Quote Originally Posted by Malithar View Post
I get where you're coming from, and to a degree I agree. But whether abilities and spells are designed around this or not, they most certainly are not balanced around it, else you'd never have instances where using these things is harmful to your performance. Varying degrees of use according to the situation, haste values, buffs, etc, sure, but harmful? That shouldn't be the case IMO.

I don't view it as "harmful to performance", it's making a choice. I use steps a lot in incursion and always cap def down in incursion. I never feel it's "harmful to my performance" because it seems that it's dmg increase in the long run.

In delve I only use 1 step or I don't use it at all, because the NM dies in less than 30 sec so it doesn't seems to worth the effort to cap it.....by the time I cap it's dead already.

If you have no penalty for using it, then you'd just cap steps in all situations, instead of making a choice between lv 5 steps or lv1 or no steps.


Quote Originally Posted by Byrth View Post
In JRPGs there may be different delays associated with actions, but (at least for all the ones I've played) using the action itself takes no time and everyone else's ATB gauge freezes while whatever action you pick executes. That's a very different dynamic than what we have in FFXI.
The actions in FFXI also takes no time to execute, it's just that you can't do anything after you execute it.

If I remember correctly, in FFX you make a choice first, then depending on the action you pick, you may have to wait longer for your next turn.