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

[dontcare]

"How long do I have to wait before I can cast my next ability?"
"If I push my ability now, will it go off?"
"The interface didn't indicate any reason why this ability shouldn't have gone off, so why didn't it go off?"

These are questions the player should never have to ask while in combat, and yet every player, at some point, has asked them. Many continue to ask them, myself included. It's bad design, plain and simple.

If they're not going to fix the model, at the very least they need to document this invisible cooldown and give it a numerical value that is indicated visually on the interface.

[Dorfentyme]

not understanding the point at all

Wait, I'm bad because I have to have a piece of paper telling me when the boss is going to do what? Or the boss design is bad? Because having a REACTION time rather than KNOWING when someone is going to happen is completely different. Being good at reacting is way better than being good at "I know when this is going to happen because the boss mechanics are lazy and they follow a set pattern." Sorry, but your logic is extremely flawed. But you'll never understand that because this game can do no wrong.

I'd much rather have to REACT to an ability rather than go "okay..he's about to do this..so...BAM. Stopped it. Piece of cake." That's so mindlessly boring over and over again. Not knowing when what is going to happen and having to REACT to it makes you a better player, and is ultimately more rewarding and more engaging. But continue supporting a game with these terrible design decisions. There's no getting through to someone who refuses to admit the game has any kind of flaws whatsoever.

The white knights have reached a new low with this game.

[Kanzer]

Still bad

Oh really? So 'reacting' to stuff is the clear defining point of 'skill' in any MMO, is basically what you're saying right? Since when? You do realize the only reason WoW became that is because they HAD to. That's the beauty of this game, it isn't wow. But sure, I guess there is little point to explaining that to someone who refuses to let go of the past.

Call me White Knight all you want, it doesn't change the fact that you're closed minded. I personally can think of many other things that can be just as challenging as reacting. Endurance, being able to remain calm when shit hits the fan, being able to deal with an impossible looking situation and coming out on top. So you learn how to deal with it and then deal with it, and then you're able to keep dealing with it the more you do it, you get better at dealing with it. Does it make it less skillful? No, it means you're learning to adapt and get better. Does it get boring after awhile? Sure, but what doesn't? If all you want is constant twitch action then go play LoL or something else. I've had my fill, and would much rather have what FFXIV has right now. Battles that require thinking and planning ahead, formulating a strategy and then succeeding when you execute that strategy soundly. Not because you could press a button in 0.5 seconds.

*best Hydaelyn voice* Think....feel....Adapt....

you might actually find you enjoy it too.

[Ryihito]

It is getting annoying for me now. It really does feel sluggish and I am not a fan of spamming a button in hopes it activates all the time.

[complexxL9]

Kanzer I think everyone by now understands your position. Thanks for bumping the thread, but enough is enough. You are like one of those 1.0 players who say 2.0 ruined the perfect and unique 1.0 game, but the vast majority will say otherwise.
Same with these mechanics, you can defend it all you want, but for most people sitting with chronometer while waiting for the boss to do it's stuff, so they can interrupt it, is simply not fun. I'm glad it's fun for you, if we are unlucky, it will stay fun for you, but my hope is it won't, as the bug report I made wen't into "duplicate bugs" section - http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ight-mechanics (yep the same video you were defending so pationatelly as working by design).

I don't believe this means they are going to fix instant off gcd abilities, neither they will make any exception for blunt arrow, I just think they will nerf bosses, and make those casts long enough, so you can interrupt them even in the worst case scenario (that is, right after using other ability).

Unfortunatelly I don't think that will please any side of the argument, because what we will have is:
most of the times interrupting will be piss easy and not challenging, but will prevent the rare broken cases like in the video.

However that is way better than being forced to do nothing while anticipating for cast, or to risk interrupt not going off in time.

[Aibo]

Some people's "working as intended — deal with it or go play WoW/LoL" attitude is just sad.

[Angelsdawn]

This is just a classic case of a 'hardcore' raider trying to justify how much time they spend in 'insert mmo here'.

I mean look at Black Desert or Tera, or APB or hell even Global Agenda. People are craving more reactive combat. If anything Kanzer you're the one stuck in the past. You'd rather we return to patterns and sitting on our hands until our UI timers tell us what to do at every moment than have a visceral and adaptive combat experience? I'm sorry but WoW's days are nearly over. In the next decade, nobody is going to want to go back to that.

[Jinko]

Hmm. Okay. Yeah. Now I understand this complaint!

To try and formalize what I think I see here...

So as I understand this issues now: in effect, the problem people are saying is that the icons show as ready, even though they are not, because the action perform is still being animated. This means that those who are only using the visual status to know when to trigger, are in essence hitting certain actions too soon sometimes. This is especially confusing and frustrating to those who equate the cast time, with the total action time, since they believe that it should be instant, and perceive by icon availability that it is instant, when in fact while the cast is instant (and non-interuptable), the performance of the action is on a delay due to being locked to the animation, that is not reflected in the icon.

This makes sense, but isn't the problem as it is being represented in this and other threads. Given the existing behaviour, the problem isn't the instant cast not being instant per-se, but the icon availability (and potentially verbiage some people are confused by), so perhaps this discussion should instead be redirected towards polite suggestions of visual cues and changes the developers could implement to account for the animation lock so that the status of icons can be clearer for these cases.

Of course the developers may still say no, but it seems that suggesting practical improvements to the icons may be a better use of time, than arguing or complaining about differing opinions on that which developers have already said they will not change. This would technically be considered an enhancement as opposed to a bug, so this venting is unlikely to do much good and is in fact likely to feed back into existing frustration with this behaviour, and that will just make the game less fun for those dealing with it.

Anyway! Hope everyone can take a moment to calm down on this (and other) issues. This is a game, and letting yourself get frustrated over it isn't much fun. Better to try and think of alternative ways to improve the game for you that the developers might be willing to consider, and in the meantime, learn to work within the existing environment as best you can.

Just my opinion.

I totally agree with you, the biggest problem with this is that not all skills share the same animation and have varying degrees of length, so for this to work the system would need to determine the recast cooldown based on the previous skills animation, I don't see SE doing this.

The other way would be to have all instant cast skills have similar length animations, again I don't see SE doing that either.

Going by the recent feedback from the dev team they are happy to sit idly by and not fix any of this stuff because it takes too much time and effort. (A.K.A working as intended)

This still doesn't tackle the problem of reactive skills such as Shield Bash and Blunt Arrow sharing the same GCD as the rest of the skills.

Are we really supposed to stand there and do nothing until a monster uses an ability in fear of missing the chance to stun or silence them, its just really bad design.

Call me White Knight all you want, it doesn't change the fact that you're closed minded. I personally can think of many other things that can be just as challenging as reacting.

Almost all fights in this game are designed with reactions as the main mechanic, take Titan or Demon Wall, or Ifrit, Garuda, and almost every boss at all of the mid range dungeons.

Endurance, being able to remain calm when shit hits the fan, being able to deal with an impossible looking situation and coming out on top.

Endurance means squat when you are on the floor dead because you didn't evade an attack, or someone didn't stun or silence the monster in time.

So you learn how to deal with it and then deal with it, and then you're able to keep dealing with it the more you do it, you get better at dealing with it.

If I was being held in a prisoner camp, I would have to deal with it, doesn't mean I would like it ! (Stupid analogy I know, but I am fighting stupid with stupid here.)

Does it make it less skillful? No, it means you're learning to adapt and get better. Does it get boring after awhile? Sure, but what doesn't? If all you want is constant twitch action then go play LoL or something else.

But bu bu but !! this game is heavily twitch based go fight Titan if you haven't already, thankfully Titan is scripted so we can "plan ahead" otherwise we would all be completely screwed.

I've had my fill, and would much rather have what FFXIV has right now. Battles that require thinking and planning ahead, formulating a strategy and then succeeding when you execute that strategy soundly. Not because you could press a button in 0.5 seconds.

*best Hydaelyn voice* Think....feel....Adapt....

you might actually find you enjoy it too.

Planned ahead standing there doing no DPS just so I can stun something is hardly planning ahead that's being restrictive.

[JiaYow]

Hello,

Based on the way the game was designed, and also taking into account the current level of difficulty, the development team has no plans to change the timing in which non-global cool down actions can be used, and would like players to take this into consideration when forming strategies.

Really? That's the official response?

You know that this statement is just a nice way of saying:
"The developers did not think this through and it's too hard and costly to change this now. The encounter designers created reactive fights, but the developers didn't think of that and made instant casts non-instant. Oops. Now, please learn the bosses by heart and time them with a chronometer, because we don't have the budget to fix our failure. Thank you for staying subscribed."

Please tell us that this isn't honestly the way Yoshida intended this game to be, and you just made that statement because the developers can't give an ETA for fix yet. Please.
Otherwise, fights in this game will shortly become the most boring yet tedious fights ever.

Like "My checklist says that the boss will cast his nuke in 2 seconds, my animation takes 1.3 seconds plus lag, so I need to interrupt him NOW"-tedious.

[Rivienne]

I totally agree with you, the biggest problem with this is that not all skills share the same animation and have varying degrees of length, so for this to work the system would need to determine the recast cooldown based on the previous skills animation, I don't see SE doing this.
<...>
Going by the recent feedback from the dev team they are happy to sit idly by and not fix any of this stuff because it takes too much time and effort. (A.K.A working as intended)
<...>
Are we really supposed to stand there and do nothing until a monster uses an ability in fear of missing the chance to stun or silence them, its just really bad design.

Ridiculously overly large (definitely way too wordy) opinion incoming:

As someone who has been a part of development teams in the past, I would like to try and diffuse this a little. While there are those developers who are very much "I don't care about you or your opinion" I have seen quite the opposite in this team. While there are hard line stances they take on some issues, it is rarely because they don't care, and rather because of fundamental design decisions that cannot be changed or more importantly, time management.

Development in a live environment is often rather like during pre-release crunch time. You prioritize as best you can the issues at hand. You have fundamental game breaking bugs: these have highest priority unless they have a large development overhead and you can release with the feature disabled and only re-enable when fixed, in which case they are usually delayed. You have lower priority bugs which vary, and are prioritized by how detrimental and what percentage of people will be inconvenienced by them, as well as how much effort is involved in fixing them. You then have features, which may or may not improve overall quality of life for a large number of users, these also are weighted based on affected number of users, and total time to implement.

A moderate bug that only affects a small number of players, but has a huge overhead in development time, is sometimes prioritized lower than a moderate feature that affects a large number of players and can be implemented in less time. This doesn't mean they don't care about it, it means they have a limited amount of time, and have to prioritize it as best they can. Sometimes features take priority over bugs, sometimes the reverse. It is a balancing act that is never gotten quite right. Sometimes you predict something will be a quick fix, and it isn't, and sometimes you predict something will be very hard, and it is easy. It is a never ending game of re-adjusting expectations to fit the reality of the situation..

By the developer response (which again appears to be in response to the op argument that there shouldn't be an animation lock, not the actual problem as I tried to lay it out) it appears that in this case they perceive it as a minor or non-bug, that effects very few people substantially, and thus is going to be a much lower priority because there are so many other things to do. However, locking the icons based on a global animation lock, may be something that they are willing to do, and from a development standpoint, could be something more easily prioritized

While I do not know how they implemented it, given my experience it would be far far simpler to implement a global animation icon lock, then change the animation lock behaviour itself as people desire. Thus why I say, it would be more productive to try and consider alternative ways to improve the situation. Assuming they simply don't care and will stamp anything as "won't fix" or "not a bug", is not really productive to determining if there is a workable way to improve the situation for those who find it detrimental to their game play.

It is quite possible that the developers never ran across this situation as you have, because they knew the system so well they never triggered it. This is a common developer problem. So claiming the entire system is bad design, doesn't take into account that perhaps when used as intended, there isn't an issue, in which case the problem isn't engine, but UI. There is a distinction between bad design, and design that doesn't take into account those who won't play the system as intended (though sometimes they can be one and the same of course). Overall this does appear to be a problem SE has had with this game, that is not predicting the ways in which players would use the system differently than intended, though again it could be much of it is simply lack of time to do things right.

Just trying to help keep things civil and help people look at things clearly. I have been in multiple sides of this kind of situation at different times (design, planning, development, support, customer.. by far I prefer being customer. and luckily I have avoided PR and PM), so I find that the biggest problem is people not being able maintain perspective and lacking empathy, and thus compromising the ability to look at things objectively. On the one side you get "everything is perfect there is never anything wrong because I like this game as it is", and on the other you "everything is terrible about this game the developers are horrible because it doesn't work the way I want" both sides are skewed and need balance. And while it is hard sometimes, the best way to keep balance is to try and step back and consider "why?", then "what can be done to improve things?" Not only in terms of the game design, but other peoples opinions on the game design. I find the best stance is to try and understand the other persons perspective, even if I don't agree with it myself. Sometimes you might find that another person is in the right and you are in the wrong, or maybe that both of you are in the wrong and that the right solution is something else neither saw because you were both so caught up in your own vision.

I guarantee the developers would far rather (and be more open to) civil discussion and considerations for ways to improve things over time, as opposed to never ending arguments about why the system as is doesn't work the way you want and needs to be fixed right now or is perfect as is and everyone who disagrees should just leave.

Right. Done for now! Just my opinion.