I share the same exact thoughts. I lost years of my life to FFXI, and to repeat that now would be even more devastating. The great thing is that its more soloable than ever. The quests alone provided me enough xp to get to my current level of 13. Im sure the whole game wont be like this, but at least it shows I can play the game more on my own time rather than on others.
I wouldn't really consider that a
great thing. I would like the option of being able to solo some stuff, but the real draw for me was grouping with people. It created a community at the expense of forcing players to group up so early to level.
I know this won't fly for most people nowadays, but I hope there's enough incentive for people to randomly group up to do stuff. Most MMOs make me feel isolated from the community because most people tend to solo everything except some instances and end game content. Starting out with groups around level 10 built a community where you either knew or grouped with a good percentage of the server by the time you hit 75. Not saying you can't do this with new MMOs, it's just become so easy to solo that you never really meet or hang out with people unless they are part of your guild or are needed for a random instance meetup.
No.
Enlighten me please. I stopped playing FFXI during CoP. The majority of jobs did relatively little in fights. I'm not going to list every single job and their responsibilities, but like I said before, most of them essentially had a only few abilities to their disposal each fight. And unless you were tanking for healing, missing your ability (usually lining up skill chains) did not wipe the party, it just lead to slower xp. I stand by what I said before. Combat in FFXI most mostly standing around autoattacking. That is not a system you should be looking to copy.
And you could not afk in WoW in any serious encounter. I don't know where your getting that from.
WoW is much more mobile than FFXI ever was. You were rooted in place which meant you could go afk for 15-20 seconds without issue if you were slow DD or debuff during combat (BLM/RDM, DRK, SAM). Those classes needed to be around mostly for combos and bursts to help speed up combat and defeat the mob a bit faster. Depending on your class, you could be very active during combat. Tanks (especially NIN) had to be on top of everything from provoke to their jutsu to keep the party from wiping. NINs were paper thin, but being able to blink-tank the entire time allowed healer classes to perform other duties in battle. Healers had to be present 100% of the time to make sure that player debuffs were cleared instantly, heals were given without causing too much hate, keeping slower DD hasted, and making sure to keep your mana pool high. RDM was pretty active in later levels with back up heals and refresh for the party.
Most players were still pretty active the entire time and with a good group, even slow DD could build TP quickly enough to keep everyone engaged in battle. To your point, I would say that the only ones that did relatively little in battle were the slower DD jobs. Hell, THF would sneak attack as often as they could and then follow up with trick attack, which meant a lot of positioning. RNG would have to hold themselves back since they could pop off TP shots pretty fast and had to make sure they didn't generate too much hate.
