Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

never played fencer, but i can understand. was tanking khim last night and it kinda makes me laugh cause, i'm a pld and the /nin gives a stronger feeling of "evading" rather than "tanking".


*edit* it is still satisfying to do shadows properly, and esp against something that tough where the right gear means you get the cast off even if you get hit.

Yeah I super enjoyed Ninja as well for that reason. Once I caught up my Ninjutsu skill and could land Jubaku and Hojo, maintaining shadows was really easy. The leveling process for that job was much the same: no healer required.

I love the concept of an "evasion tank" and I'm surprised it isn't utilized more in the medium.

Even Rune Fencer sort of fills that role. The unusual hybrid of evasion, parrying, buffing, and debuffing means that it doesn't just "take less damage than its allies" in the traditional tank sense. It really only mitigates damage if it's magical, which still covers enough sources of damage to help with that as well. Like, what a cool concept.

i like the "idea" of fencer in my head. the idea of a parry tank is... amazing. it's like the master swordsman in an anime or GoT type show that just casually deflects all the blows you bring their way.

i can't play it though, cause i'm on 75 server lol. i'm doing mnk atm. guarding is pretty cool. i have a friend in my ls with spharai who brings it out on cerb. very annoying to keep hate against, but fun to watch. right now i'm 69, and i have all my black belt items. i'm so sick of seeking. I WANT MY BELT!!!!!!!!!!

Well, RUN was the first tank i manage to suceed while multiboxing. I started with PLD, even made the shield and sword but i sucked too much on keeping hate and dividing attention to toss cures here and there.

RUN on the other side, was easier to me to exploit the JAs and build a solid amount of enmity. His bulkiness was also a plus so i could focus more on my DD chars. His Rayke/Gambit was also super important back when BLM metas were still there, thats when I started seriously no RUN.

All in all, i just cant not love RUN.

i think playing any tank is fun. whether the thing fails or succeeds can come down to your performance. even if the thing isn't difficult, feeling like you took the beast head on feels good. happy brain chemicals.

too nervous? that's the best part?! gotta be willing to relish the challenge.

Tank is kinda the protagonist of a fight (at least in FFXI).

That idea that, while the tank dont fall, there is still hope to win.

Also, i just remembered about tanking in FFXII. While many of the offline game in serie can be power creep with enough lv/gear, it was kinda nice having players filling unique roles in battle. Like against those master bosses there, needing to fight under zombie stats to last a short while at least.

The worst in FFXII was keeping all those buffs up. Even with macros, it was basically the entire fight recasting junk

I've always admired tanking, but I never took up the reins. I think I just fell in love too much with the utility of spellcasters and the mechanics of jobs like Thief.

Even in XIV, I was drawn the most to Paladin. Part of me also just likes the idea of being high in demand for content :3

Rune Fencer's tank identity is less being a beefcake that protects people by being a walking wall of iron and more so that of a more dexterous sword saint who excels at reading the enemy's movements and deflecting blows with a variety of weapons, while simultaneously weaving magic barriers and incantations to protect themselves and their charges from harm using the runes that they've had essentially implanted into them using Zilart technology.

They're an Xi-lore friendly spinoff of the Mystic Knight who could channel magical energy offensively and defensively, in some cases by outright becoming a lightning rod/conduit for magic. Iirc, Mystic Knight magical abilities were also artificially created. Celes' magical proficiency definitely was.

This does stand in stark contrast to something like a Paladin who gets their defensive strength from armor and, usually, a shield, though Paladins also often wield hammers, fails, *** swords... and more importantly, their magical ability comes from adherence to a very strict code or unfaltering piety. Final Fantasy paladins cheese this somewhat as they don't have such limitations. They're just knights who can cast spells, and it isn't usually outright evident from where they learn or maintain the potency of their abilities.

Still hoping to get Rune Fencer or Mystic Knight as the next tank in XIV. Tanking is my primary role, I started my XI career tanking and even tried pigeonholing BLU into tanking (with varying levels of success depending on Era). A lot of the time the tank also controls the pace, ebb, and flow of battle, though that's less pronounced in XI. I admit it feels far more satisfying to tank in more modern games where the enmity/threat system isn't tattered and in shambles. Really hoping for another rebalance there in XI at some point.

I think ffxi feels dead AF. Weeks of silence and people act like it's a hassle to talk to anyone, noone teams up, people log in for 30 mins a day then log off. (I don't blame them.) INB4 someone tells me to play another game. No, I like the game I just miss it feeling like its a multiplayer game and not a single player game, and multiboxing isnt the answer.

game's about to hit 2 decades old (older than most people on the internet these days...) and there's what I would call a content drought, so it's understandable really. hopefully they have something big planned for March and it isn't just another big jebait.

That 20th Anniversary can't get here soon enough. The anticipation is driving me insane. Now that they've squandered an opportunity to market FFXI that was handed to them on a silver platter, it's basically their last chance to do good for the game.

May 2022 is when we discover the fate of Final Fantasy XI. We'll find out if they have even an iota of care left for the game, or if it's going to be left for dead. They don't even have to announce a new expansion or a remaster or anything. They'll let us know where they stand by whether the event is completely internal to the FFXI community or if they use it as an opportunity to remind everyone that the game is still kicking.

I'll tell ya, it really crushed me knowing they'd rather let FFXIV flounder than even point a simple finger at FFXI. The stars aligned: FFXIV's servers were overflowing, Return Home to Vana'diel was active, we were still a month into a gigantic update, and the 20th Anniversary was just around the corner. They didn't need to spend a single Yen on the marketing, it was literally a ReTweet away, and they couldn't be assed. They'd rather give money away as goodwill than remind people that FFXI exists.

From what I understand they quit selling 14 and suspended free periods temporarily because of server congestion. FF14 isn't for me anyways, but to each thier own.

multiple things play into this. the game is slow AF - slow movement speed, endless delays, eternal loading times on zoning and shinanigans like KI RoE just to enter the queue and the need to stay in zone while waiting your turn - which leads to even the smallest things wasting a lot of time.
in 2021 you could play a full match of LoL, multiple rounds of death match in a shooter or complete a raid in a more modern MMO but you can barely finish a round of ambu in FFXI and one small fkup can easily nullify a huge chunk of the entire parties time investment.

the playerbase is also too old, the duties and responsibilities that come with age lead to very little tolerance for failure in a time intensive game like FFXI. you maybe get one or two chances and if you don't perform to their expectations you'll be avoided like the plague and with a small playerbase like FFXI has you'll get only a few chances and the only way to redemption is switching servers and name change. it puts a lot of uncessary pressure on the individual and ofc leads to ppl not wanting to join parties in the first place.

if they bothered to make a proper party finder it wouldn't have gotten as bad as it is now.

When it got like that for me I quit.

I quit 10 years ago, maybe a bit more.

This is why. It was no longer the game I fell so hard for at NA release.

I agree but reputation isn't the problem, people feeling entitled to cheat, and expect others to cheat is a problem tho, people that do this have no business expecting other people to play at the highest levels when they have to cheat to do it in the 1st place, they are just bad players. Not everyone is like this but alot of the self proclaimed "ELITE" players aren't worthy of thier false ego's when they tako ja wait 0 etc. Only saying this cuz a large part of the player base is guilty of this whether they admit it or not, and if people who do this expect everyone else to do the same well middle fingers all around. The "It's a 20 year old game who cares" or "I'm old now have kids and a fulltime job and no time" excuse doesn't justify it, nor does lack of QoL improvements on SE's part. People should be happy with where they can get in the game with the time they have with out shortcutting.

A lot of that can be solved with a port to a new engine, which is my best-case "wish" for the game. I'd rather they didn't change too much about the gameplay mechanics or really anything else. But if they could solve some of the more internal limitations it would be a huge step forward to making the game feel up-to-date.

will never happen, I'm just hoping they add more carrots to dangle in front of players or else the population will continue to stagnate and eventually roll off

I'd almost rather they didn't. If the 20th Anniversary doesn't include at least a minimum effort to inject some life into the community, I'd hope for some sort of cataclysmic event that ends the game with whatever shreds of dignity remain.

FFXI doesn't need more content, it needs recognition. It's the final bastion of the pre-WoW era, and it does a damn fine job of being everything that WoW isn't.

- How many people don't even know FFXI ever existed?
- How many people think it's already been unplugged?
- How many people believe it stopped receiving updates 7 years ago?
- How many people see FFXI as "FFXIV, but older"?

Combined, it's a lot of people. Even if only a fraction of those people decided to try it, and a fraction of that fraction actually liked it, FFXI's population would explode. We can keep stringing players along with carrots all we want, but it's a gradual leak that's going to lead to a sad fade-out.

I think my mom had some sort of food poisoning from her Christmas Eve meal so we had to shift our Christmas Day stuff until Boxing Day.