Quote Originally Posted by nia_saeli View Post
Not everything has to be DPS DPS DPS
Yes, it does. Because that is literally the only thing in the entire game that is (loosely) in the hands of the players. Healing? It's done automatically, and damage is scripted with minimal variance. Mitigation? Once again, done automatically and *rigidly* scripted. DPS is the only thing that's left, and even there they've been taking away player interactivity with it by making rotations increasingly "automatic" and removing things that might cause variance like melee having to lose uptime for mechanics or lose positional bonus because of the boss hitbox being small, etc.

FFXIV's battle system is complete trash. Straight up. It's the result of having to make certain accommodations in design due to very low tickrate servers (you can't really afford to have mechanics or concepts that are based on reaction rather than memorization/proactive behavior) and... whatever the reason for Square-Enix's crusade against player choice and "you are allowed to make mistakes" since Shadowbringers might be called. I really don't think it's being hyperbolic to say that the current battle system is just garbage and that they pretty much need to do engage in a top-to-bottom rework of it; if not in 7.0 (they will probably have their hands full with the other engine changes/improvements they're working on), certainly in 8.0. WoW ran into the same problem after Wrath of the Lich King - Cataclysm was an attempt to save the old system, but it caused as many problems as it addressed, and with Mists of Pandaria they ripped the bandaid off and just started down the road of major reworks.

Endwalker is a very good example of the problems that crop up when you start taking off too much to try and simplify things. It's paradoxically made things much harder for disorganized/inexperienced groups and players (PF), despite the changes presumably being aimed at getting more of those players into savage raiding. I think it's possible to walk back some of the changes going into 7.0, but that's kicking the can down the road - they will eventually need to completely rework them if they want to give themselves more design space to work with.