AOE Spam Fest <Please remove it>

[Alhanelem]

That's what I've been doing, you seem to be the only one throwing this inane '300' sword hits around.

Well, FFXI must be inane then, because that's what happened in the early days of that game and yet it's what you seem to want. Or did you never XP in the dunes and run into people taking 3-4 minutes or more to kill a single crab? There was no strategy, it was just long because people were using crap weapons or weak nukes or whatever and the crabs just have high defense and the warriors were missing like 50% of the time.

I see a few people demanding "longer" fights, when what people should really be asking for is more elaborate fights. Complexity doesn't dictate length.

I really don't think FFXI's combat is particularly defective. Yeah, EXP parties aren't that interesting, but EXP grinding is rarely the selling point of a game. Except on bosses, FFXIV does not use massive enemy HP inflation to draw out fights unlike most MMOs. The best thing I think they could do short of yet another combat system from-the-ground-up revamp is add "elite" versions of mobs as some other games do, which are statistically set for a party of people at the same level as itself, rather than a single person of the same level of itself. These enemies would be typically found in open world dungeons and instance raids. I don't like stat inflation but it would be a reasonably effective way to address the issue.