Auto attack: A complete battle system

[kukurumei]

There are quite a few more tactics involved than spamming 1 or 2 or whatever. I have learned that doing that only leaves me out of stamina for more important skills like Provoke, Sentinel, etc. Plus another good tactic to the current system is to start a battle regimen when you are nearly out of stamina, this lets your stamina bar's recover while others join the battle regimen.

Auto attack is unnecessary, Just adapt to the current system in place. It just needs improvements such as lag times and animation of attacks.

Way to put in some of the badly need tweaking skills... sentinel which takes half a bar and last for 10 seconds?

And a heavy stab 3x will do more damage and hate then provoke (though the provoke trait is non standard) does most of the time. Most of them falling under "auto attack".

You're not going to bring anyone to liking a system they're not liking like this, auto attack or no auto attack.

It's still "spam" trained spam is still spam. 111234 is spam. 234111345 is still spam. The sequence of unnecessary actions make the game a race to do as many action in as little time as possible. Throw in quick tactics for spice.

It is not, no matter how you explain it, selecting the best action for the situation. Sure we don't want to slow it down to a chess game, but no one wants to learn how to juggle, cook, and play chess at the same time.

Auto attack is a short cut to equalizing the playing field via stats. Like using a calculator on a math test. The material of the test is what's important, not the accuracy. Making a stupid mistake because you carried your 4 wrong doesn't mean you don't know the material, it just means you made a stupid mistake doing basic multiplication.

I'll reiterate how I think a system would take place.

All skills should be split into 3 types, auto-activate skills, Stamina skills, and TP skills.

Light/Heavy thrust, etc should be put under auto-activate skills You can even create a system where you can change skills on the fly in battle. Mages can get new skills like "charge" or defense for various effects, like MP recover or HP recover.

Stamina skills would be the bread and butter skills which would have a timer and stamina requirement, the "game changer skills"

TP skills would not be on stamina requirement but rather TP, almost like the FF11, which can also help the BR/SC situations and we again can ration them, not like now with the TP spam all over the place (FF11 before the TP nerf)

So the battle system should then be push back to only needing to watch stamina and cool downs, and occasionally tp, but very rarely do you have to constantly make attacks to be useful.

[Reika]

Sentinel lasts for more than 10 seconds... if you are a Gladiator or have Swordsmanship. Provoke is not a trait, and does not do damage.

Automated battle systems will only serve to aid botters and put people to sleep.

[kukurumei]

Sentinel lasts for more than 10 seconds... if you are a Gladiator or have Swordsmanship. Provoke is not a trait, and does not do damage.

Automated battle systems will only serve to aid botters and put people to sleep.

the traits as in properties...

and provoke is well behind heavy stabbing stuff currently.

And we already have botters(what's left of the community anyway) and people are already leaving. It's like trying to convince people would to skip town when everyone is on the road out already.

Not sure how an automated attack would help botters. Nothing differs pressing macro 1 every 10-seconds to a bot script. Heck bot scripts would be infinitely easy no matter what skills you stick in. WoW bots could beat you in a PvP, because they have close to zero lag time in cooldown management.

[Reika]

the traits as in properties...

and provoke is well behind heavy stabbing stuff currently.

And we already have botters(what's left of the community anyway) and people are already leaving. It's like trying to convince people would to skip town when everyone is on the road out already.

Not sure how an automated attack would help botters. Nothing differs pressing macro 1 every 10-seconds to a bot script. Heck bot scripts would be infinitely easy no matter what skills you stick in. WoW bots could beat you in a PvP, because they have close to zero lag time in cooldown management.

Heavy stab does not have as much Eminity gain as you would believe. Heavy Slash beats it, and costs as much stamina as Provoke, Sentinel, Aegis Boon, Deflection, Disorient, etc.

Why don't we just ask them to make this game just like WoW and Rift (both are exactly alike) since so many people have to bring up WoW all the time when comparing. Let us bring the entire immature player population over while they are at it. Make it a game all the lazy douche bags love to infest.

Lack of auto attack gives FFXIV a more into an action-based combat system other MMO's lack. To complain about spamming means to complain about every MMO every created. In WoW and Rift you spam instant skills with only a .5-1sec global cooldown and short cooldowns like 5 or 6 seconds, In Aion you spam chain skills, so on and so forth. In sense, they are still 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 2 (the current for Paladin, Rogue, Death Knight, blah blah). FFXIV just has you spamming in a way you wont do any damage unless you're awake.

[Linnear]

Sentinel lasts for more than 10 seconds... if you are a Gladiator or have Swordsmanship. Provoke is not a trait, and does not do damage.

Automated battle systems will only serve to aid botters and put people to sleep.

This is my favorite post on this thread as it is the only one that tries to explain why SE does not have an auto attack. I have tried to think of a solid reason for not having it and the anti bot/afk progression appears to be the only reason for it. You lose a lot of interesting game mechanics for not having one and gain very little for excluding it as far as I can see, other than making it harder to bot/afk. On this thread so far, I have seen people trying to figure out neat ways to implemlent an auto attack system and them being shot down without providing a reason for not having it other than the game is not that spammy without it. Personally I don't think that is a viable arguement as all it does is say that you can work withen the current system other then explain why the system is good. When you making a decision such as auto attack / not auto attack, you need to figure out what each one provides to the game experience and I don't see many +s for the current system.

All allusions to FFXI and comments about how an auto attack should be left to FFXI is a wast of forum space and time to read becuase it does not aruge the reason for it in FFXIV on any merit or metric. So if you want to reply to this post, please try to provide some detailed reason othar that my rotation is super cool and I don't spam go back to XI.

Ok, now that is said, my personal problem with the lack of auto attack is the reduction in weapon choices and advantages you get from different weapon types. I might be missing something but I really dislike the fact that as a Glad, my dagger action takes as much stamina as my sword...... this hurts my brain when I think about it and it takes something away form the game that I love in other games. I like the concept of weapon speeds and the stats attributed to them and such. I also like running around with 5 weapons in my inventory for various mobs and situations and scenarios. I do not want my decisison between a dagger and a sword to be which ever one is higher level..... I want sword A and sword B to have more differences than stats, I want weapon speeds! it may seem like a small change but personally I see it as a big loss.

Noone has mentioned this yet but gear alotments and the way that stats are assigned to gear is also uninteresting to me. In many games you can set your gear depending on what aspect of your character you want to focus. I don't see much of that in FFXIV, I will admit that SE needs to fix a LOT in the game before getting around to it, but at the moment I find the armoury system lacking. I want a decision in gear to be lose 10% auto attack for 5% in two abilities, but that does not seem to happen right now, once again I may be missing something, but without weapon speed this nuance appears to be lost.

In short, why is having no auto attack good?
Why is having an auto attack bad? other than to stop bots and afking.

I can see a couple of advantages in having one, please provide a counter arguement for not.

[kukurumei]

I still don't see how any attempt to stop bots can stem from auto attack. Bots scripts are fully capable of pressing 1 in conjunction with 2, 3, 4, and 5.

That's like saying I'll stop people stealing money by having my room at the end of the hallway instead of the beginning of the hallway.

[ChiefCurrahee]

though it's my opinion I feel that the benefits of an auto attack system far out way the cons presented in this thread.

aside from auto attack freeing up player input for the most basic of attacks, It can make way for gear player enhancements. Such as low damage weapons having higher rate of attack speed, like a previous post said.

On the line of defense people are taking on botters. They are already established in game. Adding auto attack will not bring more to the table but maybe give SE an easier time finding who is botting since they already have developed technology based around an auto attack system with FFXI.

The issues of UI navigation while using a game pad, just isn't functional or fun for that matter. Having to press left 4 times to get back to your "light stab" command to hold down right to get to your TP move, to press left twice to issue your "shield" command. It's fine for a fight or two, but play for an hour and you get tired. When the PS3 version is released I think if they stick with this battle system this will be the number one complaint.

For all intents and purposes we are in a second open beta phase. This is the time to try new systems, to go out on a limb and see if something works. The PS3 release is the 2nd chance for FFXIV that no other MMO will get. So lets be willing to try something out to see if it works instead of crashing and burning a 2nd time.

Edit:
They have made changes to the battle system since Alpha which was a GOOD thing. FFXIV's battle system was by in large inspired or copied from a game called White Knight Chronicles. A PS3 game which reviewers bashed the combat system for being slow (FFXIV alpha version) boring and tedious.
Now the difference between WKC and FFXIV is the speed. It's still boring and tedious.

Maybe we can take care of the tedious by having your basic attacks issued as Auto attacks, and then spice up the TP and skills to get rid of the boring.

[Linnear]

Thanks Chief good call, remove the boring spice up the combat system and try some new things beucase they do not have the player base to say this is a real game yet.

[sylvestew]

Why does it matter if they put auto attack in if they give you the option to turn it off

[OmegaNovaios]

Why does it matter if they put auto attack in if they give you the option to turn it off

So you don't disturb mobs that are being controlled with a crowd control effect such as sleep and don't have to disengage/turn your back to the mob like in FFXI.