Quote Originally Posted by Dzian View Post
In my experience at least this comes down to the disconnect between what you see happening and what really is happening... the game is nearly always lying to you. your standing in stupid but you dont get hit. you dodged the stupid but did get hit. because the damage was calculated and worked out sometimes 3 maybe even 4 seconds before you actually see the animation...
I agree, I like the snapshotting but it also leaves this kind of grey area sometimes. Like you said it's funny sometimes to see that you can stand in the actual effect/animation and not get hit depending on the timing. It can get tricky to adjust to the difference between the snapshot/cast bar/animation and the actual effect, at least for me. I think this also applies to some of the spells/actions that jobs have, where the delay in animation between pressing the button and having it take effect can make the combat feel unresponsive.

I think the long GCD contributes to this since the first time you hit a button the effect is instant (assuming no animation build-up), but then you have to wait a little bit to hit your next GCD action. This can be a nice rhythm/flow to get into, but it can also be frustrating at times when you just really want that action to trigger but you're moving too fast for the GCD. It feels like some actions get queued at certain points as well depending on when you press the button. When this combines with the animation delays for some abilities, I think that's what makes it feel unresponsive at times.

I've adjusted to this and I think it just takes getting used to, but I can see why others would dislike that.

Personally I don't mind the combat overall, but I do feel it could be more engaging and the jobs should have more room for decision-making. The job gauges could be played with to add more variety. For example as a red mage, maybe have more black than white could make the spells do more damage, but at a cost of lowering your HP. Maybe having more white would have your mana recharge faster and increase your casting speed. It could just be that some abilities would have additional effects depending on the balance of the gauge. Sure these kinds of things would introduce more balancing issues, but I think that really only matters for a very tiny minority of players who are competing for world firsts.

When the summoner revamp happened I was excited to see that the types of damage were mentioned as "wind-aspected" or "earth-aspected", etc. There are plenty of ways to add more things into the mix with that type of aspected damage. I'm sure every job could be adjusted to have more variety.