Skill based fights..

[Shurrikhan]

Please don't understand that remark as me saying: No FFXIV:ARR is perfect the way it is. It is not. I'd love to have some of the stuff mentioned in this thread and I really hope that with the coming updates and addons we will get that sort of stuff. But how skill based can they go for if the current "easy mode" can't be completed by a large amount of the playerbase?

Sometimes even being stupidly simple or, in ARR's case, scripted, can still be challenging in that it just doesn't meet the attention or playstyle of some. Moreover, the punishment of scripted fights, par for their course, is fairly strict.

That said, even at endgame, it does feel like we're playing with about the complexity of most MMO's half-game. We use dodge, add (kill order), and swap-mechanics, and... that's about it. There's little kiting, little defensive potential from dps classes, and relatively little class interplay except at a dull, unreactive, and/or compositional level. Even from a general aesthetic standpoint, the animations of large-scale battle in ARR, perhaps largely due to a lack of projectile or casts-in-movement animations, tend not to look as appealing as in other MMOs, such as WoW (though particular examples may be no better). It feels more like a melee mass and scattered or clumped ranged, with no artwork of casts or shots bridging or enwrapping the two. Boss movement and animation as well looks traditionally clunky or worse. In that field, ARR stands, but does nothing more. It has visibly learned nothing, and innovated nothing. And the sad thing is that there are already lively, and even FF-specific, concepts available to move us into something new.

For such to happen though, combat itself will likely need to be fundamentally revised. And that's not just about making available more to combat than just combo-cycling, but also allowing every player in a fight to more interestingly influence interplayable factors through underlying mechanics. AI improvements would also likely be important.