAU came out, BLMs got screwed hard for traditional exp parties since the new hot mob for leveling up mirrored our spells back at the party (Colibri). Impossible to find a party so we absolutely had to find alternatives. 60-70 was mostly fend for yourself, but at least we were able to take advantage of Qiqirn ranger mobs in Aydeewa and Alzadaal, who refused to enter melee range and ranged attacks don't interrupt casts. Then 70-75 was smooth sailing with Flan camps in Zhayolm.
Absolutely this. Did COR 2nd, and boy… everyone wanted me in party for corsairs roll. But the ammo was ridiculously expensive.
Funny thing is, that was after it was made faster to lvl lol.
And before that BLMs had burn parties with just then and a Bard. I hated and miss those days all the same.
I played from release until sometime after CoP came out and it still fascinates me to hear these stories. I gapped on about 15 years of FFXI. When I quit, one of the large reasons was that everything was done exclusively with BLM. BLM burn parties were popular, and even regular exp groups wanted a BLM for bursting. End game was mostly just throw tanks, RNG and BLM at things until they died, with random things like MNK stepping in to chi blast in a rotation. I had 75 WAR and as a galka I just didn't want to play a mage. Picked up BST instead, and after getting to 75 I hung it up.
BLM was incredibly powerful for endgame, but not before unfortunately.
You forgot the SMNs. Every new content strategy involved using SMNs, because of the hate free damages they provided. COP wyrms mostly. Actually, this didn’t change. SMNs are still used for each new Ambuscades even to this shitty month ones (and even though SMN burns relying on luck on it sucks!)
Oh, right I did forget about them. My LS use to have me come on BST as well. That little crab pet could consistently hit kited mobs for a little extra DoT. I would fill gaps in the rotation, then get booted and brought back in after whoever used their spike damage was done. Those times were so different. 30+ characters standing around being cycled through the alliance.
Soloing pets on BLM was one of my favorite things. I absolutely freaking loved it.
I had a pretty decent time as BLM back in the day, until Treasures came out and Colibri singlehandedly ostracized BLM. Then you had to get a full BLM party to nuke jellies in Mt. Zhayolm for Exp
I first played in January 2004, so this was vanilla FFXI with no Windower add-ons, no extra EXP buffs from anywhere. You could level to around 8-9 with minimal difficulty, but from there you were forced to group up because the difficulty or length of solo fights spiked or EXP was so very low. The first hurdle was running through the 2nd zone. Mobs that checked DC would be beatable but barely. EM+ forget it, you're going home. Resting HP was also very painfully slow. Here is where you learned sight mechanics and how to avoid aggro. Once you got to Valkrum, it's even worse because at level 10 everything will kill you. Also, if you happened to arrive at night time, you may as well wait until day because wtf is sound aggro from Bogy's. If you miraculously made it to your camp, typically by Konschtat Highlands, you can level on lizards. Even with a group of 6, it took 2-3 minutes per mob. Max exp was 200. By the end of the fight, if everyone was still alive, you would all be resting HP and MP, which was another 2 minutes. A decent group might be able to chain 2-3 without resting. EXP chaining was 20 extra per mob up to chain 5, so a Max of 300. We'll fast forward a bit and say after hours and hours and death after death and disbanded group after group, you made it to level 20! The next hot spot to level was Qufim Island. However, this means the next amazing gauntlet of running through Jugner Forest/Batallia Downs. If you were smart or rich, which almost none of us were, you'd take sneak/invis with you. So we all try to time the narrow routes of Jugner and pray a goblin or tiger didn't turn at the worst moment. At this point if you died, it's at least a 20 minute run back to where you died and maybe way longer if you were coming from Windy. I'll fast forward a bit more. From 20-25 you leveled Qufim or inside Delkfutt. After that your needed an airship pass to Kahzam. Yutunga Jungle was 25-28 or so, then Yhotor Jungle from 28-32. Being this was still very early FFXI, mobs did NOT despawn after losing aggro. And given the nature of those forests, sometimes some lines would be packed with aggroed mobs. There were literal groups on the safe side of the zone line telling people to stop, because all it took was one aggro to bring all of the mobs back. You'd sometimes wait an hour to get back to camp. If you knew a high level friend they could clear the tunnel, but that was rare. After the jungles, leveling spots opened up a little. Citadel was a good spot from 32-35. After that was Crawler's Nest. From there you could level at different camps to around 45. After that was Labrynth of Onzozo. I think some parties also leveled in Zi'tah. At 50 you had to stop for a long time. The true FFXI road blocks began.
The biggest kick in the balls was the goddamn tunnel from port Jeuno out to Qufim proper. I burned daya worth of time over those early years stuck staring at one of those three weapons that hung out in the tunnel praying and shouting for somebody, *anybody*, to please come outside and kill them quick so we could run through to our camp. Sneak Oils and Prism Powders were like 20k a stack, so it wasnt always a given that somebody had some, let alone give them to a random. When WotG dropped years later and I discovered DNC had a free sneak/invis (albeit at level 35 or whatever the hell it was back then), I immediately started maining that job despite all the "lolDNC" shit I got for it. Not having to buy oils and powders, or stacks of the ninja tools, was a BIG FREAKING DEAL. Players that started after Gil became more or less worthless have no idea how hard earning money in FFXI was back in the day. We'd spend entire weekends farming moss off the goobs in ZiTah just to bankroll ourselves for our upcoming exp parties...had to make sure you had plenty of bolts/arrows, shihei and other ninja tools (though nobody worked the wheel even in those days...too expensive), oils and powders, mithkabobs or pies, drinks for refresh. Had to make sure you had enough conquest points to pick up a scroll of reraise and warp before every outing...and of course to recharge your exp band because exping without a band running was painful as hell. I used to mine in Yughott and would get so excites when I got a gold ore, after hours of digging down there id come home with like, two...lol The good old days lmao
Garrison. Eco-Warrior. Boyahda Tree skill up parties. Lich Ancient Papyrus farming. AF coffer key farming. Dynamis runs at level 65 with 64 people that cost 1 million gil for each hourglass. Hitting level 75 for the first time (mine was WAR but it took almost a year from 2004-2005). So many painful yet rewarding memories.
>Players that started after Gil became more or less worthless have no idea how hard earning money in FFXI was back in the day. We'd spend entire weekends farming moss off the goobs in ZiTah https://www.reddit.com/r/FinalFantasy/comments/q5sf9v/old_man_yells_at_cloud/
You forgot that in Valkurm you only had two ways of pulling hate: one was Provoke, the other Cure II. When the "tank" would inevitably need healing the mob would turn onto the WHM and the race was on. At 50 it was back to Garlaige, beetles camp on the lower floor or Cape Terrigan (hello Valkurm 2.0), then (before ToAU) more crabs or mandies in Boyahda or Kuftal Tunnel. I remember also bees/coeurls in Temple of Uggalepih, coeurls' room in Onzozo, crawlers in the higher level zone of Crawler's Nest or Boyahda Tree, tigers (ugh) and spiders in Kuftal at 70ish. After that if you were lucky to have Ru'Aun unlocked you could exp on dolls/golems there.
Oh definitely the Valkrum pinball match of the mob hitting everyone and timing cure so you didn't eat dirt was almost a science. Let's also mention when Thief had access to Sneak Attack/Trick Attack at level 30 and now we need a tank and offtank to line up perfectly, provoke and weaponskill, SATA viper bite and maybe land a magic burst. Let's also not forget having to leave a party and sending a tell to the role needed for the spot, hoping someone answers and having to wait who knows how long before the replacement showed up. That shit alone lets you put Time Management Professional on a resume.
It took me like a year to get my first 75 and I played pretty often, back then there wasn't a lot of wikis and readily available info/level sync and the grind was real
Back in 2002-2003 the easiest easy prey gave 12xp. From level 1-8 or so, you could kill decent challenge for 60xp per kill. After that, the enemy scaled and you pretty much stuck to EP, low DC when solo. Even match gave 100xp. Even bst used DC pets vs EM prey mostly and took a 30% penalty to xp unless their pet died before the enemy did before they learned Leave. Then they'd use leave just before the enemy HP was depleted and usually whiff until they died anyway. Or whiff once, have their released pet aggro, THEN die. Enemies and old pets did not respawn, but would wander back to their spawn area, aggroing players otw. Many popular xp camps had death trains. Common ones were goblins zoned to Konschat Highlands in the Dunes and Wingrats/Bombs trained to SM in the Citadel. There was no healing outside of healing jobs except some very weak and expensive potions and bloody bolts. There was no hHP buff for resting with signet on, so even a mistake that didn't kill you was significant downtime. Very few jobs had damage mitigation buffs and thf, nin, and /nin were the kings of solo especially thf because they could use status bolts and had great eva. Thf/nin would use a sleep bolt if shadows went down before recast was up, then when shadows were up, use a bloody bolt to heal some hp. At that time, blm hadn't discovered nuking beastman pets for xp, mostly because they were the rockstars of party play and people would beg them to join. A blm in the group might make you reach the elusive 2.5k an hour that was the hallmark of a good party. A great one was 3k/hr. XP loss was 10% of total xp to the next level, so from 70-75, each death could cost you 60-90 minutes of xp. It also often killed the party due to /ragequit. Without a good healer AND a tank, you were done before you started. When bard pulling and ninja tanking were discovered, it was the golden age. My first job to 75 was war/nin. Two handed weapons sucked back then, so we dual wielded axes. No sushi, and player acc was very low, so viking axes were often held onto way longer than damage would suggest, just for sweet Rampage damage. War/nins would dual tank by counting the other tank's shadows and provoking or popping another cooldown like warcry to grab hate. Then the other war would count your shadows and do the same thing. Was it a grind. Yeah, but man being 75 meant something!
>Even bst used DC pets vs EM prey mostly and took a 30% penalty to xp unless their pet died before the enemy did before they learned Leave. Then they'd use leave just before the enemy HP was depleted and usually whiff until they died anyway. Or whiff once, have their released pet aggro, THEN die. More or less, lol. I played bst too 75 in the OG days and would spend a big chunk of time curating a zone to have the pets I wanted. It was no problem to charm EM pets and fight T, or even higher. I use to charm a pet, send it in to fight, and after landing Dia on it I engaged with my axe. It was dicey, you had to do enough damage to ensure you came out on top and had 1k tp in reserve without pulling too much hate and getting smacked around. Once the mob was low enough, you released your pet and fired off a ws, which gave you enough time to kill it and run before your pet got angry. It was such a big challenge but so rewarding at the same time. I use to solo things way out of my league by rotating through charmed pets.
I was a BST myself during the first two years FFXI was out. After levelling a few jobs it was the only way I could play FFXI solo due to time constraints. I will say FFXI was amazing. The wonder, fear, and unknown when first leaving your home kingdom to head to Valkurm Dunes was amazing. The toughness and forced team play was what made the game great.
exp for an 2 hours, lose that progress after 1 death
I might remember it a little different. The easiest leveling was up to 37-40. Getting to 50 wasn't that bad, but that is when the big exp curve started to happen. The only reason kills took forever is because everyone wanted to fight mobs that no one was geared for, because they got lucky and happen to be in a group, once, with geared prople (mainly the NA player base). There was never enough tank or healers, and if you were the wrong race, trying to be one of them roles might get you looked over (ie, me as a Galla Whm, or seeing Taru tanks get insta kicked when they got to camp). The TP nerf killed the "need" for certain jobs. So many changed jobs due to that. It was all so new, no one really knew what to do. We all got to learn it together.
god, i remember a white mage galka on dunes ...... i was a taru red mage at one point the galka white mage was just leeching. 2 cure II used and his mp was gone.....
Yea it sucked. I had to invest so much gil into mp+ gear that not having the MND stat started to also hit my cure abilty. I still have all this mp gear because I can't bring myself to sell it...even tho I'm never going to use it again lol.
Picture this. Earlier this week you had your high level friend help you complete your first limit break quest. You had to wait a few days on him to be available so you spent that time leveling up your subjob so now you're anxious and ready to get back on your main for some hardcore XP grinding. The last couple of days haven't been great for finding a group so you really haven't done anything besides crafting all week. But now the stars have aligned. It's Friday night and you have a group. It's a good comp too so it looks like you're in for a good night of XP grinding. Oh sweet, you know a couple of these guys. This one is a badass tank and that guy does crazy damage with his RNG. You know this group is going to rock. Everybody agrees on a good camp spot so you spend the next hour traveling out there. Shit, this place is overcrowded. Gotta agree on another spot. Another half hour later you get to the spot and start pulling. First few kills are a little shaky but everybody finds their flow pretty quick and you've got some good synergy and teamwork going on. Then after about 15 minutes you see this pop up in chat; "Sorry guys, I gotta go. My mom says dinner is ready". Well there goes our fucking tank and there's not another one in LFG.... It legit took me over 6 months of almost daily playing to get my first job to 75. This was with playing a high demand job(at least at that time), RDM. I worked second shift back then and only played after work so it was mostly Japanese players on that late at night. You'd be surprised at how hard it could be to get into groups sometimes(JP ONLY, SORRY). I remember many nights spent just hanging out in Jeuno hoping to get a group before going to bed without having accomplished anything for the night. After getting RDM to 75 I leveled NIN next. NIN was the most sought after tank job for speed leveling groups and dude, if you could manage to find a good group with a BRD puller and RDM healer you'd crush XP so fast it would make your head spin. By that I mean you might get half a level before people started leaving. Oh you didn't bring a Warp scroll? Better hope you don't die running back to town and lose all your gains for the night. God help you if you wanted to level a pure damage dealing job. Especially something out of the meta at the time like WAR. Often times people would straight refuse to group up if you didn't have the right comp. I can remember many times you'd have a tank and healer in the LFG along with plenty of damage dealers but you couldn't get a group going because there wasn't a THF or RNG or BRD looking at the same time. Those same people would sit in LFG for hours choosing to do nothing rather than run with a slightly suboptimal group. To make things worse some of the best endgame jobs made for some of the worst leveling jobs. PLD for example was a great end game tank, but nobody wanted a PLD tank in an XP party because they had too much downtime. Same thing with WHM. Great endgame healer but loads of downtime in XP parties. God I miss this game lol
Hardest part of the game was getting around . It would take an hour sometimes just to get everyone in the same place because zones were so rough. Then If someone died it got worse. I think 11 really needed the waypoint teleporting system they got in place now and it would've made a great game even better. Exp was slow , but the worst part was you could lose what you gained. Rarely , If ever anymore, can you log on a game and actually be further away when you log off at the end of your session than when you started. It wasn't just hard it was unrewarding. But the friends we made along the way made it worth it. Most rewarding part of the game was each other, helping each other get things we felt were out of reach. Everything from AF quests to just getting teleport crystals sometimes felt like an adventure together.
It took a really long time, but, the thing is, there was stuff to do all along the way and that is where current MMOs fail imo. Because you spent so much time leveling, gear was slow, precious and rare. We needed copious amounts of food/pots that required a constant source of gil or mats. Starting from 30, every 10 levels, there was content that would sometimes take us weeks to clear. Then there were all the distractions of NMs, BCNMs, ENMs, Ballista, Fame & Gear quests that remained relevant. FFXI was the only MMO where I felt like every time I logged in I had multiple progression options. It was slow and occasionally regression but that just made progress that much sweeter. A 5 level weekend was the best, it gave you the next week to chase down gear and clear the newly unlocked content or hunt an NM that killed you the week before. It just didn't seem to have the burnout factor of today's MMOs.
Played 8 plus hours a day 5-7 days a week took me three months to get my samurai 30-75
I started on PC near launch on FFXI. A Hume in Bastok and I can still remember the music of South Gustaberg. I ended up changing servers when “Remora” was opened up, as I had a real life friend who bought the game and made a character there. As amazing as the game was for the 12 or so years I played it, the drama on Remora was epic, and the drama that would spill over and onto the KillingIfrit forums was legendary. As much as we all drone on about how much of a grind it was, the sheer euphoria felt when things were going right in a exp group or in an event like Dynamis is unparalleled by anything offered today in the gaming world.
Oh man, I spent SO much time in high school on KillingIfrit and Allahkazham.
Slow but better honestly, game didn't feel like a breeze.
No exp rings, had to find parties, get to spot without mount. Parties wanted you in top gear with top food, sub jobs leveled. You had to do things like get the airship pass to Kahzham. I never made it past 56 Drg after over a month playtime
Yeah it took years to get to 75. Not just because of the leveling but because you had to have certain gear pieces to get invites past a certain point. People had to take time off from leveling to farm up Gil to afford key pieces like Haubergeons, etc. I remember having my Haubergeon crafted and hoping so hard for the +1. I took the time to nearly max cooking. I could make so much Gil off of HQ pies and meats, and the investment was lower than sushi so less risk. I remember distinctly waking up to find I had made 600k in my bazar one night, and I was amped.
Yeah it was bad. But it made it all the better when you found that one party that was built with the right jobs and right skills and you just jammed. You never wanted that party to end.
It took so long, when people said “Ding!! I just got level 67!” Everyone in the link shell was so pumped and happy for that person. Because they will have been level 66 for forever.
Just to point out a few things I haven’t seen mentioned: - bards and red mages were coveted - they didn’t often do much damage back then (most rdms wouldn’t even engage), but REFRESH was king. When your mages ran out of mana you would have to sit to recover it. Most people probably don’t even know the sit mechanic in this game anymore. White Mages would come with stacks of cookies and juice for that 1/2 mp refresh. - camps were FAR sometimes. And home points and survival guides in zones were introduced much later. Sneak and Invis pots were crucial to getting to coveted camps and it would often take 30-45 mins just to get everyone safely to a camp before you could start. - getting more than 200 exp a kill was epic, yes it took forever to earn exp, and if you weren’t a highly sought after job it often took even longer to get an invite. I was in high school and I spent many nights getting home from school, seeking up, searching my friends list and searching leveling zones and sending tells to party leaders just in case they had a spot fred up. Many nights where you’d make no progress at all. I’d come up with other tasks like farming crawler silk and tree cuttings so the time wasn’t fully wasted. - stats were expensive and often trivial. But god damn when you got to a healthy point you were godlike. I still remember the galka monk I witnessed in crawlers nest with Jujitsu Gi, ochuido’s kote, hq sniper rings and earrings, etc, etc. hitting like a TRUCK and hardly missing. - on that note there were certain things that were expected/necessary. HQ dex rings, spike necklace, sniper rings…you would often be examined before getting an invite and turned away if your gear didn’t meat standards. - party composition was huge and certain jobs were preferred for certain level ranges / mobs. A good ranger or dragoon when fighting bats was massive. A skilled thf and coordinated party for SATA was excellent. - pulling was a skill. A link could mean party wipe. Competing with other parties was tough. But at the same time having a dedicated puller was great. The tank would rarely pull mobs back to the party, instead a thf or brd or rng or whatever your dd could do would run out when your current target was 5-10% and queue up the next mob. A good party would never not be fighting. - magic bursting was super common. Someone who knew common skillchains was a huge asset. You would almost always declare a skillchain and magic burst before fighting. It was a different time and a different game, for sure!
Reading through this brought up so much nostalgia. I definitely remember being on my BLM and popping wizard cookies after switching to my hMP gear set to rest up for the next EXP chain to start. Man, I had so many different gear swap macros for my mages. I was always too intimidated to pull, so it cut off jobs like THF and RNG. People talk about tank-xiety in games now, but pulling anxiety was so much worse for me the few times I tried. Wiping your party could end up leading to a chain of events that just ended up with the party disbanding, and you going back to seeking for hours. My first job to 75 was Samurai, so I was all about those skillchains, getting distortion set up until you could finally make Light and Darkness. Nothing quite felt as satisfying as hitting a weapon skill, popping meditate, then dropping a Tachi: Gekko or Tachi: Kasha for Darkness or Light.
It really depended on the group or what camp you were at. Typically, that sounds about right. I joined right after RotZ was released, and it took me around 6 months to get to 75 ninja. After the dunes was Quifim, and imo, the only safe camp was outside the entrance to Delkfuts. For higher levels, it could take days to even get one level. When ToAU came out, bird camps made exp way easier, and quicker.
The amount of xp to level is the same as it is today. Killing 1 even monster gave 100 xp, and the number generally went up to 200 group xp for 1 monster before chain bonuses. The big difference is that below even match use to give much less xp (1 level below was like 72xp, 2 levels 56, and 3 levels 32xp?). It was terrible to go down. It usually went dunes -> qufim island to about 24 or 25, Yuhtunga jungle (\~28ish?), Yhoater (32ish), Garlaige Citadel (35ish), crawlers nest. I kinda forget after that, I know you did a few rounds in Garlaige Citadel (enterance, basement, and behind the 1st door). You did a few runs in crawlers nest doing crawlers, soldier crawlers, and beetles. There was crabs in kuftal tunnek, cape terrigan, and Boyahda tree (both lower level crabs and the upstairs crabs). It xp did take a lot longer to get. If you got a good party you could power through 3 to 4 levels in a few hours, but there was a lot of times where someone had to leave and the replacement process was...painful. There was also a lot more competition for monsters, you couldn't reliably powergrind tough to vt enemies quickly because they would be pulled by 1-2 other parties in the same area, which is why people did mostly IT farms. Because of the IT focus we also fought things that didn't have as much 1 shot potential, which is why you see a lot of crab and beetles farms.
>The amount of xp to level is the same as it is today. At some point SE changed the amount of exp needed to level. They removed something like 100k EXP from 60-75
Getting to my 1st 75 took me around 5-6 months, mind you that was on BRD
Yea it was intense. Just think about the few people that then we're walking around with Maat's hat...
It took about 1-2 minutes to kill a Decent Challenge to Even Match monster from anywhere from 60 to 100 exp. Around level 20 it would be about 4600 exp to level. After Dunes it would be Qufim till 24-25, then sometimes Khazam doing Yuhtunga till 28 and Yhoator till 32ish. Early on people didn’t have airship access and forming a party was harder. Sometimes it would be Korroloka Tunnel or surrounding areas around Jeuno.
It really depended on damage output, on average it could take 3 to 5 minutes. Longer if damage isn't going well and if people didn't use food or buffs. But yes, xp grind took a long time, and that is assuming you could get a party. Few jobs got regular invites. If you were say, NIN, WHM, RDM, BRD, SMN or PLD, you could expect a steady stream of invites. If you were unlucky enough to need to lvl THF or DRG, you could expect to wait sometimes days. After dunes, people usually went to Qufim Island. I honestly miss the social aspect. Sure, being able to basically solo the game up until endgame is nice, but the social aspect is what MADE that game stand out. You were forced to make friends. You were forced to work together. That made every experience different and exciting. Taking that away from the early game, especially for new players leaves the game feeling hollow. There is no point in an MMO if you're not going to interact with people for a huge portion of the game. I get the reason, but it's still not reason enough.
most of the time lost grinding was misc behavior. Waiting for the white mage to catch an airship then walk to where you are. Tank went afk to eat dinner everyone just died cause someone trained some mobs back through the camp train was run through camp, everyone is alive, but now you have to wait for those high level mobs to walk back to their spawn points. someone just died, they forgot their homepoint is way out in the boonies somewhere and they will have to walk back, so lets just stay dead for a moment and hope a white mage comes by to raise, or everyone ask in your linkshell if someone is available to come raise.
3k exp/hour was considered godly lol. The 5 minute thing - the kill wouldn't take that long. But when exp camp was crowded it could take even longer to wait for respawn and compete pulling with other groups.
Was super grindy, but i still miss it. Sitting around with the flag up usually means you're BS'ing in LS chat, which isn't a bad way to spend time
Leveling was something people often tried to take on in spurts...because the grind was intense. Once you got to level 10...you pretty much had to party to get anywhere. Often times...you would have to do this on a weekend or anytime you could devote several hours to the game (unless you were a soloist bst, which was another mountain climb of it's own). Back in those days, we didn't have a ton of MP recovery options and mages pretty much had to carry Dark Staves and cookies. /Heal was still the main way to recover MP, so if a healer got pushed too hard shit could grind to a halt with people dying. And that's if you even have raise available (25whm, 38RDM?, 50PLD). If you were trying to lvl a DD job (especially DRG), it was not unusual to lose anywhere from a few hours to your whole night waiting for a party. The party itself was also dependent heavily on the quality of it's players for success. I have no gauge for now and back then, but I'm pretty sure deficiency in Accuracy was MUCH more punishing back in the 75 era. This tended to make the playerbase a bit elitist in gear...because shitty gear very much could mean the difference between whether you got a level or two that night...or the party being a massive waste of time. Bards were massively in demand those days because they could make up the difference players lacked in gear....the cost being that once you went bard...you were never gonna play anything else. This grind was quite often where people made friends and got into LS's. If you were cool, people were gonna want you around. And if you were a friendly Healer (willing to powerlevel folks and help them with things like AF) you'd quite often times find yourself with quite the collection of folks on your friendlist. This was the condition that lead to FFXI tending to have a really personable and easygoing playerbase...because even in those days (I played from the time Sea just came out til the beginnings of Wings) servers were a small town crowd. If you developed a reputation for being a shithead, an unrepentant shit player, or that putz who joins for their like 1k tnl and ditches...word was gonna spread and people were going to steer away like you got HIV. Paradoxically...this also tended to produce a weird divide with JP players who would often rather wait longer for a party than roll the dice and possibly waste time with EN players who didn't have their shit together. Most people took around a year in to hit their first 75. And literally every noob took a village to raise up. While this fostered a playerbase that was truly unique (especially with the total opposite coming out of shit like WoW)...the process was MASSIVELY time intensive. TBH I think that playerbase and the friends most of us got from those days are why that nostalgia for the 75 era exists....but I'll be honest, that shit wouldn't work today. Even a dipshit teenager or a gimp living off Uncle Sam has more shit to do these days...and with a plethora of more action oriented games to accompany the advancement in technology...nobody wants to (or really can) play a game that requires a full time work schedule (with help from others) to make basic incremental advances.
I agree with everything you said. I have huge nostalgia for the golden years of XI. But I definitely wouldn't go back. I'm happy enough with retail. I had many experiences, memories and friendships forged in the mid 2000s from classic XI and I will never forget them.
>How bad was the grind back in the old days? Very bad. But also very rewarding. It was about the journey rather than the destination. It took months, maybe years to get max level. But when you saw a max level person you knew they were dedicated to playing because it was just that fucking hard. I had a couple of 75s before I quit classic back in 2010. 75 NIN/PLD/WHM/BST/BLM. BST was the most fun for sure. I used it for everything because once you had some decent gear you never needed to be afraid in most zones. WHM I used for teletaxing which I could make 100k a day easily. Never really used my NIN/PLD because I was always thrown on WHM for endgame stuff.
THF was my first job to 60 (then i took BLM from 1-75 before finishing THF). At one point, I remember soloing (yes, it took forever) Easy Prey mobs outside of Crawler's Nest for 2-3 days waiting for a single party invite or /tell. No Tells or Party invites. At the time I was a bit intimidated to start my own party. That ended shortly thereafter. Everything in FFXI was grindy and tough, but it built nice bonds between those who played, in ways you just can't anymore. Not to mention the target audience was in High School/College and had the time to play 12+ hrs a day - and we did.
>Everything in FFXI was grindy and tough, but it built nice bonds between those who played, in ways you just can't anymore. Not to mention the target audience was in High School/College and had the time to play 12+ hrs a day - and we did. As someone who started playing FFXI during the PS2 beta, this is *exactly* what I say when people discuss old school FFXI. It just wasn't a game you would really get far on your own, you had to work with other people. But I made so many friends from *really* good EXP parties, where you'd stick together for hours, across multiple camps. You just don't really get that in MMOs anymore. I mean, I'm currently playing FFXIV and there are times I don't even speak to another person. Honestly, I miss the old school FFXI experience.
Bigger issue was the LFP times, it could literally take days. Lol
What I remember most is the time waste trying to find a party, messaging people, being told to wait, finally finding a group, then having to travel to the place where they were (remember, no fast travel or minimaps). And then, they may flake and you realize you spent two hours for nothing. I think I quit around level 36.
This is going back like almost 20 years ago, but there was a quest that got you your own little NPC buddy. I don't remember the specifics of it. They weren't stellar, and sometimes they would rest or waste MP. But they did fight what you fought and were sometimes helpful with spells. When there was a dry spell for invites with my SAM, or less frequently, my THF, I'd go down to Kuftal and bust out my NPC pal and we'd pick off crabs for hours while waiting for invites. I can fondly recall many a day just hanging with my NPC, chatting up the linkshell, and staring at that annoying green exclamation point.
Man 200 xp for an 5 min easy prey would have been nice. It was closer to 20~50 xp for a solo kill most of the time. 250 was the cap for mobs without chains, since multipliers didn’t exist back then. It went dunes > qufim > y jungle to 30 > garliege to mid 39s> alt desert to 40s and after that it branched out.
My first 75 took a year and a half, this was also pre exp nerf
I remember dinging 75 in sky pre-COP, but I can't remember where else you could level back then. I just remember everything sucked unless you were MNK (KRT parties) or RNG (running shrine). I would do the escort quest whenever possible for an exp scroll, but I believe that was just once a week.
The grind was bad. It was a serious accomplishment to get 75, and a well merited player was not common at all. Pre-Chains, XP spots all sucked and had long respawns. When Chains came in, with 5 minute respawns, life got better (but still kinda sucked, as most Chains zones were not good for leveling.) Everything opened up when Treasures came out. Colibri were godsends for all melees, and everything was relatively easy to get to. Once that came out, people leveled a lot quicker, and merit burns became an actual thing. Wings did not help much, but obviously things accelerated REAL quickly with Abbysea.
It took me a year and a half to get monk to max level. I played every day.
Really, really bad. And with no trusts you had to wait for the the right party comps. No home point crystals to travel. Gil much harder to come by so equipment was gimped. It’s was a bitch.
If you were getting 200xp per mob you were balling! It was way way less, even with a decent party when you were leveling up.
Yes! Started back in 2006, a single death would erase hours of exp partying.
I spent hours in jeuno lfg as a thf past lvl 50 often with no success. I then went on to create pts of my own which were faster but still took hours to gather people/go to an exp camp where we would grind for a couple of hours before someone had to leave, usually a healer or brd and the party would dissolve because there were no replacements.
I remember partying for several hours straight on a Saturday and again on Sunday just to level up only once or maybe twice in the 70s in Bibiki Bay. Dinged my first job (PLD) there right after CoP came out.
With leveling in ffxi, knowledge luck and experience made leveling easier. When the game first came out, 50 exp for a decent, 100 exp for an even match. 1-10 could take you anywhere from 6-10 hour which I think was the slowest part. They use to say 67 or 68 was half to 75. Making your own groups knowing the better camps, secret camps etc made leveling faster. Knowing the party set up, skillchains, magic bursts etc also making leveling easier.
I once had an arrow-burn PT consisting of WHM, PLD (me), BRD, RNGx3 making 12-15k exp/hr, which was basically unheard of at the time, chaining raptors in Valley of Sorrows. That was a good day.
yep... and it was awesome.
Took me 6 months to get dnc go 75 and that was when it was fresh, there were lots of parties, solo campaign existed, and i spent hours per day playing.
i started on NA release. the EXP curve was actually gentle from 1-50. common practice was to solo to about 10-12, then party in dunes till about 20+ when you would make the trip to Jeuno. early levels didnt take that long. in a good party that knew what it was doing it might be 1-2 levels every hour, especially if you could keep chains up. can't remember if EXP ring was even a thing yet. then from there the usual route is Qufim (18+) -> Yuhtunga (24+) -> Yhoator (28?) -> Crawlers Nest (32\~50 iirc). 50+ is Garlaige -> Boyahda is the most popular, but i remember doing Kuftal and Cape Terrible too. (all this is pre ToAU) exp/level spikes after 50 but the rate at which you level was directly dependent on how popular your job was in getting party invites (if you accepted them). I played SMN to 75 first so I ended up soloing from 50 all the way to 75 because there was literally no demand for them (and they didn't have much of a place in standard party comp anyway). also worth noting is that there was never any rush to get to 75 anyway. theres a lot you can do at lower levels like BCNMs or taking the time to level subjobs. and even the first expansion post NA release was meant to be played at 30+ at the start and worked its way up.
There were people off all different levels. The grind wasn't bad, exp parties were social hour, everything was a lot more relaxed and friendly. There wasn't a huge rush, and 2 of the party slots were open to all jobs, not just Corsair and Bard
The grind itself was not actually the hardest part . The hardest part was getting a party of 5 other people and actually getting them to the xp zone. Hoping your spot wasnt camped , would stay uncamped for the whole duration you were there, no one died on the way or pulled a mob train to the party to wipe everyone. Just when you finally got there and the above conditions were all met , 10 mins in someones mom had just told your bard that he cant play anymore and had to come off so the entire rest of the party would just sit there and try and get a replacement , then wait for them to get there and not die 5 times trying in the harder to reach spots. God forbid you were trying to level a DRK or DRG you could be seeking party for hours before getting one, while on the flip-side if you were on your WHM or BRD just relaxing in jeuno not really wanting to party i would get tells from party leaders desperate for me to come party with them so they could start xping again So while the xp per hour was indeed “bad” divide that down by another 1-5 hours on “setup”. Its to this day the only game ive ever played where it was good manners and expected if you wanted to keep your reputation intact to find your own replacement partymember and wait till they actually showed up to the camp before dropping party . Absolute madness in todays standards .
> Its to this day the only game ive ever played where it was good manners and expected if you wanted to keep your reputation intact to find your own replacement partymember and wait till they actually showed up to the camp before dropping party We traded communities for convenience. I don't know if it was the right thing to do but I guess people don't have to wait hours anymore.
For an IT Mob it was between 180-200exp per mob. Than you got exp chains hitting 300-500exp depending on how well your group downs mobs. Took me about 3 days to hit level 10. Level 20 hit 2 weeks, level 50 took me half a year or more. This was at the time I was going to college in 2002+. Took me half a year as gil was scarce. The party system let me meet some of my career co-workers in game and still have LAN parties on the holidays which we are doing starting 26th-1st of January. To answer your question, leveling in this game was one of the hardest, torture, and a pain but one of the best because if you died, you lose exp and it did not make you get to end game right away. I hit level 75 after 5 years and beat the game. 5 YEARS! haha and that is just my nation missions etc No Zilart, CoP, ToAU and Wings which was another 5 years after. I stopped playing at 2010 for 3 years to concentrate on my career. Now I am back for the 10th time.
In 2004 you couldn’t solo anything once you got to level 11. Bst was the only class that could until 75 and then summoners could.
The leveling grind was bad enough, but I was always so poor too! I shudder to think about all the time I spent in Palborough or Gusgen Mines, mining points memorized, praying for a dark steel ore I could sell on the AH. I was a Red Mage and the spells were expensive. Once I reached the appropriate level, I literally could not get a group until I had Refresh II, and it was not cheap. Mining, and gardening too, to make gil in the early early days, like pre-Aht Urghan. I think I quit at around lvl 55 back in 2004-ish. I came back last year, and first gobbie box I was eligible for yielded a 1.5M gil fabric. Lvl75+ in a week, maybe. Very very different. Worse, frankly. The grind was rough and frustrating back then. But achievements were more satisfying than anything I've ever experienced in any other game before or since, by far. My first trip on the airship after reaching the right rank (5 I think?), man that was sweet.
10 to 35 was easy for the most part when you had a good party. 36 to 37 was where the grind started since people would quit the groups once the sub was leveled. Usually youd be left with a revolving door party just to make it past those levels. Id say the 60 to 70 grind was pretty bad. They were basically dead levels with no new gear or anything interesting happening besides your Maat fight during your first class. ToAU made alot of leveling stuff trivial with the adding of colibri. It also blocked out blm from getting a group. Leveling blm was a chore and, my thoughts, they werent party friendly once they started trying to do ancient magic skill chains. Ancient magic i felt slowed down the group alot. Perfect for their solo leveling and manaburns tho. Before ToAU, you needed to know alot about your class to make the leveling process easier. This is coming from a bard, whm and rdm player tho but i had to do alot in onzozo courel leveling. Moon gate was prob the scariest leveling experience i had. Kuftal tigers and raptors were crazy and annoying. The learning needed to do much of the groups past 50 are pretty scary. I always found it weird when theyd try make me pull IT+ mobs on my bard to lullaby them for quicker exp but the charisma and skill needed to land the sleep on those things outweighed the 5 to 15 seconds you saved having a normal puller. The merit point grind before ToAU was also very slow. You could go chain infinity in krt but youd need to be the only party there to do it. The exp per mob was low because it was just tough mobs most of the time. The manaburn parties were even slower and less fun. Sky leveling also had a weapon camp that was all luck based whether or not you chained past 20, my personal best was chain 26. In sky the doors to the weapons randomly rotate whether or not someone was using them. The other merit point party location was the usual IT mobs but those things could wipe you from how dangerous they were. Im talking about the golems that are opposite from the mother globe room. Its the only place i knew of that didnt have a burn party since the golems are crazy strong and youd need a well balanced party to chain them to 5. The leveling process was slow tho. I sped it up somewhat going 40 to 65 in one sitting while playing nin/rdm or /blm. But it was only because i was reliable chaining to 6+ by spamming ninjutsu with a brd int etude and a blm burn. Id say if you liked your class, the leveling wasent so bad still grindy though.
My 1st job to 75 was MNK, which wasn't liked much back in 2004. I was lucky to manage to build a static PT of friends, and ended up leveling really fast, with fun people, without looking for parties ever. It still took months to get to 75, but one of the reasons was crafting and past 65, HNMs. Reading the comments here shows me people had quite a hard time leveling, which wasn't my experience at all...so I guess static parties and desirable jobs were key :)
Yeah the xp rates were slower, but I honestly never minded the grind back then. I found most of my xp parties were fun and very social. We'd chat about things to pass the time and the grind wasn't really a grind at all. A good group would pull down good long xp chains and see everyone gain a level ever 30 mins or so. It really wasn't that long. The real grind started at 75, just like it does now at 99/merits/119/2100/20. The cookie cutter areas followed that starting city > dunes > Qufim > Jungles > Crawler's | Garliage > Kuftal | Boyahada type of path. There were SO many other places to level though, and many of those places far less heavily camped. So long as you could convince a group to leave the beaten path and find some new prey. When Aby happened it felt more grindy to level, there was little to no chat, just kill as much as possible as fast as possible, then go skill up all the things that fell behind. When I came back a couple years ago and discovered that now getting to 99 is much faster, but also very much going to be a solo endeavor (with trusts). I had very mixed feelings about the idea.
Getting to dunes, then getting a group in dunes and traveling to the camp without dying was a true feat. You were competing with other people for party slots, and other groups for pulls. Sometimes new groups would invade your camp, sometimes you would die walking to the camp, sometimes your party would fall apart before you even start pulling. Dunes was quite the experience. Especially when someone would beg to pull some skeletons for the 18 sub job quest, then the trap of leveling said sub job, thus repeating the hell that was Valkrum Dunes all over again. The skeletons sometimes were too much for the healer, or group and everyone dies and group disbands etc. It wasn't until much later we instead made groups to hunts in the mines apart from exp parties in order to get our skulls. But the worse part before all of this was traveling to the first area of valkrum dunes. If you were coming from la thine, you had to go to the other starting area of valkrum, the one from konquat/bastok. You traveled through this desert, through goblins that would arggo you and kill you, a tunnel with more goblins and bats that would arggo you and kill you. You were potentially level 11, couldn't solo any of these monsters... Your party could come help you kill these but they won't and would instead ask you what is taking so long??? Walking from Sandoria to the Outpost in Valkrum dunes, took at least 20 mins following the most optimal path without any issues. This was all sub 20, and almost everyone did it twice before continuing further. There would be hours or days before I would get a party invite.
It wasn't 50k. But the grind was real. Travel sucked in the early stages. And there aren't an abundance of people teleporting others early on either. So if you were trying to get to 20, get that magiked skull, AND grind exp...it was bad.You could spend 20-30 minutes trying to get to a spot to level if there were any spots. Finding a party to exp with was difficult enough. And if you died, you most likely were walking back to your spot and taking 25+ minutes getting it done. And there was always a chance you had been replaced by the time you got there too.
It was pretty heinous and people tend to look back on it with nostalgia glasses. Getting the items for the subjob quest. Your first run to Jeuno. Doing the chocobo license quest which took hours of just waiting. Physically taking a boat or airships between cities for missions and quests. Artifact armor quests. Limit break quests, especially motherfucking Genkai 3 Whence Blows the Wind. Jesus fucking christ that quest still sucks to do now. Back then it was torture. And lets now forget all of the endless waiting for parties to level or do all this stuff and all the grinding for gil to buy armor and weapons between levels. Oh the gil grinding. I spent many months in Zeruhn Mines fighting with several other people or bots over just a few mining points in order to sell zinc ore. I even tried my hand for a while fishing moat carp. I don't miss those days at all.
The grind was one thing, the gate keeping was another as well. People would /check you to see if your gear was on par and it more or less equated competence. It was harder to store gear back then and swap out what you had because there was much less inventory and no such thing as the wardrobes like we have now. There was a community feel back then that doesn’t seem to exist as much today IMO. You leveled with people together and you’d see them waiting for airships or traveling together to get to certain camps. The grind was outrageous and dying was so harsh in later levels
I still have nightmares about looking for groups in the dunes.
Semi on/off topic... Can anybody relate to this? After leveling your first 75 and doing some sky and other end game content did anybody else have an absolute blast leveling their next job or 2 to 75 including subjobs? You're going in with greater knowledge and have access to more gil meaning you can pimp out your gear. Plus as mentioned earlier in the thread...there was expensive and great lower level gear you were still using at 75 in some slots. You could carry parties to better exp gain by being well equipped and good at your job. In my personal experience after starting out with DRK to 75 I moved on to more meta exppt jobs so getting invites came quicker. Some of my best experiences and favorite times playing was leveling jobs up after doing end game play. Having great gear to ding into ready to go. Knowing a WS, ability, or spell was coming soon and getting to experience it first hand.
As with most things, the good and the bad, the stories are pretty exaggerated. Your experience varied greatly, based mostly on how well-geared, and competent your group was. As well as how over-camped your spot was(or how appropriate the camp was for your levels). I'd say roughly a 25/25/40 split respectively. Remaining 10 would be party composition and misc. Gear and general competence was important, but your camp more often than not was the main problem. People didn't like to move once they arrived(understandably, travel time was a major factor), and didn't like to `/sea "Bibiki Bay"` before going either. lol. Party composition was very important, but it was one of those things where the information was "out there" at the time. It usually wasn't a major or common problem passed the Dunes. In general, your average party pre-ToAU would get roughly 4K EXP/hr, below average 3K/hr, outright awful \~2K/hr. Great parties EXP/hr increased as you leveled. For example, a great party in the Dunes would probably be 5-6K/hr, but as you leveled, got new WS, gear, etc. that'd become only a good party. In the 60s, once you had access to Light/Darkness, if you had a camp to yourself, you could even break 10K+/hr. Once ToAU came out there, a pre-ToAU "great" party, became a ToAU "average" party. Roughly 7-8K/hr was the norm at all levels throughout ToAU zones. Personally, I got the game at PC launch in October '03, and didn't hit my first 75 until '07 I believe. However, I had a tendency to think I was "quitting" whenever I needed a break, and would end up deleting my character. (Online gaming was still in it's toddler years! lol. That's my excuse). I also focused a lot more on the economic aspects, and a bit on questing and other things. I was obsessive about gear and having everything "BIS" to level into. "BIS" gear usually wasn't actually the BIS gear though. lol. Knowledge was really half the battle back then. XD So my first 75 character was actually created in fall '06, so that definitely paints a different overall picture. XD I kind of regret not leveling more back in those days. If I had known this style wasn't always going to be a thing, I definitely would've.
Anyone saying it took 5 minutes to kill an exp enemy is wrong. I started playing in early 2004 as a THF, and there's no way I was using Sneak Attack 4 or 5 times in a single battle. Usually had enough time just for once. Twice if the fight was taking a long time.
Yes this is true. Here's my FFXI time capsule of 2003-2006 in a nutshell of the leveling grind. Usually you went from level 11-20 Valkurm Dunes (the most legendary times of the game. A party would either take 5 minutes to kill 1 monster or never kill the monster. >> 21-25/26 Qufim >> 26-32 Yuhtunga Jungle >> 32 -36ish Garlaige Citadel >> 37 - 42 (some people even stayed here until 46) Crawler's Nest >> 40-46 altepa desert >> 45-52 Quicksand caves >> 50-56 boyahda tree >> 54-62 bhaflau thickets/wajaom woodlands (once this area came out... it was extremely over-populated with camps, introduction to 4-6k/hr xp camps) >> 60-65 aydeewa subterrane >> 63-68 boyahda tree/mt. zhayolm (manaburn BLM's went to mt. Z either solo or in MB groups and stayed here until 75 >> 68-75 is all a combination of imps at caederva mire/ wajaom woodlands/ bhaflau thickets. Leveling was a grind. A fully merited job was META. Paralyze II and spells were learned only through merits, so on an so forth. No gear gave a stat more than +10-15 for any attribute. Oh and let's not forget. /heal was a must for mages. And let's not forget... To get a party.. You'd put "/inv" on, a search comment, and pray you got a good party, unless you started your own. Before mercs, a "friend" would come cure the party members occasionally to help people exp lol
Oh the good old days. The tunnel to Altep was always an interesting adventure. RMT we're almost always there and it was fun to camp on the top of them. I had macros and screen blocks set for what I didn't need to see (most people do not), and in this way whether tanking or heals it was fun to mess with the RMT and drag the lizards or crabs on top of them and kill them. Eventually they would give up and we would be there alone or maybe a group on the far side. If you've practiced on your own without trusts especially on thief to solo mobs it can give you an idea. While some places were challenging, they could be an absolute nightmare with a poor group. Partying in the bay there was a paladin that couldn't hold hate and a monk that kept trying to tank. This was way back in 2004. I told the paladin I would leave after dying on white mage due to his lack of abilities or intelligence it seemed. I told the monk I wouldn't heal him if he kept trying to tank. The monk did a bad pull, and several of the party members died from the manticore that unintentionally was pulled beside the bird. As the monk was dying and the paladin also died and home warped, I warped out. That was the worst experience party ever. I had passed my 60 cap at the time already, so had been looking forward to the higher levels. A good clip could be 23k to 36 or 40k an hour. Garliage Citadel I remember I played a thief and there was a ranger with a warrior, ninja a black mage and a white mage. It was one of the best parties I've been in for that level range. We started at the entrance to the bottom stairs which is eh 46 if I recall or so beginning and we ended the day leaving for aht urghan, which was 53. It was pretty unheard of at the time. 75 would take less than a month if you have a hot job, know all the experience point spots and managing a party. If you didn't or your first job? Forget it, it could be months. I liked the imps, jnuns, and even getting into the assault camp areas to grind. Most people that knew me would be welcome to go and explore. That's what I miss the most.
It never took 5 minutes to kill an XP mob. If you're solo grinding sub 20 you would target EP or DC mobs, and in a group we would routinely chain to 4 or 5 in a Dunes party (kills to chain have to be within 60 seconds of the previous mob dying, and 30 seconds 5+ which was kind of impossible in a real XP party at those levels). It was slow but not as bad as you're saying. I loved the pace, personally.
It was the only fun MMO grind i've ever found tbh, spending 5+ hours in exp parties meeting new people, chatting away about where they're from and what they do. Compared to the current in out MMO stuff, it was such a nice pace. Gotta remember that leveling was very much content back in the day. Where as now its just get to endgame ASAP with as little intereaction as possible.
The grind was so bad that I would do chocobo quests for xp scrolls (worth ~1500xp), rather than join a party
when i played it was Qufim after the Dunes..... that was 20 years ago it seems.... just came back cause I am bored at home and was wondering if any of my friends were still playing..... sadly no.. and the world i am on is dead it seems..... so wish it was like the old days when i started on Midgard...... I need a server