Things that FF14 needs to improve upon

FF14 is a great game and we all know it but there are some small things that need fixing.

One would be things that make the gameplay not feel smooth. One example that really annoys me is the face target feature. An example would be how you follow a pack and attack it while moving and if u are sideways you suddenly change direction to attack it and then fall behind and can't attack the mob even if you are close by. With casters you would 180 to heal someone behind you when the spell doesn't even need you to face your teammate. One could argue you can just change the setting in the options but then placing dots with that same healer becomes clunky just because you are at a slight angle and so does dpsing with melee. Perhaps a change to the degrees in which you can perform attacks would be a very simple and easy solution.

Another gripe I have is the PvP. In my personal opinion I feel like FF14 PvP shouldn't have more than eight players per team and I think there should be only two teams instead of three. The game mods don't have to be convoluted, they can be simple. Mods like capture the flag are always loved by PvPers even if they are very simple. The spells and the rotations need some more love too and the balance with the healers feels a bit off.

Lastly some more polish on the UI would be nice to make it a bit more modern and easy on the eyes. Things like making the health bars on your party frames bigger and maybe remove some cluster of useless info.

These are a couple things that I personally believe can go really far into making FF14 the GOAT of MMOs

Level sync and available abilities, especially at the lower ranges. I want every duty I queue into to be a good experience, as unreasonable as that might be.

Sticking specifically to combat/gameplay related things:
The Tab targeting is absolutely terrible. There is no reason at all why when I have something punching me in the face that my Tab target should select something else 30 feet off in the distance. There's also no reason why when I have a mob flagged as a potentially hostile target specifically centered on my screen that the tab targeting should snap to a non-hostile water elemental way off to the side or in the far distance. If they can't make it smarter they should at least make it more configurable so that this sort of thing doesn't happen if you don't want it to.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by StriderShinryu

Sticking specifically to combat/gameplay related things:
The Tab targeting is absolutely terrible. There is no reason at all why when I have something punching me in the face that my Tab target should select something else 30 feet off in the distance. There's also no reason why when I have a mob flagged as a potentially hostile target specifically centered on my screen that the tab targeting should snap to a non-hostile water elemental way off to the side or in the far distance. If they can't make it smarter they should at least make it more configurable so that this sort of thing doesn't happen if you don't want it to.

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You can keybind "target nearest enemy". But yeah, I agree the default tab targeting is terrible.

/autofacetarget can be both convenient and annoying. It's useful for most classes so that you don't press an attack and then it not hit because you are not facing it enough. It's annoying for healers though. On a healer, I macro my attacks like so.

Code:

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/autofacetarget on
/action "Ruin" <t>
/action "Ruin" <tt>
/autofacetarget off

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This makes sure that autofacetarget is off when healing so that I don't turn around while healing, which is a big problem if there is a gaze attack while healing, which actually happened in the one savage floor I healed. The problem with this is the attacks no longer queue, but it's something I'm willing to do so that I don't automatically face players while running just because I healed them.

PvP is already being changed soon and UI elements can already be changed, hidden and resized in almost every way. You can even use different UI themes including the traditional blue one from a lot of FF games.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Imoye

You can keybind "target nearest enemy". But yeah, I agree the default tab targeting is terrible.

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If you have target nearest enemy then you can't cycle, if you can cycle you can't target properly. This leads you to have only two ways to target properly, one being to have the cycle option and tab to target, escape to un-target then tab again to target the other mob you want to switch to or two you can have two binding one for nearest and the other for cycling. Both ways are extremely frustrating and clunky. Tab targeting shouldn't be this bad when the game is a tab target game, it can't have one if its core elements be this unfriendly to use.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Metalface_Villain

If you have target nearest enemy then you can't cycle, if you can cycle you can't target properly. This leads you to have only two ways to target properly, one being to have the cycle option and tab to target, escape to un-target then tab again to target the other mob you want to switch to or two you can have two binding one for nearest and the other for cycling. Both ways are extremely frustrating and clunky. Tab targeting shouldn't be this bad when the game is a tab target game, it can't have one if its core elements be this unfriendly to use.

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Exactly. Goodness knows I've tried the Tab Target options that are in the game multiple times, and none of them work the way they intuitively and logically should.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by StriderShinryu

Sticking specifically to combat/gameplay related things:
The Tab targeting is absolutely terrible. There is no reason at all why when I have something punching me in the face that my Tab target should select something else 30 feet off in the distance. There's also no reason why when I have a mob flagged as a potentially hostile target specifically centered on my screen that the tab targeting should snap to a non-hostile water elemental way off to the side or in the far distance. If they can't make it smarter they should at least make it more configurable so that this sort of thing doesn't happen if you don't want it to.

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They just need to shorten the length of the targeting cone to half(?) its existing length. The logic is that when you are tab targeting you are cycling immediate threats which are usually right next to you, if you really want to target that mob standing off a mile away a simple mouse click is enough (not sure how this would affect consoles).

To start with, they need to at least catch up with modders in regard to basic QoL:

• An animation lock procedure that doesn't (doubly) punish players for their ping.
• Additional option to only automatically face targets for actions that require you to face target, to hide your EXP bar at max level, and similarly obvious choices.
• Showing shield (and predicted DoT) values on any and all HP bars.
• Chat messages timing out and fading separately.
• Consolidating abilities that would not (or, especially, cannot) be options at the same time anyways.
• Improved targeting (especially, being still able to target enemies who are too tall for their nameplates to fit on your screen when playing in Ultrawide aspect ratio without having to back out the camera to max and aim up from the floor...)
• Other UI improvements, including improved retainer and inventory interface, better world map, status effect filtering and prioritization, conditional UI elements, etc.
• Job-specific, auto-swappable UI layouts.
• Queuable macros (at least to their first usable action), so we can set up targeting schemes as we like.
• ...so on and so forth....

Thereafter, the big stuff:

• Put in the time to develop systems to save time later (else we'll just end up with longer and longer delays between patch cycles). Challenge modes and developing a means of syncing old content up, for instance, could be huge -- as could be, say, player-made (obstacle/combat) courses.
• Seriously reconsider avenues of time-gating and gear-treadmills as compared to just letting people do whatever's fun for them. (I realize gear progression can be a factor in that 'fun', but it's rarely the sole one.)
• Take more risks, but only where willing to put in the full effort to flesh them out. Additionally, build those new things with an endgoal in mind (Step A prototyping for Step B, which acts in turn for Step C, etc.), but always in the interest of greater ambition, not to trickle out an initial plan over a longer amount of time.

I just wish SE would fix the server tick rate if anything.