2.0 battle system will depend on rotations like in WOW?

[Antipika]

MMOs where you just spam skills suck and suck hard. There is nothing fun about clicking every skill you have as fast as possible. I don't know what the hell SE is thinking with the universal cooldowns.. Did they not play SWTOR? That battle system is total crap.

So friggin sick of this Dev team repeatedly trying to fix things that are not broken.

Did you ever play at a high level in those "so called MMO"? Maintaining a rotation != spamming skills. But if you only know XI and XIV, this concept may be a bit harder to understand.

On top of having an order to execute spells/abilities, like A > B > C > A > D... You also have a priority order list to follow. A/B/C/D may be the four "damage" abilities you will use the most, on top of that you will have other things to manage. Like refreshing DoTs, refreshing Buffs, etc.

This can become extremely complex because of procs that doesn't occur in a steady manner (i.e. : X% chance of your next cast to be instant). And also because of battle mechanics that will force you to skip certain spells and will disrupt you in your rotation.

Here is an example of a 32 seconds rotation in Rift, for a Mage DPS. You don't know the spell names/abbreviations, but it doesn't mater.

[FB, (IC), CD, ^SV, Def, ^DT] (/IC) <2s> VB
[FB, (IC), CD, ^SV] (/IC) <4s> VB
[FB, (SL:D), CD, SV, Def,^ DT] <3s>
[FB, CD, ^ SV] VB <4s>

(IC) (/IC) is an ability that consume charge over time (see it like if you were depleting your TP in XIV, gradually over time). When it's on, you do more damage. Since the supply of charge is limited, you have to keep activating/deactivating it only at specific part of your rotation to maximize DPS.

The rotation is so complex that DPS between two mages, having the exact same gear can vary by up to 30%, and that's on a battle dummy (so with no external factor disturbing them). This is a typical example where skill > gear. Someone with gear that's 1 tier lower could out-parse someone with better gear.

Maintaining a perfect rotation in a "real" situation (in raid) will be even more trickier. Only experienced players who know an encounter perfectly well can maintain a high DPS.

Last time I checked, current XIV "rotations" (hard to even use that word for XIV) are extremely easy to follow and the gap between two players, with the same gear, if we had battle dummy, would be non significant. We do rotate spells in XIV not because we want to, because we need to due to high CD.

[Ryans]

Last time I checked, current XIV "rotations" (hard to even use that word for XIV) are extremely easy to follow and the gap between two players, with the same gear, if we had battle dummy, would be non significant. We do rotate spells in XIV not because we want to, because we need to due to high CD.

The reason it isn't called a rotation in FFXIV, aside from blm because of how stupidly easy it is, is because the encounters are more about timing of abilities rather than rotating your combos. Take Garuda for example, as a dragoon you can do chaos thrust combo in the first 10%, time ring of talons combo for plumes, and then dread spike combo Garuda before she ports again. When she summons more plumes, you leg sweep and then chaos thrust combo Garuda and probably stop damage at that point and finish off plumes. If you weren't timing your weaponskills to land at the correct time, you wouldn't have that ability ready the next time you needed it.

My point is, I suppose you can call that a rotation, but the fact that you wait almost 30 seconds before hitting the same button makes it very atypical to the common definition of MMO rotations. It certainly isn't a spamfest, by any measure.

As for the part about the dummy, FFXIV has been more about your skill than your gear for the entirety of its endgame existence. It hasn't been about how many weaponskills you can use in a 30 second window, its been about timing those weaponskills to have the maximum effect for the specific boss because of the long CD.

The only thing SE needs to do to fix the current combat system is make a responsive server so that more complicated boss fights will be possible for the majority of active endgame players.

[Kiote]

Did you ever play at a high level in those "so called MMO"? Maintaining a rotation != spamming skills. But if you only know XI and XIV, this concept may be a bit harder to understand.

For starters, I've probably played more MMOs through Endgame than you can name. It's my Job. More importantly, if you want to convince someone that the way you like things is better, you should probably not start out by being a complete bitch.

On top of having an order to execute spells/abilities, like A > B > C > A > D... You also have a priority order list to follow. A/B/C/D may be the four "damage" abilities you will use the most, on top of that you will have other things to manage. Like refreshing DoTs, refreshing Buffs, etc.

This can become extremely complex because of procs that doesn't occur in a steady manner (i.e. : X% chance of your next cast to be instant). And also because of battle mechanics that will force you to skip certain spells and will disrupt you in your rotation.

Here is an example of a 32 seconds rotation in Rift, for a Mage DPS. You don't know the spell names/abbreviations, but it doesn't mater.

(IC) (/IC) is an ability that consume charge over time (see it like if you were depleting your TP in XIV, gradually over time). When it's on, you do more damage. Since the supply of charge is limited, you have to keep activating/deactivating it only at specific part of your rotation to maximize DPS.

The rotation is so complex that DPS between two mages, having the exact same gear can vary by up to 30%, and that's on a battle dummy (so with no external factor disturbing them). This is a typical example where skill > gear. Someone with gear that's 1 tier lower could out-parse someone with better gear.

Maintaining a perfect rotation in a "real" situation (in raid) will be even more trickier. Only experienced players who know an encounter perfectly well can maintain a high DPS.

No matter how overly complicated you want to go out of your way to make it sound, there is not currently, nor will there ever be, anything difficult about clicking a series of buttons in a specific pattern with a mouse as fast as possible. The simple fact of the matter is, that is just repetition. Anyone can do it and in systems set up for it, it never changes.

You can claim your Elite status all you want, but I'll take actual Strategic combat over Mindless Repetitive Rapid Clicking any day.

[Antipika]

blablabla

Stay bad, keep spamming

[Shurrikhan]

No matter how overly complicated you want to go out of your way to make it sound, there is not currently, nor will there ever be, anything difficult about clicking a series of buttons in a specific pattern with a mouse as fast as possible. The simple fact of the matter is, that is just repetition. Anyone can do it and in systems set up for it, it never changes.

You can claim your Elite status all you want, but I'll take actual Strategic combat over Mindless Repetitive Rapid Clicking any day.

I'm having trouble believing that you read her post at all with that response. She just said that the rotation is what you do whilst spamming. Yes, within a couple weeks at most of playing a game, clicking the next button within a single global cooldown is going to be cake, no matter the distance between them. (Not that you'd have to use mouse for this...) Her point was the strategy and the arrangement of those immediately accessible elements is what makes the difference, and that the difference is often larger as those skills become more accessible, rather than being restricted by long cooldowns. In other words, the more choice, the less restriction, the large skill-gaps will often be, as long as the types and functions of abilities are at all diverse.

When you're restricted by XI-length cooldowns, there's not going to be much difference between players of the same gear, because their rotations are essentially clicking off CDs as they pop back up, with little prioritization in a long fight because there's little overlap. In those cases, the gap is usually shrunk, or it's based off a very small amount of crucial decisions -- stuff like saving every Howling Fist for Blindside, or using Keen Flurry on HF vs. something else, saving the HF for the Blindside line-up when using FoF. These decisions can make differences, but there are usually too few of them, or they entirely independent of the fight itself, and in either case they have enough reaction time that the speed of the player's decision-making isn't much of a factor. The result being, again, a smaller skill (read: result) gap.