Does the combat system need to be reworked?

Just as title states,does the combat system need to be reworked, should it stay as is? Should yoshi experiment with different battle system mechanics in future content releases?

It needs something that's for sure! I suppose what the specifics of "combat system" actually entails is quite hard to pin down and I'm not gonna get my hopes up for any big changes but we have remained in more or less the same point for 2 expansions now. Something's gotta change. I'd personally like to see the 2 min timers reverted to closer to how they were in SB. I feel like the changes the devs made in ShB onwards were an over adjustment to feedback on timer jank AND the rigid party composition buffs. IMO they should have adjusted one [removed the party comp buffs] not both of those issues and this is something the dev team seem to do repeatedly. Over correcting and removing too many elements of the battle system at the same time so every adjustment feels more like we're having our toys taken away instead of adjusted to be more fun.

not until someone gives a actual good rework that is actually different.

the suggestions are always i wanna press the same buttons i have pressed for 10 years in a different order and a slightly different time as if that is some magical rework that is going rejuvenate the gameplay.

Yeah make this into like devil may cry, but Final fantasy xiv.

This far in to XIVs life span? No. Wide, sweeping changes of that nature aren't usually well received by stable fanbase and it would represent a large risk with no promise of any real gain.

Refined, enhanced, expanded on? Maybe. For my buck I'd like to see them add new specifications to existing jobs to allow for a wider variety of play styles and letting people differentiate themselves a bit more than they do now.

As for new mechanics and such, I'm the wrong guy to ask for those specific questions.

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Originally Posted by Palladiamors

This far in to XIVs life span? No. Wide, sweeping changes of that nature aren't usually well received by stable fanbase and it would represent a large risk with no promise of any real gain.

Refined, enhanced, expanded on? Maybe. For my buck I'd like to see them add new specifications to existing jobs to allow for a wider variety of play styles and letting people differentiate themselves a bit more than they do now.

As for new mechanics and such, I'm the wrong guy to ask for those specific questions.

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Nah that only happens when the changes are half assed and not tested properly. This is why XIV needs to allow public testing since iirc, even CBU3 has a hard time testing their own products since they don't have enough people to test half the time.

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Originally Posted by Palladiamors

This far in to XIVs life span? No. Wide, sweeping changes of that nature aren't usually well received by stable fanbase and it would represent a large risk with no promise of any real gain.

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Star Wars Galaxies comes to mind.


IMO should add in a lot of the more niche stuff cut from SHB, easy why to raise the skill ceiling a bit.

My suggesting is what it always is, Go back to having jobs and roles be synergistic with one another. Go back What we had in Stormblood. It worked, fans loved it, allowed for nuance. But with this actually expand upon the roles different abilites, make CC matter, let roles have group based mitigation back, get back to when tanks and healers actually subverted the Holy Trinity of MMOs. the things that actually made XIV different from other MMOs.

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Originally Posted by strawberrycake

Nah that only happens when the changes are half assed and not tested properly. This is why XIV needs to allow public testing since iirc, even CBU3 has a hard time testing their own products since they don't have enough people to test half the time.

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Genuine question, can you name one time an MMO made sweeping changes to a combat system that was well received by the community? I've been playing MMOs for about 22 years now and I can't think of any BUT I also haven't played every MMO out there.

In my experience even relatively inoffensive changes usually lead to a lot of community push back if it's not a highly requested feature. I'm not saying I don't believe you, mind, just that I have seen many a community react... vehemently in the wake of combat being changed

There's a lot of issues with how they did this expansion in terms of combat systems due to how they did the mitigate or die mentality.

Lets just lay this out with removing the defensive stats and just do some simple numbers.

Tank = 200 HP
Melee DPS = 100 HP
Ranged DPS = 90 HP
Healer / Caster DPS = 80 HP

Why does the tank have 200 HP? Because they got the highest HP and defense in the game, so if someone flattened it out they really have a massive health pool compared to anyone else, even beyond what is visible. So technically, to wipe the group you'd need to do something like 200 damage to everyone to make it happen, but the issue is how do the other jobs survive the attack if the idea is they want people to mitigate? The mitigations only do 5%-20% of the damage, so a 200 HP attack would only go down to 160 from the strongest mitigation possible, and mitigation stacking has diminishing returns.

And thus we arrive at the body checks. In order to make this whole design thing work, they would have to make it so that a 20% mitigation is necessary for people who are not tanks. However, healer and casters in this example are at 80 hp, so therefore at least two mits are needed for group content to survive as that means an AOE meant to wipe the group has to do at least 100 HP worth of damage. So then, to enforce the mit or die idea, the next mechanic after the AOE has to be something that requires everyone to be alive. Think the Limit Cut of p12s p1 or paradigma 3. Do you see where this is going?

And then they still have tank busters which have to deal enough damage to kill a tank without mits. This means that they got to either do 200 HP unmitigated to a tank, or have the first hit apply some kind of debuff to make the next hit do 200 HP or more to the tank. Well in this case they actually did both so the first attack will kill the tank unmitigated at 200HP, and then if they don't swap they will die because they got a debuff increasing the damage of the next attack by +100% or some crazy number.

This entire idea was stupid to begin with because outside of the hardest content available, your other content just isn't going to be able to enforce this mindset. People later on are going to out gear the content that came earlier to the point that they wont instantly die to anything except a tank buster. Thus, the aoe that would wipe non-tanks fails to do so, people ignore using a mit, then the coordination mechanic comes and everyone survives without ever knowing there was a check.

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Originally Posted by Palladiamors

Genuine question, can you name one time an MMO made sweeping changes to a combat system that was well received by the community? I've been playing MMOs for about 22 years now and I can't think of any BUT I also haven't played every MMO out there.

In my experience even relatively inoffensive changes usually lead to a lot of community push back if it's not a highly requested feature. I'm not saying I don't believe you, mind, just that I have seen many a community react... vehemently in the wake of combat being changed

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I'm gonna use the dread word here so bear with me. And my definition of sweeping changes could be different from yours. But I'll say WoW and the massive changes made coming out of shadowlands. DFs changes so far have felt fun, it's a step away from borrowed power and it's ofc a work in progress as well. It's beginning of a new system that will be iterated upon rather then replaced, as it is the replacement itself to years of making the wheel over again that blizzard is known for. I've raided each tier and nothing has felt too underpowerd for long. It feels good actually having classes bestrong on their own and funtional without a gimmick or Set of items built in for there to be function, a return to what WoW had been prior to expansions like Legion and closer to at the very least Wrath/Cataclysm

YEEEESSS!

This game honestly doesnt feel as satisfying to play compared to other tab targeting games. Its not as reactive as it should be what with action lag and encounters feel too slow for it. This kind of thing would've worked if it did an action/turn based hybrid to compensate for it but FFXIV's combat is quite possibly the weakest aspect of today's modern MMOs (personally I feel its on par with ESO's combat)

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Originally Posted by midnitdragoon

Just as title states,does the combat system need to be reworked, should it stay as is? Should yoshi experiment with different battle system mechanics in future content releases?

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Bozja showed it can be a lot more interesting with just a few additions, but we can never have those for the sake of the raiders and their balance.

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Originally Posted by midnitdragoon

Just as title states,does the combat system need to be reworked, should it stay as is? Should yoshi experiment with different battle system mechanics in future content releases?

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No, and here's why...

If you change a fundamental, defining feature of the game like that, a lot of people will get upset and quit.

For example, let's say it was changed to action combat with no hotbars... all the people who are used to or prefer MMO combat would not be happy and want it to go back to what they have been used to for years of their life. It's not a good business decision because of that.

Would a different kind of combat, such as action combat, be cool? Sure! But it's not the sort of risk that is smart for an established online game to take.

What they could do though is create an isolated area like Eureka or Bozja or Deep Dungeons and put a different battle system in them, because then it wouldn't affect everywhere else and the people who don't like it can avoid it.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

No, and here's why...

If you change a fundamental, defining feature of the game like that, a lot of people will get upset and quit.

For example, let's say it was changed to action combat with no hotbars... all the people who are used to or prefer MMO combat would not be happy and want it to go back to what they have been used to for years of their life. It's not a good business decision because of that.

Would a different kind of combat, such as action combat, be cool? Sure! But it's not the sort of risk that is smart for an established online game to take.

What they could do though is create an isolated area like Eureka or Bozja or Deep Dungeons and put a different battle system in them, because then it wouldn't affect everywhere else and the people who don't like it can avoid it.

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That's true, but for sake of argument, let's say this just stays limited to certain areas like how eureka and bozja are. They are seperate instanced zones with their own rules etc.

Would this be a favorable thing, something that stays within its own instanced zone, doesn't affect the rest of the game, but allows for experimentation and testing combat ideas?

It doesn't need a rework. It needs a revert back to Stormblood.

Nah. Do I think it needs changes, and new ideas, yeah. But I don't think it needs a rework.

Yes, let's go back to Stormblood, where people forced other people to change class or were gated out of content because MUh Metah!!!!!, please listen to this people.

if they dont rework the combat then they atleast need to do something about the combo system, pvp has all combos combined into one button why is it so hard to do this for pve, get rid of the button bloat

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Originally Posted by Ritsuka-55

Yes, let's go back to Stormblood, where people forced other people to change class or were gated out of content because MUh Metah!!!!!, please listen to this people.

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Yeah but at least it was actually fun back then, and not the homogenized snooze fest that we have now. The only classes that have some complexity and interesting mechanics to them right now are Monk and Black Mage.

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Originally Posted by Ritsuka-55

Yes, let's go back to Stormblood, where people forced other people to change class or were gated out of content because MUh Metah!!!!!, please listen to this people.

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That's a player issue, not a game issue.

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Originally Posted by Ritsuka-55

Yes, let's go back to Stormblood, where people forced other people to change class or were gated out of content because MUh Metah!!!!!, please listen to this people.

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Except that didn't really happen. 99% of party finders you'd see in Stormblood did not ban any job from joining. You had meta comps for the hyper elite, day 1 raiding groups and speed running parse groups, but that's an experience that those players actively sought out and were team-building on their own accord. The fear mongering of job gate keeping was based on anecdotal horror stories, not a rampant issue that was making it impossible for certain players to find groups to clear with.

People's heads exploded when they added stealth quests in FF14 and look what happened with the whole FF16 experience when they tried something new. Sorry to say but the biggest barrier to innovation are the fans (sometimes with good, oftentimes with bad reasons).