FFXI Nostalgia

Farming Guardian Crawler in Crawler's Nest. Months in the first Sac Room trading rolanberries to the ??? in the basket to spawn and kill it for 881's and maybe a silk to if lucky. Then being asked every 10 minutes why are you killing it and if I answered truthfully within the week I would be CC'd by them lol. Learned later on about the second spawn back by lizards which made things much easier. Friends always knew if I was in the zone and anon it was what I was doing. Wasn't fast gil but made millions there all the same. HNM's and angel skins in Cape Terrigan before nerf was better but just liked farming that crawler for some reason.

I remember once people waiting outside CN because a bee NM was waiting at zone and we were waiting for High levels to come and kill it, lol good times XD

lol i did it once a merit pty there because ALL camps in toau were full and once i did a KRT mnk burn party for the same reason lol

edit: also, subligar farm alliances.

Once upon a time, in late January 2008, this little LV. 16 RDM was exploring the vast area of Konschtat Highlands.
His name was Fredjan.
He used to run away from any mob that seemed decent challenge or even match. However, that changed once he saw this guy near the crag of the zone.

Seconds after the fight began, defeating the mighty monster seemed an impossible task. Fred was being struck for more than 30 damage per hit, and death was inevitable.
Until what he thought was an angel arrived.
With the help of a LV. 36 WHM, Fred managed to defeat the powerful foe in an estimated time of five minutes.
And he never felt a thrill like that again. Not even after defeating Maat on RDM.

I killed that thing once, It was dead before I even finished dismounting my chocobo. So much for the XP scroll.

-remember pting at secret beach and then getting aggro at night and then trying to zone but not having the CoP expansion?
-when people in the dunes used to fight each over over whms..if you had 2 whms your pt was good and if you got a PL you were rockin it..sometimes you even got a third whm and then your pt was kinda like "wat is this".
-5k an hour in bibiki bay was ideal..if you could get 10k in 2hrs it was an amazing pt. Took me 4 days to level up in the late 60s-early 70s :3
-people hung out outside crawlers nest lfp...mostly they hung out there because of the pre-despawn-patch..you literally took your life into your hands by zoning into crawlers nest.
-same deal but in Garbage 5hitadelle.
-kiting genbu
-rdms and brds didn't pt together (I didnt know what a brd did other than refresh until I was in my 70s)
-rdm maat (1/11 that turd)
-rdms could sub /blm (didn't lvl /whm til I was in my 70s either)
-standard rdm role in a bibiki bay pt was
refresh self, refresh pld, dispel the crap out of that mob, refresh whm, refresh blm, dispel sommore and try to enfeeb it before you refresh drk, help whm haste DDs, refresh sel--oh holy crap dispel the mob, reapply enfeebs, maybe get in a MB>darkness etc etc.
-when blms would ask for refresh the second it wore and I wanted to strangle them because they knew I had an entire pt to refresh and it takes more than an instant to cast the danged spell.
-my rdm didn't learn how to main heal really til it was in the 70s and it was atrocious...ToAU was a culture shock (I moved and was gone a couple months during this transition)...and then they made me pull........in a manaburn..........WTF is going on in the world!?
-almost quitting because nobody would help me get Airship keys
-almost quitting because nobody would help me get rdm AF
-being told nobody would help me get rdm AF hat because the boss would kill entire alliances of 75s.
-took me 2 years to lvl rdm to 75 and that wasn't exactly unheard of. There were days when I was lvlin fast..like a couple lvls in a week!
-CoP was the scariest thing ever. It was near impossible to do prommys 90% of the time.
-somebody always died on the way to byakko
-RMTs/CGFs
-botters/rmts at leaping lizzy, Valkurm Emperor etc unless you spent a fortune or botted..you would never outclaim the literal 1000s of people who hung out at these pop spots..it was not possible. Sorry. And people in pts would totally look down on you if you didn't have these items...
-omg...people in sky...I still have nightmares about people in sky. More wars have taken place over sky drop mobs..than..than...idk what....whoa
-leveling went in this order: 1-10 solo, 10-14 noob dunes, 14-20 boat/secret beach dunes, 20-24 quifim, 25-36 kazham, 36-38 GC, 38-49?something CN (+ballsackroom) or maybe you went to altepa if you had the crystal in the 30s or you could die a horrible death at the bottom of GC, early 50s Boyahda tree, then that f-ing desert with the crabs on the other end of that tunnel past the scary MF-ing manticores and dinosaurs....omg..then bibiki bay forever! until you got sky and could better exp..
-"CAN SOMEBODY OPEN THE GATES"
-"WHERE IS THE PRESIDENTS OFFICE!?"
-also I was terrified to go into Rulude Gardens for many months..I thought it was an Alice and Wonderland place with high leveled monsters.
-loldrg
-if you were a monk you couldnt get an invite cause you couldnt make distortion (it was distortion right?)
-nobody could kill AV + ebon panels
-4hour kirin
-Charybdis...enough said....except that little jp rdm that solo'd it..***.

Im sure Im missing alot..uhh..

I will never forget what I did one day. I was wandering around and saw these two guys dead. I told them to hold still I will <Raise> and used my <Warp> macro by mistake and found myself at home point. I hated myself leaving them dead there as I had to log out and it was long way back there.

i miss the sence of accomplishment that came with completing a mission or quest or getting that rare spell.

in the old days, people actually cared about the gear they wore from level 1

people didnt afk in parties

i miss normal party mechanics. every once in a blue moon im presented with the opportunity to magic burst because my brother enjoys solo skillchaining on blu. but half the time, the mob is damn near dead when i can burst.

not gonna go so far as to say there is no challange in the game. but the "thrill" factor has greatly deminished.

i miss when people cared about the job they played. they understood their role in a party. capped skills/all spells

i miss the feeling or pride that came from upgrading gear. now its just a rush to get the newest and best pieces without reallt appreciating the effort required.

I gotta say, after reading the first page...

Totally glad that stuff is all gone.

yo wut i miss are REAL vulkern doones pardehs and wuer if the dang ol pardeh suckorz y'all can ditch thems and run to a nother pardeh wuth your pardeh flag ons yo and gets in thear pardeh cuz ur buff..

annnnnnnd i dang ole miss fishin while mah pardeh fights the mobbie in vulkern doones not worring about some dang gobbeh fisherman attaking ya!!

and i dang ole miss whitegate!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I miss Pankration.....




I also miss dying horridly to this guy.... thinking he was some random mob not really paying attn.. just running around on my rdm for exp... honestly.. I've seen this *** 2 times in my life..first time when I first started... 2nd time I just hit 75 on rdm...




I also miss when tav was the hot spot to hang out in and afk

This is like you ripped it out of my own memories!

I remember kicking DRG's out of party when their wyrven died cause they were useless then.

You just made me remember my first time in Ru'Aun Gardens...
I was with a friend and we just finished the mission that gave you access, so we went there to explore. We checked wiki and the dolls had an (A)(S) so we ran around all the area getting invisible up everywhere, a lot of people around there checked us, a few days later when we read that only the dolls in the walls aggroed to sight we could understand what that ppl was thinking about us D;

Camping for Yinyang robe at Ro'Maeve and the feeling of absolute accomplishment when I finally claimed it over a full enemy linkshell of people running around in the zone and then being bitched at by the linkshell leader.

There are some great things now though which have started to bring the good old team spirit back. Voidwatch is a great addition and I like how that has started to bring people back together. Plus now things like mythic weapons and the sort are more accessible to the "casual" players who go to school and work. I can honestly say that I am now doing the things that the elite players were doing 2-3 years ago and I like it.

The weight has shifted from exping to endgame which I think is inevitavle progress to a game that has been out as long as FFXI has been.

Yes, I made my first friends in the Valkrum Dunes parties, but would I want to go back there now? Nope.

Being scared shitless of the tigers in Jugner when i first zoned in as a noob.
Defeating Shiva Prime for the (level 20 cap i think?) Always wasting my gil on items to bring with me and FINALLY BEAT HER after 5 tries and endless researching.
CoP was by far the best experience for me personally.. The music, The cutscenes, and the friends that did it all with me.
Winning lot on Novio in my LS over quite a few people.. and i went through hell and back reasoning with them about why Scholar should considered for Novio and not only blms (since i only had scholar ;D)

What I miss is the old school end game areas (Sky, limbus, dynamis before the upgrade)

I still remember the airship fight, oh the airship fight... took us a few times just to get the right strategy down and even then still took us a few times to get it done right. I remember the awesome feeling once we beat it and took our first steps into sea.

Oh and my first encounter with a UFO... can't forget that.

I miss leveling 1-cap outside of Abyssea. I miss how there were active xp parties in most zones, and to get to 75 you had to explore the world a bit; everywhere from Valkurm, to Qufim, to Bhaflau Thicktes to places like Mount Zhalyom just to get xp. The world just felt more alive, the zones didn't feel so empty.

It was a hell of a lot slower, and infinitely more tedious, but it felt like so much more of an accomplishment. Getting a job to 75 was cause for a celebration; now it feels like marking off a checklist. Those days are never coming back.

Some nostalgic lol here:


This galka guy was new to our sky LS (then called WildCard) and he was trying social engineering on us to obtain "accounts to farm big items" ... The nerve ...


Aways report jerks to your LS leader.

Also back then, I used to hang out a lot with this guy and he were this cool already:


Back then the 10k gil reward from doing avatar fights daily was BIG MONEY so I helped him around a bit with healing...

I still do talk to them out of habit... or a few years ago told my friend to talk to the rent-a-room npc soon as they got in jeuno and they were like uh they wont give me that option... That is when I realized it has been years since they removed it.

i miss 30k/ stack silent oils and prism powders.

I miss not being able to land Slow on Byakko because people couldn't stack enough INT, and Haste was given to the tanks last because they "Didn't need to attack faster"

2004 was awesome.

Apparently so is 2012.

O.O i kinda made a video about low lvl pts etc on my pup episodes videos few days ago. it kinda sum up how i feel about old school pting in the past etc>.>



videos i make it always about NMs pup fights but did 1 episode about old pts etc O.o

Gonna edit this post and just say how lovely I thought that video was, nicely done

Was looking through my old SSs from when I had EVEN WORSE NSE graphics. Found these from the exp partys I made w/ ls when lvling my 62 war to be able to wear Ebody.




Edit: war war sam(all PAs) cor brd brd PL x4

I really do miss colibri partys.