Ambuscade Volume 1 - March 2017

Personally this fight is easy with 1 of 2 things. Elite group with a still very good brd or a decked out mythic/master brd with the rest still being very good. Having both is even better obviously, but if you don't have at least 1 of those scenarios just bump it down to D. Nothing wrong with 800/400 if VD is too hard and/or slow.

I pulled Dynamis and farmed my Mandau over a 1.5 year period of living in my mother's basement living and breathing FFXI, so I'm aware of what Dynamis was like. There was strategy involved in pulling (to the tune of: Don't link too much ***) otherwise you had BLM's nuke statues and melee zerg one at a time. That's actually almost exactly how this months intense ambuscade works, actually.

I'm not really sure you can quantify old school dynamis as being terribly difficult as a general rule, as Shiva (and I'm sure many other servers) had a LS that would enter with 64 people and just zerg the *** out of the zone twice a week.

I can't speak of Pandy Warden, as I had quit for that era, though.

I hold that most endgame of yesteryear was difficult because we didn't have a full understanding of mechanics or didn't have proper ways to mitigate them. DT sets were barely a thing in original endgame for non-tanks (oh wait, did we even use melee in endgame in the back in the day? Ehhhhhhhh...) and now DT sets are absolutely required for all jobs and knowing how to use them is very closely linked to how "good" you are.

*** VD we do it on the hidden IT++ difficulty, if you don't know how to get that then you don't deserve to know. Better to stay in town in glowing gear then to lower ourselves to a lessor difficulty. Linkshell pride yo

We used melee all the time for endgame... ya know build tp on other mobs and run in and SA ws. Or SA cannonball. Or random zergin.

Yes some of us used melee in those "by gone" years, and yes we did have -DT sets, they were called "Ohh ***" sets and used to buy your healers time when bad things happened. Darksteel and Coral sets existed along with various accessories and HP / defense items. Of course we couldn't get nearly as much as we can now but NM's didn't hit nearly as hard either, we went from taking 400~600 "high" damage attacks to 2000+ damage attacks. Our HP hasn't scaled nearly as dramatically as the monsters damage output, our HP's raised by about 50% while the boss's attacks have gone up ~300% which creates a situation where you need -DT merely to survive and it's not just a "reduce load on healer" set.

The current meta is probably the most "balanced" the game's been in a very long time, mostly because there is so much gear available that nearly anyone (sorry MNK) can exploit some form of gear stacking.

Yeah, but that's a mechanic that straight up wouldn't work in how current game works (since there often times aren't corses to gain tp on) but that's a prime example of what I mean. We didn't have a way of mitigating mechanics so we had to avoid it entirely. Whereas now we use Carols and vex/fade and DT sets to mitigate mechanics and keep on going.


You're right, they existed, and people used them. But if you go to the job forums back in those days the guide didn't say "MUST HAVE DARKSTEEL+1 FOR DT". It may not even be mentioned but in a random thread with one of the higher end players. Now it's a regular part of every guide for nearly every single job. It's now an expectation, it was expected for NIN, PLD and BRD back in the day, but not nearly as widely used as now.

Yeah back then "end game" was it's own community separate from most FFXI players because "Playing FFXI" was mostly killing random monsters to level up to 75, getting merits, doing random quests for some minor gear item or some form of farming for gil. Among the already small "end game" community only a small group of people payed multiple jobs and understood the need for those defensive sets. Most DD's didn't care because "get a healer who doesn't suck" was the answer to them being stupid, of course most had never actually played a healing role and didn't understand the limit that time places on heal output. To this day that *** 3s global cooldown is the single worst problem in healing.

Should also note that tanking wasn't quite the same back a lot. There was no DT II or 100% block rates (well odd sipar things aside). Sure there was some blink tanking and elemental resist setups but otherwise "tanks" were often not incredibly more durable than a defensive other job. Heck rdm and drks tanked for a bit. So if the melees were eating enough to feel the need to dt chances are the tank was burning a hole in the healers mp

Also tools have changed a lot. It's easier now to do and have swaps like that in vanilla than it was for a long time to do even with 3rd party stuff. Spellcast really revolutionized things. And for that matter dt pieces that were actually not horrible to melee in helped a lot as well.

Chriscoffey now thats a name i havent seen in awhile

been pretty good landed on asura while back just been playing and living lol if you make your way to asura let me know we can kick it like old times