Level 75 Content

Just going to add to Melphina's point that the HNM system was indeed garbage.

If you were a collage kid at the time you could take 30 minute powernaps between spawn windows for kings but yeah the whole system was ripe for abuse on so many levels.

Salvage alone was a god damn mess with those amazing piss poor drop rates on certain pieces of armor. A guy named Neosutra if anyone recalls him went over five-hundred Salvage runs before his Usukane 35 body dropped. That's a point of where the game isn't fun anymore but a *** chore.

75 cap FFXI was a *** mess. Too many stories of people waiting in town seeking for hours on end as a SAM DRK or DRG. Even if you had top gear you would still seek on a server with close to 1500 people on at peak times with your thumb up your ***.

I almost quit originally because the ***was boring. I eventually started making my own "good" parties mainly from interviewing people in tells & getting to know them which in turn made them more invested in willing to come out. One thing I learned was if you made a group, be polite, respectful and just don't send stupid *** tells with /party? in it.

If you actually talked to people you'd most of the time get a good group. I made a lot of friends that way whim I still talk to now.

The only thing I hated the most about building parties were the god damn *** princess bards and red mages. Some people had their *** heads so far up their *** their cheeks were resting on their tongues.

One RDM I was in a party with in Ro'meave behind the moon gate refused to cast Dispel saying it was the bard's job to do it.

*** you BOTH should be *** doing it.

PT'd once with a NIN in the nest who said he didn't need Utu:Ni to tank.

Had an RDM in Kuftal Tunnel on Robber Crabs who somehow made it into the 50s without ever having Dispel.

Guy in the nest who refused to let the PLD rest for MP saying "PLD's don't need MP to keep hate."

God my rage meter was so easy to set off years ago. lol

Yeah, lots of ignorant people back in those days. People who had no clue how to play their own jobs let alone anyone else's to critique them.

People who go all the way or nearly all the way without key parts of their jobs like dispel (as you mentioned) or not even having up-to-date spells such as a Rdm in their 60s not having Refresh or a Bard who didn't have Ballads. But at the same time, I don't blame some of them. Making gil back in those days wasn't exactly intuitive but then everyone else suffered because of it.

I always put really harsh expectations on myself and then got really angry when I'd find out other people didn't follow them as well. Most notably when it came to spell-casters and having spells. I know a bunch of spells go forever unused, but if that 1-in-1,000,000 chance came up where you'd need it, you'd better damn have it.

Back in the day, I altogether halted leveling Blue Mage at Lv.61 for close to a year because I didn't want to attain a level for which I didn't have all of the spells. Of course, I had a hard time getting Memento Mori. Even though at the time nobody would have ever used it.

In fact, I think the second time I quit was because during the Abyssea era and my blood utterly boiling with all of the player characters missing every spell from 1~70 because they'd "only ever cast spells closer to Lv.99". I'd partied with a White Mage who only had like 10 spells.

If you're an overachiever, it's hard to set the bar there but I do feel you. At the time, I set my expectations low when someone I never met joined an exp party, that way my disappointment wasn't as bad.

Blu was sometimes frustrating when leveling it up. I remember trying to get Cocoon just so I could join parties since blu tanking in the dunes worked well but I just wouldn't learn it for some reason.

I remember when I got my RDM to level 32 (my highest job at the time and no kazham airship pass) one night in sauromugue on weapons and took a break after. I logged in the next day to get an invitation to a PT in garlaige, only to get kicked from my group when I arrived there because I didn't have dispel for the beetles.

It felt really bad but in hindsight having that happen so early on made me make sure I had spells prepared for my mage jobs before I even dinged into it and even went further by capping skill levels in my free time. I spent hours grinding Giant Femurs in Bubu so much just to make enough gil for spells. This game consumed so much time for a simple things like a 50k scroll of dispel from the AH.

Loooooong time ago I never bought viruna, cause all you ever fight is crabs beetles bats and mandies 1-75 oldschool literally nothing had plague or disease in the entire game. So why bother right?

Then I got a party in the valley, didn't know what we were killing. Raptors. well that sucked. Too far to go and buy it to come back.

At the same time, it wasn't un common for people to ask if you had those things before you waste your time getting there or them wasting time waiting. Either way, we did learn some hard lessons.

It would be cool if a group of 75 players took down AV, since he's never been defeated at 75 cap using the SP ability locking gimmick. Same for PW. Nobody ever figured out what his gimmick was to lock/prevent Astral Flow shenanigans.

People beat PW at 75, AV was never beaten "properly" at 75 though far as i know

There was a time where killing Wynavs enough times seemed to lead to full SP lock; never really nailed down the exact mechanics but got 1 rage wipe and 2 kills out of it. They seemed to patch it after our 2nd kill so was probably unintended, but we had no way of knowing that especially when you consider killing JOL pets continuously is also a mechanic. Personally I consider those clears legit, definitely more-so than wall cheesing. Plus for all we know they added the actual SP locking mechanism after they implemented the 2hr fight time limit.

Are you sure? I remember that one herculean 18 hour run that got PW low then failed, and then SE reduced the time limit to 2 hours but only roughly halved the number of forms.

I don't remember anyone killing it between then and Abyssea when they raised the level cap to 80.

Fairly certain. Once they reduced the number of form changes to a realistic amount it was killed a handful of times

That one 18 hour run gets brought up a lot, and sure the shell had some respect at the time, but the truth of the matter is that it was the first look at that NM. Nobody knew what to expect, nobody prepared specific jobs, nobody was playing their best. It wasn't a good benchmark for anything except how stubborn the shell in question wanted to be at the time, it's perfectly possible that the original form was fully defeatable and we'll never really know because the bad PR they garnered resulted in a rapid nerf.

That said, it was certainly defeated in the nerfed form by multiple shells before level cap raise. Visions of abyssea released in June 2010, and first kill was in January 2009 by Apathy.

Pretty sure I remember some interview confirming that the SP locking mechanic was what people always thought; using the matching 2hr right after AV uses it. The problem was that they failed to account for how long it takes to display in log and latency in general, so the interval was too short for anyone to reliably execute in the early days. Massive oversight by SE.

The wynav thing was almost certainly just getting the AI logic bugged in some way or another, not an intentional lock-all. Wouldn't really call that a legit kill, though it's probably the closest anyone gets. Level sync on current retail and current topaz in general are both miles away from accurately representing era.

Hmmm, since that got brought up, this video just popped today.

"AV was never meant to be killable as a troll boss and the devs releases a troll video using a fake tactic to win" @10:00