The problem with "Instant OFF GCD" abilities makes combat feel less rewarding.

[Ricky]

You have a lot of good points but the Chimera example is funny, you have 90-120 minutes to kill him don't you? So when it's your turn to interrupt, don't use long animation abilities

[complexxL9]

You have a lot of good points but the Chimera example is funny, you have 90-120 minutes to kill him don't you? So when it's your turn to interrupt, don't use long animation abilities

You could do the same with a cooldown GCD ability, what is the purpose of "instant off-gcd" then, if not to be able to react instantly?

[Hirosashi]

You could do the same with a cooldown GCD ability, what is the purpose of "instant off-gcd" then, if not to be able to react instantly?

Where in the world are you people getting that these abilities are supposed to be instant!? Stop thinking about wow...put it out of your minds please this is not an instant gratification combat system it takes work and strategy just like playing a real final fantasy game this is not a button mash fest, time your attacks, I have never experienced an issue with this so long as I planned ahead and acted accordingly This is the first game I have ever had to actually try and read incoming attacks to know what I needed to activate for those weapon skills that so not have an aoe affect that hurt.

[Jinko]

Where in the world are you people getting that these abilities are supposed to be instant!? Stop thinking about wow...put it out of your minds please this is not an instant gratification combat system it takes work and strategy just like playing a real final fantasy game this is not a button mash fest, time your attacks, I have never experienced an issue with this so long as I planned ahead and acted accordingly This is the first game I have ever had to actually try and read incoming attacks to know what I needed to activate for those weapon skills that so not have an aoe affect that hurt.

ROFL, you realise that most FF games you can win most fights by spamming attack attack attack ... right ?

Also lets stop comparing an MMO to a single player game because they function completely different.

...And what right is it of ours to demand that they change something in the game because we cant be asked to adjust to the level of strategy they had in mind for us using with this system. If they say its working as intended then it most likely is working as intended they tried hard to make a game that was awesome and they did and now people are giving them crap for the minor stuff that they cant adjust to because of the instant gratification mindset, these abilities are not in any way meant to be instant, instant cast does not mean instant animation, they are not reactionary skills. This game is more about planning than reaction.

And you don't think the "working as intended" is their lazy way of saying we don't want to or have no intention of fixing that, sorry did you even play FF11, do you have any experience with SE prior to this game ?

If you are happy to believe what they say then good for you, I however do not.

If they did intend for us to have to deal with clunky combat and server latency/lag issues, AoE's that hit even when you are clearly out of the visual cues on screen then their game is going to fail just like SWTOR did.


Everyone goes on about how whiny people are, but ask yourself do people complain when they have nothing to complain about .. you may answer yes to this just to be awkward but I can assure the majority of people have a valid reason for complaining.

[Hirosashi]

ROFL, you realise that most FF games you can win most fights by spamming attack attack attack ... right ?

snip..

Ok so perhaps I was the only one who used strategy at all in prior final fantasy games, and I did play XI which honestly for melee was basically an auto attack game, I liked the combat in XI it was a nice departure for the traditional template. I agree companies have a tendency to over look flaws, however I do not think the system is broken in this case it just seems that people are unwilling to take it for what it is. I never found myself putting this much thought into my attack patterns in WoW or even XI (Keep in mind for XI I did not make it to end game so I am not 100% familiar with end game content). Either way this is its own game with its own combat system I have never really had an issue with aoe so I cant speak on that I have seen many other people get hit with stuff they say the shouldn't have but I have never experienced it myself. It is truly an instant gratification attitude that ruins this combat system. They never state that these skills are supposed to be instant.

[Jinko]

Either way this is its own game with its own combat system I have never really had an issue with aoe so I cant speak on that I have seen many other people get hit with stuff they say the shouldn't have but I have never experienced it myself. It is truly an instant gratification attitude that ruins this combat system. They never state that these skills are supposed to be instant.

I think when your skill say Cast: Instant, you generally thing its an instant ability ... or maybe I am wrong :S

Here's an example for you, If I use Swift Cast > raise during Titan, which is a pretty hectic for healers, I will sometimes be in a rush to heal the next target.

So I go Swiftcast (subtarget dead person)> Resurrection > carry on healing the tank with Physick, but sometimes raise doesn't fire off and my Physick just used the swiftcast, I have absolutely no time to stand in place and cast a Resurrection spell, 1) because people are taking damage and 2) I don't want to be standing on a plume when it pops up.

This is pretty frustrating, you can say oh but its working as intended, well I say working as intended = complete shit.

Edit because of post limitation:-

Instant cast does not mean there is not an animation or effect or even that the effect with be applied instantly it simply means there is no cast time. Being able to apply 6 dots in an instant would just be broken, it would take all the skill out of chaining off-gcd and on-gcd abilities together to make a good attack chain.

A good example is thunder to aero, cast thunder the nano-second its down casting you can cast aero bam, two dots on the target at the same exact time, thats how you chain effectively. I dont know of any dots that are off gcd lol so aero was all I had there.

Nobody is asking for this !, for example summoner has Virus(which isn't a dot) and Bio both of which are instant, you couldn't possibly stack 6 dots in one action and you can't even do this in games like WoW which does have instant cast with no animation limitation bullcrap.

There is no reason why an animation has to block the next skill from activating either, they could just incorporate a system where the first animation takes priority and the second one is skipped, its not rocket science, so stop using "the animation must play out" as an excuse.

Show me a job (or class for that matter) which has 6 instant cast DoT's and I will agree with you.

[Hirosashi]

I think when your skill say Cast: Instant, you generally thing its an instant ability ... or maybe I am wrong :S

Instant cast does not mean there is not an animation or effect or even that the effect with be applied instantly it simply means there is no cast time. Being able to apply 6 dots in an instant would just be broken, it would take all the skill out of chaining off-gcd and on-gcd abilities together to make a good attack chain.

A good example is thunder to aero, cast thunder the nano-second its down casting you can cast aero bam, two dots on the target at the same exact time, thats how you chain effectively. I dont know of any dots that are off gcd lol so aero was all I had there.

[Reika]

And then there is that issue where instant abilities are never really instant. Spirits within, instant right? wrong. You have to wait almost 3 seconds for the ability to do damage and silence your target. thats not instant. Even shield bash isn't really instant even tho it is a lot faster than spirits within.

You can't be truly reactionary in this game, because no skill is really instant. And they do this by design. in 1.0, skills were actually instant. You may have had animation lock, but if you use say Chaos thrust, the damage was registered to the server the moment you used the skill before it appeared on your screen. you can tell because if a long animation WS were to do enough damage to kill a monster, your party would not be able to attack the monster further, and they would have sheathed their weapons the moment the kill-skill got used.

It is even worse with healing spells. Lustrate is the worst of the single target, and succor is the worst of the aoe.

[Unruhe]

Where in the world are you people getting that these abilities are supposed to be instant!? Stop thinking about wow...put it out of your minds please this is not an instant gratification combat system it takes work and strategy just like playing a real final fantasy game this is not a button mash fest, time your attacks, I have never experienced an issue with this so long as I planned ahead and acted accordingly This is the first game I have ever had to actually try and read incoming attacks to know what I needed to activate for those weapon skills that so not have an aoe affect that hurt.

It's funny because the current system IS a button mash fest. There's no way to tell when/if your off-GCD ability will fire or not so you have to spam the key to try to use it.

Even reliably using Swiftcast (next spell is 'instant') is a joke in combat because 90% of the time the key will not fire properly if you try to use it just after a spell. Once it does fire, there's a delay before you get the "buff" so if you try to cast immediately, odds are the spell will hardcast anyway. The amount of time you take recognizing that the game is shit and then adjusting your tactics usually makes you waste more time than if you'd've just hardcasted whatever spell you wanted in the first place. And that's just talking about one single off-gcd ability, I'm not even talking about chaining them. The game doesn't work like it should.

And don't even get me started on how much I have to mash Raging Strikes.

Shit awful game mechanics aren't the kind of "challenge" anyone should be defending.

[Blimbeard]

It's hard to believe that people are actually defending this. Even as a staunch supporter of SE and a huge fan of FF, it should be patently obvious to anyone with any sense of logic that the system is not functioning as it should be.

Instant abilities on the whole are designed to be reactive. Prime examples are skills like Benediction, Swiftcast and any interrupt. If they don't take effect immediately they are almost pointless, especially when you factor in short enemy cast times and RNG spike damage for example

I don't think every instant should be off the GCD, but even when they aren't, stopping a cast time spell and then firing off an instant is simply far too unresponsive to be useful most of the time. If a skill like an interrupt is designed to actually trigger after a 1 sec animation, then it should have a 1 sec cast time.

As stated previously, as things are, a lot of the difficulty is simply fighting the interface rather than actual meaningful game difficulty.