Would you play FFXIV if it had action combat?

I would be far more dedicated to the game if the combat was as engaging as an action game. Tho I'd prefer it if the animation locks weren't as strict as TERA's Something around Wildstar or Blade and Soul's system would be preferable.


and just noticed the bump.
Tho that doesn't change my answer. I ♥ action ;)

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Originally Posted by Tint

damn...

2 years later i am sitting here and playing a tank as main class...

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Life's sense of humor is funny that way :p

I like WoW style combat - which is essentially FFXIV combat but with faster GCDs.
Not that I mind the longer GCD, it gives me time to think and my buttons get less trashed from bashing, but it could do with maybe being a little shorter.

It would be a resounding 'NO' from me and SE would immediately lose my subscription. Action combat systems are the exact reason why I have not bought another Final Fantasy game past 13-1. I do not like them, I can not keep up with them, and I certainly don't want them in my Final Fantasy game.

I will and have bought SE's off shoots like I am Setsuna because their combat system is ATB based. But as for Action Combat RPGs...well if I'm going to play one, it'll be the Borderlands series.

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Originally Posted by Kassiekane

As the title suggests.

-Pretty much every melee attack is aoe to some degree
-Ranged dps actually have to aim
-Animation locks on every skill (because we all love animation locks)
-Every class/job has a self heal, and dodge/block ability that you can use every 5-10 seconds

Would anyone prefer this over the traditional combat we have now?

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I'd give it a try. I think FFXIV fills an awkward middle ground right now, anyway; it's fast enough to realize few of the benefits of "non-action" combat (being able to more easily plan moves, being able to reasonably communicate mid-battle, engaging in more tactical decisions) while still retaining many of the downsides.

Edit: My preference would actually be a return to FFXI-paced combat. I miss having to take into account largely varied spellcast lengths on BLM, not having to press a button every two seconds, and being afforded the time to truly master and utilize tremendously large skill sets. Also, I miss being able to talk to my parties. I really hate how anti-social the combat pace has made FFXIV.

If it was like TERA, I would absolutely love it. The main thing I miss about TERA is how engaging tanking is there, but the combat as well. Like here you have a long GCD where you're sitting there spamming your next button for it to queue while in TERA it's just based on CDs. You're not sitting there doing nothing and waiting for a GCD. Also, tanking there is really fun because you can cancel most animation locks by blocking.

But TERA is actually pretty strict so I would understand that many people would not like it. Like you got to be pretty precise with the timing of your invulnerability frames, which vary in duration by class, and ping affects this timing a lot.

No. If I wanted a action game I would get one that is way more engaging and functional then a MMO. There is a bad trend homogenization of games these days, like everything HAS to be action, HAS to have open world, etc. See the mess that is FFXV combat. It is not good classic RPG and also it is not a good action game.

I love action combat MMO's (I think that Black Deserts combat is the best in that genre) *But* with that said, I think that with the new changes to the classes and battle system in SB, it would be for the better to keep the upcoming SB combat. Pre-SB I think i would've preferred a more faster style of combat, but with the new mechanics of each class to differentiate themselves the SB system may be the best choice.

As for a comparison I saw, regarding WoW and this game, the older version of WoW and FFXIV (pre-sb) were very similar, but currently, WoW seems to be moving almost like a tab target/action combat hybrid style system. It's far faster paced than before (more spammy as well).

I've posted here before, but since the thread's been resurrected (which, according to the forum guidelines is preferable to a new thread, btw) and I've nothing better to do:

Having made use of the wait until Stormblood to try out some other MMOs, I can definitely say at this point that manual aiming feels far more intuitive to me that tab-targeting, especially in AoE situations.

However, "action combat" is an incredibly vague term. While I think SE could and should pick up some aspects of the idea, others I simply trust their competency in the finer details of net code, etc., or willingness to spend funds to improve service to its customers enough to expect they could actually pull it off.

To take your list:

• Yes, I'd prefer that every attack was as much an AoE as it appears to be.
• I'd like soft-targeting for ranged DPS (BDO > Vindictus, basically)
• Animation locks are a thing in action combat? If anything they just use a lock at most as long as the animation itself (making ani-cancel important in many, as some skills flow better both in appearance and in actual lock time and/or where precise timing can outpace queued skills), whereas GCD play uses a standardized lock made irrelevant by the GCD system anyways unless attempting to maximize the number of oGCDs to place in their gaps. If you mean movement lock during animations, I'd be fine with that as long as they're done as well as most successful action MMOs. I don't necessarily trust SE to do so, though. That requires fluidity, rather than gaudy flourish. Generally I prefer strikes with logical movement or non-movement than to be gliding around awkwardly. It's simply a flat increase to aesthetic and tactics for me, at basically zero cost.
• I don't necessarily think every class needs a self-heal or block. This has nothing in itself to do with action RPGs. Rather, dodging does. But because so much damage then depends on or can be countered or circumvented by player skill, the value of dedicated healers decreases immensely, and so they tend to be trimmed entirely and a portion of their toolkit spread about the remaining classes. That does not necessarily have to be the case, though. Personally, I'd like to see more involvement or at least awareness and readiness to involve oneself from every member across all concerns of the party, regardless of the (illusion of) "role". But, I don't think I'd want to see healers removed outright. I'd rather there still be some unavoidable damage, so long as it looks like it ought to be unavoidable, rather than creating a frustrating break between aesthetic and the actual numbers and opportunities of combat. Again, I don't know if I trust SE with that, but it's certainly a fine goal. The majority of "Action" play is essentially just matching output to aesthetic and increasing the frequency of control (not to say that one needs to hit keys every half second; you could actually have a highly controllable combat system made up mostly of dynamic auto-attacks (well, auto-flows/combos/battle).

No.

I prefer the GCD system we have now for it's accessibility and pace that let's me play any role I want or need at any time and succeed.

In fast action games, I'm usually stuck sliding into the role of the defensive hulk or tank role, which is often the most macho of roles, and not my taste... The ones that require pin-point precision and hyper-fast reactions give me way too much anxiety, so I just deteriorate.

Turn based games don't do that to me. Half the reason why Tactics sold me hard on the FF job system is that I could freely use any character for any class and still feel lile a girl.

Thank God characters like D-Va, Zarya, and Mechanica exist, though. Cute lady tanks is a trend that should never die.

Yaaaaassssss~ I played TERA for a few years and the fast paced healing was ridiculously fun. It took me a while to get used to XIV's slower pace and tbh, if it weren't for race/gender locked classes I'd probably still be playing TERA more.

A middle-ground I think a lot of players might like is simply reticule / free-mouse swapping. This allows you to target via your character facing at will, so that you can still move comfortably while selecting a target, or target vs. a free mouse, whichever you prefer at the time, toggle-able with any given bind (I tend to make this my mouse's "Fire" key). You could even swap between two completely different key configurations in the process, including or excluding LMB, RMB, etc. from regular play. Given that I find the reticule more intuitive, especially when needing to target from among many mobs or during periods of movement, I'd probably spend most of my time there, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't swap back for healing, etc., especially if I could program a third intercepting set to allow me to cast LMB, RMB, and mod keys (Shift, Alt, Ctrl) for each on party or alliance members via direct clicks or the party list or attack spells via clicks on my target bar. At that point I'd rather my keys be auto-aimed at my current target.

Just some concepts I'd like to toss out:

Action combat doesn't have to be especially APM/IPM* intensive. Button holds can provide as much play unless allowing for changes to combos based on input delay (e.g. in Devil May Cry). By that matter, XIV could still have just as much nuance even if one were to simply hold down or hit once to automate "Thrust Chain" instead of hitting the skill 5 times, inserting oGCDs between. The issue is only tangential to either style of combat. FFXIV suffers from button bloat because it's been specifically designed as such, not because it's tab targetted. BDO has about as many actions in just 6 keys because it's smart about it, not necessarily because it's an Action MMO. You can have high APM/IPM, soft targeting, finely differentiated manual timing, AoE integration, and 4 hotbars worth of keys, for instance. Which then would you call it?

(*I prefer to consider APM as the differentiated actions a character takes per minute, and IPM as the number of inputs, keystrokes or clicks, that created that, but APM is the standard term for both, so have both.)

Action combat doesn't have to break the "holy trinity". While I would rather players actually have ways to skillfully outmaneuver damage, one could still have a satisfying amount of avoidable damage even while topping it off with enough unavoidable or uptime-reducing (potential) damage to warrant a healer. It'd just take a lot more potential damage overall, and may also warrant some QoL-like ways to deal with really poor players, such as each heal also tacking on some amount of bonus mitigation for a time, and may encourage a view of Support that's not limited to healing and MP/TP battery replacement alone. It just makes the decision more realistic. How much time can be saved by bringing a support. In some cases, the fight might not be clearable without it. Others, the added aggression possible for the remaining DPS outweighs the loss of one. But, you don't simply die outright to a composition check. (The same concerns of course affect tanks as well.)

This game still can't even give a consistently rock-solid indicator of when an enemy's AoE attack will hit. Whether an attack hits you or not is still calculated well before the animation actually occurs, often creating absurd scenarios where your corpse lies well outside of the blast radius. Full-blown action combat with attacks striking precise areas in real time is completely out of the question.

But technical concerns aside, I don't even find the question to be valid. You can't just plunk action combat into an MMORPG with traditional tab-targeting, with all the content designed and balanced under that system. It just doesn't work that way. You are basically asking to change the whole genre of the game and alter the mechanics at their core -- might as well be trying to make FFXIV into a 2D side-scrolling platformer.

That said, before FFXIV came out I was actually hoping it would lean more towards a somewhat action-based style. Maybe something like Guild Wars 2, where attacks and projectiles move and strike in real time, but you can still "target" things. But that would have been a very different sort of game, not anything like the FFXIV we know today. Maybe the next Final Fantasy MMO, if there is one, could experiment with this -- but not this game.

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Originally Posted by Ametrine

No.

I prefer the GCD system we have now for it's accessibility and pace that let's me play any role I want or need at any time and succeed.

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Hmm, yeah that's probably why they have it, for accessibility reasons. And I can understand that. I know people with disabilities do play this game. I think it's also the reason why tanking and healing is so easy. Although, I kind of wish they would do something to add more engagement to those roles even if they keep the current GCD system.

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Originally Posted by Kassiekane

As the title suggests.

-Pretty much every melee attack is aoe to some degree
-Ranged dps actually have to aim
-Animation locks on every skill (because we all love animation locks)
-Every class/job has a self heal, and dodge/block ability that you can use every 5-10 seconds

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Sooooo like Monster Hunter (sans that dodge limitation is pretty bleh)?

Yes.

Think id be better if it was a side scroller personally, like a castlevania game. You know like some platformer action going on. Guess if it was like a screen swiper like the fruit ninja thing id be ok too. Guess they could go like candy crush for the combat though....

My issue is that a game is designed within its design idea. Tera was fun enough and BnS is ok, the issue I have is, would I be ok with it being overhauled to action after playing it as it has been and my answer is no. Something designed with action is going to react differently to something designed without it.

I really don't know what to say, I just now came back to the forums and this thread gets necro'd.

I guess I'll take this opportunity to clarify that I'm quite neutral on this subject. I don't care if its action or not, as long as its interesting.

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Originally Posted by Kassiekane

I really don't know what to say, I just now came back to the forums and this thread gets necro'd.

I guess I'll take this opportunity to clarify that I'm quite neutral on this subject. I don't care if its action or not, as long as its interesting.

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well call oriley and spank me with a luffa! didn't even notice this was a necro lol. mea Culpa! :)

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Originally Posted by Kassiekane

As the title suggests.

-Pretty much every melee attack is aoe to some degree
-Ranged dps actually have to aim
-Animation locks on every skill (because we all love animation locks)
-Every class/job has a self heal, and dodge/block ability that you can use every 5-10 seconds

Would anyone prefer this over the traditional combat we have now?

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Action combat in this game would be amazing, though maybe you went a bit too far with the suggestions. As you have it, there would be an reduction of roles and trinity game play. While it sounds good, making MMO's single player and getting rid of the trinity has never worked all that well. Loosing the group focus of this game would be to its detriment in my opinion.

Same, but it's kind of interesting how ideas can come full circle with time.

Yes, that would be awesome, we need it.

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Originally Posted by YitharV2

Hmm, yeah that's probably why they have it, for accessibility reasons. And I can understand that. I know people with disabilities do play this game. I think it's also the reason why tanking and healing is so easy. Although, I kind of wish they would do something to add more engagement to those roles even if they keep the current GCD system.

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Disabilities are one factor, but it also widens the audience to those with lower internet requirements and just a wide range of skill levels in general.

I know making games easier rubs certain people wrong (less satisfaction in "winning" if it's not as big of a challenge), but those players have EX and Savage level content tailored just for them, with plenty of rewards attached.

Besides, there are plenty of high action MMOs out there, and they aren't exactly pulling players away en masse. FFXIV has a good thing going here.

Ugh, necro thread.

I would not consider Tera an action MMORPG, it has more in common with FFXIV's pseudo-action AOE-avoidance elements than it does action elements, but that's about as action as it gets. The AI in that game is even more stupid than FFXIV's, where nearly everything just comes at you and then just spams it's one attack until you die, you can't even avoid most non-AOE attacks.

Action MMORPG's have three critical features:
- You have to aim, if you aim correctly you get critical hits, and hitting the flank or rear is more damaging than the front
- You have to actually block as a melee fighter, or you get one-hit-killed frequently.
- You have to time things, as you typically have to stand still to use a bow or magic, but can then continue running. If a mob is on your tail and you're a ranged character, that's often instant death if you aren't faster than the mob.

I'm actually not fond of the "press X to win" mechanic that many WoW-inspired/clones have either. I will keep calling these games "turn based" because you are literately playing the same way the ATB system from FF6/Chrono Trigger works, only the GCD is the turn indicator. Action games usually limit what you can spam to your stamina/mana and have no auto-recovery mechanic, so you need to bring enough pots to spam if you've over-estimated the difficulty.

Most action MMORPG's are not good in the West because we do not yet all have Fibre-optic internet to the door connections. Many games that are developed in Japan and Korea just utterly suck to play in North America unless you live within 200 miles of the data center. Sure yes you can play with >60ms latency. But you will be doing so much poorer than the person with 8ms or 20ms who lives in the same city as the data center. The internet connections need to become a lot less rubbish before Action MMORPG's will actually feel like action MMORPG's. What we get currently feels sluggish compared to just playing a single-player action RPG game like Neir:Automata.

I'm honestly not sure. It would be such an overhaul, and as stated, no guarantee that it would be a successful change. I certainly wouldn't mind a reduction on the global cd in this game, but I'm also OK with it being a more traditional MMO style of play (tab target auto attack yada yada).

I play tera style games (not tera as much as stuff like blade and soul), and I enjoy them for what they are, but in the same sense I enjoy FFXIV for what it is. GCD could be a bit faster tho.

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Originally Posted by Ametrine

Disabilities are one factor, but it also widens the audience to those with lower internet requirements and just a wide range of skill levels in general.

I know making games easier rubs certain people wrong (less satisfaction in "winning" if it's not as big of a challenge), but those players have EX and Savage level content tailored just for them, with plenty of rewards attached.

Besides, there are plenty of high action MMOs out there, and they aren't exactly pulling players away en masse. FFXIV has a good thing going here.

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I understand that as well, as that is pretty much Yoshi-P's thoughts, basically.

The thing is though, even if I were to do EX Primals or Savage I feel like I would have the same gripes, because my problem is mostly with gameplay and encounter design in general, which would also apply to those fights. In TERA, tanking is the most engaging out of the three roles, but I feel here in FFXIV DPSing is at the same level or more engaging than tanking.

Well, I have A LOT of criticisms about TERA. There are reasons I quit 1-2 years ago.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Most action MMORPG's are not good in the West because we do not yet all have Fibre-optic internet to the door connections. Many games that are developed in Japan and Korea just utterly suck to play in North America unless you live within 200 miles of the data center. Sure yes you can play with >60ms latency. But you will be doing so much poorer than the person with 8ms or 20ms who lives in the same city as the data center. The internet connections need to become a lot less rubbish before Action MMORPG's will actually feel like action MMORPG's. What we get currently feels sluggish compared to just playing a single-player action RPG game like Neir:Automata.

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Yeah, I agree. When I tanked in TERA my ping would spike from 60ms to 120-150ms sometimes and it would be very very horrible for me to play. And I bet my 60ms would be bad for those playing in Korea.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Ugh, necro thread.

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I keep hearing this but people who say this misthink what Tera actually is.. cause it very much IS an action combat mmo. The mobs and whatnot have nothing to do with it. It's pretty much action game/mmo, but that doesn't mean it's going to be as hard as Devil may cry 3 or Bayo. But it def is an action title. The only thing Tera nad FFXIV have in the same is the hotbar.... other than that they have completely different combat systems. Just because the mobs may be just as stupid doesn't mean a tab target mmo and a free attacking system is the same thing. - Sorry but my inner nerd rage kicked in cause when BnS came out people ssaid the same thing comparing Tera to BnS.- And NO they are not the same either seeing as Tera is true action combat while BnS has a soft tab targeting system. - :c sorry...... raged moment. T.T-

I'd take an action camera just like in GW2. Just having the camera following my mouse and not having to hold RM all the time would make me happy.

If it was well done action combat I would play it much more because action combat is superior in almost every way.

Like I used to say to a friend: FFXIV combat is like senior citizens wailing at one another until someone bites the dust.

I'd jump ship instantly. I've played most of the highly praised action MMO's and hated everything about their combat systems.

If it was more reactive (less animation-locked) than, say, Tera, with more of the skills fluidly and determinedly mixable into each other, and with more complex and cumulative gameplay that were thereby more forgiving of split-second events, and with greater nuance in meeting those events... then I'd definitely prefer action-based combat to GCDs and oGCD weaves by it simply being more intuitive and open to ingenuity.

No. If it was I would be playing a different game and not one without.

Seeing as I've never played an Action-MMORPG that wasn't horribly balanced in terms of both class balance and PvE/Raid encounters, I'd have to say no. I would even go as far as to say that it's impossible to properly balance a game like BDO and that no game ever will manage to do that; there's a reason why Bluehole Studio chose to go the tab-target route with their new project AIR instead of making another TERA.

Probably not, I tried the action combat types blade and soul, wild star and the likes I don't like them at all and prefer the tab target method as we have in WoW and FFXIV. Though I think action combat will work in games where they are not using the holy trinity based style tbh!

As much as i love action combat, I'd rather FF14 stay where it is, maybe if the next FF online game have action combat, then I'd be all for it, heck I will likely end up playing that more instead. But right now FF14 have it's own charm, and I think action combat would disrupt it. If you get what I mean.

It’d be fun... until I play Bard.

No. I bloody hate those kinds of systems. I tried a lot of games with action combat and I got bored real quick.

Heck no. I like the combat as it is. We don’t need drastic changes like this.

Yes, but only if it didnt have the latency issues that this game currently has.

By the way the OP is probably trolling becuase action combat games dont neccesarily have animation locks. they don't seem to have any understanding of action combat and just want to troll, while hinting that they think action combat sucks.