Coming Back Over a Year Later (Impression)

[SixSixSix]

(1/3) I stopped playing a couple months after launch...got a Warrior and a Paladin to 50...got them to about 64 ilvl. Then I quit because I found something a little more exciting to play.

Yeah I guess it's a dead horse, but combat was pretty boring...really slow...slower than a lot of other games out there. Rolling a gladiator/paladin the second time around was a pretty brutal grind. Having only FATEs to grind, a small handful of side quests to do, and the limited levequests to get exp from made it pretty excruciating. The combination of slow combat and the exp grind just ended it for me.

So I come back about a year and 7 months later, and you know what?

Nothing has changed.

[SixSixSix]

(2/3) I rolled a rogue this time. Got a pugilist to 15 and got Ninja to 50. From level 1 to 35 was a lot worse than before. It was rare to have anyone around to help with FATEs so it was about impossible to do it yourself as a squishy dps, so since I was capped out on levequests, that got me to about 25. Talk about brutal. Then from then on it was dungeons (with its 30+ minute queue times) and FATEs. My eyes were bleeding. I'm trying to level pugilist/MNK, but I just can't bring myself to do it all over again.

[SixSixSix]

(3/3) Combat is still slow as mud with the 2.50 second GCD. And I see why now...it's because of the spell animations. Most of the animations take about 2+ seconds to finish. If they changed the GCD to 1 second, they would have to speed up the spell animations and cut the damage in half, I suppose. I would honestly be happy with that, though. I remember in the offline FF games you could change the speed of the battles from Active Time Battles to Wait...or something to that effect...for players who wanted a faster play style. That would be a pretty nice feature to have...let players choose the speed of the combat.

I guess the ability to roll multiple classes on a single toon are really for those that can't afford the standard subscription and can only have one toon on a server. Oh well. Other than that, the game looks like it has a lot of potential...I just need a faster pace of combat.

Thanks for reading!

[Enkidoh]

You can get around the 1000 character per post restriction by simply going back and editing your first post (and thus not have to waste your posts).

I presume you've never played a FF game before this because FF combat is not traditionally action-based. And ARR is actually far faster than how combat was in the original version of FFXIV (version 1.0, or rather, 1.0's battle system post 1.21 patch) and it's MMO predecessor, FFXI, both of which you basically just sat there on auto-attack trading punches with the enemy while slowly watching the TP gauge build up so that you could occasionally let rip with a weapon skill.

The GCD isn't actually that bad, as it's a nice balance between a full-on action-based system and the more turn-based battle systems of earlier games in the FF series. If you're expecting FFXIV's combat to be arcade-style button-mashing, then I'm afraid you will be sadly disappointed, as that is not how this game is designed, and perhaps this game is not for you.

[ChiiSoSeriouz]

One of the first things I noticed when servers came online for 2.0 was how much faster combat was compared to 1.0. Its perfect IMO, with skill/spell speed on higher tier gear it shaves off some CD time as well. But did you really suggest having active time wait? Hold on bahamut.. Pause... I need to find that ether in my inventory. Enkidoh said it best, that's not how this game is designed and this game might not be for you.

[Velox]

Sorry to read about your disappointment OP. Take care and good luck in your search for your perfect MMO.

[Nadirah]

I can afford the subscription for having alts I just don't *want* alts. To insinuate its because I'm poor is stupid.

As for "faster combat", games with lower gcds have spells with stupid long cast times.

[Alberel]

I'm surprised you still had a problem with the GCD when playing Ninja as they actually get a GCD closer to 2s through use of Houton. Same goes for Monk with three stacks of Greased Lightning. They each get a 15% skillspeed increase which, when coupled with the skillspeed stat, is more or less a half-second off their GCD and puts their combat speed at something much closer to typical MMOs.

Having said that it seems you've taken issue with many of the fundamental concepts of the game and have resorted to baseless insult as criticism. I guess the game just isn't for you.

[AskaRay]

Ninja is very fast with their Huton 2 second GCD. Are you spamming huton? You should be.
Also this game has very little reason for alts, unless you're extremely crazy about your RPing or something like that, I guess. So why would I pay for something I'm not going to use?

And the ATB, the "wait" function stops all actions that are going on while you are in a menu, deciding what to do which is honestly the opposite of a fast battle. There is the option to turn wait off, of course, but it sounds like you got it backwards.

[elemental10]

OP wants an Action Adventure from an MMO game.

OP is going to need to look at single player games for that.