DEV REQUEST: Reduce the GCD to 1.5 in 4.0

I love FF14 , but I feel the only thing it is lacking is the much slower combat pace compared to more modern MMOs. I feel that is a missed opportunity and the slower pace combat drives potential customers away. Yoshi comments that he wants to stay modern and current to meet the industry’s demands. I believe a game wide reduction of GCD of 1.5 that applies to all players and bosses will make the game play more engaging, less clunky, fast faced, and much more modernized.

I disagree. I'm sure they're out there, but I personally have never heard someone say the game-breaking thing for them was the long GCD. Yoshi-P said it was made that way so people could think about their moves in advance, if I'm not mistaken. I doubt they'll change it. I like things the way they are in terms of GCD.

I like the GCD where it is. WoW's combat is too frantic for me, even with how simplified it's been. I rarely have more than a half second of downtime between skills, when factoring in OGCD skills and procs.

y tho

10char

No thanks, I have enough oGCD's too keep me busy even with the one we have at the moment.

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Originally Posted by Underdog2204

No thanks, I have enough OcGD's too keep me busy even with the one we have at the moment.

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Good god, playing BRD or MCH with a 1.5s GCD would be a nightmare

Monk would have instand skills

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Originally Posted by AzraelX

I love FF14 , but I feel the only thing it is lacking is the much slower combat pace compared to more modern MMOs. I feel that is a missed opportunity and the slower pace combat drives potential customers away. Yoshi comments that he wants to stay modern and current to meet the industry’s demands. I believe a game wide reduction of GCD of 1.5 that applies to all players and bosses will make the game play more engaging, less clunky, fast faced, and much more modernized.

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A lot of jobs have off GCD abilities so honestly the combat isn't really slow even with the 2.5 GCD. You are almost always pressing an ability of some sort, be it a buff or a off GCD attack like bloodletter, sidewinder, howling fist, shoulder tackle, blood for blood, inner release, ninjutsu (and this is just some of them)...I mean we have tons of them for multiple jobs even all the card stuff for AST is off GCD.

We also have two jobs with faster GCD (MNK and NIN) for people who really want it even faster. So there really is something for everyone. I also have never heard anyone complain about the current GCD only people who never played the game and the only thing they know is "it is 2.5 GCD" but don't realize the speed really involved for playing a job to high efficiency/skill.

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Originally Posted by Miste

A lot of jobs have off GCD abilities so honestly the combat isn't really slow even with the 2.5 GCD. You are almost always pressing an ability of some sort, be it a buff or a off GCD attack like bloodletter, sidewinder, howling fist, shoulder tackle, blood for blood, inner release, ninjutsu (and this is just some of them)...I mean we have tons of them for multiple jobs even all the card stuff for AST is off GCD.

We also have two jobs with faster GCD (MNK and NIN) for people who really want it even faster. So there really is something for everyone. I also have never heard anyone complain about the current GCD only people who never played the game and the only thing they know is "it is 2.5 GCD" but don't realize the speed really involved for playing a job to high efficiency/skill.

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Yea I see your point and you are right. Thanks for input

Honestly, I would rather see animation locking removed before a drop in the GCD. Popping my oGCD abilities shouldn't delay anything by any amount of time.

With my 1300 skill speed build on my DRG and 1.5 gcd... Yeah... My fingers tho.

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Originally Posted by AzraelX

Yea I see your point and you are right. Thanks for input

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Wait, what? Someone on the internet listened to another person's reasoned argument? What is this?

I would be happy if they let the macro system use tenths and hundredths of a second in the /wait command.

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Originally Posted by Nutz

Wait, what? Someone on the internet listened to another person's reasoned argument? What is this?

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*Checks outside for fire and brimstone*

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Originally Posted by ErikMynhier

I would be happy if they let the macro system use tenths and hundredths of a second in the /wait command.

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I bet if they put in an API to let players develop add-ons like... you know, the way they said before, that could be a reality.

A faster GCD would make the fights more frantic, and more focused on button mashing rather than strategy. I think speeding it up would be likely to drive away as many players as it would attract.

Jobs with either high skill/spell speed or lots of off-GCD abilities offer plenty of chances for fast gameplay.

The problem isn't the length of the GCD. Anyone with a job at 60 will tell you that the 2.5s GCD is a non-issue due to the number of OGCD skills to weave in.

The problem many newer players have with what they perceive to be the length of the GCD is actually just a lack of usable skills. A new player usually only has 3 or so skills on their hotbar at the start of the game and this makes the GCD feel rather painful simply because the player has little else to press in the meantime and few early encounters require much movement to distract them.

If SE wanted to improve this early experience they would just have to give every class an OGCD skill available to use very early and make it clear to players that they can use these skills whilst others are on GCD. There are a lot of players at 50+ that do not even know how OGCD skills work!

Personally, until they fix skill speed and make it influence tp regain in combat, a lower gcd will only hinder tp classes vs help. Lower gcds in a game such as WoW work because the haste stat increases how fast main resources are restored naturally in combat, such as energy and focus. Its pretty funny how important the haste stat is in most mmorpgs that have it (FFXI included) but pretty much treated like cancer in this game for physical dps.

That's something I noticed when I started leveling MNK and NIN. Combat at the lower levels feels slow and clunky because there's not a lot of stuff to do, and your gear won't have a lot of skill speed. It picks up once you get your speed increases. By 60 NIN it sure felt closer to a 1.5 second GCD.

I personally think combat is a bit quick. there's so little weight or power to anything it kinda feels like I'm pressing buttons just to auto attack...

I kinda find it amusing how some people get bored if they don't have a button to press every nano second.

i'd much prefer a slower system that put some weight behind its skills. 1.23 had a pretty good system. was much more popular than this one in beta

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Originally Posted by Dzian

I personally think combat is a bit quick. there's so little weight or power to anything it kinda feels like I'm pressing buttons just to auto attack...

I kinda find it amusing how some people get bored if they don't have a button to press every nano second.

i'd much prefer a slower system that put some weight behind its skills. 1.23 had a pretty good system. was much more popular than this one in beta

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No thanks, and no, it wasn't much more popular lol.
Waiting around doing nothing was way less fun.

Personally, I think a 2.0s GCD is about as far as it ought be reduced at base. Competing MMOs with such short GCDs also rarely take around a half second to complete their skill animations -- ours, on the other hand, are quite a bit more complex.

That said, even if you scaled animation times with attack speed, at 2.0s you're already risking removing double-weaves for many, many players. Which then leaves you the question, do you want to remove the only unique thing XIV gameflow has, double-weaves and the apm (actions/keystrokes/presses per minute) dynamics of double-weaved openers to the slower lull of having everything on cooldown -- likely decreasing the apm ceiling, in the process -- in order to increase the apm floor?

Removing animation locks entirely would only give us a flurry of disjointed limbs as animations clip wildly into each other. That would look fairly awful, and would defeat the point of having our more detailed animations in the first palce. Certain animations made to have multiple clipping points and starting points as to more quickly and smoothly clip into each other, alternatively, would be great, but there's a reason that oGCDs in most games without animation locks... also have no animations (at best surrounding visuals, rather than manipulating the character model). Some of our animations could probably still look good as mere surrounding visuals, requiring no animation lock, or similar animations for different abilities could combine the animation while carrying both effects, but that would of course add complexity to memorizing what you can and can't double-weave, with all others having already been removed...

:: I have heard plenty of complaints about the relatively long GCD by players who haven't hit 50+ yet, and therefore (1) haven't filled out their hotbars yet, and thus lack the oGCDs to fill up a lot of those gaps, and (2) haven't seen enough fight complexity to ever make them glad they have that extra second to look around, check their CD syncs, etc.

If resources/skill powers are not revised for skills to be stronger but used less often. Then GOD no, I don't want the GCD lessened.

I want to combat to feel more like Dark Souls, where now it feels more like a Fighting game. If GCD gets lowered it will be Final Fantasy MK XIV.

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Originally Posted by KitingGenbu

Personally, until they fix skill speed and make it influence tp regain in combat, a lower gcd will only hinder tp classes vs help. Lower gcds in a game such as WoW work because the haste stat increases how fast main resources are restored naturally in combat, such as energy and focus. Its pretty funny how important the haste stat is in most mmorpgs that have it (FFXI included) but pretty much treated like cancer in this game for physical dps.

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Natural TP generation and effects that generate bonus TP have been reduced by 20% but now tick at a rate equal to the (affected) player's GCD. Additionally, animation times now scale with attack speed. Done.

(50 per 2.5 = 60 per 3.0; only buffs attack speed regen after that, keeping it level with others.
TP dynamics (e.g. the difference between AoEing and standard ST dps) affect high-speed players more than others, but they also recover faster when under TP-refreshing effects.

(Fine detail fix: Abilities that give a set duration of extra TP generation (Spire, Goad) will now also supply the a remainder portion at the end of duration based duration before or after the first or final tick.)

There is only ONE type of people I ever saw complaining about this: people who came from WoW and were pretty much used to the keyboard mashing a 1s GCD combat is, then came here and found the combat "slow and clunky".

Thing is, they LIKED to mash buttons non-stop during combat, I figured it gave them a sense they were playing an action game instead of an RPG. Well, to each it's own, but after playing (and raiding in) WoW for 8 years, I don't miss AT ALL the 1s GCD.

You people just like doing this

https://media.giphy.com/media/g8GfH3i5F0hby/giphy.gif

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

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I would just say that the numbers they picked seem a bit low to even scale properly. The amount of skill speed that the average physical dps can have before it turns into a negative is really low tbh (like 600-700 on drg before it becomes negative? idk the exact numbers) and should be adjusted. It also does not help that our gear does not have any 'extra stats' to compensate for excessive stat builds or set bonuses. I'll utilize WoW as an example. There are trinkets (legendary items as well) or certain set bonuses that allow the player to generate extra resources like energy/focus or have a chance to get refunded a certain amount up on using skills. Such things kind of balance out the gearing system since honestly people dont care about BiS until their ilvl is at a certain point. If you're sitting at i200 and trying to gear up to 230, you're gonna take the piece that has acc/ss at 230 over the crit/det piece that is 215.

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Originally Posted by KitingGenbu

I would just say that the numbers they picked seem a bit low to even scale properly. The amount of skill speed that the average physical dps can have before it turns into a negative is really low tbh (like 600-700 on drg before it becomes negative? idk the exact numbers) and should be adjusted. It also does not help that our gear does not have any 'extra stats' to compensate for excessive stat builds or set bonuses. I'll utilize WoW as an example. There are trinkets (legendary items as well) or certain set bonuses that allow the player to generate extra resources like energy/focus or have a chance to get refunded a certain amount up on using skills. Such things kind of balance out the gearing system since honestly people dont care about BiS until their ilvl is at a certain point. If you're sitting at i200 and trying to gear up to 230, you're gonna take the piece that has acc/ss at 230 over the crit/det piece that is 215.

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It's not so much that it becomes bad, so much that it just doesn't fit their rotation (Life Surge, primarily, in DRG's case) properly past that point. Until then, modifications can be made to keep it more or less in place. But, "fixing" that could use any number of things, from (1) reducing potency dynamic range so that popping LS on a non-FT carries less of a loss compared to the CD holding, (2) reducing LS cooldown, (3) scaling LS cooldown with attack speed, (4) scaling LS's (and likely other CD's) cooling rate with attack speed (e.g. 1.1 seconds of cooling for every 1 second of gametime at 110% haste), (5) causing certain regularly rotated skills -- as would apply to a speed rotation (e.g. as would have a potential extra FT per CT) -- to reduce the cooldown on LS, and so forth, (6) making LS a variable CD, which can be "rushed" or "overcharged", etc., etc.. But lets also keep in mind that DRG requires a certain amount of Skill Speed to even rotate conventionally in the first place. (I personally really enjoyed the 2.33 and 2.22 rotations way back when, and have even gotten to see DRG gameplay at as low as a 1.95 GCD. Just... that TP drain.)

Now, in a Monk's case for example, the main issue is simply TP drain. I prefer a 1.95 GCD rotation myself, because it allows me to have DK drop off just after a True Strike, maintaining Twin through the following Demo and Touch of Death and then Dragon Kick, losing only 7+3+(7 to 14) = 24 potency for up to a 75 potency gain via Bootshine, and just generally allowing me to use the full lengths of my DK and Twin buffs, down to the quarter-second, throughout my whole rotation. It feels great. Until you run out of TP in under 3 minutes. And seeing that Meditation's psuedo-GCD doesn't scale with attack speed, making combat Meds for TP recovery nonviable, doesn't help. (Purification's 3 minute CD then deals the mercy blow after that.)

To be honest, the more obvious flaws of the stat, or what would cause it to experience perhaps unintended variance between otherwise similar jobs, is the lack of an oGCD damage modifier. (Or for that matter, an auto-attack modifier, for which crit scales best... as with everything else outside the realm of BLMs.) The more of one's damage is vested in oGCDs (or AAs), the less attractive skill speed becomes, so even if two jobs were looking at equally useful plateaus for the amount of skill speed necesssary to be achieved, one will still like skill speed more or less than the other.

And then there's the issue that there's both skill speed and spell speed, meaning that skill speed can't affect a number of skills on an otherwise "physical" slot class. (Flash, Unmend, Unleash, Abyssal Drain, Mage's Ballad, Army's Paeon, Foe Requiem...) I don't know why the two aren't simply "Haste".

Now, to take imo stranger example of WoW, which has bounced between trinkets making up some 15% of your dps (I only somewhat exaggerate) and requiring adjusted rotations in Mists, massive stat scaling oversights (Armor Pen, sold as a choice, but actually scaling better AFTER reaching what would have made sense to be the cap, having reduced the target's armor to 0 -- yay negative armor!), and useful but unimaginative stats there just for complexity (Multistrike, for when you Haste and Crit can't do the proc-related trick you need), dependence on and then removal of Hit/Expertise/Defense... I can't honestly say I want to see the kind of balancing necessary to keep Legion's latest legendaries or a similar system in check.

I'd honestly be fine with just holding onto the 3 essential stats -- the plain one, the RNG plain one with some synergies, and the plain one with gameplay-affecting plateaus. Barring that... I'd like to see new stats or especially gear-applied traits that function in a more universal manner than WoW's legendaries. I mean, I can imagine there being some really, really cool legendary gear/weapon opportunities out there for XIV lore, but it's hard to decide what would best be relic material (i.e. user progressed) vs. storyline, boss-, or random drops, just what level of rarity they should have, but even more than that, or how interesting their mechanics can be without seeming 'out of left field' to the pre-legendary gameplay, etc.

At the moment I don't feel like there's much difference between XIV and WoW gearing otherwise. Item Level is usually the answer unless a stat is exceptionally bad or under-tuned for your spec (see SV mastery). The nerf to higher-end secondary stat scaling from WoD to Legion only brought them closer, imo.

No thanks. Playing Nin, Mch, Brd, or even DRK with a shorter GCD would be nightmare fuel on par with Sister Location.

Ugh, thanks but no thanks. With 1,5 GCD, a 1-2-3 rotation is still doable, but doing your regular rotation and weaving in OGCDs? That's not even fun anymore. Raiton already clips into the GCD, I'd rather not shave off another 0,5 seconds by default so Fuma does the same.

So in other words, what you're saying is you want Monks to never have TP again.

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Originally Posted by AlexionSkylark

There is only ONE type of people I ever saw complaining about this: people who came from WoW and were pretty much used to the keyboard mashing a 1s GCD combat is, then came here and found the combat "slow and clunky".

Thing is, they LIKED to mash buttons non-stop during combat, I figured it gave them a sense they were playing an action game instead of an RPG. Well, to each it's own, but after playing (and raiding in) WoW for 8 years, I don't miss AT ALL the 1s GCD.

You people just like doing this

https://media.giphy.com/media/g8GfH3i5F0hby/giphy.gif

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I mean it's not an unreasonable complaint. Most people, including myself, had this problem at the beginning. It's not really fun to hit one button and then wait for 2.5 seconds until like level 40. When you start getting positionals and more oGCD skills it comes together, but early levels are dreadfully boring. Especially DRG.

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Originally Posted by AzraelX

I love FF14 , but I feel the only thing it is lacking is the much slower combat pace compared to more modern MMOs. I feel that is a missed opportunity and the slower pace combat drives potential customers away. Yoshi comments that he wants to stay modern and current to meet the industry’s demands. I believe a game wide reduction of GCD of 1.5 that applies to all players and bosses will make the game play more engaging, less clunky, fast faced, and much more modernized.

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yes please

If the GCD would be decreased wouldn't it mean that content would have to be adjusted to the new pacing of the combat? If so I guess they won't do it since it would require alot of work.

Healing on a console with a 2.5 GCD would not see an improvement, it already takes a moment to cycle through the target list to cast a heal. If they wanted to speed up healing, reducing the cast times of some of the larger heals would be a start.

TP regeneration would have to be reworked along with aggro generation

Having played older games (pwi comes in mind) and being able to have assassins healing themselves while soloing nearly every content due to the insane speed when geared correctly was something I always enjoyed. But sadly as the time went by more and more games adjusting to the slower pace game style. Would I love to see SE implementing instant cast/extreme speeds etc? yes but I do understand and see that it won't work for ffxiv. I've never played wow therefore I can't say anything about the combat.

To those who think faster combat speed means button mashing, look at Diablo and other like ARPGs. There is no button mashing in ARPGs, if you button mash you are just going to die. Also there are many jobs in FF who SHOULD be attacking fast, Ninja and Rogue being two notable ones. Why would you want a slow Ninja?

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Originally Posted by Chiramu

To those who think faster combat speed means button mashing, look at Diablo and other like ARPGs. There is no button mashing in ARPGs, if you button mash you are just going to die. Also there are many jobs in FF who SHOULD be attacking fast, Ninja and Rogue being two notable ones. Why would you want a slow Ninja?

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The two jobs in the game right now where it makes sense to have a faster gcd(monk and ninja) already have a faster gcd.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

i'd much prefer a slower system that put some weight behind its skills. 1.23 had a pretty good system. was much more popular than this one in beta

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Auto-attack killed the fun at the beginning of a battle. It was better before auto-attack (1.20 ?), where you used skills to build up TP instead of waiting until the auto-attack build up the TP.

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Originally Posted by Chiramu

To those who think faster combat speed means button mashing, look at Diablo and other like ARPGs. There is no button mashing in ARPGs, if you button mash you are just going to die. Also there are many jobs in FF who SHOULD be attacking fast, Ninja and Rogue being two notable ones. Why would you want a slow Ninja?

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Ninja is already not slow, if played good.
Also, faster speed = increased TP consume

I like the speed but what I would love is getting rid of animation lock so that we can weave a lot more effectively.