Trying to level my second DoW and combat is extremely unsatisfying, there is absolutely no joy over control of you character.
It would be so much better if stuff would happen as soon as you push the button and not after playing animation.
What this does is promotes wow. It demonstrates how great of a combat responsiveness wow has, where we took it for granted.
Adding in my 2gil. Make instants truly instant. This, along with MANY other people feel the same way. This combat system is unintuitive, sluggish and most importantly, for you (you'd hope), FRUSTRATING! Trying to fire off a silence and getting denied because I'm still recovering from a recent bloodletter cast is seriously frustrating, annoying and rage inducing. The combat system right now is a mess and it's pushing me towards discontinuing my subscription.
Hopefully SE will come to their senses and realise this cutsie system of animation lock is in actuality, incredibly dumb. I know some designer out there considers this their baby and is resistant to the idea of changing it, but you really should.
While you're at it, remove the battle chocobo as a full fledged party member when summoned. Soon after starting the game, I spent 3 hours in the queue and for the life of my couldn't work out why and how my dungeon queues as a bard kept on silently ending...it was battlechook.
I have to agree that the animation delay is maddening. A few classes seemed to suffer worse then other classes. An instant ability (like silence and stun) should really be instant. Right now the game overall fills sluggish and just spending my time on levelling all my classes instead of doing what I enjoy.
The combat is so unresponsive in this game, I almost cant believe this is a new MMO.
I thought it was just me and lag, I didn't realize everyone else had the same problems. I get to the point in fights where I don't even bother trying to stun or run out of certain boss moves because I know the stun won't go off in time and i'll be hit by the aoe regardless of whether i'm in range or not.
This game truly does make you appreciate previous MMOs more. If they don't fix this junk soon, which I'm sure they won't, the novelty of FF14 will wear off and nothing will keep people playing.
I like it how it currently is. Off GCD and instant cast =/= instant animations. I find having to time abilities to work right in the right order much more rewarding than the twitch ADD reflex method most mmos have been using.
I find it about as rewarding as playing a MMO with dial-up and 500+ latency. I do agree that this mechanic makes the game more challenging but only in a way that must be unintentional- like forgetting to put in a ramp for people with wheelchairs at a hospital.
Do you really think they're so unimaginative in creating challenges that they have to use lag and misleading skill descriptions to simulate challenge? It HAS to be shoddy game mechanics, because why don't they just list the abilities as not being instant? The same goes for enemy aoe attacks hitting you when you're clearly out of their range, why don't they at least increase the radius based on however long the average server-to-client delay is? It makes no sense!
But they are instant, they just have an animation that needs to play out. Misleading tooltips (like bane's) do need to be fixed, and the enemy aoes aren't based on latency... Unfortunately they do the "did you get hit" check after the cast time, but the damage doesn't get displayed until after the animation.
Of all the classes I have played Pld seems to be the worst for it. I cannot stand my level 50 paladin because of it.
After a while I just felt that I am logging on and not enjoying the game, so I stopped. Will come back if SE reconsiders these mechanics.. tho I don't believe they will. This could have been a great mmorpg, they've missed it by so little and so much at the same time.