What are your thoughts on FFXIV's combat?

[angienessyo]

My only beef with the combat is how a slight shift in my ping can cause me to bunny or the game to think I only pressed 1 button instead of 2 so my raiton became a shuriken.

[ThaCa]

It's pretty nice at level cap but really boring below. The jobs have been getting more and more same-y as more have been added, it's like there's a rule that everyone has to keep up damage buff or dot.

[Dzian]

You keep saying this but it doesn't look like you actually do any of the harder content?

The amount of harder content I do gets less and less each expansion. Numerous reasons as to why include the over-focus on simplicity and accessibility just making things boring enough that a good number of raiding friends just don't play anymore.
The removal of depth and engaging elements of the combat system.
The meaningfulness of the content itself, or lack there of.
The lack of a story to keep my interest. etc.

They will never recapture the magic that was Coil. Not only a solid story but a difficulty that made the story feel like it actually could have ended the world. Also, it was arguably the toughest raid series the game has ever had especially considering every raid tier since the devs keep lowering the bar and making them easier because of accessibility...

What made 1.23s combat so good? What, particularly, did you like? Building up TP to use big moves? Combat wasn't really all that engaging back then, it was really slow and rather boring.

To borrow something I said in another thread. You could liken the 1.23 combat system to a bowl of stew.. It's not one thing its a combination of many things.

The way TP worked in an earn it then spend it fashion.
The way combos worked in that they took a hint of skill and choice to execute. If you missed the positional on a Dragon Kick you lost the whole combo. What this meant was that landing it successfully felt rewarding.. In XIV you wouldnt even notice if you missed one.
The incapacitation system showed a lot of room for promise and growth adding real choice to your actions.
The overall feel of skills. When you pressed a button in 1.23 they had weight they had impact, even in the animations. You kicked a boss the boss felt it.. Instead of you kicked the boss but the boss didn't even notice.
The diversity between jobs. every job had strengths and weaknesses and felt unique.
The diversity in bosses in 1.23 where bosses actually felt different.. boss A would be super tough and resilient, they would hit you hard but slow.. Boss B might not hit you quite so hard but they would hit you fast and while they may have been squishier they were also agile.. Boss C might hit you just as hard and fast as B but be more armoured and less agile.. they all felt different. and indeed in many cases required a different approach even in terms of gear choices.
Gear choices. stats that mattered or made a difference. do you go MND on your WHM and focus on stronger heals.. or do you go VIT and go for stronger buffs,, do your DPS go STR for super hurt or ATT to be able to penetrate that tough bosses armour.. or even accuracy just to be able to hit it.. as well as interesting sub stats. the way certain gear granted enhancements to certain skills.

While any one of these ingrediants alone may, or not be amazing. The way they were mixed together made for what I believe to be a much tastier and more delicious stew than anything ARR has done since.

By contrast, the ARR Stew has been taking all of its ingredients away,
TP / resource management,
buffs
debuffs,
emnity,
crowd control.
stances..
jobs identity has been stripped away. they all feel the same.
Gear is boring.. 95% of the time if not more.. highest item level wins regardless of stats.
Every boss feels the exact same to fight.. Your biggest badest hit on whatever job your on hits for about the same damage against a level 90 god as it does a level 1 bug. (another reason I find raiding less fun. Bosses are just super inflated hp pools nothing more.)

Again 1 of these ingrediants alone may not amount for much.
For example there's a thread do we miss aggro? On its own, not so much.. However aggro or emnity was just one ingrediant in what was ARRs stew.. And with so many ingrediants removed.. XIVS combat is now just a bowl of water. quite tasteless and very lacking.

TLDR. it's not just one thing, but the way many things meshed together that made 1.23 combat feel superior. at least imo.

[ameliaw]

I don't like it much, I'd rather play another mmo combat wise and I'm considering picking a secondary game because of that.
I play at 200 ping which doesn't help, but I just don't like how classes "feel" much.

[Asako]

My only beef with the combat is how a slight shift in my ping can cause me to bunny or the game to think I only pressed 1 button instead of 2 so my raiton became a shuriken.

It would be nice if when you hit a jutsu it faded out so you cant hit it twice or change the job meter to show what has been pressed in sequence so far

[AmiableApkallu]

I think FFXIV combat suffers from too much predictability and a lack of on-the-fly decision making.

Every run of a particular dungeon is the same trash packs with the same walls, so even the rare instance where you're rewarded for interrupting or DPSing down a particular mob first rather than blindly AoEing becomes rote. Every run of a particular boss is the same mechanics in the same order. There aren't enough "gimicks" and "gotchas" to keep dungeons and bosses from running together (maybe high-end content is the exception?).

Compared to earlier FF games, the single Attack/Fight command has become 1-2-3-x-y-z on repeat, which feels just as boring to me. We've picked up the need to move about the arena, but you can plant yourself in one place for long stretches of time, so again, it's not so different from an era where the party stood on one side of the screen and the enemy stood on the opposite side. We've lost quite a bit of unpredictability and variance in how damage goes out, which is ultimately the source of FFXIV healers' woes. We've lost blunt vs. piercing, elemental affinities, and the like, which I suppose makes it easier to balance jobs to all be "viable," but turns fire/ice/stone/aero/thunder/… into a flavor text instead of something to make a decision over or something that the party needs to compensate for.

In terms of job design, I sometimes wonder what jobs would look like if we reduced their kits to FFIV or FFVI style action menus: what would each job's one unique entry be? How strongly does the FFXIV kit lean into that one unique entry?

[vetch]

I still prefer with 1.23 had.

ARR and current combat is just to spammy and lacks weight or real choice / decisions. It's just the same base rotation fight in fight out. And the strategy for every boss is essentially the same..

Outside if maybe a few ground telegraph's or something bosses are basically just giant striking dummies for you to flail away at..

Makes no difference is the boss is a big dragon or giant robot the strategy and rotation is always the same..

So etimes I wonder if that's why so many people are so bad. Because when it's so bland and lifeless there's no engagement in it so just mash keys rather than actually engage with and make choices.

Yeah, for me it's this. All the non-healer jobs feel slightly tedious to play because there aren't any impactful decisions to make, you're just given a bunch of skills plates and your only task is to keep them all spinning so you do as much damage as possible.

"an add spawned"

"oh crap, what do I do? stun it? kite it? CC it? drag it away from the group and sacrifice myself?"

"wait for the OT to touch it once and then spin your plates at it until it dies"

repeat ad infinitum

Tanking is still fun for me in ARR content because not only do bosses hit proportionately harder relative to your max HP, you'll occasionally run into a boss that requires you to do positioning and think about how to get DPS the most uptime while keeping things under control. But as you level up you get so many plates to spin even as a tank that the bosses start to position themselves because if you ever had to move out of optimal plate-spinning range, 3 out of 4 tanks would have their plate-spinning rotation fall into shambles.

And healers are of course tedious for a different reason.

[Striker44]

I very much enjoy the combat in FFXIV. There's enough oGCD abilities to keep things flowing, and there's still a rhythm to the GCD even if it's a bit slower than in other games. Only annoying part on that front is the lower levels when you don't actually have those oGCD abilities yet to fill the gaps.

But overall, I like combat here. The fight design is fun for me, too. I like that many of the raids in particular feature a set of moves that you can memorize, but where the specific ones used each time are randomly chosen, so it's not mindless. You still need to pay attention to some kind of cue, think on your feet, and react appropriately.

And for the obligatory healing comment - I like healing in FFXIV. Yes, the DPS part of it is usually one DoT and then spamming one ability. I don't mind that. Because I don't play a healer to DPS. I still do DPS, but it's not why I play the role, so I don't mind that part being simple. I like the different feel between some of the healers (e.g. WHM's big single-target heals vs. SCH's shields and AoE heals). I haven't yet had the desire to get into Savage or Ultimate fights, so virtually all of my healing is done either in DF or with my FC, which is a casual/social group. Meaning my group experiences usually involve me needing to do quite a bit of healing, and I enjoy it.

[Xaruko_Nexume]

It's a symptom of a bigger problem. Healers are barely functional fundamentally. They are designed to deal damage a lot more often than they heal. But then don't get an actual damage rotation. No job should have to mash 1 button 90% of the time.

Weird, cause I have a lot of fun on all my healers.

[Supersnow845]

Weird, cause I have a lot of fun on all my healers.

Fun and design flaws are not independent, I still enjoy running expert on SCH more than any other class but I fully acknowledge it’s a highly flawed class because of the way healers do damage compared to healing, it would work better if you spent 90% of the time healing but you really don’t need anywhere near that level of healing in any content