My FC is going back to FFXI... FFXIV FAIL

[Lakshmana]

I exagerate a bit to make a point, but FFXIV battles are hard in the way a Contra level is hard. You have to memorize the pattern of the enemies and dodge a lot of stuff. This is NOT about RPG, tactics, strategy and character development. This is about dexterity, hand-eye coordination and lack of lag. It may very well be hard, but it's hard in a sense which doesn't please a big part of the players which were looking forward to devising strategies, not play an arcade.

A MMORPG should be about:
- "what party composition is best for a certain fight?"
- "we don't have the best party composition, but let's adapt our strategy based on what we have"
- adaptation and to some degree improvisation to what happens in the fight. Look at Titan EX. Does that leave any place to improvisation or a different strategy? 90% of the fight is about a group of 8 people synchro-dancing on a pre-remembered tune.

I want this game to succeed because it has a ton of potential in the way it's executed. It's beautiful, it has atmosphere, great looking characters, the combat has a nice feel to it. But they simply tilted the balance way too much towards the "arcade" side so to say of the game, in the detriment of the RPG/strategic/tactics part, oversimplifying the later. And this makes the game shallow and lacking any kind of difficulty in the RPG sense.

Fixing it simply involves giving WAY more uniqueness to the each job and make each best at a certain thing. Yes, for certain fights some jobs will be less than optimal, but that is really not a problem. Some people will level the optimal job, some will adapt their strategy around that, working with the rest of the party. It's what makes these games fun.

In fact, their plan of having the DD jobs equal in the sense that they are all acceptable in any scenario has failed. See the Ranged vs Melee dispute.