What most turns new players off from FFXIV?

[Laerune]

Biggest turnoff for the newcomers that I have met are:

1. Boring gameplay, for most of the classes untill you become level 30, you only use 2-3 skills max. WHM was my first class to reach level 30 and doing Stone and Aero was very boring. It does not help that ARR mobs were very easy to kill and do not do alot of damage (they fixed it for HW content though)

2. Story takes its time to develop and there are alot of fetch quests. Minfilia gives you an Eorzea's version of mobile phone and she never uses it to receive your mission report.

3. The rush crowd. One of the things that I dislike when doing a dungeon as a Mentor with another max level player and 2 newcomers is seeing that max level player push around the newcomers, so he/she can finish the dungeon run fast. Newcomers learn nothing, they do not get to enjoy the content and often they get bullied for being new to the content. When it comes to toxic community, FFXIV is a better community then World of Warcraft and League of Legends, but if you look at what happens both ingame and on the forum, you see a rise of toxic behavior.

[Dalvy]

I have heard many complaints from the experienced MMO crowd that combat mechanics are extremely dull

And that damn 1.5 GCD is a huge problem

[Morningstar1337]

2. Story takes its time to develop and there are alot of fetch quests. Minfilia gives you an Eorzea's version of mobile phone and she never uses it to receive your mission report.

TBF, Wiretapping is a thing and something Garlemald can be reasonable expected to be able to do. Not that it justified the sheer about of back and forth we had to do. If anything the scene of us receiving the LS could be cut out and the story would still make sense

[Reinha]

I have heard many complaints from the experienced MMO crowd that combat mechanics are extremely dull

And that damn 1.5 GCD is a huge problem

Might have been a typo on your part but it's actually 2.5 seconds.

I used to dislike classes with a 1.5 second GCD in WoW and preferred the ones with a 1 second GCD. By the Twelve, the things I would give to have even one class with a 1.5 second GCD and with less or none of the stiff animation locks in this game. It only takes me 0.5 seconds to swap targets and queue an ability and the rest is just... waiting. General movement, melee positioning and dodging happens independently from combat rotation with a proper setup for controls.