Auto attack: A complete battle system

[kukurumei]

I guess if they implement auto attack they might as well give us flashy skillchains like ffxi as mentioned above. Also Haste would be needed for Marauders.

Don't know about that, since we have no such thing as weapon speed. We just have a very unbalanced stamina usage right now.

All the battle systems are interconnected, there's never an easy way to explain one feature without another.

But Auto attack is just going to keep coming back. Cause no matter how much people endorse the current system...it sucks.

[Betelgeuzah]

But Auto attack is just going to keep coming back. Cause no matter how much people endorse the current system...it sucks.

Obviously the combat system will be changed in other, better, ways that actually make sense. Auto-attack should be a remnant of the past.

[Vanguard319]

Lets pretend SE slapped on AA just for the sake of shitsandgiggles.

You see the mob you want to kill you draw your weapon. (you still haven't engaged it yet because you didn't press 1 to start your attacks) You use your buff skills: Multishot and Trifurcate you're now buffed up and ready to decimate the mobs face with your salvo of arrows. you press 1 you rain death from above with you "light shot" which also happens to be your AA, if you take no further actions your character will a few seconds later attack again with light shot.

Now lets say you're fighting a NM You take the above steps to open the fight. so you're AAing and using skills then "Multishot" and "Trifurcate" timers are up, you want to do some spike DMG. so you press 1 to disengage your AA buff up and press 1 again to continue.


Alternately you could be fighting that NM and the delay between auto attacks is ~3 seconds (one one thousand two one thousand three one thousand) your timers for Multishot and Trifurcate are up you can press a macro between AAs and buff up. (I suppose stacked skills x3 and if you have multiple you would want to turn AA off) But for single stacked skills this would work very well.

*sigh* I shouldn't even give this the dignity of an answer, your counter-arguments are weak at worst, and they don't validate your argument that auto-attack is better than active-time battle. I even suggested a compromise, but it's clear you won't rest until I mindlessly agree with everything you say. So I'll say this intead:

Since the player poll showed active-time battle winning out over auto battle, even by a narrow margin, it is safe to say the they will not remove active battle. The most you can hope for is a toggle or programmable que.

[KeyserSoze]

I am 100% in favor of implementing the auto-attack function into the battle system.

One of the very first things I noticed about the current battle system is the constant spamming of abilities starting at rank 1. I didn't have that same feeling of accomplishment as I did in XI. When you started leveling a new job in XI, your options were VERY limited, many to the point of just auto-attack and a 2 hour ability available. I felt this made leveling up "that" much more rewarding.

At levels 10-20, you were thrown to the wolves in Valkurm, forming parties of six with still, very limited abilities. Players were forced to learn that combat system, or die. I think this punishing process made every good FFXI player into what they were, skill-wise. If you really think about it, it wasn't until level 30 where you finally felt you had enough abilities/spells to be a semi-bad ass.

One of the things I truly loved about FFXI was how hard and time-consuming it really was. If you dumb-down a FF MMO, of course it won't be successful. I believe if auto-attack is implemented, it can bring some of that feeling of accomplishment back. Maybe taking away some of the abilities wouldn't be a bad idea either. I want to feel as if I earned every ability.

The next big reason I think auto-attack can be great is it can open up more options and freedom for tactical combat. As the combat stands right now, there is very little, to no strategy involved with combat. This is more so with party combat, as soloing always requires some tactics.

If auto-attack is in place, combat speed can be slowed down and allow for some more party tactics including the battle positioning, which was supposed to have a huge role in combat. For an online game, slower combat just makes sense. Some lag will always be present, so slowing down the combat will give everyone a fair chance.

I just honestly see auto-attack opening up the combat system completely. As well as the entire experience of leveling up.

[Fieros]

I am 100% in favor of implementing the auto-attack function into the battle system.

One of the very first things I noticed about the current battle system is the constant spamming of abilities starting at rank 1. I didn't have that same feeling of accomplishment as I did in XI. When you started leveling a new job in XI, your options were VERY limited, many to the point of just auto-attack and a 2 hour ability available. I felt this made leveling up "that" much more rewarding.

At levels 10-20, you were thrown to the wolves in Valkurm, forming parties of six with still, very limited abilities. Players were forced to learn that combat system, or die. I think this punishing process made every good FFXI player into what they were, skill-wise. If you really think about it, it wasn't until level 30 where you finally felt you had enough abilities/spells to be a semi-bad ass.

One of the things I truly loved about FFXI was how hard and time-consuming it really was. If you dumb-down a FF MMO, of course it won't be successful. I believe if auto-attack is implemented, it can bring some of that feeling of accomplishment back. Maybe taking away some of the abilities wouldn't be a bad idea either. I want to feel as if I earned every ability.

The next big reason I think auto-attack can be great is it can open up more options and freedom for tactical combat. As the combat stands right now, there is very little, to no strategy involved with combat. This is more so with party combat, as soloing always requires some tactics.

If auto-attack is in place, combat speed can be slowed down and allow for some more party tactics including the battle positioning, which was supposed to have a huge role in combat. For an online game, slower combat just makes sense. Some lag will always be present, so slowing down the combat will give everyone a fair chance.

I just honestly see auto-attack opening up the combat system completely. As well as the entire experience of leveling up.

You have my vote.

[ChiefCurrahee]

*sigh* I shouldn't even give this the dignity of an answer, your counter-arguments are weak at worst, and they don't validate your argument that auto-attack is better than active-time battle. I even suggested a compromise, but it's clear you won't rest until I mindlessly agree with everything you say. So I'll say this intead:

Since the player poll showed active-time battle winning out over auto battle, even by a narrow margin, it is safe to say the they will not remove active battle. The most you can hope for is a toggle or programmable que.

What player poll?
THe only player polls that matter are the ones SE puts on the lodestone, and they never asked about preference ATB vs AA.
The devs are already thinking of implementing an AA, as stated in Yoshi Ps letter.

According to the official player polls "Spamming actions" is the 2nd biggest complaint of the battle system losing out to "Lack of class uniqueness." And only by 2.8% of the vote.

And No, I'm not trying to convince YOU that an AA is better then your "ATB". I'm concerned about the overall reception of FFXIV and how with the current UI, the current input methods and the future release of a console version, how Auto Attack can make this game more assessable and user friendly to new and returning players.

There were WAY more interested potential players who were turned off and left the game than are currently playing. I don't have numbers to back me up on this next statement but I'm willing to bet that a fairly significant amount of people who are currently playing are doing so in hopes of the game getting better. The fact is FFXIV lost 90% of it's initial buyers, even despite being F2P atm

People can stick around to a game with light content, that has an exciting combat system.
People can stick around a game with a shitty combat system, that has awesome content.

FFXIV has a shitty combat system and no content.

Why do you think Yoshi's dev team is tackling content and combat first?

Quote from Yoshi himself:
"In the spring you'll be getting that high-end dungeon and the first round of battle changes. Not everything, but the first round. You can't just change the rules overnight. There's a lot of stuff that has to change, especially with reassessing all of the attributes and actions of all the classes and rebalancing and adjusting stuff with the armory system. "

Sounds like a HUGE combat change is coming down the pipe.

[Vanguard319]

There's nothing wrong at all with the concept of active battle. It's only "shitty" because you think it is, instead you would rather ruin the combat system further for an outdated play style that was obselete years ago, and that the game itself wasn't designed around. Also, Yoshi-P didn't explicitly say that auto-attack was coming now did he? For all we know, He could be referring to adjustments to the armory system, or even the idea of instanced dungeons. Even if there is a major adjustment coming for the battle engine, it doesn't necessarily mean that your getting the dumbed down auto attack that you keep begging for. As for the current UI, it is a vast improvement over what we started out with, considering how awful it was on release. As for content, what do you call sidequests? The content being added will improve with continued feedback, hence why we have forums with dev tags. Sounds like you're now making assumpions that aa is gauranteed without any concrete evidence to back it up.

[Venat]

Auto-Attack is a must. If you want it to be more Active then you can add a small amount Damage/TP Bonus option when you time your attacks, like push X button on the xbox controler right when your charcter uses a Auto Attack and is right about to hit the enemy. When pushing it too earily or late u do less damage or gain less TP then letting it auto-attack itself.

Spaming attacks is very stressful on the hands and even your controler and keyboard. Abilitys themselfs are too quick of use or dont last long enough, this will cause problems for players when they add new abilitys and spells in the future.
Then the problem will be spaming too many Ability and Spell actions instead of Attacks.

When I play FF14 I pay way too much attention on the action menus then the actual game. Paying too much attention to everything is very tiring which can effect gameplay altogether.

I play FFXI and everything mainly is done in marcos and its more friendly used in FFXI then it is in FFXIV. I think FFXIV takes too much on screen attention like watching for Parry and Eva and Blocking actions followed by watching HP/MP/TP, other players, enemys, abilitys. These Moves that are required to be used right after a Parry,Block,Eva should be used Auto without putting in there input.

[Betelgeuzah]

Spaming attacks is very stressful on the hands and even your controler and keyboard.

Hello, and welcome to playing actual video games where that is required from you. I hope you can get over the culture shock.

[ChiefCurrahee]

Hello, and welcome to playing actual video games where that is required from you. I hope you can get over the culture shock.

Welcome to a video game where hundreds of thousands of players quit seemingly overnight. The lack of content, and the Battle System being the culprits for this one.

What would you say to this:

1,000 people are sticking around right now to see if SE puts in an AA If they Don't those 1,000 people leave.

1,000 people will leave if they do implement an AA.

of the several hundreds of thousands of players who quit maybe 5,000 are willing to come back with AA.

Of those hundreds of thousands of people who quit, how many will come back if the battle system stays the same?


FFXIV if effectively in a beta mode right now. This is the time to try things. For better or worse SE needs to bring players back into the fold. Player Polls show that people who play or played this game do not like the current battle system.

Betelgeuzah, you are in the minority when it comes to liking what we currently have.