Suggestion: Pre 50 GCD buff to solve the complaints

[Caurcas]

Imagine think sub 50 content is overwhelming when players have never had less skills than now in sub 50 content. Big brain, just deleted ARR and start new players in HW after a story summary. Why? Because ARR content is bad these days.

[Shurrikhan]

This is an example of identifying a concern and suggesting a solution that creates problems that are more numerous and severe than the original concern.

Do: maybe restructure when classes get their first couple oGCDs.

Do Not: make changes, especially level-based changes, to the GCD.

I'm with Equitable on this one.

That said, I'd also be cool with the 2.5s GCD being "base" in name only, and everyone having 10% towards each stat by default, up from the 5% only towards Crit. In that way the effective base GCD would be at least a slightly less absurdly long 2.25.

But... the larger problem here is simply that there's so little going on over the 1-50 experience, which could be solved by just having more to do such that the longer GCD feels fitting. We should, imo, have our first oGCD by level 12 or so (probably as low as level 8 for some), and ideally for that oGCD to be more than just fire-on-refresh.

:: On a similar note, bring back job-specific stuns and pacifies with attached potency and actually fix CC DR so there can be meaningful competing uses for skills instead of some of them being locked away as purely situational/bloat. Better that the occasional DPS uses his stun a little too soon to lower overall DPS given positionals or heals then required than for skills to be stripped away, pushed up in levels, or their button-space to become less efficient for their being simplified into purely situational use.

[lezard21]

Bad idea, people would inevitably perceive this quicker GCD as normal, as default. And then be pissed when suddenly it, from our perspective, normalizes and becomes slower. To them it would not be normal, to them it would be a baffling thing because they only experienced a quicker GCD.

Yep, pretty much this argument completely negates OP's suggestion.

I do agree that early game feels incredibly slow and boring. Specially for classes like Lancer and Rogue who only have 2 skills till level 30, and then become some of the most entertaining and unique jobs. The early classes are a really poor representation of what the job will evolve into.

Personally I think a better solution would be for new accounts/new characters to have a tutorial mission where they get to experience the class they pick as a level 50 job in a small area, for example, a flashback of the Battle of Cartenau.

TERA used to do this where upon starting a new character you played through a tutorial battle as a level 30 and then when that tutorial was over you began the game proper at level 1.

[Shurrikhan]

Players on higher latency are already disadvantaged when it comes to weaving with any complexity. I'd wonder if highlighting that shortcoming in the game's networking code before they were hooked would drive people away instead.

It's less a netcode issue than certain toggles. Our animation locks are only 600 ms and the game queues skill usage up to 500 ms in advance. As such, a player at under 250 ms ping should only require 1800 ms in order to triple weave. Except...

• XIV doesn't allow you to queue ground-based AoEs, which is exacerbated by XIV not allowing you to queue even the first command in a macro and thus to queue <t> skill macros.
• XIV doesn't allow you queue any but your first oGCD, making double-weaves and triple-weaves have disproportionately high uptime costs. (On the other hand, weaponskills that aren't on the GCD, such as HW-era Empyreal Arrow, did not have this problem. It's literally just a classification issue.)

The reason this shouldn't happen is because a lot of sprouts actually find the few buttons they have in ARR difficult to execute right. They can't do their 3-button combo, even with the GCD speed in ARR, especially with mechanics happening.

They could when they were given reason to. Heck, there was a time when it was relatively normal for melee/DoT comps to CC-focus target at 3 or fewer mobs because it was ultimately faster due to all the healer uptime that could then be put into offense. In the opening week, tankless comps were also common among premades because they'd clear most dungeons faster; same with healer-less comps until the Int/Mind split. All of that, even week 1, set more complex norms than what we have now...

[johnnylogen1337]

generally a bad idea imo, because it simply never feels good to have something cool taken away as you level up. i agree that the low level experience is terrible but this is not the solution. you can look to the world of warcraft legion into BFA expansion disaster, where they took away a lot of our legendary powers to the point where characters below a certain level were stronger than a fresh maxed character due to levelscaling.
obviously this is an issue due to a borrowed power system but the same principle applies. it feels like shit.

[Lanadra]

Yep, pretty much this argument completely negates OP's suggestion.

I do agree that early game feels incredibly slow and boring. Specially for classes like Lancer and Rogue who only have 2 skills till level 30, and then become some of the most entertaining and unique jobs. The early classes are a really poor representation of what the job will evolve into.

Personally I think a better solution would be for new accounts/new characters to have a tutorial mission where they get to experience the class they pick as a level 50 job in a small area, for example, a flashback of the Battle of Cartenau.

TERA used to do this where upon starting a new character you played through a tutorial battle as a level 30 and then when that tutorial was over you began the game proper at level 1.

Wait.. are you talking about that OG intro on the Island of Dawn? Where you fight alongside Elleon?