In the game FFXI, cooperative play with other characters is vital to being a successful adventurer. By successful, of course, I mean efficiently slaying many, many beastmen and such. Cooperative play is mostly accomplished by means of the “party” system, in which up to six characters can participate in hunting the same prey. It is also possible to link up to three full parties (for 18 characters cooperating), but this isn’t done without having a special reason to do so: a six-character party tends to work best for gaining experience points and advancing in your job.

A party needs to be able to do three things: find prey that is worth fighting, bring that prey down, and survive the encounter. The more effectively these tasks can be accomplished, the better. Each of these tasks can be handled with various techniques and degrees of competancy depending on your character’s job. A mix of jobs is vital, making sure all the bases are covered.

Anybody can locate prey and bring it back to the party (aka “pull”). Key considerations are efficiency in locating prey (Rangers are best at this, bar none), and the ability to get back to the party without being killed by the prey (for this reason, Blackmages and Summoners shouldn’t pull). It is normally best not to have a spellcaster pulling, as the time spent locating and pulling prey is time that those folks can rest and recover magic points.

Pulling properly involves a lot of perception-based work. Be aware of your party’s status in regards to MP and HP levels (don’t bring difficult prey when the party is already hurt). Also be aware of any skillchain status. Very difficult opponents are more managable when multiple melee combatants are ready to pop a skillchain with magic burst support. Once the prey has been located, it is a matter of pulling that individual target (and nothing else) back to your party. This can be easy or difficult depending on what you’re hunting, and what else is in the area (undead are notoriously perceptive critters, and will make getting a clean pull more difficult). On a long pull (where you are spending more than twenty seconds or so running back to your group), you may need to slow down and actually let your prey hit you a couple times. This keeps the prey interested. If you’ve ever had a pull stolen by another party because you let your aggro wear off, you know what I’m talking about.

Last, but not least, on the topic of pulling, is where you pull your opponent to. Do not deposit your prey right next to your party’s spellcasters. Spellcasters have very few hit points. Don’t get them caught up in AoE attacks, and give your agrro-management folks time to react if your spellcasters draw too much attention to themselves. Pull your prey to a respectable distance away from your spellcasters, and make sure that somebody is ready to use “provoke” on it immediately to keep aggro away from your casters.

Once the critter is there, the real work starts. This is when characters with the appropriate spells or abilities should “soften up” the prey with spells such as “slow” or “silence,” and weapon skills such as “shield break.” De-buffing an opponent early on makes everybody’s efforts more successful as the fight drags on. Only characters that wish to draw attacks from the prey (tanks) and Thieves should immediately lay into the target with their highest-damage abilities. Harming the prey, healing your party members, and healing yourself are all excellent ways to draw attention away from the tanks and towards yourself. Let the target get weakened a little bit and everybody get into their groove before casting “Cure III” or large-damage elemental attacks.

Bringing down your prey is about the most natural thing in the world. Everybody who is a melee-type (Warrior, Paladin, Dark Knight, Dragoon, Ninja, Samurai, Thief, Monk, Beastmaster) selects the target and uses their auto-attack, suplementing as appropriate with weaponskills and job abilities such as Boost or Sneak Attack. Mages have a variety of offensive options, ranging from elemental attacks (fire, fira, etc) to DoTs (bio, dia, etc). Damage your prey till it’s dead. Easy, right? Add in skillchains (whereby multiple combatants combine weaponskills to deal additional damage) and magic bursts (whereby mages augment the damage of an existing skillchain), and you’ll have the target dea in no time… If you keep yourselves alive in the process.

Keeping yourselves alive is generally the responsibility of a Whitemage, the job that is simply best at casting cure spells. Whenever a party member is getting hurt, the person on healing duty casts cure or one of its variants, the stricken party member stays alive, and combat continues. In addition to casting cure spells, casters can also use spells that add to the defensive capabilities of party members (redmages and bards are good that this, too), or that negatively impact the ability of opponents to harm party members (redmanges and bards are great at this). While on healing or debuffing duty, most parties prefer that the caster not be engaged in melee combat, but rather focus on the task at hand.

During the course of combat, if everybody keeps it in their pants and maintains a steady stream of damage and healing, the “provoke” job ability of the Warriors in your party shouldn’t be too necessary. This isn’t always the case, so often you’ll see one “main tank” warrior-type popping “provoke” every 30 seconds like clockwork, with a secondary tank hitting every time the target’s attention heads the wrong way (such as towards a mage). This is an indication that the party’s tactics aren’t exactly “optimal,” but so long as the mages aren’t getting hit too often, this is just a normal part of play and shouldn’t be frowned upon too much. Your “main tank” should be the party member with the highest Defense and Evasion scores that is capable of maintaining aggro. Paladins are outstanding main tanks when Warrior is set up as a subjob (permitting the “provoke” job ability), but anybody with Provoke can do the job if need be.

Also under the heading of “keeping yourselves alive,” the party needs no be located in a safe place, where no aggressive critters are likely to spawn or wander into. An otherwise efficient party is dead meat if, in the midst of battle, a second or third difficult opponent decided to jump into the fray. If you find beastmen and undead spawning right next to or admidst your party during a hunt, move.

So, you need to have all of this going on (in no particular order, as they are all important):

A competant puller
Somebody to heal whoever is getting hurt
Somebody to keep the target’s attention
Somebody to get the target’s attention if things get out of hand
Somebody hurting the target as much as possible

A fairly generic party makeup is three people with Warrior as a subjob or main job (one as main tank, one focusing on doing damage, one trying to focus on damage but always ready to “provoke” if needed), a Whitemage dropping Cure spells like mad (but being careful not to go overboard unless needed), a Blackmage to drop massive-damage spells and wrap up the combat (but being careful not to blow his wad and draw aggro early on), and either a utility-caster (such as a Redmage or Bard) to make everybody else more efficient, or a general-purpose damage-dealer like a Thief or Monk (who doesn’t need to worry about drawing aggro every once in a while due to decent hit point totals).