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Jun 18th, 2019
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  1. I believe Pat spoke about FFXI, WoW Classic, and horizontal progression on the same podcast that's been on my mind lately. I figured I'd marry those topics as it ties in here.
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  3. A big sticking point for XI over WoW at the time was how XI didn't raise their level cap for years (until the Abyssea expansions changed that) and thus most gear stayed relevant in some way or another. Since you could freely swap gear during combat you could swap in the most beneficial gear for X action leading to the same job having multiple "sets" to make the most out of that action.
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  5. Melee DPS has haste, weaponskills, and ability-specific sets they'd swap in. Tanks had haste, damage reduction, enmity, weaponskills, and fast-cast sets. Mages have it the worst with some mix of Resting MP+, Idle-but-not-resting, Healing, Enfeebling/INT, Enfeebling/MND, Enchancing, Elemental, and ability specific gear-sets with some slight tweaks here or there based on the element of a spell or the fucking weather leading to situation where I had 11 different belts for Scholar alone.
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  7. All of that is to say that it gave SE a lot of breathing room when it came to gear progression. Each endgame activity brought with it gear that wasn't useless, a side grade, if not a harder-to-obtain complete upgrade of an existing piece. It a way the gear you owned chronicled your personal journey and accomplishments in the game and all the status that went with it.
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  9. Then they added Abyssea which finally raised the level cap five levels with vendor-bought armor sets that rendered a lot of gear obsolete. It was a major turning point in the game and the end of a "golden era" that a lot of private servers try to recapture, often referring to themselves as "era servers" to denote pre-Abyssea gameplay.
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  11. All of that to say, while the horizontal progression was great, swapping the gear fucking sucked. It wasn't so bad on DPS even even tanking, but the amount of gear space and gear set fine-tuning that went into mages was insane. Scholar, specifically, that used "charges" to modify their spells with most "charges" having a piece of gear that specifically enhances it.
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  13. Wanna cast fire?
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  15. Base: INT/Elemental Magic/Magical Accuracy+ gear set.
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  17. Fire Day/Weather: Base+ w/ a specific belt.
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  19. Using X charge to enhance spell: Base w/ X Ability enhancing gear piece.
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  21. The prep-work and logistics that went into macros was insane. There were multiple ways of accomplishing this, and some later updates to the game added more macro-swapping functionality, but the limit of six lines per macro when swapping out a single piece of gear takes up one led to some limitations for console players — PC players at least could use a 3rd party launcher that would read an entire .txt file as a macro regardless of how many lines there were.
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  23. The effects weren't limited to the user, though. Changing any visible gear caused your character to "blink" out of existence for a moment that turned your invisible and caused anyone targeting you to lose you. Often times a well-geared tank was a pain in the ass to heal unless you were spamming their corresponding F# key to get them before you could see them or used another 3rd party launcher fix that blocked character models from "updating" after your initial zone-in.
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