Auto attack: A complete battle system

[Vanguard319]

If you reread my OP, and read many others ideas for AA, you have an option to toggle it on/off. For reasons of not breaking crowd control, or by your example to use skills that buff attacks.

Now as a Archer you could start by engaging a mob you press 1 to start your Auto attack rounds. Once you get to a point where you want to use stacked TP skills or other abilities you press 1 again turn AA off use your buffed skills then press 1 to recommence AA.

Or alternately skills can be reworked to a point where AA won't effect buffed skills.
example:
Hawk's Eye: Your eyes gain hawk-like precision, increasing the accuracy of your next attack.
becomes
Hawk's Eye: Your eyes gain hawk-like precision, increasing the accuracy of your next ABILITY

Multishot: Nock an additional arrow for your next attack, up to a maximum of 3.
becomes
Multishot: Nock an additional arrow for your next ABILITY, up to a maximum of 3.

You make a good point, unfortunately there is a problem with your reasoning, and anyone with a well progressed archer should understand this counter-argument right away:

Multishot and Trifurcate ONLY affect light shot, they can't be used with other attacks or weapon skills. I even verified this for myself when I tried using them with close shot, and heavy shot, so that idea will not work the way you expect without major reworking of archer abilities. as for assigning buffs to work only with abilities, there may be times where an archer may wish to use a buff like hawkseye or raging strike with light shot, for example, at the beginning of a fight where the arc has no TP and has to hit a very evasive target. Your proposal would deny an arc that level of tactical flexibility.

If you are hopelessly hell-bent on getting an auto-attack feature, I would propose this:

give each player a universal ability that costs 0 AP and can be swapped with the default attack, and call it something like

Steady strike - pace your rate of attack to conserve stamina, while dealing constant damage, continues until ability is used again.

Essentially, it would be a looping default attack that only uses a certain amount of the stamina gauge at any time, as the amount of stamina decreases, the attack rate adjusts to allow the gauge to recover.

e.g. if stamina gauge is low, then the attack rate = slowest pace, and stamina recovery = highest rate.
if stamina gauge is high, then att rate = fast pace, and stamina recovery = slow pace.
if stamina gauge is full, then att rate and recovery are both equal.

in addition, make some minor adjustments to the stamina gauge, either abilities use slightly less stamina to function, the stamina gauge refills slightly faster, or possibly even both.

This I believe would satisfy the pro-auto people and thier insatiable need to not think, while giving the pro-manual people the free choice to choose thier strategy, This is a fair enough compromise, and it can be implemented without excessively altering the battle engine.

[ChiefCurrahee]

You make a good point, unfortunately there is a problem with your reasoning, and anyone with a well progressed archer should understand this counter-argument right away:

Multishot and Trifurcate ONLY affect light shot, they can't be used with other attacks or weapon skills. I even verified this for myself when I tried using them with close shot, and heavy shot, so that idea will not work the way you expect without major reworking of archer abilities. as for assigning buffs to work only with abilities, there may be times where an archer may wish to use a buff like hawkseye or raging strike with light shot, for example, at the beginning of a fight where the arc has no TP and has to hit a very evasive target. Your proposal would deny an arc that level of tactical flexibility.

If you are hopelessly hell-bent on getting an auto-attack feature, I would propose this:

give each player a universal ability that costs 0 AP and can be swapped with the default attack, and call it something like

Steady strike - pace your rate of attack to conserve stamina, while dealing constant damage, continues until ability is used again.

Essentially, it would be a looping default attack that only uses a certain amount of the stamina gauge at any time, as the amount of stamina decreases, the attack rate adjusts to allow the gauge to recover.

e.g. if stamina gauge is low, then the attack rate = slowest pace, and stamina recovery = highest rate.
if stamina gauge is high, then att rate = fast pace, and stamina recovery = slow pace.
if stamina gauge is full, then att rate and recovery are both equal.

in addition, make some minor adjustments to the stamina gauge, either abilities use slightly less stamina to function, the stamina gauge refills slightly faster, or possibly even both.

This I believe would satisfy the pro-auto people and thier insatiable need to not think, while giving the pro-manual people the free choice to choose thier strategy, This is a fair enough compromise, and it can be implemented without excessively altering the battle engine.

Lets pretend SE slapped on AA just for the sake of shitsandgiggles.

You see the mob you want to kill you draw your weapon. (you still haven't engaged it yet because you didn't press 1 to start your attacks) You use your buff skills: Multishot and Trifurcate you're now buffed up and ready to decimate the mobs face with your salvo of arrows. you press 1 you rain death from above with you "light shot" which also happens to be your AA, if you take no further actions your character will a few seconds later attack again with light shot.

Now lets say you're fighting a NM You take the above steps to open the fight. so you're AAing and using skills then "Multishot" and "Trifurcate" timers are up, you want to do some spike DMG. so you press 1 to disengage your AA buff up and press 1 again to continue.


Alternately you could be fighting that NM and the delay between auto attacks is ~3 seconds (one one thousand two one thousand three one thousand) your timers for Multishot and Trifurcate are up you can press a macro between AAs and buff up. (I suppose stacked skills x3 and if you have multiple you would want to turn AA off) But for single stacked skills this would work very well.

[Vanguard319]

Lets pretend SE slapped on AA just for the sake of shitsandgiggles.

You see the mob you want to kill you draw your weapon. (you still haven't engaged it yet because you didn't press 1 to start your attacks) You use your buff skills: Multishot and Trifurcate you're now buffed up and ready to decimate the mobs face with your salvo of arrows. you press 1 you rain death from above with you "light shot" which also happens to be your AA, if you take no further actions your character will a few seconds later attack again with light shot.

Now lets say you're fighting a NM You take the above steps to open the fight. so you're AAing and using skills then "Multishot" and "Trifurcate" timers are up, you want to do some spike DMG. so you press 1 to disengage your AA buff up and press 1 again to continue.


Alternately you could be fighting that NM and the delay between auto attacks is ~3 seconds (one one thousand two one thousand three one thousand) your timers for Multishot and Trifurcate are up you can press a macro between AAs and buff up. (I suppose stacked skills x3 and if you have multiple you would want to turn AA off) But for single stacked skills this would work very well.

*sigh* I shouldn't even give this the dignity of an answer, your counter-arguments are weak at worst, and they don't validate your argument that auto-attack is better than active-time battle. I even suggested a compromise, but it's clear you won't rest until I mindlessly agree with everything you say. So I'll say this intead:

Since the player poll showed active-time battle winning out over auto battle, even by a narrow margin, it is safe to say the they will not remove active battle. The most you can hope for is a toggle or programmable que.

[ChiefCurrahee]

*sigh* I shouldn't even give this the dignity of an answer, your counter-arguments are weak at worst, and they don't validate your argument that auto-attack is better than active-time battle. I even suggested a compromise, but it's clear you won't rest until I mindlessly agree with everything you say. So I'll say this intead:

Since the player poll showed active-time battle winning out over auto battle, even by a narrow margin, it is safe to say the they will not remove active battle. The most you can hope for is a toggle or programmable que.

What player poll?
THe only player polls that matter are the ones SE puts on the lodestone, and they never asked about preference ATB vs AA.
The devs are already thinking of implementing an AA, as stated in Yoshi Ps letter.

According to the official player polls "Spamming actions" is the 2nd biggest complaint of the battle system losing out to "Lack of class uniqueness." And only by 2.8% of the vote.

And No, I'm not trying to convince YOU that an AA is better then your "ATB". I'm concerned about the overall reception of FFXIV and how with the current UI, the current input methods and the future release of a console version, how Auto Attack can make this game more assessable and user friendly to new and returning players.

There were WAY more interested potential players who were turned off and left the game than are currently playing. I don't have numbers to back me up on this next statement but I'm willing to bet that a fairly significant amount of people who are currently playing are doing so in hopes of the game getting better. The fact is FFXIV lost 90% of it's initial buyers, even despite being F2P atm

People can stick around to a game with light content, that has an exciting combat system.
People can stick around a game with a shitty combat system, that has awesome content.

FFXIV has a shitty combat system and no content.

Why do you think Yoshi's dev team is tackling content and combat first?

Quote from Yoshi himself:
"In the spring you'll be getting that high-end dungeon and the first round of battle changes. Not everything, but the first round. You can't just change the rules overnight. There's a lot of stuff that has to change, especially with reassessing all of the attributes and actions of all the classes and rebalancing and adjusting stuff with the armory system. "

Sounds like a HUGE combat change is coming down the pipe.