More advanced battle system please!

[Mastanight]

First of all for example howcome shield, parry, sword fighting isn't more controlable? Players should have their own control and timing to block and attack enemies by their own reactions, is this not possible or not given purposely? (Parry then attack open area of target like a real fight, instead its more hacken slash and take the hit playability). Also i don't like where 1 player can cause a wipe to whole party or 1 player is in control of keeping another alive totally, like pld has healing for example but without a healer his cures don't compare at all. No matter how good you are we are still dependant and which feels if there is less control of my own character this could be made possible but fights would probably need to be made more difficult to balance out the change.

[Squrilruler]

You seem to be looking for a SINGLE PLAYER game... Maybe Skyrim or Dark Soul.

Or wait 10 years for VR tech.

[Sumimi]

Vindictus, Fiona.

You're asking for an Action RPG. FFXIV isn't really one.

[Xystic]

Vindictus, Fiona.

You're asking for an Action RPG. FFXIV isn't really one.

Goodness, I haven't heard about Vindictus in a long time.

[Mastanight]

No this battle system is more ancient and not much playability to it, also feels like half the time some other player is playing my character for me.

[Kasathar]

OP: So what you don't like about the game is..."team work"?

[Risvertasashi]

Vindictus, Fiona.

You're asking for an Action RPG. FFXIV isn't really one.

Personally I'm a fan of a team/party being required... although there are alternatives to the Holy Trinity that accomplish this, that's what the devs went with.

But mostly Sumimi nailed it. There are games that do this, XIV just isn't that kind of game... It's a design decision to not have active blocking and parry, and instead you rely on tactical, timed use of cooldowns. It's not for everyone.

[Mastanight]

Where is the group combo system also, it made fights more fun like in FF11

[Nutz]

Your first question is simple. Combat was purposely not designed that way because it's overly intricate and any latency greater than 100 ms or so would completely destroy it. When you're playing an MMO you're essentially streaming a game (at least parts of it) so when you want to parry a mob's attack, you'd have to hit the timing right, then the server would check it, then the server would send confirmation that it was right and the reaction would occur. This can happen quickly enough under ideal conditions, but any small hiccup would lead to missing blocks and parries frequently when it looked like it should have gone through. To combat this they'd have to make it more lenient, but then people would almost never miss them. It's better to have them occur based on math because it's easier to do, fair, and allows you to do things other than try to block/parry every single attack.

As to the second part. Well in team based combat what else would you expect? Healers heal, tanks tank, etc. If players weren't reliant on each other then why bother making group content? If they made all player characters more powerful to not rely on each other so much, but then made the fights harder to balance it out we'd be right back in the same spot but with bigger numbers (note that this actually is happening anyway).

EDIT: as to skill chain type combat mechanics: they were in v1.0 but eventually removed because they didn't work well. They worked on it a while but eventually decided not to re-implement them because they felt it was too much to do during combat. Given the pace of combat I think I agree, though perhaps they could create chains based on off-GCD skills that various classes have. Creating a combo between various classes' regular weapon skills (as it used to be, but combat was much slower) would do nothing more than sometimes create chains at random because people wouldn't be able to coordinate such things. Doing something like Howling Fist -> Dragonfire Dive = [some cool effect with additional damage] might be cool to have and add another layer to combat, but I haven't heard that they're considering anything like this.

[Risvertasashi]

Where is the group combo system also, it made fights more fun like in FF11

Now this I could get behind. Skill chains and MBs were, I thought, a pretty awesome way to work together. (In concept, I realize at times the system has had its... quirks.)