Does Playing FFXI Take Skill?

Sure, there are people who still underperform badly using GS, no doubt about it. It doesn't automatically make you a better player.

But somebody on vanilla who can get near the performance of a person who knows their ***AND uses GS is obviously pretty skilled -- that's all I meant.

Sure, for monsters who's HP doesn't scale, more players is an option. Not sure if you noticed, though, most things that are at 119 or above DO scale HP with party size.

why is this thread still happening

You know ffxi is in a sorry state when someone has to ask if it takes skill to play the game. Man has this behemoth fallen.

Yeah if you had a legion of K-Clubs.

This is my issue with the private server heroes. That ***was hard because we didn't understand mechanics more than it being legitimately hard. Level correction isn't real difficulty either. The game was ***, it just got a lot of us at just the right time in our lives (and the right time in gaming) that we ignored it and only saw the positives.

Incredible truth right here lol. The "final fantasy" name got you in, the mmo heroin kept you.

there is one aspect that I will always defend is easier now than back in the day- and that is hate mechanics in old zones versus Adoulin and afterward zones. Yes, we do need that "help" because we can deal a great deal more damage quickly, but I still believe from a practical standpoint we have it much easier nowadays in new zones.

Another aspect is how potent GEO can be in alliance setup without adding to the "buff cap", and that was an option we didn't have pre iLvl either.

But prior comments are spot on- the content wasn't harder from technique, strat, or difficulty level, we just didn't have the wealth of knowledge we have now. Strats that we avoided and resulted in much faster,easier fights were capable (and no, not with an army of K-Clubs- Hagun SAMs with HQ armor and similarly geared DDs would have been fine)....I'd wager most groups avoided them because building a Kirin set back then wasn't getting done in 2 hrs from scratch with server populations of 10,000 when Sky was King of endgame, so they didn't want to risk them on "trying things out".

Not really, everyone likes to blanket 75 as one thing, but when Kirin was first being farmed people didn't cap gear haste(didn't even have turban). CORs and DNCs didn't exist. Hagun wasn't a thing. There weren't enough kraken clubs in circulation for single shells to have enough, much less everyone. COR didn't even exist for years after Tiamat came out.

Players get stronger as the game ages, by design, so even if Kirin itself wasn't directly nerfed for many years, the difficulty was drastically reduced by adding new jobs, gear, merits, etc.

It's like saying 'lol ppl struggled so hard with HELM 2(3?) years ago.. all they had to do was smn burn!'. Not really, without the evasion reduction that came with GEO adjustment, omen gear, and escutcheons making HQ BP stuff cost less than a pack of smokes, etc.. it wasn't feasible for most of the playerbase even if they had the knowledge in advance.

Content was 'hard' because you were undergeared for it. Same as now, if you have a group of 18 up to date players with half a brain in each of their heads, you can stomp anything.

I always feel the right way to judge content difficulty is to compare the difficulty when it was out, and how long did community get the first clear.

"Throw people at Omen" wasn't even an option when it was out. Not saying omen 2016 has comparable difficulty to master trial/pw2/T4/pre ilv delve etc of course.

I like this path of logic actually. In that case, First Release Delve was definitely Challenging. It was like climbing a mountain until your LS got their very first pair of Oats... OATS MAN!! Before SE.. "Helped us out" by scaling out the gear-values across the board to make the fights much easier but still challenging.

I'm sure there's more but those were pretty fun times. Dynamis Wave 3 is probably challenging as well BUT I just can not stand Dynamis.. Omg I hated it back at 75 and I most especially hate it now; puts me to sleep.

Personally I feel dyna wave 3 is like delve aeonic all over again.

Delve got a lot easier after first clear and members getting oats.
T4 became melee-able after brd got honor march.
We'll probably see wave 3 become very easy after members finish their DREAM upgrade.

Maybe similar in that it'll become a joke with upgrades, but it was defeated in less than a week while delve and aeonic lasted months. It's certainly not some colossal super hard content that takes an amazing group.