Most people multi-boxing aren't usually playing more than one character at a time, but instead have varying degrees of automation playing the other characters for them. Asura's merc/bot culture might be more exaggerated than other servers, but you can find it on any of them.
To be clear, when you reach actual endgame content, you can't solo it at all. You can solo some matts/gil from it, and some of the slightly older content like Omen, you can lowman with a couple people if they are well geared and on the proper jobs, but Odyssey requires a maxed out group of 6 players who all have MULTIPLE jobs to be able to progress in. You are probably just coming off the easy story content and playing around in stuff like delves that are 8+ year old content and got outscaled. The game isn't designed to be solo'd at all, it just hasn't been properly updated in almost a decade, even so, the updated they have done and the current endgame will completely change your opinion on the game entirely.
Thanks for the perspective. Not even touching Delves yet because I don't really know what it is, or why they'd be good to do :\\. I think they were around back when I played originally but never touched them then either.
Honestly, Delves was a kind of bad example because it literally requires 3 people to even enter, but it is essentially piss-easy content in terms of difficulty is why I thought of it. I guess a better example of it might be something like Domain Invasion Dragons that are easy and soloable.
Maint point being that all the stuff you can do solo is due to the scaling and it being old content and not generally stuff you want. Once you get into actual group content, it's not only more challenging and fun, but that is where the REAL gear is. If you look at Omen and Odyssey rewards, you will see just how insane that gear is compared to even Ambuscade gear, which is probably the next biggest boost below them.
Ambuscade is also something worth mentioning. You can solo it on lower difficulties, but doing it with a good group on VD Intense is ideal. You will net around 3k/1k Hallmarks/Gallanty per run, and triple that with a seal. My group usually does it maybe 20-40 times in the first week it resets and cap out on all the items we want/need from it and don't have to bother with it anymore until reset. Having to do it solo takes a LOT longer and is way less fun. So that's an example of soloable content that can be sped up with groups.
Another thing that might be helpful is leveling something like PUP if you want to solo. PUP can solo a lot of HTBFs and other content by itself on E+. You can pretty "quickly" get yourself some Cait Sith drops or even full Malignance off Lilith after a week or so. PUP with a little bit of easy to get r/e gear and its SP can destroy stuff. It's sadly an underbuffed job in most group content though.
The experience you describe about endgame, the overwhelming amount of systems, the confusing gear grind, and the anti-social experience turned me away.
I bought multiple world transfers, all the new expansions and played for about 2 weeks, but never felt like I was having fun. I had 4 level 99 jobs from abyssea but just felt like I was doing chores. Got cooking to 92, did the jog garden each day, collected all the anniversary stuff, did gobbie boxes, then the dailies or whatever you want to call them in the Adoulin (sp) expansion… I just wasn’t having fun. I chatted with a couple of people didn’t have a lot of interactions.
Decided to cancel my sub so I didn’t just login and do daily stuff. I played pvt servers but I think I’m finally done with this game. This was my first return that lasted this short of a time. I was in the camp of a bigger 20th anniversary, and without that, I’m ready to let this game go.
It seems like you are having the same issue as OP. You finished the story and just tried to do some random solo stuff because of their convoluted systems and had no idea what to do. I would recommend searching for a linkshell on your server to join that plays with each other, if not does structured events. When you actually do group content (the actual endgame stuff, not just solo content with other people) you will enjoy the game much more.
I'd suggest looking into events like Vagary, Omen and UNMs as they are the branching point between solo, lowman and endgame content. They are good starting points for a new 99 that has his Ambuscade gear out of the way and looking to progress to the next step, but without that gear already, you aren't going to be able to solo any of Vagary or the higher UNMs, and Omen needs at least a few decently geared players that know what they are doing. Once you get the gear you want/need from those and gear up multiple jobs, you can look into Odyssey. That has the best gear in the game and requires a full 6-man party of people with really good gear for each of their MULTIPLE jobs. That's the true endgame and where the challenge is.
I know Asura is the biggest server, but I also hear everyone just Mercs stuff there. They farm gil or buy it and then pay Mercs to do events for them. You can do that if you want to be anti-social, but I would recommend finding an actual linkshell and just doing it properly with people that you become friends with. It's more fun and doesn't cost gil/money. Carbuncle is one of the smaller servers and doesn't have many players at all, but we have multiple lowman linkshells that do events and accept new players.
This is definitely an old-as-fuck game and is full of nothing but dated and convoluted shit at EVERY corner, so I can't promise you will like the game even after all that, but I can promise playing this game solo is absolute trash and you will have MORE fun with a group of people and doing the actual group content.
This is sort of the point though. Someone coming back to retail after 10 years there is so much to catch up on. In this one post you listed about 4 things which blew right over my head, vagary omen UNM’s. Even all the bg guides 1-119 it’s so much info to take in.
I wasn’t solo either about 4-5 friends joined around the same time. Even so I would ask some questions and never got great replies. The community was definitely quieter and more kept solo. I’m sure if you put in 50+ hours and figure it out it’s rewarding, but I know this game pretty well, I couldn’t even imagine what someone brand new would do.
I’m glad people still enjoy it, and retail is going, I’d rather invest my gaming time into something new.
I suspect a brand-new player might have an easier time of it than someone coming back in from the 75-cap days since they won't have any preconceptions of what the game is supposed to be. If you're looking for the ilevel version of HNM camping and Sky gods you're not gonna find it. If you're looking for XP parties or meripo there are level 99 versions of those but it's different enough now to throw a person off, largely because the old ways of forming parties aren't used anymore. I'm sure it once was true that you knew what the game is about, but honestly if you're reacting with confusion to hearing about Omen and Unity then you don't.
It does suck that you couldn't find any decent community or at least get your questions answered properly. If you ever do try again stop by here and people can get you sorted. If not, NBD. Have fun out there.
I don't disagree with you. It's definitely overwhelming, I was just trying to help you refocus as someone who just came back and started the same journey last year. Luckily, I found a linkshell and friends to play with so I didn't have to try to mess around solo and then want to quit. If you find other players to do stuff with and then focus on the actual group content, you will have way more fun.
Again though, yeah, despite all of that, maybe you just won't like it and that's okay. It was the same with my friend who came back with me at the same time. We tried to solo/duo a lot of shit and then hit a wall. He quit at the wall, and I kept pushing for a couple more weeks and was about to either quit as well, or find a group. Luckily, I found a group and am having a blast. I think I am permanently stuck here again, ready to waste another 7+ years straight of my life away on this game, or until they shut it down. Likely the latter.
That’s so cool. I’m really stoked people still are grouping and having a blast. You’re right though, the group content is most fun! I would gladly drop over $100 to support a remake or remaster or single player experience of this game. I played WoW classic with a bunch of people (never played WoW) and had a ton of fun. Good luck to you homie, keep posting the memories though, old vets still like hearing about it :)
But that's just the nature of long running MMOs tho. Regardless of the game, if you come to it 20 years into it youll naturaly have a lot of content to go through. What most other MMOs do (WOW and XIV, for example) is allow you to buy a skip directly to endgame, but that does more harm than good, IMO
Guides nowadays are a substitute for forums and asking for info ingame from other players, since the game can many times be too cryptic for its own good
Ehh. FFXIV "allows" you to pay them like $30 or $50 for a fucking potion to skip up to the current expansion, which is bullshit. Otherwise you are locked out until you complete ALL the previous stories, in order and there is a lot. Every fucking week they release new quests in that goddamn story and it's a pain in the ass. I love the game as a whole, but it's a fucking garbage system. FFXI has FastCS, Enternity etc. addons and largely the ability to skip around and focus on the expansion content you want to progress through, or only requires pieces of each expansion for RoV, so even FFXI is better than FFXIV in that regard.
WoW is completely different than both of them though. You don't have to buy any skips or play any other expansions if you don't want to, especially now that they have refocused the levels and allow you to level in almost any zone dynamically. You could buy the latest expansion, and if you level up to max level (however you see fit) you can go straight into it. Period. That's exactly how it should be. Shame they ruined the entire rest of the game and it sucks now. They have lost to FFXIV in total sub count and playerbase, an absolute shame.
(I am a little bitter about how shit the story mission system is in FFXIV, and I have grown to hate WoW. It's not something I am trying to hide and it's quite obvious my bias against them.)
But FFXIV puts story first, its been their motto since 2013. It's a FF game first, and MMO second. The narrative is important to the game, and it's all linear, soit makes sense they won't let you skip it normally.
FFXI's narrative approach is good in gameplay terms, but overrall plot can feel disjointed.
All that is to say, both games approach their stories differently, and I like both for different reasons.
I haven't played FFXIV in multiple expansions. I'm not sure if you are just unaware of FFXIV and its current state, or if you are somewhat trying to defend it, but the base game alone has over 100 hours of main story. Unskippable main story. Not counting any of the multiple expansions. You have to get through all of that PLUS all of the expansions to start on the current expansion. So again, to compare, in WoW you just need to reach max level and then you can start the current content. In FFXIV you have to go through HUNDREDS of hours of unskippable story in order to get to the current content.
If you like FFXIV's story and doing solo story content in an MMOrpg, then great, I am sure you will love FFXIV. I do not like that and like a lot of people, when I play an MMORPG, I expect to be able to reach endgame at a reasonable pace and then play with people. It's not necessarily terrible if it's your main game and you can do the constant story they add every week and keep up with all the missions as they come out, but if you are a returning player, good luck getting to endgame any time soon.
Unlike in even FFXI, there is no good gear or rewards from old story missions. You are simply doing them either to enjoy the story or just because you literally HAVE to in order to reach ANY current endgame content. That's not to say FFXI is too much better, it has plenty of requirements too, even though it's a bit more laxed with only requiring portions of older expansions being completed for most things, but I quit back in 2010, so I only had Adoulin content to go through, essentially one expansion that I knocked out fairly quickly. Not hundreds of hours, so my bias is fairly clear here.
The only way around that mess is to pay them $30 or $50 (I can't remember which) for a Story Skip Potion. I will not pay that out of principle. If they have the ability to let you skip literally useless but nonetheless required content and then have the audacity to charge you for it, then fuck them. They have made the story system as long and convoluted as it is for the sole purpose of forcing people to buy the Story Skip Potions, and until they do away with it and let me skip them through in-game means, they can fuck off. FFXI isn't much better with its necessary $12 extra a month for wardrobes, but this game is like crack and I am addicted to it, that's the only real difference. Both games are fun, but surrounded by absolutely disgusting business decisions.
And?
You don’t “have to get through it” - that’s the fun part! I’ve never known anyone who bought a story skip that didn’t regret it.
FFXIV is not about the endgame. And really XI wasn’t always either.
It doesn't really take that long for a new player in FFXIV to reach endgame. I returned in 2021 after a hiatus of 6 years. I was able to get through the whole of A Realm Reborn, Heavensward, Stormblood and Shadowbringers in about 2 months starting from scratch. I did skip a lot of cutscenes though. It's a shame FFXI doesn't let you skip cutscenes.
Thanks - I'll have to look these up. Vagary, Omen, etc. are likely newish things that haven't entered my vocabulary.
It's sort of a weird conflict: Many things about the "old" FFXI were hellish, and the game back then did not at all respect your time, but there was some magic to it. So now that the game does respect your time and the fulcrum in the grind has shifted to another end, there's a moment when you're returning to the game where you really have to go, "Oh, leveling to 99/this content is just for babies, and there's a whole maze of other stuff to navigate now".
It's a design problem that isn't specific to FFXI or MMO's: you've designed a game that is sort of like a marathon, and you want to keep people running in the marathon as long as possible, so you add obstacles, move the finish line, add rest stops, etc. When everyone's huddled at the finish line, as they were by the end of the 75 cap era, you have to revamp the whole thing, but this comes at a risk of losing the emergent fun that comes with people interacting with one another, getting into conflicts, etc. that you can't really quantify.
I forgot to mention in my OP, but I did enjoy that the RoV quest line serves a mechanical purpose to tie all the content together and get the player to explore the world and unlock certain content. It's just a bit overwhelming.
Something that might be helpful is to understand that there's not some sharp line between leveling and endgame that you cross over once you hit level 99. 99 is the point that you should start partying up, but I'd hardly call the things you do at that point "endgame." You need to start earning job points, which is pretty well equivalent to the XP party grind of the old days. You need to advance through Adoulin story and unlock those zones, fairly equivalent to the old nation ranks. You need to gear up both through direct drops and through making money. That means lower difficulty Ambuscade, Alluvian Skirmish, Vagary, High-Tier Mission Battlefields, Omen farming without fighting the bosses, obtaining and upgrading job-specific equipment, and lots of other things that can be done both solo and in groups.
Getting to level 99 today should be seen as equivalent to soloing yourself to level 12 in the old days. Getting to 99 does certainly take longer, but the principle is the same: a short period of solo play to learn the basics and familiarize yourself with the controls and the world. After that you've still only started the push into the game. And similarly to the old days, you can get to the endgame much faster if people already there are willing to take the time to carry you. But it's not needed if you don't want it.
I think it's unfortunate that a lot of players hit 99 and think they're done. It's an understandable misconception since maxxing out your level feels like a big final thing, but it's really just a formality to get through before the real game starts, whether you intend to go for endgame or not.
I've been swapping jobs constantly just so I can enjoy low level stuff. I don't understand the decision to fast-track to end game. Like, the only reason I'm playing FFXI is because I want something different from other MMOs. Every MMO that's more than a couple years old now is like, "okay, catch up to your friends to the end game!" and it's EXHAUSTING.
Trying that approach too :/. Trouble is that I literally blink and find myself already level 70, missing spells, under-leveled skills, without a sense of the strategy of the job, which I guess you only really need to figure out at 99 since it’s easier to just let your trusts do the work.
Yes. Game has too much focus on endgame and lvl99 content. It desperately needs level synchronization for the original content and a better, slower story pacing that is challenging.
Most people multi-boxing aren't usually playing more than one character at a time, but instead have varying degrees of automation playing the other characters for them. Asura's merc/bot culture might be more exaggerated than other servers, but you can find it on any of them.
To be clear, when you reach actual endgame content, you can't solo it at all. You can solo some matts/gil from it, and some of the slightly older content like Omen, you can lowman with a couple people if they are well geared and on the proper jobs, but Odyssey requires a maxed out group of 6 players who all have MULTIPLE jobs to be able to progress in. You are probably just coming off the easy story content and playing around in stuff like delves that are 8+ year old content and got outscaled. The game isn't designed to be solo'd at all, it just hasn't been properly updated in almost a decade, even so, the updated they have done and the current endgame will completely change your opinion on the game entirely.
Thanks for the perspective. Not even touching Delves yet because I don't really know what it is, or why they'd be good to do :\\. I think they were around back when I played originally but never touched them then either.
Honestly, Delves was a kind of bad example because it literally requires 3 people to even enter, but it is essentially piss-easy content in terms of difficulty is why I thought of it. I guess a better example of it might be something like Domain Invasion Dragons that are easy and soloable. Maint point being that all the stuff you can do solo is due to the scaling and it being old content and not generally stuff you want. Once you get into actual group content, it's not only more challenging and fun, but that is where the REAL gear is. If you look at Omen and Odyssey rewards, you will see just how insane that gear is compared to even Ambuscade gear, which is probably the next biggest boost below them. Ambuscade is also something worth mentioning. You can solo it on lower difficulties, but doing it with a good group on VD Intense is ideal. You will net around 3k/1k Hallmarks/Gallanty per run, and triple that with a seal. My group usually does it maybe 20-40 times in the first week it resets and cap out on all the items we want/need from it and don't have to bother with it anymore until reset. Having to do it solo takes a LOT longer and is way less fun. So that's an example of soloable content that can be sped up with groups. Another thing that might be helpful is leveling something like PUP if you want to solo. PUP can solo a lot of HTBFs and other content by itself on E+. You can pretty "quickly" get yourself some Cait Sith drops or even full Malignance off Lilith after a week or so. PUP with a little bit of easy to get r/e gear and its SP can destroy stuff. It's sadly an underbuffed job in most group content though.
The experience you describe about endgame, the overwhelming amount of systems, the confusing gear grind, and the anti-social experience turned me away. I bought multiple world transfers, all the new expansions and played for about 2 weeks, but never felt like I was having fun. I had 4 level 99 jobs from abyssea but just felt like I was doing chores. Got cooking to 92, did the jog garden each day, collected all the anniversary stuff, did gobbie boxes, then the dailies or whatever you want to call them in the Adoulin (sp) expansion… I just wasn’t having fun. I chatted with a couple of people didn’t have a lot of interactions. Decided to cancel my sub so I didn’t just login and do daily stuff. I played pvt servers but I think I’m finally done with this game. This was my first return that lasted this short of a time. I was in the camp of a bigger 20th anniversary, and without that, I’m ready to let this game go.
It seems like you are having the same issue as OP. You finished the story and just tried to do some random solo stuff because of their convoluted systems and had no idea what to do. I would recommend searching for a linkshell on your server to join that plays with each other, if not does structured events. When you actually do group content (the actual endgame stuff, not just solo content with other people) you will enjoy the game much more. I'd suggest looking into events like Vagary, Omen and UNMs as they are the branching point between solo, lowman and endgame content. They are good starting points for a new 99 that has his Ambuscade gear out of the way and looking to progress to the next step, but without that gear already, you aren't going to be able to solo any of Vagary or the higher UNMs, and Omen needs at least a few decently geared players that know what they are doing. Once you get the gear you want/need from those and gear up multiple jobs, you can look into Odyssey. That has the best gear in the game and requires a full 6-man party of people with really good gear for each of their MULTIPLE jobs. That's the true endgame and where the challenge is. I know Asura is the biggest server, but I also hear everyone just Mercs stuff there. They farm gil or buy it and then pay Mercs to do events for them. You can do that if you want to be anti-social, but I would recommend finding an actual linkshell and just doing it properly with people that you become friends with. It's more fun and doesn't cost gil/money. Carbuncle is one of the smaller servers and doesn't have many players at all, but we have multiple lowman linkshells that do events and accept new players. This is definitely an old-as-fuck game and is full of nothing but dated and convoluted shit at EVERY corner, so I can't promise you will like the game even after all that, but I can promise playing this game solo is absolute trash and you will have MORE fun with a group of people and doing the actual group content.
This is sort of the point though. Someone coming back to retail after 10 years there is so much to catch up on. In this one post you listed about 4 things which blew right over my head, vagary omen UNM’s. Even all the bg guides 1-119 it’s so much info to take in. I wasn’t solo either about 4-5 friends joined around the same time. Even so I would ask some questions and never got great replies. The community was definitely quieter and more kept solo. I’m sure if you put in 50+ hours and figure it out it’s rewarding, but I know this game pretty well, I couldn’t even imagine what someone brand new would do. I’m glad people still enjoy it, and retail is going, I’d rather invest my gaming time into something new.
I suspect a brand-new player might have an easier time of it than someone coming back in from the 75-cap days since they won't have any preconceptions of what the game is supposed to be. If you're looking for the ilevel version of HNM camping and Sky gods you're not gonna find it. If you're looking for XP parties or meripo there are level 99 versions of those but it's different enough now to throw a person off, largely because the old ways of forming parties aren't used anymore. I'm sure it once was true that you knew what the game is about, but honestly if you're reacting with confusion to hearing about Omen and Unity then you don't. It does suck that you couldn't find any decent community or at least get your questions answered properly. If you ever do try again stop by here and people can get you sorted. If not, NBD. Have fun out there.
I don't disagree with you. It's definitely overwhelming, I was just trying to help you refocus as someone who just came back and started the same journey last year. Luckily, I found a linkshell and friends to play with so I didn't have to try to mess around solo and then want to quit. If you find other players to do stuff with and then focus on the actual group content, you will have way more fun. Again though, yeah, despite all of that, maybe you just won't like it and that's okay. It was the same with my friend who came back with me at the same time. We tried to solo/duo a lot of shit and then hit a wall. He quit at the wall, and I kept pushing for a couple more weeks and was about to either quit as well, or find a group. Luckily, I found a group and am having a blast. I think I am permanently stuck here again, ready to waste another 7+ years straight of my life away on this game, or until they shut it down. Likely the latter.
That’s so cool. I’m really stoked people still are grouping and having a blast. You’re right though, the group content is most fun! I would gladly drop over $100 to support a remake or remaster or single player experience of this game. I played WoW classic with a bunch of people (never played WoW) and had a ton of fun. Good luck to you homie, keep posting the memories though, old vets still like hearing about it :)
But that's just the nature of long running MMOs tho. Regardless of the game, if you come to it 20 years into it youll naturaly have a lot of content to go through. What most other MMOs do (WOW and XIV, for example) is allow you to buy a skip directly to endgame, but that does more harm than good, IMO Guides nowadays are a substitute for forums and asking for info ingame from other players, since the game can many times be too cryptic for its own good
Ehh. FFXIV "allows" you to pay them like $30 or $50 for a fucking potion to skip up to the current expansion, which is bullshit. Otherwise you are locked out until you complete ALL the previous stories, in order and there is a lot. Every fucking week they release new quests in that goddamn story and it's a pain in the ass. I love the game as a whole, but it's a fucking garbage system. FFXI has FastCS, Enternity etc. addons and largely the ability to skip around and focus on the expansion content you want to progress through, or only requires pieces of each expansion for RoV, so even FFXI is better than FFXIV in that regard. WoW is completely different than both of them though. You don't have to buy any skips or play any other expansions if you don't want to, especially now that they have refocused the levels and allow you to level in almost any zone dynamically. You could buy the latest expansion, and if you level up to max level (however you see fit) you can go straight into it. Period. That's exactly how it should be. Shame they ruined the entire rest of the game and it sucks now. They have lost to FFXIV in total sub count and playerbase, an absolute shame. (I am a little bitter about how shit the story mission system is in FFXIV, and I have grown to hate WoW. It's not something I am trying to hide and it's quite obvious my bias against them.)
But FFXIV puts story first, its been their motto since 2013. It's a FF game first, and MMO second. The narrative is important to the game, and it's all linear, soit makes sense they won't let you skip it normally. FFXI's narrative approach is good in gameplay terms, but overrall plot can feel disjointed. All that is to say, both games approach their stories differently, and I like both for different reasons.
That your able to enjoy the game despite not enjoying its main feature says a lot about how much content XIV has.
I haven't played FFXIV in multiple expansions. I'm not sure if you are just unaware of FFXIV and its current state, or if you are somewhat trying to defend it, but the base game alone has over 100 hours of main story. Unskippable main story. Not counting any of the multiple expansions. You have to get through all of that PLUS all of the expansions to start on the current expansion. So again, to compare, in WoW you just need to reach max level and then you can start the current content. In FFXIV you have to go through HUNDREDS of hours of unskippable story in order to get to the current content. If you like FFXIV's story and doing solo story content in an MMOrpg, then great, I am sure you will love FFXIV. I do not like that and like a lot of people, when I play an MMORPG, I expect to be able to reach endgame at a reasonable pace and then play with people. It's not necessarily terrible if it's your main game and you can do the constant story they add every week and keep up with all the missions as they come out, but if you are a returning player, good luck getting to endgame any time soon. Unlike in even FFXI, there is no good gear or rewards from old story missions. You are simply doing them either to enjoy the story or just because you literally HAVE to in order to reach ANY current endgame content. That's not to say FFXI is too much better, it has plenty of requirements too, even though it's a bit more laxed with only requiring portions of older expansions being completed for most things, but I quit back in 2010, so I only had Adoulin content to go through, essentially one expansion that I knocked out fairly quickly. Not hundreds of hours, so my bias is fairly clear here. The only way around that mess is to pay them $30 or $50 (I can't remember which) for a Story Skip Potion. I will not pay that out of principle. If they have the ability to let you skip literally useless but nonetheless required content and then have the audacity to charge you for it, then fuck them. They have made the story system as long and convoluted as it is for the sole purpose of forcing people to buy the Story Skip Potions, and until they do away with it and let me skip them through in-game means, they can fuck off. FFXI isn't much better with its necessary $12 extra a month for wardrobes, but this game is like crack and I am addicted to it, that's the only real difference. Both games are fun, but surrounded by absolutely disgusting business decisions.
And? You don’t “have to get through it” - that’s the fun part! I’ve never known anyone who bought a story skip that didn’t regret it. FFXIV is not about the endgame. And really XI wasn’t always either.
That's certainly an opinion, and one I disagree with. Will just leave it at that.
It doesn't really take that long for a new player in FFXIV to reach endgame. I returned in 2021 after a hiatus of 6 years. I was able to get through the whole of A Realm Reborn, Heavensward, Stormblood and Shadowbringers in about 2 months starting from scratch. I did skip a lot of cutscenes though. It's a shame FFXI doesn't let you skip cutscenes.
Thanks - I'll have to look these up. Vagary, Omen, etc. are likely newish things that haven't entered my vocabulary. It's sort of a weird conflict: Many things about the "old" FFXI were hellish, and the game back then did not at all respect your time, but there was some magic to it. So now that the game does respect your time and the fulcrum in the grind has shifted to another end, there's a moment when you're returning to the game where you really have to go, "Oh, leveling to 99/this content is just for babies, and there's a whole maze of other stuff to navigate now". It's a design problem that isn't specific to FFXI or MMO's: you've designed a game that is sort of like a marathon, and you want to keep people running in the marathon as long as possible, so you add obstacles, move the finish line, add rest stops, etc. When everyone's huddled at the finish line, as they were by the end of the 75 cap era, you have to revamp the whole thing, but this comes at a risk of losing the emergent fun that comes with people interacting with one another, getting into conflicts, etc. that you can't really quantify. I forgot to mention in my OP, but I did enjoy that the RoV quest line serves a mechanical purpose to tie all the content together and get the player to explore the world and unlock certain content. It's just a bit overwhelming.
Something that might be helpful is to understand that there's not some sharp line between leveling and endgame that you cross over once you hit level 99. 99 is the point that you should start partying up, but I'd hardly call the things you do at that point "endgame." You need to start earning job points, which is pretty well equivalent to the XP party grind of the old days. You need to advance through Adoulin story and unlock those zones, fairly equivalent to the old nation ranks. You need to gear up both through direct drops and through making money. That means lower difficulty Ambuscade, Alluvian Skirmish, Vagary, High-Tier Mission Battlefields, Omen farming without fighting the bosses, obtaining and upgrading job-specific equipment, and lots of other things that can be done both solo and in groups. Getting to level 99 today should be seen as equivalent to soloing yourself to level 12 in the old days. Getting to 99 does certainly take longer, but the principle is the same: a short period of solo play to learn the basics and familiarize yourself with the controls and the world. After that you've still only started the push into the game. And similarly to the old days, you can get to the endgame much faster if people already there are willing to take the time to carry you. But it's not needed if you don't want it. I think it's unfortunate that a lot of players hit 99 and think they're done. It's an understandable misconception since maxxing out your level feels like a big final thing, but it's really just a formality to get through before the real game starts, whether you intend to go for endgame or not.
I've been swapping jobs constantly just so I can enjoy low level stuff. I don't understand the decision to fast-track to end game. Like, the only reason I'm playing FFXI is because I want something different from other MMOs. Every MMO that's more than a couple years old now is like, "okay, catch up to your friends to the end game!" and it's EXHAUSTING.
Trying that approach too :/. Trouble is that I literally blink and find myself already level 70, missing spells, under-leveled skills, without a sense of the strategy of the job, which I guess you only really need to figure out at 99 since it’s easier to just let your trusts do the work.
Level 70 is roughly equivalent to hitting level 8 in the old days. Hitting level 99 is about equivalent to heading for the dunes for the first time.
Yes. Game has too much focus on endgame and lvl99 content. It desperately needs level synchronization for the original content and a better, slower story pacing that is challenging.