Now that leves will be gone from our main exp function...

[Physic]

Yep.

What's the point of adding supposedly cool content now, when all combat devolves into spamming random actions with almost no strategy or consequences? Dungeons, hamlet defenses, questing, whatever... all of those sort of assume that they players have to get together and do meaningful things in a party. Otherwise, they'll just be adding more snoozefest zerg fights in the game, except these now have a different name.

uhh battle only "devolved" into that when they made the cap lower than 10 levels. Back when they had large level difference groups, you needed dedicated healers, dps, and tanks, who were completely kitted for those roles. you couldnt spam random actions with no consequences, your dmg would suck and the monster would take forever to kill.

Imagine FFXI if you were forced to fight even match in 6 man groups, tanks would be useless, mages would get by with cheap cures with no cares, blm wouldnt get to nuke much, because stuff would die faster than they could cast an ancient magic.
oh wait it would seem to become a mindless spam fest and zerg fights.
It has nothing to do with battle and everything to do with the SP reward system, which wasnt the initial SP plan, soooo i dont think i could blame the original plans for that, it was the hastily added fixes that caused it. Back in the original SP system, good partying and not zerging was the best way to get SP, and you attacked monsters as high as you were able to kill at a decent speed.

A tank had to tank well, or people died, people had to dodge WS, or the mages had to cure it up and remove effects, DD needed to optomize their damage, guess what, spamming reg attacks is not the most damage. Using tp skills from your base class is the most damage. in fact, even better damage now, would be using small BR chains.

No battle system will be a non zerg fest versus monsters 1 person can solo its simple mathematics.

[Rydin]

uhh battle only "devolved" into that when they made the cap lower than 10 levels. Back when they had large level difference groups, you needed dedicated healers, dps, and tanks, who were completely kitted for those roles. you couldnt spam random actions with no consequences, your dmg would suck and the monster would take forever to kill.

Imagine FFXI if you were forced to fight even match in 6 man groups, tanks would be useless, mages would get by with cheap cures with no cares, blm wouldnt get to nuke much, because stuff would die faster than they could cast an ancient magic.
oh wait it would seem to become a mindless spam fest and zerg fights.
It has nothing to do with battle and everything to do with the SP reward system, which wasnt the initial SP plan, soooo i dont think i could blame the original plans for that, it was the hastily added fixes that caused it. Back in the original SP system, good partying and not zerging was the best way to get SP, and you attacked monsters as high as you were able to kill at a decent speed.

A tank had to tank well, or people died, people had to dodge WS, or the mages had to cure it up and remove effects, DD needed to optomize their damage, guess what, spamming reg attacks is not the most damage. Using tp skills from your base class is the most damage. in fact, even better damage now, would be using small BR chains.

No battle system will be a non zerg fest versus monsters 1 person can solo its simple mathematics.

I see your point
A zerg fest or tank and spank easy content wasn't the fault of the battle system so much as it was the MOBs
You can build MOBs that require skillful play under the only battle system

A Beast MOB with a tough outer... And you need to incap each part to do any real damage on it...
Incap moves don't do much damage (Because of the shell) so you need a really big BR to put enough damage on to break the shell
But incaps are tough if you can't build TP to do the weaponskills....
Siphon TP, Comrade in Arms and Invigorate help...
You use your Archers, Marauders and Pugilist to incap the headshell... Finally....
You have a choice.... everyone can attack from the front (And risk being hit by a massive AOE) or you can try to incap the sides or rear shells
Also Incapping the head (After the head shell has been incapped) will stop him from using that massive front AOE... so thats what you decide to do...
You could have also chose to incap the right shell and then the right arm underneath it to stop his physical counterattack but you decide to try to heal through it...

Challenging play isn't just in the battle system, you've just got to build interesting MOBs
Add some minions to that battle... give him a huge HP pool and you've got yourself a fight