Combat system is beyond saving.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Well, you won't find me calling BG3 an mmorpg but it does prove that that kind of gameplay and game design is still very much revelant.
The issue is no major or even minor mmorpg has tried to replicate it as an mmorpg unfortunately.

Game designers have this belief that people don't have patience for more tactical gameplay; again BG3 proved them wrong.

I don't think it'd make for a good MMO though. Imagine waiting for 24 people to take turns.

[Rekh]

I don't think it'd make for a good MMO though. Imagine waiting for 24 people to take turns.

XI, X-2, and XII already invalidate your bad faith example. Those 3 games are BG3 but in real time; of course they'd use real time turns-taking for an mmorpg.

[KisaiTenshi]

I don't think it'd make for a good MMO though. Imagine waiting for 24 people to take turns.

You don't wait for 24 people to take turns, you wait for 24 people to telegraph what they want to do, and the server executes all the turns in order of agility/dexterity at once.

In a 2-4 player game you can "wait", because you're only really waiting seconds. Final Fantasy has never been a Tactical RPG, and FF1-5 didn't have ATB (that was introduced in 6) up to that point they were based on the player's internal "speed/dex" values, so a character with higher dex would be able to hit twice as often, but maybe not twice as hard. Meanwhile a fighter/knight/tank-type character is slower, but if they defending or drawing enmity (no FF game actually does in the way other RPG's do) they can be more effective at defending if they are slower. A DPS that has a heavy weapon, can hit twice as hard, but their dex will be lower, so they don't hit as often. The amount of damage both do is essentially the same, but the amount of critical damage the heavy hitter can do is much higher, where as the fast hitter is more likely to hit a crit, but not twice.

Overall, no MMO has tried to go back to the Ultima Online/Everquest model because of reasons that still permetate the MMO landscape today:
1. Cheaters/Botters/RMT
2. AFK/Server Capacity
If there are too many people in the game doing "non-productive" game activity while hogging server capacity, then the game just asphyxiates.

I'd love there to be giant world bosses, but we basically only get FATE's that people can cheese solo. (Blue Mage basically makes all ARR FATES over in one second.) Nobody needs to call for help, no FC has to get the gang together when the boss spawns. Even the "Hunt"'s are super cheesed, if you spot a hunt target, you just kill it, even if you don't have the hunt mark for it. Cause it doesn't look like a rare monster, it just looks out of place. What people should be doing, and what developers think players should be doing become farther and farther apart as time goes on. Which makes old content (particularly the relic weapons) pointless unless you want to collect everything. And the developers don't even want us doing that, because otherwise we would be able to stick every piece of gear collected into the glamor dresser as a "collection book" rather than having it limited to 800 pieces. Once you found it, you shouldn't need to "find it again" to glamor it.

Some of the silliest things I've had to do in this game is glamour the same gear over itself because it was the only gear at that level but I wanted it to be available on more than one jobs of various levels. That should not be a thing. If I want to run the dungeon 30 times to get a piece of gear, I shouldn't have to throw away all the other pieces "today" if I might want them tomorrow.

Likewise I'd like the game economy to actually function with proper gil sinks. If you are leveling you should either buy the NPC NQ gear, or HQ gear off the board, but the reality is that the HQ gear is often non-existant, and the tomes gear is pretty much good for the ENTIRE expansion, by which you can then get the next tomes gear. Once a crafter has leveled past that point, there's no reason to buy it except to desynth.

If combat is to be saved, then gear has to matter, and it pretty much doesn't except for glamour purposes and whatever is the highest end raid at the time.

[Shurrikhan]

You don't wait for 24 people to take turns, you wait for 24 people to telegraph what they want to do, and the server executes all the turns in order of agility/dexterity at once.

Which, as soon as you account for the fact that the more agile can lap others, is effectively what the GCD does now. You're just allowed oGCDs and positioning atop that.

If combat is to be saved, then gear has to matter, and it pretty much doesn't except for glamour purposes and whatever is the highest end raid at the time.

I'm struggling to think of any actually combat-focused experience that wasn't improved by capping or outright ignoring gear. Gear exists specifically as either a grind-wall for content or a difficulty slider moved via luck and/or money instead of a menu option, and generally through as haphazard of granules as possible.

Perhaps if gear-progression (too often synonymous with progression in general, imho) came through nonetheless enjoyable means other than those dependent on completing/clearing those core crafted experiences, I could see it, but otherwise it just means "Here, you finally learned how to do X. You are now free to do X a tiny bit worse while still succeeding."
That said, the last thing I want the gameplay I'm playing the game for to be barred instead by gil-grinds the moment-to-moment and overall gameplay of which has no appeal for me, such as in having to buy crafted gear repeatedly just to not "sandbag" my party while leveling. /shudder