Thoughts on combat system

Hi,

I just recently came back to the game, and I have to say it has improved a lot since last year and I enjoyed my sunday afternoon playing it.

However, the battle system still seems kind of stiff to me. I played FFXI for many years that it didn't bother me that much, but I have to say I enjoy the more natural feeling fighting scene in other games rather than this round based mechanism.

To explain more, action between me and the mob feels like going back and forth on a very consistent, mechanical long time intervals and each special move I click seems like to sit on the regular time queue and it will delay quite a bit. The animation, the effect and the real damage (shown on mob's health bar) doesn't seem to align at the same time that sometimes the mob dies before the animation of special skills kicks off.

On the skill combo part, the effect of combo doesn't seem very obvious and it doesn't give me the feeling of a "combo" since everything has to happen in a set time interval. I have played Aion for a bit and I think they did a better job on creating a combo system. With pop out interface next to the character showing what the following combo options are instantly, and a combo tree interface you can check for a clearer idea and easier manipulation of the combo tree/system.

Sorry that I haven't been following up with the development log that I am not sure if this is something that has been discussed or if they are going to refine in the future.
I think the game has a lot of potential, including the extremely well designed aesthetic that is above any other MMO's I have played so far (even the low level gear is so beautifully made) and with a huge world and a unique backbone story to elaborate on. Even though I can't convince any of my friends to come back at this time due to
1. the nightmare-ish impression they had when FF14 first came out
2. the user interface is still quite hard to use and not yet being modified completely for computer/mouse input
3. still kind of lack of content, but I understand its tons of work to add new stories while the basic system is till being worked on

I do hope I will be able to re-introduce this to my gamer friends sometime in the future.

The combat system is fine just need a few fix here and there i really don't like the system of other games to fast speed and get boring press F1-F12. I think 2.0 is where the battle and everything else really going to be fix so we just have to wait on that.

The combo system is very basic atm but does show a lot of promise. Some classes also get much more mileage out of it than others, and some classes don't open up until mid levels. Pugilist combos have you moving all over the place so you might want to give that a try, you will probably want some abilities from it anyway. Party-wide combos are in the works so they are also something to look forward to.

There is a unique keyboard/mouse interface the devs are working on but I can't remember when it was supposed to be implemented (next patch is going to add a toggle to get rid of the extra targeting confirmations that aren't needed for mouse and keyboard users, so it's a start). And content wise the next patch is looking to add quite a bit of it, but of course we have to wait and see just how involving it is. Since it's stuff that is meant to carry over into 2.0 it will hopefully be good.