Opinions On FFXI's Life.

I agree, but the people who traditionally excel with or without tools hold themselves to a higher standard. I don't think you can compare skill and reaction time because there aren't equal people on both sides. There may be people equally effective, but I challenge you to choose an event (solo or otherwise) that you can perform well with standard fare plugins then go back and try it with vanilla PoL.

I reverted back to an old vanilla RDM macro book at one point to prove to myself that it wasn't a big deal... I was wrong.

Nostalgia alone will keep this game running for a long time.

Hmm, all I was saying is that if you have a person and give them equal time in both to train, they will perform better using scripts or spellcasts. Not even including skill and reaction time it's the same. I just mentioned that to be sure that someone isn't comparing some newb windower user to someone who's spent years playing vanilla with complex macros.

Regardless of how hard you try, humans are simply incapable of pressing a macro fast enough to keep up.

And yeah, I know damn well I'd play horridly with my old macros. I've had to go back to them when windower was broken.

What you need Windower for when you can G15 vanilla?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the assumption that you needed windower to pass G15 macros on to the game.

Well to be fair, vanilla macros do not load immediately for keyboard users (there's a delay). You're right though, they are inferior when you're trying to determine the difference between 95% and 100% efficiency.
After a certain point, having Spellcast macros over vanilla macros doesn't really help (practically speaking). I'm sure that in parses they make a noticable difference across the board, but I used to be a master macro manager on my mages, and my Stoneskin and Stun usage was better than anyone I ever partied with, bar none. It'd be unfair to dismiss that by saying everyone else just sucked, and I'm not trying to brag, but player determination trumps Spellcast as far as I'm concerned.

Anyone who thinks SE will just let another company take over FFXI is just silly. Unless they think SE is going down as a whole and selling the Final Fantasy brand as a whole to some one.

Naw, this isn't true. I'd put in-game macros at around 80% of third-party macro maximum efficiency on average across all jobs. Also, "Spellcast macros" aren't really a thing. Windower macros allow you to swap as many pieces of gear as you want, create loops, etc. Spellcast is a scripting language that lets the client react to actions you take and serves several other features.

In-game macros have an innate delay between the execution of macro lines, which you can see if you hit two macros sequentially quickly. Users behaviorally adapt to this delay, generally by swapping gear more slowly (slight pause between macro hits) so theycan be sure that they got all the gear on. This can contribute to stuff like TPing in a partial WS gearset in high haste situations, or can encourage you to make behavioral decisions like idling in combo fastcast/refresh instead of precasting spells, etc.

To be sure, gear swapping matters less now than ever thanks to Adoulin one-size-fits-literally-everything-you-do approach to equipment creation, but these optimizations mattered a lot back when FFXI was still (lolTanaka) "balanced."


Yes, plenty of players with spellcast still suck, and many people use it wrong and never bother to verify that their files actually work. I played on PS2 until 2009 or 2010, wrote guides for the optimal way to use in-game macros on BLM, etc. I was in a pretty hardcore endgame shell and no one ever really questioned my capability.

When I switched from that to Spellcast, I honestly hated it for my mage jobs. Despite the title, SpellCast is (in my opinion) far better for melee jobs than mage, mostly because I spend half the time on my mage jobs with the log open scrolling around and spellcast's equip commands are blocked by the log. Still, it was a godsend for melee jobs and especially for DNC. I do not regret switching over at all, and now I'm writing/have written GearSwap, so the mage thing isn't a problem anymore either.

You're such a tease.

who the *** said that?

There is most definitely a difference in efficiency, and a well planned set of gearsets, a modest understanding of game mechanics, and a good XML help bring a mediocre player to a higher level. However, it's a reflection of a poor UI and development when something as innate as changing more than 6 pieces of gear, utilizing hybrid sets, and accounting for mob stats is so much better handled by a plugin like spellcast. The best players are the best because they put in the extra effort, and that transcends tools.

If SE planned to release gear specifically targeted toward precast, potency, regen/refresh, -DT, raw stats, haste, and accuracy and put it on so many mutually exclusive pieces of gear, expecting people to chain 6-10 macros to execute an action with latency/reaction time is pretty pathetic from a developer's standpoint.

I've always hated the not being able to swap while in the log or while you have a menu open and I can't wait to get a chance to use gearswap, but for me that wasn't anything against spellcast. I mean that affected both equally. At least with SC you could just hit the macro and spend more time watching so you might not have to open the log quite so much.

Back in the day, blm was what made me switch to spellcast in the first place. Obi's, grips, staves, uggy pendant, sorc ring, af2 pants. Any one of these things can be done just fine with manual macros but the amount of macro space it took for all the various situations were awful and we didn't have /book or /set commands back then which was really a significant improvement to the vanilla client.

It's available on v4.1 (Development Build) in the app store: http://www.windower.net/

I'll provide three disclaimers right up front though:
1) It's less user-friendly than Spellcast because it's in Lua.
2) 4.1's LuaCore appears to have some mysterious stack corruption issues at the moment. These also exist on v4.0, but are less prevalent.
3) 4.1's LuaCore also has a few minor things wrong with it at the moment, like get_player()['in_combat'] always returns false.

Pretty similar for me. There was about a year total since NA release that my account(s) were off prior to a couple months ago. Both times, I wound up coming back to play with people I'd known for years. There was always a group to come back to.

SoA basically ruined that. As the small group stuff we'd been doing was rendered less and less relevant, interest in XI nosedived. So, while all of us are currently having fun with ARR, XI accounts were getting turned off well before that launched. There's nobody left in XI, so, easier to stay gone...and to be fair, with respect to my LS, I think that would have happened with or without ARR launching when it did.

I've never used Windower so I'll just take your word for it. Personally I feel like I used to be one of the more effecient players in my grounds, but it's whatever.

You may be right, Isiolia. I used to play the old FFXIV and really liked it (I only shortly returned to FFXI awhile back to wait for ARR to debut, and once I've finished up some business I'm off). There isn't a whole heck-of-a-lot to really DO in FFXI anymore. If you're new, everyone tells you to rush to 99 so that you can participate in endgame content, and when you're done with endgame content, you really don't go back and do all the beginner/intermediate stuff because it's either boring/tedious/requires oldschool party participation (which nobody in town really signs up for anymore). Hell, I've seen like 3 VW shouts in the past month I've played, and I don't think they even filled up. I kinda feel bad for all the oldschool players that appreciate the game outside of endgame, but that's all there really is anymore.

What business is it that you're finishing?

I'm cornering the market on novelty Moogle bobblehead figurines. Also helping Berry until her arm is ship-shape.

I can beat hardest game content without using a windower, and I notice no difference in win rate, IMO game is playable without windower. If the content is not beatable without 3rd pt tool, or if you suffers from much lower win rate without it, then it's not fine. But from what I've seen, it's perfectly fine atm. Most of my gear swap issue came from lag anyways, which I doubt 3rd pt tool can fix it.

Yes, I may not be able to outparse a 3rd pt tool user in same lv of gear, but the difference should be about 3%, 5% max. With a little more love and careful planning it's possible to get less than 3% difference. It's not like you're going to be 10% behind windower user.

Sometimes I find it fun to challenge myself to parse higher without 3rd pt tool and lower the difference, such as using build in recast, adjust macro position, gear swap more effectively or just focus more.

Same thing happening in XIV atm, sady ;/ low lv group content takes forever to get a pt on DD job and it's required to continue the story, low lv fate are dying :( I play slow and now I feel like I'm being left behind when entire FC doing higher lv stuff :(

Trust me when u get to the higher levels when all these jobs have all these AoEs and everyone is just decimating mobs before you can even target them you will wish the fates at higher level were as empty (though I find the fact that low level fates in your server are dying so soon surprising cause they arent on mine) as the low level ones. You don't need tons of people to clear alot of the fates anyway. Really only the boss type fates require more people but even those I have been soloing on monk with my chocobo cure bombing me in zones where people dont generally hang out in (excluding obviously stuff like behemoth and odin). I do agree about the dd and dungeons dilemma though it does exist.

Is that everyone in the alliance not using Windower or you're just soloing content now? If so, SE really needs to make this game just a tad bit more difficult.

That actually doesn't seem too far from the truth, but why be secretive about it?

Sorry to hear about Berry's arm, I guess that explains why I haven't seen her.

What secret? Nobody asked.

We have a thread on here telling us how to setup a script that automatically skills up for you. If that's not a 3rd party hack then I don't know what is. Seeing all the bias towards windower while demonizing everything else is slightly agitating.

I'd imagine that windower scripts are a grey area, but it was explained to me as bots and POS tools are off limits because they do not operate within the design of the game, whereas things like windower and spellcast are more advanced versions of in game features.

I just don't see the issue with discussing them for scientific purposes. We're not distributing them, and some of the things windower does could be seen as far more of a "cheat" than much of the offlimits chatter.

Well to be fair, he did just ask. :p

He asked what my business was, because I mentioned I had business, so I told him what that business was.
You're going to have to explain to me how that makes it a secret. I recommend using sock puppets and pie charts so everybody can follow along.