Making smart decisions with skills

[Platinumstorm]

Are you really expecting me to believe that keeping buffs up and debuffs are important decisions? They are important, but they arent decisions. They are just as mandatory as combos are in this game. If you are going to say that wow has important decisions to be made... you couldve used better examples. Shoot, most things in wow are set into rotations that have been defined, cannoned, for years now. ei. 69696969 tanking rotation. That being said... i believe that one more layer of complexity is needed in ffxiv.

One thing to note is that all those things you mentioned took a long time to implement into wow. By comparison, this game is in its infancy.

Yes. I play as a warlock, and when playing as an affliction warlock there are several things to note regarding debuffs.

So the general debuffs are a few moves I'll refer to as UA, C, and BD. Then there is another move which is called Haunt. Haunt is a very slow moving projectile that, when applied to the mob increases, the damage done by the previous three moves, and increases the damage of all shadow damage on that mob with a secondary debuff that stacks up to three times. To do as much damage as possible haunt needs to be on the boss 100% of the time, but you also need to minimize the amount of overlap you spend casting it. Simply for haunt to be applied you have to decide how far away you are standing at, and how long it will take for the projectile to hit the target. If you wait too long then dots are ticking without being applied by haunt - and the shadow damage debuff risks falling out - if you do it too early then you're just wasting your time, and if another debuff is running out [generally UA], then you have to make a decision of how to best use both moves to keep dps as high as possible.

In itself, Haunt acts like mechanics of combos, but still allows players the ability to make good or bad decisions, rather than forcing them into a set decision. A normal opening moveset, btw, is 2, 1, control+5, control+g, control+f, "click", 3,4,7, 2, 2, 1, 3 - and from there it is dot maintenance, being aware of trinket/enchant effects, boss mechanics that make it more vulnerable and require a reapplication of my debuffs to take advantage of that, etc. [hopefully I don't need to continue to go into detail, but it's much more than just "2,3,2,3,2,3,2,3,2,3," over and over]

I also realize, as you note, that WoW's battle state has taken years to develop [affliction has actually been nerfed in difficulty several times], but new games are being released with battle systems more complex than FFXIV's, which has been out for over one year now, and the strategy within the battle system itself needs to be turned up to keep players engaged. Hopefully with my posts you can see how WoW's system is one that is layered with depth of understanding levels -also known as Blizzard's mantra - "Easy to learn, hard to master", and that's something that should be adopted into FFXIV, but really isn't right now.

With that said I am not encouraging the game to become like WoW [with the exception of tight movement controls] - just to include more strategic decisions within the battle system itself.