~Poll~ Longer fights <Do you want it?>

[Alhanelem]

No aiming for the head/bodypart is not a "Intricate" tactic either.

Anything that breaks from continuously repeating the same action with no others in between is adding intricacy. I will not accept your arbitrary "doesn't count as intricate" rules. The incapcaitation system is an intricacy, as is the combo system, as will be battle regimens if/when they come back. None of these things require a certain amount of time to pass to be utilized. We already have enemies (e.g. bombs, cactuar) that have a significant consequence for allowing them to live too long. Mechanics like this allow short fights to be interesting.

Most of the problems with combat in this game come from
1) the lack of primarily-enfeebling type actions
2) lack of sophistication in enemy actions. With the exception of boss fights and instanced raids, few enemies have any variability in their behavior and are all extremely predictable, so even in the worst case situation you know what's going to happen.
3) lack of probability in complications to the player's actions. While original accuracy and resistance rates were really bad, it feels like things may have been taken too far to the other end of the spectrum. There is rarely a case where you have to choose anything other than your universally most powerful action because you can always count on it working.

None of these problems with combat have anything to do with fight length. The only point at which fights are "too short" is if you are literally one/two shotting enemies of comparable level. I don't know, maybe super triple melded people are doing that? I know I can't. It usually might take me three spells plus some abilities to take out a ~50 monster? Which isn't much different from FFXI- the only real difference with XI is the amount of time spent auto-attacking or waiting between actions.

Depth of combat != length of combat. You don't need to spend minutes per monster battling common enemies to have combat system with reasonable depth.

I'd love to hear your ideas on making fights more interesting. I don't want to hear your ideas on making fights longer, because making fights longer doesn't make them automatically better.

Take games like the kind where we stuff little critters into balls and make them fight eachother- where battles can sometimes be decided in a single turn, and other times can take dozens of turns. The combat system for those games seem simplistic, but is intricate for the sheer variety of moves available in the game (something that is being limited by this game's engine right now, as I understand it) and number of factors you have to consider (such as type). There is a significant crowd of people that play it competitively as a result- battles can sometimes last a long time, and sometimes be very short.

(There are a few things in FFXIV, such as differences between monster types, that were dumbed down to make experiences more consistent, and this does represent an area where I think things took a direction they shouldn't have)

[note; above section vague-ified to not sound like an advertisement]

TL;DR: advocate for better combat, not for arbitrary durations of combat.

[Arcell]

TL;DR: advocate for better combat, not for arbitrary durations of combat.

Agreed. While the fights would have to last a little longer for them to make better use of the existing systems, they don't need to be obnoxiously long simply for the sake of being long. I'd personally like to see further use of the Incapacitation system in a meaningful way.