Combat still too slow. We need a shorter Global Cooldown!

[casker]

I agree and I get what you're saying about the "shitty twitch spam crap", so why couldn't they have just kept the battle system from 1.23 then? You know it was good.
I keep seeing people saying in here that they like the "slower" pace of the 2.5 second GCD, they don't want faster combat, etc. etc.

The pace was fine in 1.23. A little strategic. Faster than XI and a little slower than 2.0's current system. And for the animation people.. the animations had more weight to them and looked great and/or even better than today's animations, never minding the solid animation locks(which sucked at times).

I can't really answer your question of why not keep 1.23 combat, but I imagine it actually has more to do with FF14 needing to reinvent itself and overhaul everything even if what we had was good. Sucks I know, but I'm also pretty fine with what we got in return. I suspect that what we got was borne out of an idea to make the game more actiony than 1.23 while keeping a strategic turn based feel. So what we already got was made in an appeal and compromise to the "make it twitchy" crowd, and like you said, sacrificed some animation quality. But the twitchy crowd wants to throw it further to their own end of the spectrum and homogenize it until its the same as every other game out there.

And you know, personally I'm not someone who says they "like the slower pace" because actually as a monk the pace is very speedy. At a 2.5 GCD, you weave in non GCD abilities at 1.25s. And when you have 3 greased lightning stacks, it becomes 2s, with 1s inbetweens. It's actually faster than other mmos I can think of, and requires more decision making. It adds of layer to technical skill in execution, and I find myself having to plan ahead sometimes 3 or 4 moves in advance in order to get through my "pipeline" properly.

The GCD pace requires rapid but steady decision making, compared to other games where maybe you can react to something faster because of a shorter GCD, but IMO don't have to make that many decisions.

And while I liked the 1.23 combat, it actually used the usual kind of cooldowns on every ability like other mmos. The fact that ARR mostly doesn't lock you out of abilities after you've used them is MORE like FF and lends itself to decision making. I like where they went in ARR with the idea that most abilities don't have cooldowns but instead just an opportunity cost. If a different developer were doing this the gaming media would be calling it innovative.

What ultimately bothers me here is that people think just lowering the GCD will magically fix everything they don't like about the combat, like that's the only change you'd have to make, and like it wouldn't screw a lot of things over. If you dislike the battle system you're going to have to offer a ton more changes than just lowering the GCD. It makes no sense by itself.