FFXIV ARR: Battle System Flaws

[reality_check]

There are a lot of good things about FFXIV ARR battle system. The stellar animations and faced paced tempo are just two of the many things that the team has done excellently.

I am disappointed, however, that in a year of FFXIV ARR updates there have been very little, if no significant changes to the battle system. Over the past year these are the things I've noticed:

1. (I don't want this thread to digress into this specific point because it's turned into a dead horse on these forums, but it wouldn't be doing this post justice if I didn't mention it quickly.)

There is still too much delay in the battle system. Sacred soil, provoking a monster, placing virus on a target, stoneskinning, position update mechanics for melee, the list goes on and on. The delay is brutal sometimes.

2. Resource Management In short, there is none. We have this pseudo-fake system of resource management with TP and MP. Play within the rules and there is no running out of your resource. Why is this an issue? If there's no challenge in managing your resources, challenging encounters have to "kill" you in other ways. If resource management were more difficult, encounters could afford to have less insta-gib-jumping-over-the-flaming-skipping-rope mechanics. Which brings me to my next point...

3. Difficult Encounters and the Fiery Skipping Rope Ever feel like when you enter a new encounter, you're relearning everything from scratch? Extreme Primals and Coil are the two big culprits for this one.

There is no intrinsic difficulty to FFXIV's combat system. Because of this, 100% of the difficulty has to lie within the encounter.

A party's success in difficult FFXIV encounters is about 10% gear, 10% knowing your role/job, and 80% learning the encounter mechanics. This makes new encounters stressful and frustrating. Yes, every encounter should be difficult and hopefully bring a new set of challenges. But the whole difficulty should not come from the encounter.

If the distribution to a party's success was more around the 40% player skill, 30% gear and 30% knowing the encounter, developers could make challenging content that didn't rely on almost completely on the Fiery Skipping Rope.



The vision of an MMORPG's combat system can change a lot over the course of its life span. FFXIV: ARR is still a very new MMORPG, and I'm sure that in future updates and expansions we'll see a reworking of the battle system. But, the current system seems to discourage a lot of people from trying the truly difficult and challenging encounters.

[Khalette]

I really love this game as a whole. The only thing that I absolutely despise about this game is system latency/delay/global cooldown this game has. It's just not twitchy, and I can't tell you how frustrating it is to have a game that is fairly new be years behind games that were coming out in 2004-2005. I think it's hilarious that I can have zero lag, but if bad things drop on the ground, I risk getting hit by it because there's positioning issues within the game.

I think Yoshi commented on this in the beginning of 2.0 and he said there were no plans to change it. I can't stress how clunky so many mechanics feel because of it, and I refuse to play a melee-based class because the 2.5 global is just painful.

All in all, great game. If there is room for improvement, your post hit it spot on.

[Tolmos]

I actually disagree with 2 and 3. I don't consider either of those to be a detractor.

For me, the game has continued to be interesting as I progress because each encounter is a new level of difficulty. In other MMOs, encounters get boring before they even release, since the difficulty lies in something outside that encounter and having the encounter itself be hard would just make it a pain, rather than fun. In this case, the system itself is relatively forgiving, while individual encounters are not.

What this means is that I need to learn each encounter on its own merits. I feel like a newbie all over again, every time... a feeling that I quickly lose in most MMOs, even after expansions release.

I agree entirely with #1, and while I understand where you are coming from for #2 and #3... I disagree completely.

[HeroSamson]

no thanks I like the battle system how it is right now.

party mechanics change I wont have a problem with it, though if battle mechanics change we have a problem.

[Seibah]

Every boss in the end game being a dance/pattern memorization is kind of silly. It's not like in old FF games you just lost to a boss over and over until you knew it's exact pattern and how to counter every attack.

Don't get me wrong, the game is challenging and a lot of fun, but something about memorizing every single move of an enemy with zero mistakes clashes with how I've enjoyed Final Fantasy or even Square RPGs in general for as long as I can remember.

I'm not saying randomizing everything is a great idea either. But I think gear should be able to carry you more than it does. That may sound like a "baddie" thing to say, but it seems silly to go from i90 to i110 and still get one shot by twisters or landslides or something. If you think of classic FF or Dragon Quest, whenever you got to a difficult boss, you would always grind some gear, change your jobs around, level up, build your party, etc. One shot dance mechanics make the game sorta lose that classic jrpg/ff feeling in my personal opinion.

[HeroSamson]

Every boss in the end game being a dance/pattern memorization is kind of silly.

well that battle mechanic can change the one where you know exactly whats coming up that I agree.

[Tupsi]

-Snip-

1. The delay isn't really that big when you think about it. Provoking is instant and the effect is instant as long as the person you're not voking off of does actions (to regain the hate you're putting yourself at the same level of.)

2. People said complexity of any kind is bad for MMORPGs, Yoshi listened to them.

3. To be fair this is good and bad because you should relearn as you enter new encounters - however it's a bit much simply because of auto kill mechanics more than anything. A lot of XI fights you could go in and do what you do normally but the boss tend to throw in loops that give them their own set of difficulties, for example Omega's Quad/Bipedal modes completely changing the fight without throwing in an annoying instant kill mechanic if he does like it would be in XIV.

[reality_check]

1. The delay isn't really that big when you think about it. Provoking is instant and the effect is instant as long as the person you're not voking off of does actions (to regain the hate you're putting yourself at the same level of.)

The action is instant and the enmity is instant because those are client based calculations that you see. The target of the target won't change for a second or two as it takes time for the server to process those.

[Eissels]

I agree with the battle system being a bit of a wash, but #2 I'm on the fence about and #3 I disagree with. Encounters SHOULD have the difficulty within the encounter; if the encounter's not the difficult part, and it's instead in the class you're playing, then it's back to the EQ1 style of combat; It's not a hard fight, but it's given false difficulty because you aren't provided with the tools you need. It's like doing a mini-golf course, except instead of putters they give you pool cues.

But as far as everything being server side, and the 2.5 second GCD, I agree. It makes combat feel slow, clunky, and sticky, and feels like something we would've had to put up with 15 years ago - not today.

[RazeLandale]

I'd say my biggest complaint about the combat system would be how useless most macros are. Like if I want to put physic and ruin on one macro so I can heal if my targets friendly and attack if it's not...well I *can* do it. But now that button's going to be clunky and unresponsive. And that goes for any macro with a ability on the gcd in it. So there's a lot of UI cluster when there doesn't need to be.

The blanket reasoning for it seems to be they don't want the macros playing the game for you. But if they don't want you to be able to do something with a macro don't allow it. Don't just make macros in general bad.