It's a different game mate, a game that actually takes skill rather than gear and bodies to do high end things. I did everything in XI, and fuck if I don't have some good memories of it, but it was all RNG and grind, and in the eight years I played that game, downing Absolute Virtue, getting my first relic, getting my first mythic, beating Shadow Lord (S), Promathia, Ark Angels, Alexander… nothing compared to my first T9 kill, because I actually had to use skill for it. In XI, fights are so barren and devoid of mechanics. Every fight just has one thing. Two if you count adds.
Anything hard, you chainspell stun zerg down or kite around so it can't do anything threatening, then you don't get your drop because it's a 5% drop, and start building a new pop set, or waiting 72 hours to go back in. Fights were never hard, taking more than a couple tries to learn from that. Closest thing i can attribute to skill in XI was not aggroing the house of death in Dynamis-Windurst or not attacking a slept summon.
I can't imagine trying to do a fight like A9S where I wiped probably the better part of a hundred times before we finally inched out a win, not because my team was bad, but because each phase had about the better part of a dozen mechanics to juggle at once, and it took more than one attempt to clear a fight. The community I've built with my FC and my static dwarfs even the best friendships I built in my XI linkshells from going through all this content with them.
This isn't even trying to take into account QoL features this game has, or the fact that the leveling process has some variation to it rather than just mindlessly grinding identical blue crabs/pink birds/various colored crawlers with increased HP pools/attack strength.
Look man, I loved XI, it was my home for eight years, but I would never go back to it, not to it in its current state, not to it in a magical state before "Abyssea ruined everything"
