I wish FFXIV had WildStar's "telegraph" combat...

[Terin]

Obviously, this isn't a serious suggestion, because it would require fundamentally redesigning the entire game... but to be honest, the combat was one of the only saving graces to that game (the other being the Housing system... SO GOOD!).

Basically, the idea was that instead of targeting an enemy, and then your attacks being aimed that THAT SPECIFIC enemy, your attacks would basically fill a cone of some kind, hitting whatever is inside of the cone in front of you.

The biggest reason I loved that system is that, for a controller, it was really organic. Not that it's a HUGE problem in FFXIV or anything, but now and then I'll still catch myself being targeted on the wrong target, despite standing right next to it. It's mostly problematic when in Raids, as I wind up hiding my UI as much as possible.

And since I intend to start tanking with a Controller once the Dark Knight is available... Well, I pity the fools who wind up in my group :P

[Gyson]

Just to clear something up.. "telegraphs" in MMO combat are when the mob's attacks are "telegraphed", or made obvious, by markers on the ground (usually red). FFXIV already does this.

You're talking about an entirely different mechanic, which is basically the ability to swing your weapon without a target and deal damage to an area in front or around you. Which I agree is cool, but the wording in your title is a little confusing and you're likely to get some responses from people who don't bother to read the rest of your post.

[Fenral]

You can set the cross hotbar to hide itself except when you're holding L2 or R2. With the right mappings, it's like you're not using a hotbar at all.

[Dervy]

Won't work. You're talking about an Action-Based combat mechanic to be implemented into a traditional Tab-Target MMO.

[Darlan_Ashwood]

A completely revamped combat system would be interesting. That would be a crap load of work tho.

[kyuven]

A completely revamped combat system would be interesting. That would be a crap load of work tho.

revamping 1.0's combat into 2.0's, despite being fundamentally similar, took more than a year. That was just things like increasing pacing, redoing animations, and tweaking the UI.
Games that revamp their combat systems beyond basic tweaking (such as changing calculations or adding/removing stats) tend to have a lot of problems.
SWG is the shining example of why revamping battle systems is just plain not worth it. They did EXACTLY what the OP mentions...and failed hard.

[madolyn]

ew, no.

/10char

[Ramien]

I'd rather not have to realign my facing to the boss every time I have to dodge an aoe or deal with another mechanic (Or just heal a teammate). combat systems like that might work well for melee attacks, but for ranged, I don't think it would fare very well. (I didn't play Wildstar enough to try a lot of different classes, though, so maybe they fixed the ranged problem somehow)

[Bluejay]

Wildstar has one of the best combat systems of any of the 30 or so MMO's I have played (too bad the game had so many other flaws...)

But I think it would be almost impossible to integrate that kind of combat into FF 14. If what used to be posted about the underlying protocol between the server and the client is true the game couldn't handle it even from a technical perspective (something about long polling times between client and server... used to be talked about a lot on these forums).

[kyuven]

Wildstar has one of the best combat systems of any of the 30 or so MMO's I have played (too bad the game had so many other flaws...)

I agree with this. Wildstar is far from a perfect game, but the parts they did well they did VERY well.
TERA is the same way.
I wish someone would take the best parts of Wildstar, FFXIV, and Tera and make a game...