Please Make this the Best MMO

[Kaedan]

Now I play FFXIV ARR on both a powerful PC with an incredibly good internet connection and the PS5 Pro, and previously on the PS4 normal and Pro. The game has always had a sort of "lag" when characters are running around on screen.

Not really sure what you're referring to here. Never seen anything like this unless I was running too many things at once on my comp.

When you are performing an action with a cast time and have to move, the body is in an animation lock during movement. It looks really bad, very immersion breaking, and I cannot believe they've never improved on this.

Unfortunately, that's something we're stuck with. It's a carry-over from 1.0 and something that's far too ingrained in the coding to be "fixed".

Example, the ninja's teleportation, why just two? It's very fun to teleport around in smoke, why are you limiting that?

Because of balance. They build Savage and Ultimate raids around what abilities can be used and how often. If you could suddenly have on-demand movement anywhere, that would be game-breaking.

As it stands playing a lvl 20ish dungeon as max level, for example, is punishing, highly unrewarding, because the abilities are removed. There has to be a better way to handle this that doesn't involve punishing the max level player.

This is the one thing I agree with you on. I think they should allow us to use our full kit in level sync, just sync our damage down appropriately.

The current travel system in the game is teleportation to an "atheryte". However in most FF games travel occurred using an airship, a boat, a vehicle. It seems like it would have been a bit more authentic to the game if travel actually happened using a vehicle around the world to "landing zones" but whatever, the atheryte is the decision they made and it's too late to change it.

It's been done in countless MMOs, and the vast majority of people hate being forced to manually travel. So they definitely need the teleport travel. If you want to travel manually though, you kind of can. There's a fishing boat you can take, and you can also turn off skip cutscene so you see the airship take off and land.

[Rohen]

Because of balance. They build Savage and Ultimate raids around what abilities can be used and how often. If you could suddenly have on-demand movement anywhere, that would be game-breaking.

Hi there, then it sounds like they need to rethink raids. An example take the WoW Mage, they can blink constantly and the only limiting factor is mana. Why can't we have that! If we have an ability that allows us to get out of trouble, then let us use it, it's why we chose the class in the first place right, because they have that one skill we really like ? It's their job to think of these game balancing solutions and not take the easy way out with just limiting actions and giving us limited character abilities.

[Titancleaver]

Hi there, then it sounds like they need to rethink raids. An example take the WoW Mage, they can blink constantly and the only limiting factor is mana. Why can't we have that! If we have an ability that allows us to get out of trouble, then let us use it, it's why we chose the class in the first place right, because they have that one skill we really like ? It's their job to think of these game balancing solutions and not take the easy way out with just limiting actions and giving us limited character abilities.

I don't know what WoW you're playing but Mages blink have always had a cooldown. I think it's 15 seconds right now. It's a bit more frequent than Ninjas yes but not "THEY CAN BLINK CONSTANTLY".

I honestly don't know what you think is a fun ability either tbh. It's not really clear at all at this point. As a WoW veteran since Vanilla I don't think WoW has had any fun abilities in a long time (maybe a few exceptions, Draught of Souls trinket on Warrior was fun in Legion).
Dragoon has a cool and fun kit. Black Mage has badass big monster slaying spells. Except for teleporting around unlimited (which wouldn't work in any game trying to maintain som balance) you've not said anything that would make FF14 abilities more "fun".

Limiting abilities also makes sense from a lore perspective, since you've been talking so much about immersion breaking, it wouldn't make sense if our characters could just do everything constantly. There's such a thing called fatigue. Doing your special move twice in a row might be too much for our hero and make them unable to assist for the remainder of the fight.

"Limiting actions and giving us limited character abilities" is literally what balancing means. Even if we removed ALL cooldowns on everything we'd just get a Stamina bar that if we used too many of our abilities we'd run out of. But I would be interested to see this magic solution you have.

[Rohen]

I don't know what WoW you're playing but Mages blink have always had a cooldown. I think it's 15 seconds right now. It's a bit more frequent than Ninjas yes but not "THEY CAN BLINK CONSTANTLY".

Ah ok I guess it's been a while but I guess back in the day I just felt I could teleport much more often. Regardless it's a heck of a lot more frequent than what abilities in FFXIV allow.

Fun abilities: Using WoW's mage as the example, blink, sheep, nova, group portals, conjuring and being able to trade something you conjured, really just all those CC abilities are incredibly fun to use both in a PvE and PvP setting. There are zero (or very few) CC abilities in the game at all...

Limiting abilities also makes sense from a lore perspective

Yes your point makes sense and even so they still feel incredibly restrictive. It obviously wouldn't be great to be an unlimited thing, but the long cooldown and limited number of uses just make the ability seem not that fun nor useful during fights.