A Big Failure in FFXIV Battle system - You're doing it wrong man!

[Rowyne]

Yeah, the battle system now is WAYYY to slow for me. I feel like I'm standing around most of the time waiting for TP so I can actually play the game a little. On MRD in 1.19 I could run up to a group of mobs, hit warmonger, gather them up and broadswing 3000tp, now it takes 30 seconds to get that. Combined with one AOE move for 3000tp with an 80 sec recast timer? Good thing it takes almost that long to get the tp back up 0-o.

^ Quoted for truth.

I truly hope that this is another transitional change within the grand design of the new battle system. But the fact that Yoshi-P asked us to judge whether or not the game was worthy of subs on 1.20 doesn't bode well and makes me think it's pretty much fleshed out.

1.20 has ruined melee combat, IMO. I pray the devs will rethink taking away all active non-TP based abilities. You have to have at least one or two things to jump into combat with, or battle feels slow and non-interactive while you do nothing but watch your auto-attack and wait.

Somehow battle is now even slower than FFXI. I didn't think that was possible.

[Sivara]

After reading through most of the thread, I was afraid to say something, but it looks like it might be safe to chime in.

I hate the battle system of 1.20. I've only tried it out as 30 MRD, but it's painfully slow, I have much less to work with, and while the first basic MRD combo is very easy to learn, I end up doing nothing but that combo over and over. It's boring. I can't get the second combo to work because of positioning issues. I duo with a THM friend or play with a small party of friends and I'm usually tanking or dispatching strays on my own as MRD, so most of the time the mob is facing me. I'm not looking forward to dealing with more positioning issues in a major fight like Ifrit.

In 1.19, I'd get 2-3 mobs, single-attack one, and conal AOE the others while my THM partner threw magic all over the place. It was a lot of fun and it really worked for us at least. We found challenges here and there and enjoyed overcoming them.

Now the battle system is so boring that I don't want to subscribe to the game. I'm thinking of suspending my account and waiting to see if future patches improve things. I'm trying to have faith in the devs because most of the previous changes have been good, but this patch has been extremely discouraging.

Combos, in theory, are good. I like the idea of chaining skills together for effects. I just wish they had implemented combos with the battle system of 1.19 or something.

[Betelgeuzah]

Somehow battle is now even slower than FFXI. I didn't think that was possible.

Battles in XI at level cap aren't even slow to begin with. And if you seriously implied that battles are slower than at low-midlevel in XI you are grossly underestimating XIV and overestimating XI.

I guess hyperbole is what makes the world go 'round.

[Gidonoidon_Sur]

My beef is that monsters die too fast. Make auto-attack faster, fine, but I think monsters need more HP. In parties in particular, I feel like you are lucky to get off an action before the monster is dead. There is zero strategy involved. I want to learn monster strengths/weaknesses, TP moves, etc. Not just spam a button or two and watch the exp pile up. No challenge, no fun!

[Estellios]

I think you are meant to split the party into units depending on how tough the enemies are. If your 8 person party is getting 4 enemies at a time from links have everyone split into groups of 2 to take down enemies. If the enemies are much higher level than you everyone ganging up on one or two seems to work ok. I was trio'ing with some LS members on my THM and I was taking care of any links since I could kill them pretty instantly and normally we would only get one link at a time.

[Gidonoidon_Sur]

I think you are meant to split the party into units depending on how tough the enemies are. If your 8 person party is getting 4 enemies at a time from links have everyone split into groups of 2 to take down enemies. If the enemies are much higher level than you everyone ganging up on one or two seems to work ok. I was trio'ing with some LS members on my THM and I was taking care of any links since I could kill them pretty instantly and normally we would only get one link at a time.

Thing that bums me out is, with the current monster groupings and respawn rates, but also no crowd control abilities, its almost like you need to have 8 person TP burn parties to successfully party. Small man parties are much more difficult to create and find manageable areas due to this. Seems the overall direction is TP burn to cap and that is when the game will really begin! Dungeons! Yay! Unfortunately most people won't understand the basic mechanics of the game because they zerged their way to the end....makes me sad.

Guess its my experiences with FFXI but I actually enjoy having challenging 'grinding' to cap.

sorry will stop ranting...

[Estellios]

Uh.. there are crowd control abilities. ARC has Shadowbind, THM gets Heavy and Bind from Blizzard/Blizzara, CNJ gets Heavy from Stonera. They're pretty damn reliable too, getting a bunch of adds in that 3 man group i was talking about i could Blizzara and bind landed literally 90% of the time. Stun moves can also be used to hold enemies in place too, Pounce stun lasts a good 10 seconds or so. Just gotta adapt and look at moves differently. Also making sure to keep moving while camping and staying against edges of spawn areas helps avoid respawns ganging up on you.

[Crux]

Solo Grinding is still boring as hell, so dont do it.

I agree, but the game as is pretty much forces a new player to do just this. There is no General chat, there is no level chat, there is no one talking in-game. Join a linkshell, well most random linkshells are just as bad with no one talking or grouping.

There aren't the social tools to build a community. If you could do leves while you lfg, that would be much better.
The way the game is now, it is very frustrating for a new player. The game seems dead because there are no chat channels.

I like the combos, it makes it a little better. The pace of combat was sped up once. They probably need to speed it up a little more. Just like sheathing/un-sheathing your weapon was sped up. Take out some animations, speed more animations up. There is things they can do, I don't believe that combat cannot be faster. Get creative.

[Bowen]

Aren't you always going to be spamming a button at some point in time? Oh, and for those of you who said that all you had to do was spam x in FFXIII, stop lying there are many times where you MUST select your own abilities. Try beating the to berries by just spamming x. :P

[Masamune1004]

If you could do leves while you lfg, that would be much better.

You can do this.