Level 75 Content

Hey folks,

I was wondering if there were any 75 cap linkshells around in any server that still love doing old content the old way! Although private servers can be good they have been very frustrating for several reasons, so, I was wondering if there was any LSs on retail which still endure the chaos of old!

If anyone runs one or heck, would like to start one, feel free to post up or DM me! Im looking to start 2 new characters to grind up the levels for a good bit of nostalgia, again, it can be any server at all!

Even if you stopped at 75 on retail the game is much different than it was back then. Abilities/damage formulas/exp gain etc. What's frustrating about private servers? The core game has changed too much on retail to replicate the old days other than the monster names.

I've seen 2 75 cap linkshells over the past few years on Asura, they end up falling apart after a while once the novelty wears off.

Except for AV and PW, I don't imagine much 75 cap stuff is still difficult these days. Even back then, nearly all of the content was only hard because players hadn't figured out good strategies or required jobs were rare (like bards). In addition, since then players have gotten huge power creep even outside of levels, most noticeably with the WS fTP buffs, but also stuff like the monster PDIF update and the STR, DEX, and VIT changes.

Fighting stuff today at 75 would still be hard.

Back in the day the reason it became so easy was becasue everyone had such great gear near the end from years of doing it. A 75 cap shell with fresh players would not have that luxury. A 75 cap ls with all basic gear would probably struggle to kill Nidhogg or Tiamat.

The reason these shells fall apart is very simple, modern players do not have the desire to put shell first as they used to. If a few key players don't turn up, nobody is doing anything.

Honestly, with some exceptions, there wasn't really a big gap in gear between "serviceable" and "top level" at 75 cap, especially early 75 cap. A Sniper's Ring +1 was only 4.5 accuracy better than a generic Adroit Ring (while giving less crit rate), for example, and an Armadaberk was only 5 STR/DEX/ATK/ACC better than a Hauberk. 90% of the time, players got the shiniest of shiny gear as status symbols, not because they'd make a noticeable difference between winning and losing. Players also have the advantage of having access to late 75-cap gear (like Walahra Turban) to use against early 75-cap enemies like Nidhogg.

That's not even counting the fact that it's much easier these days to get yourself quickly to endgame levels with buyable gear; back in the day, 1m for a Sniper's Ring was very expensive for all but the highest earners, but these days you can get the 300k for one very easily (or even cheaper options that are now available, like Ecphoria Ring or Ulthalam's Ring). The same goes for other slots that have high tier 75 gear that used to be prohibitively expensive but are now cheap (if you can find them in stock), like Ancient Torque and Mars' Ring.

We also have food that is MUCH more powerful than we did at 75 cap (like Sublime Sushi and Miso Ramen), medicine is much more accessible, job adjustments have made us much more powerful than we used to be (Majesty is usable in 75 cap, Berserk/Last Resort have parts of ther buffs intact, DRGs have 4 tiers of their WS Damage Boost trait and Wyverns buff their ATK/DEF/Haste/WSDMG, etc.), much more lenient merit caps, many 75 cap WSs are many times as strong as they used to be, and more. Average max HP at level 75 even went from ~1k to ~1.4k due to buffs. Finally, we also have more jobs than we used to.

Savage Blade alone going from one of the worst to best WSes in the game changes 75 cap.

From the looks of your avatar, if you want that real old school experience, head to Lower Jeuno, turn your party invite flag on, and sit there for four ~ six hours. Next, use your imagination that you got a party invite, got to camp, fought 4 pink birds, and party disbands because BRD has to go because mom called him to dinner table.

If you are drinking Mntn Dew and snacking on something that makes your fingertips coated with "cheese-like substance" and get it on your keyboard, you're all but living 2006 all over again.

Edit: To quote someone from another thread that tells the story better:

Those cheese covered fingers smacking away at the keyboard, thats the key

30-60 were the real tragedy for me. So many hours waiting for altepa / kuftal parties... 60-75 was pretty easy though. Kill stuff on your own terms, or find a buddy. Good stuff.

Also ToAU was when SE started making items that were... okay. So BLMs would have access to Yigit feet instead of... oh dear god have you seen BLMs RoZ CoP feet options?

There's also the just general ease of crafting stuff either through finding a shield crafter or through leveling it up yourself because it's super-duper easy and materials are much more plentiful.

Would be kinda funny and pretty sad to look back at some of the horrible bis items we had to wear just because 2 int or whatever was actually the best(and only) thing at the time.

There was a purpose for it tho, light sc, and swift blade for dark kind of don't remember but for dark i think u had to sc with thf mostly not sure what could be evisceration , remember doing those on aspid and adaman and just melt his *** with nukes!

They're infested with bugs.

That reminds me that Skillchains are far more useful now since they're no longer MACC/MEVA based.

Another one is that immunobreaks make landing enfeebles on strong enemies easier than it used to be.

debuff WS actually work now too, so its even easier to stack atk/def down than it was in the past. Pet WS' also got a massive overhaul, most of which can be used at 75, not to mention all the AI/attachment bonuses pup got over the yrs

To me it feels less like 75cap FFXI can't exist. It's more like they finally got around to fixing all the bugs that existed at 75cap era. (like paralyze eating your meds)
except dynamis, that zone was swapped out.
Aside from that, just need a feature to level cap yourself for stuff like promyvion & mission fights, so they aren't just a joke and done. (can't expect anyone to keep around lv.30/40/50 jobs all the time)

Can you imagine taking people from 2021 and trying to organize 2008 endgame?

I don't even know if it would be possible past the first few weeks.

Vs the ton of OOE stuff here?

Even if there was a shell of people doing lvl 75 content, if you've been playing the game the past 11 years since level cap increases, I'd assume the novelty would wear off after a couple days, maybe even a couple hours. It wasnt the game that was fun back then, it was the comradery of a ls doing things for months on end to achieve a goal or get that piece of gear. Doesn't take a year to get a d ring or ridill anymore.

Edit: Not saying the game wasnt fun back then, was just saying people that talk about the good ol days want that feeling of playing with the same people daily who all want the same things and the joy of when that super rare item dropped finally.

Still never got my rostrum pumps =/

For starters, no server that I'm aware of has proper damage calculations for the era. everything is all jacked for various reasons. some servers are worse than others -- weaponskills that rightfully should be awful do tons of damage for no reason, and other weaponskills you'd think would be decent are trash. The worst offenders I see are magic damage, it's way too good generally. This might be compounded by the fact we don't really know INT values for most mobs, and I don't even know where to begin to calculate a mobs MAB.

The secondary problem is that a lot of job mechanics straight up don't work or are implemented incorrectly. Over time there's been less and less of this, but in particular lesser played non bandwagon jobs have what little they bring to the table broken or unimplemented. I doubt anyone's spent time to make PUP work remotely correctly, let alone most things revolving around a wyvern. Does BLU work anywhere?

Oh, let's not forget that some private servers just straight up won't implement DNC and SCH because they "are broken" even if they were part of the game. Though... I don't think WoTG is very well developed even on bleeding edge code, so that is a lesser problem even if /DNC alone helped soloability for a lot of jobs.

tl;dr opinions, eyeballing, and niche stuff sort of ruin private servers. don't get me wrong, i'm glad they are there but it could be so much better.

I used to run my own shell back then with friends i was one of the founders.

it was hard even then getting people but people were willing to do ***win or lose and just for fun.

2021 players besides the ones who grow up with 75 would be hard pressed and even now i am not sure i want to go back to 75 stuff cuss i got gearsets i really love and love that i feel like an unbeatable monster sometimes

<<<<<<< your 100% right i made a lot of friends i love and respect some of them still play one guy been friends with him 19 years cuss of the things we did back in the 50-75 days at like 11-2am to get 1 thing.

They are all just reverse engineered garbage of a game that already has tons of sphagetti code. I don't know how people even enjoy themselves playing on those servers when ***doesn't even work right. Too bad they can't get the code somehow, the only private servers I played in the past were Ragnarok Online ones and they were pretty decent with their own unique take.

I saw some BLU vs. Raubahn vids from one of the private servers on Youtube. It looked alright. Text certainly looked off. Didn't really inspire confidence.

This and individual progression can be overly challenging. A friend of mine plays on Nasomi, which is one of the most popular and unless you're established in a clique, you won't obtain anything relevant.

I'm glad it's over, so bad and super flawed, Mega corrupt leadership on every linkshell with a weird attendance point system. More than 24hrs of camping to only get out-claimed by a JP bot. 75 cap era had the most horrid toxic behavior in most players as well. NO NO.

I played on Supernova for a bit, and I can confirm the magic problem. It was so bad that everyone subbed blm no matter the class and just nuked the ***outta whatever we were xping on. At least til the gm's told us explicitly to stop doing it.

Nothing from 75 cap is hard on current retail. Anyone trying to tell themselves that level syncing while all the balance adjustments still exist is comparable is delusional. Defense actually matters, pdif caps are higher for every job, m.acc and m.eva have been reworked numerous times, base stats are higher, gear is easier, it's a joke. Never mind that people are using modern era ***like gearswap, react, UI mods(both SE introduced and player introduced) when in the old days you'd be lucky if 1/3 of your alliance had spellcast. Capping merits with retail boosts to exp rate is trivial, and thus everyone has capped merits(to say nothing of the people who take merits past the in-era caps, since caps are higher now). Leveling jobs takes hours instead of weeks, so everyone has numerous jobs. I could go on.

Private servers aren't a whole lot better. The actual gameplay is getting close to retail, their packet handling is decent for the most part and visible bugs are getting less frequent. However, internal bugs are still all over the place (active branch of landsandboat is still checking east/west + vertical for interrupting ranged instead of east/west + north/south, and ranged attacks fail if the mob steps over 25' away after you've drawn your weapon, for a couple easy examples). The UI issues still exist, but more importantly, the higher population ones intentionally balance toward the easy end to entice players. They claim to be retail-like, while still being nowhere near the original difficulty.

Wings has a 1 second cooldown between skillchains and massive increase to pdif caps result in potential to do over 50% more damage than you could in a real server. This is before you get into the stats on endgame mobs, almost all of which are lower than they used to be. Drops get massively increased and then kept because it wouldn't be fair for other players, or just increased for no reason whatsoever(limit break bumping thief's knife from 'very rare' to 'rare', which amounts to a 7-8% droprate with TH2-TH4).

If you want an actual, true to 75, FFXI experience.. you just can't get it right now. I don't think you'd enjoy it anyway, but it doesn't exist.