Difficulty In FFXI - A Retrospective

Bit early maybe, but I'd like to read more opinions on other old time FFXI players concerning content difficulty in FFXI.
First of all a premise, what is "difficulty"?
I don't think there is an unambiguous way to define it, it's subject to context, personal opinions and scenarios.
Ultimately the most efficient way to measure it would be by amount of players completing a specific content in a window of time post release. A smaller number of players completing a content X weeks after release, would hint at that content being more "difficult" than others. With the uningnorable key aspect that it's hard to measure it since there is no official, open and transparent list (like in WoW for instance) and we only get approximate values from boards like FFXIAH, where only a small part of the overall player base participate in discussions, hence this can lead to biased perceptions.
Also right now we have a much smaller player base compared to several years ago, this skews the results because there are less overall attempts at a specific content, at the same time on average the player-base still playing these days is likely more proficient at the game than the average level we had several years ago.
The amount of different tools in the players' hands and how widespread they are compared to several years ago, also affects the result.


From the developers' point of view
"Balancing" the difficulty of content for Devs is much higher when you have too many variables at play.
This is exactly the reason why over the years most MMOs, following WoW's model, tried to standardize these variables.
With less and less of them at play, it's easier for Devs to "control" the environment and hence create a more predictable one where the difficulty isn't too hard or too easy according to those variables.
WoW started this progressively with several steps bit by bit. The most important one has been the "homogeneization" approach started in patch 3.0 (WotLK), followed by 4.0 (Cataclysm).
In FFXI the definition of "roles" according to the trinity system is more bland. This is made furtherly complex by the fact you can customize role/purpose by combining different subjobs, by variable number of players participating in the content (3-18) and by the fact that there's a plethora of different support buffs, most of which can be combined together because they don't share the same slot.
This makes it incredibly hard for devs to "balance" content because players have too much freedom and what can be borderline impossible with some setups, becomes a joke with some combinations (synergy) of specific jobs/buffs.

Lately SE tried its own way to "standardize" things without completely changing the game approach like WoW did.
They did this by creating limitations (6 people content, no subjob, WS wall), immunities (targets immune to several abilities/spells/effects) and "*** you" mechanics (instant death, unresistable full dispel, AoE weakened status, targets ignoring enmity rules, systems that require a specific proc with that proc getting progressively harder to activate each following time) and much higher HP pools of targets (making zergs with buff-stacking and short duration invincibility things like Perfect Defense, uneffective, especially in environment where content is fixed for 6 people and not variable).

All of these features together greatly limitate the excessive freedom in the hands of players, making content somewhat more "equally difficult" instead than being excessively difficult with some setups, but easy with some others.


A Retrospective of end-game content difficulty
Here's my personal take on some end-game content I can think of

Abyssea
Voidwatch
Legion
Delve
Incursion
Vagary
Aeonic (Zi'tah, Ru'aun, Reisen highest tier battles)
Omen
Master Trials
Divergence Dynamis
Odyssey Sheol-Gaol


My personal take is that, thanks to the extremely controlled environment Odyssey Sheol Gaol is so far the "most difficult" content for FFXI.
They succeeded in making the hardest version of the content "desirable".
They succeeded in limitating the huge amount of freedom/synergy in the hands of players, hence creating content that's more averagely/regularly difficult, instead that the classic Black or White FFXI situation (where a content is extremely hard with most setups, but somewhat easy with a few others).
They succeded in creating this extremely controlled environment, without completely changing the core of the game (like WoW, for instance).

They failed in making, in my humble opinion, the content a bit too unaccessible (too many requirements, too many punishments, too many random/uncontrollable things).

I'm glad they managed to reach these goals.
I hope over the next few years the content will be progressively made more accessible for everyone but I don't see how they can do it given how there are no Job adjustments plans, ML is capped at 50 (and quite hard to reach) etc.
We'll see!


All things said, despite me whining a lot for all the choices they made for Odyssey, I can somewhat see why they made them and apreciate the fact they managed to reach this level of challenge.
Wish the content would mantain this level of challenge but with more reasonable/accessible requirements, but oh well, it is what it is.

I ignored on purpose all pre-abyssea content.
I also didn't mention some post-abyssea content like New Nyzul (which was quite tough!), Meeble Burrows and Ambuscade.
I feel like it wasn't particularly relevant to discuss those content but of course there's a lot of stuff that could be said about them.

Apparently 75 era was peak difficulty. Them crabs was rough

It would be better to debate why 75 era thumpers are wrong and they have nostalgia goggles bolted on. It's insane how they think something like the CoP airship battle or leveling was harder than something like Odyssey or Delve. I was there and it was a different time, but they are just completely blinded by nostalgia. Examining it overall and not just due to a lack of game knowledge most had back then.

I come across so many videos with the same stupid comments. And maybe sometimes there's maybe one voice of reason. This video in particular:



Rife with comments like that and even includes someone trying to convert people to a private server, "ninja even plays on it"

Also don't care for the inevitable comments from them, but it's a discussion on difficulty so I think it's interesting to see why they think 75 era was peak difficulty.

This quote was good but it doesn't let me copy on my phone, by "AtomocArturas"

The only thing that was ever of any level of difficulty was finding competent humans to do things consistently.

If you had loyal humans willing to throw their lives away and give more than the bare minimum (including job flexibility) everything was generally quite simple. But if you didn't everything was impossible. Universally. Every era, every meta, every time.

(*)Special sidenote for beating claimbots/having equal claimbots/your ping being superior so things don't spawn purple. and TPmove/chat log slowness.
(**)Sometimes a mob was overtuned due to incompetence and adjusted

Idk, the Pre-Nerfed COP Airship fight was indeed a *** to get done.

50-Cap so very restrictive on gear and job options. The mallets were easy but will smash your group if you mess up and Omega was a VERY brutal NM to deal with at lvl 50 before it was Nerfed, Ultima was much easier to deal with but you still had to be on your toes and you still had to recover from Omega lol. We had to use all kinds of meds and strategies, it was a brutal fight.

Only certain jobs excelled at the fight and back then Leveling was a tremendous pain to do so most groups had to scrape by until they finally weakened the fight 4 months later unless they had a viable LS with ability to help carry you in. Not calling it “The Hardest Fight Ever” but that one was pretty brutal.

As for 75 era leveling, Hard? Not particularly. Annoying? Absolutely. It took WEEKS to get a job from 1-75 back then, the grind was absolutely terrible. It was ok for the time because we didn’t know any better? But that was really bad.

I look at difficulty by how cut-throat a fight is. If there’s one thing that will kill the run if it’s allowed to happen, that’s pretty difficult imo. And iirc, there was a little bit of that in every era? I feel like we have it easier now thanks to power creep and 3rd party tools but I feel like the Devs do a good job of throwing monkey wrenches at us with new content to keep us from steamrolling it; at least half of the time lol.

Delve was rough until the LS completed its first Tojil and got those Oatixurs… THE INSTANT WE GOT THOSE OATS, we started steamrolling the rest of Delve lol. Except for the Tree, *** that thing.

Tldr; every era has challenges, QOL has gotten much better now vs 75 era imo

I think most of the time it's due to nostalgia goggles.

Personally I myself "perceive" many of the 75 era content as "difficult" but I think this perception is mostly from other secondary aspects rather than intrinsic difficulty within the content.
To name a few:

1) Players were on average much less skilled
2) There was less knowledge of the overly complex FFXI mechanics
3) There were less tools (addons, plugins, third party tools)
4) It was harder to find people with multiple jobs with good gear (lotsa people didn't even have a single job at 75, let alone having BiS gear or merits for that job). With this I mean that more often than not back then you had to deal with the fact that you didn't have the best possible jobs/setups available while composing a party/alliance setup

I could go on, but these are the first coming to my mind.

With the amount of resources, skill and knowledge we have nowadays, maybe not all but a large part of that content would have been almost trivial.

It was 60 cap, for one. But it was a joke of a fight if you had people who were reasonably geared and worked together. If you look at the amount of mechanics going off relative to any fight today, it's not even remotely comparable. It just felt harder at the time because the level of gameplay expected out of the average player was much lower.

I think you'd find that if you took a group that can tackle even V15 odyssey into 75-era content, they'd find it to be leagues easier. There just weren't any complex mechanics or interactions to be dealt with back then.

This part alone, the fact many linkshells were capable of carrying, says enough.

Yes.

I dunno. In general I'm following the logic behind your reasoning and I can agree to a certain extent.
Then again there have been large periods of time where content was quite evidently much "easier" to complete.

This can be for multiple reasons for instance.
The fact that it was easier to gear up your job(s).
The fact there were good catch-up mechanics.
The fact the content was inclusive (as in: it allowed you to bring a certain amount of "left behind" players)
The fact there was a somewhat large degree of potential errors happening (content less punishing)
The fact the requirements to participate in a specific content were pretty bland
Last but not least: the fact that the content, for multiple reasons, slowly became easier and more accessible.

Incursion was very accessible and overall "easy". Yes at the highest difficulty it was a monstrosity, but you didn't really have to aim for that level of difficulty to efficiently farm the content (which is good and bad at the same time)
Delve had its fair share of difficulties at start, but it quickly became more and more accessible (at least for organized linkshells) as good gear became more available from multiple sources (Delve itself included)
Vagary was never really a big deal.
Even Abyssea, c'mon. Yes the start was rough, but as you worked out on those completition achievements (buffs, stones, atmas, the plentifum gear assortment) it was becoming easier and easier with each step taken. There was a clear sense of "progression".


Odyssey for instance is quite different compared to these points I listed. In the future we'll see, but so far that's how things are.

My counter to this is that the fun of FFXI is inside that massive freedom of configuration. By taking that freedom away they just created a crappy version of WoW / FFXIV / <insert wow clone here>.

Players enjoy freedom to choose their gameplay style, taking that away to make dev's job "easier" is a recipe for disaster in a game like FFXI.

One word, gearswap.

Back then most people were not changing gear, or if they did they only changed a few pieces inside the built in system. Some had discovered how to use windower scripts to change lots of gear. Then the ancient wizards of old made this thing called spellcast and the chosen few acolytes of XML then entered a whole new level of gameplay.

Seriously, almost all the difficulty of the past boils down to managing gear sets on a per-action basis. If you want to see this is in action, try playing your favorite job with a single gearset on, notice the massive difference in ability vs having sets for everything? And that is with modern ilevel stat vommit, back then gear was way more one dimensional.

SE has always built content to be complete *** that cheats and kicks the players in the nuts over and over again. We beat the devs by cheating even harder. Now they are building content expecting us to cheat hard, so the bosses are now SSJ4 cheaters.

Oh yippie, this minefield again^^ I kid, Sechs, I know your intent is well-meaning, I just seriously doubt we as a community handle this conversation well based on track record ;)

That being said, at the end of the day there's one thing that SE and FFXI in particular doesn't do well: Variation.

Is a fight essentially just a script that once geared properly for and learned becomes muscle memory, or are there still enough random aspects that can happen which can make that 'script' useless and require on-our-feet thinking/reaction? Something like Bumba at V19 and lower (read: no add) essentially boils down to just preparation and damage check, very little "difficulty", very little variance.

In my mind most concepts of "difficulty" mentioned by players in this game boil down to a battle not letting those players do it the way they want. 22 Friggin jobs, and most people I meet just wanna Savage all the Thingz because its easy, which to me begs the question: why should SE even try to create true difficulty vs just dps checks, if the only reason the majority of their customers want new content is to lord the results over other players? Sure, a good number do want unique content that forces us to tackle things in ways we're not accustomed to, but it never ceases to amaze me the level of complacency in the average player who pays to play this game just to have shiny pixels to wear around Mhaura, not for the challenge of the content.

75 was a lack of job choices, knowledge of game mechanics and lack of gear options. (haste, DT etc)

Towards the end when we were stacking BRDs, CORs, hitting 93.3% haste, stuff was getting steamrolled.

Airship fight is not "end game content", it was main story quests.
But yes, it was tough. Promathia fight itself wasn't a breeze and a couple of other mission things were quite tough.
I can't deny that and the noob Sechs and his friends back then STRUGGLED to get some of that stuff done.

Then again we have to wonder: was the difficulty intrinsic within the content itself? Or was the difficulty "outside"?
And I'd rather say it was the latter.
The fact that it was so difficult to level up jobs, if you and your friends ended up with a combination that wasn't one of the "good ones" then good luck levelling another job to 75.
The fact exp grind was so tough that not everybody had merits.
Let alone gear accessibility and blah blah blah, all the other things we already discussed about average levels of skills, knowledge, tools availability and so on.

Ahh the naegling argument. Basically this sword gives a large attack bonus to jobs that are usually not high attack jobs, and since BRD and COR are in practically every melee orientated strategy, it's a great way for them to add damage. It's not the best option for most other jobs, but is the best option if someone is needing to use Savage Blade. Why are we all using Savage Blade, because Savage Blade doesn't SC with itself and several bosses now have a "your *** if you do damage from random element X". If a BRD was to use say, Rudras instead, well that might make a random Distortion or Darkness which could then cause a boss to go nuclear and deal five digit damage to the entire group.

Some folks saw other folks beat the "hardest content" using a bunch of Savage Blade spam, then assumed it must be the bestest best ever. If they nerfed naegling tomorrow, we should still end having to use SB because of the anti-SC mechanics.

One of the things I find interesting about FFXI is that there are a lot of strategies that are viable, even if only a couple are "optimal". There are so many different ways to play it that you could even stumble across something new that's even more optimized than the existing optimal strategy.

If you're playing with friends, they'll often grant you the freedom to play how you want to play. And Trusts couldn't care less, so it's even more freedom to test new waters. Doing so also allows you to experience things with more challenge and accomplishment.

Yet part of the fun as well is figuring out how to overcome all of the challenges in the first place. Through optimization you can reduce the time it takes for one cycle of the grind by seconds or even minutes. Maybe instead of running Ambuscade only four times in an hour, you've figured out how to do it a fifth time. FFXI content always starts out excitingly challenging, but gets easier the more you plan on grinding it. And I think that's really good design.

I ran a CoP static during that era, the fights were not difficulty mechanically, they were difficulty because of lack of knowledge. We were all reading posts on Allahakzam and trying to figure mechanical counters out. We didn't have super gear swapping like we do now. Recent I "relived" all the old content with my 75 era character, it wasn't nearly as hard as we remembered because we now have a ton of knowledge.

In general? Absolutely, yes!

For Odyssey V25 specifically? Especially T3 and onwards?
Uhhhhm... not so much? At least for now?
Things could change fast :D


Well... I can't counter that.
Part of me completely agrees with you and despite their "noble intent" they ended up putting together way too many restrictions/requirement to achieve that goal.

Part of me apreciates that they managed to create what is undoubtely quite a challenging content.

Off topic a bit:

Oh very true, and if some situations like SE has given us in the past (Onychophera for example) specifically required a no-SC strategy, sure. Its when avoiding other weapon types and avoiding the skillchain (a very unique FFXI aspect of gaming) becomes the better method in every situation that it is broken. And yes, the real offenders aren't really the attack-starved support-DD jobs which it helps put on an even foot, its when that weapon simply becomes the better option for 95% of jobs in 95% of situations its being overused.

I may have come across this way, but my issue isn't with all use of it, merely overuse of it. There's nothing wrong in my book with different situations requiring different tactics- I've often commented how I think that's the only hope FFXI has for variance any more vs 'balance' (give us different moments where different jobs/strats are needed rather than allowing various methods to work in the same fights).

Nuuuu RadialArcana why did you delete that post :-(

Didn't want to derail, sorry!

It's actually not the best weapon usually, just folks get that stuck in their heads. NIN is the one where Naegling Savage is definitely better, buy only because of how weak Katana options can be. Ten is decent but Naegling Savage is just better. People just saw folks without SJ's beat the "hardest content" using Naegling SB spam and thought it must always be best. If you are low attack and need to not make SC's, Naegling Savage looks really good. A strong corollary to this is tendency of SE to have geomancy debuffs nerfed. Previously Idris Frailty + Dia II generally ensured that attack ratio would be capped or near capped for everyone, if frailty is heavily nerfed then a sword that gives +15~25% attack becomes very attractive.


Basically SE created the Naegling Savage spam problem by trying to restrict us too much with *** "*** you" mechanics. Law of unintended consequences in full effect.

haven't ever looked at it being an 'unintended consequence' before...now you got me intrigued to do some self-reflection^^

The more recent the content is, the more difficult it should be/is perceived. Very much because difficulty of content revolves around knowledge of the content first and foremost.

If you literally know everything that a monster can do and why, then you can plan/strategize/react to everything it does. Having no firsthand knowledge of anything endgamey beyond the year of 2014, I still say this is true.

Moderating here I read tidbits about modern endgame, and some of them stick in my brain. Like a couple years back I watched that TP denial strat for Mboze. It was amazing even to me.

Now as I play and record through the earlier eras of the game, not even close to modern day stuff, thoughts on difficulty swim through my head a bunch.

Everything nowadays is verifiably more difficult, this is true just from the fact that nearly everything has a difficulty setting, and even the lower settings can kill you.

It's due to us players being handed so many things that were undreamed of in days of old. We have more player power than ever before, not just from iLvl gear or Job Point gifts, but from the raw skillsets we have now in our spells and JAs. We've got secondary 2hrs(1hrs). We've got whole new spell effects that didn't use to exist. Weaponskills and their extra effects have been altered to actually work. Defense is no longer bugged. New food recipes add more to our stats at any level than ever before!

So when you consider the difficulty of an era, it can never be relative to the newest one. The answer will be that it's always easier now. You have to consider each era within the context of its time. Even the smallest changes make big waves.

Like there's almost no way to do a TP denial strat in the 75 era. You might think, "Oh, just bring a buncha Penance merited Monks." But then you are forced to recall that Penance wasn't always in the game, so which slice of the 6 or so year 75 era are you talking about? The latter half.

How was Abyssea talked about when there was only the 80 cap and a single atma allowed vs. Abyssea after multiple atmas and the 85 cap? I seem to recall being in a full alliance using some fairly run of the mill kiting strats for certain bosses in early Abyssea and then being in a 6 man or less party by the end of Abyssea, always just critical hit zerging every single thing with occasional quadruple damage procs from Empyrean +2 stacked on top of ODD from Empyrean weapons.

You always gotta think about the barrier to entry, too.

People think about 75 era, and they think of CoP fights being said to be difficult because that's what a lot of folks actually got to access to complain about. Could you imagine what people would say about things like Einherjar in comparison? How many of you beat Odin's Chamber at the level 75 cap?

Bah, I'm rambling now. Suffice it to say, difficulty will always revolve around our current ability set and gear. And it will often reflect on stopping a strategy that's wiped the floor with all previous content.

Yes for every action with an intended outcome, there will be at least three unintended outcomes. This is why very few systems should be absolute, there should always be a system for handling exceptions. In game mechanics, this means there should always be a way to disable or circumvent mechanics. SE still hasn't learned this lesson and ham fisted attempts at "fight difficulty" result in the players just opting for the approach that best ignores the mechanics in the first place.

Yeah I think the difficulty of the 75 era shouldn't be CoP mission fights, which were difficult but I agree with OP, that's mostly because people were stupid, had the wrong jobs, no gear, or whatever.

The ACTUAL difficult content in 75 era were things like: Dynamis Lord, Odin, Jailer of Love, Kirin, KB, Salvage. When you look at fights like these an important distinction comes out as well: they actually had mechanics and were not cleared by PUGs.

That said, I still think Odyssey at high vengeance levels is much harder than most (all?) 75 content. As someone who cleared everything in my list above at level 75 and who has cleared just about everything (Ody V25 aside) in the current endgame, I think the current era is much more difficult and requires a ton more coordination and skill. Odin is possibly comparable, but when you have 36 people there's a lot more room for error than when you have 6 in a Sortie basement run.

Last comment: the strategies for current content are quite a bit more complicated than those for old content. Sure, is it difficult to get a BRD rotation going so you can keep up 6 (!) songs up on 2-3 parties? Granted. Is there some nuance to chainspell stunning, or coordination between multiple RDM/DRKs? Sure. But that's nothing compared to dealing with a V20 boss doing fetters, dispels, spawning an add, giving crazy debuffs, and all the other nonsense going on in those fights.

There's a connection between how new a content is and how difficult it's perceived. If anything because it's so new that "easy" strats/approachs haven't been found yet.
I can't deny this.

Yet I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's always been the case.
Among the content I mentioned in my initial post there's plenty of end-game content that even when it was new or relatively new, I personally never perceived it as "hard" as some older previous content.


I mentioned this and I agree, but some content (Abyssea on top of the list here, but there's others) slowly but steadily became "easier" because of stuff you slowly unlocked through doing the content itself, I'm not simply talking about "knowledge" of the event since we addressed this before.

In Abyssea you could definitely feel "progress" being made, and each new progress made things much easier as they released new, harder stuff.
I dunno, am I the only one clearly perceiving this big difference? Not saying it's necessarily a good one, but a difference nonetheless.
Anyway overall the challenge level was never on par of what we're currently seeing with V25 Odyssey, even if we make a comparison relative to each content's release time.

At least that's how things look to my eyes.