I think I've figured out the source of 90% of my wrong keypresses.

[Shurrikhan]

God I hope SE don't change the GCD, if they do I'm out. I like the combat nice and slow, WoW's was terrible as all hell and it pissed me off.

See, that seems equally strange to me. The average APM is just as high on many a XIV job as WoW class/spec, and the maximum over shorter windows generally higher. Outlaw Rogue with haste buffs up, Flurry Fury, and Deadly Calm - Focused Rage Arms (RIP) were about the only WoW classes in Legion that could put out the same APM as a NIN, Crit-high Bard, or SkS Monk.

Is the GCD, rather than number of button-presses within a given minute or second, our only metric for speed of combat?

[Minako_Nightsong]

See, that seems equally strange to me. The average APM is just as high on many a XIV job as WoW class/spec, and the maximum over shorter windows generally higher. Outlaw Rogue with haste buffs up, Flurry Fury, and Deadly Calm - Focused Rage Arms (RIP) were about the only WoW classes in Legion that could put out the same APM as a NIN, Crit-high Bard, or SkS Monk.

Is the GCD, rather than number of button-presses within a given minute or second, our only metric for speed of combat?

The rate at which I press buttons WoW vs FF14 is probably the same at level 55 but my problem is that WoW might have five different buttons for those presses and FF14 has 12. On a Dragoon I have six combo buttons, then three jumps, 2 combo finishers, and mirage dive. I also need to watch these combo buttons to see that they went off so it's monitoring another 6 cooldowns as I can press buttons in FF14, have them even light up, and then they do not do anything. I am using some pretty awkward key binds that delay my reactions by having so many more buttons.

[Shurrikhan]

The rate at which I press buttons WoW vs FF14 is probably the same at level 55 but my problem is that WoW might have five different buttons for those presses and FF14 has 12. On a Dragoon I have six combo buttons, then three jumps, 2 combo finishers, and mirage dive. I also need to watch these combo buttons to see that they went off so it's monitoring another 6 cooldowns as I can press buttons in FF14, have them even light up, and then they do not do anything. I am using some pretty awkward key binds that delay my reactions by having so many more buttons.

Oh I'll agree completely that XIV is a genre-leader among major MMO titles in the extent of unnecessary button bloat they have. There's no reason Mirage Dive can't simply replace Jump/SSD after Jump/SSD readies Mirage Dive for those 10 seconds. There's no reason ever to use a skill from the same combo out of order, except perhaps -- in an already rotationally-screwed circumstance that might happen, if playing poorly, in one out of every thousand fights -- to restart that same combo from scratch. That would mean at most 3 buttons necessary to provide all the decision making of DRG's combo skills, 4 single-target melee skill slots in total once you include Heavy Thrust.

Now, I wouldn't mind if those skills could actually see individual use, in recombinable order. But, they don't, and they probably never will. Thus, their taking slots greater in number than the number of separate functions they can viably achieve is merely bloat.

[KaldeaSahaline]

See, that seems equally strange to me. The average APM is just as high on many a XIV job as WoW class/spec, and the maximum over shorter windows generally higher. Outlaw Rogue with haste buffs up, Flurry Fury, and Deadly Calm - Focused Rage Arms (RIP) were about the only WoW classes in Legion that could put out the same APM as a NIN, Crit-high Bard, or SkS Monk.

Is the GCD, rather than number of button-presses within a given minute or second, our only metric for speed of combat?

Just curious - mind showing the data that you looked at to come to this conclusion? The data I looked at showed that on average (looking strictly at melee DPS), the fastest in FF14 are generally equivalent with some of the slower specs in WoW, not even on average.

Because random procs exist along with boss mechanics. OGCD's also fill up the slack of GCD downtime. Not to mention traveltime needed for positionals.

I don't have any random procs to fill up my downtime. Nor do a handful of semi long CD oGCDs qualify in that regard.

What SE should have done is tune secondaries to let me push buttons more by using skill/spell speed, and have the offset actually matter and be balanced (i.e. faster attacks, more buttons, but less damage per overall hit compared to a slower presser who opted for more damage per hit). That or make more oGCD resets, add more oGCDs, etc.

Also not sure if you guys know this or not, but it is possible to do mechanics and push buttons simultaneously... you don't need a longer GCD for boss mechanics...

[Shurrikhan]

Just curious - mind showing the data that you looked at to come to this conclusion? The data I looked at showed that on average (looking strictly at melee DPS), the fastest in FF14 are generally equivalent with some of the slower specs in WoW, not even on average.

Sorry, mine were generated taking APMs from 75th percentiles on warcraftlogs and fflogs, and then simulatively stripping the effects of haste/skill_speed/spell_speed from each, avoiding parses with rotational breakpoints that would lead to disproportionately higher cpm.

I suspect I accidentally allowed for simultaneously-executed macroed actions to be counted as one apm count on WoW's side, however.

With Haste accounted for, WoW beats XIV hands-down for apm for most jobs, excluding perhaps against a parse-lucky Bard and ofc WoW specs with spammable oGCDs such as FR.

It was a rough check in either case, of no more than a sample size of 2-3 per spec/job.

[KaldeaSahaline]

Sorry, mine were generated taking APMs from 75th percentiles on warcraftlogs and fflogs, and then simulatively stripping the effects of haste/skill_speed/spell_speed from each, avoiding parses with rotational breakpoints that would lead to disproportionately higher cpm.

I suspect I accidentally allowed for simultaneously-executed macroed actions to be counted as one apm count on WoW's side, however.

With Haste accounted for, WoW beats XIV hands-down for apm for most jobs, excluding perhaps against a parse-lucky Bard and ofc WoW specs with spammable oGCDs such as FR.

It was a rough check in either case, of no more than a sample size of 2-3 per spec/job.

That makes sense then.

Curious why you thought removing Haste/skill_spell speed was a good data point though? That's marginalizing a lot of the class design in WoW knowing full well it doesn't make as large of an impact in FF14. It seems disingenuous at best.

For instance - compare my Ret DPS cooldown in WoW vs. NIN/MNK/SAM's skill speed modifiers. By removing a haste source like this from my Ret you're removing a staggeringly large portion of its kit. I'm not confident that normalizing MNK/SAM/NIN's skill speed buffs even remotely captures the same level of interaction and depth that the Ret cooldown does.

[Shurrikhan]

That makes sense then.

Curious why you thought removing Haste/skill_spell speed was a good data point though? That's marginalizing a lot of the class design in WoW knowing full well it doesn't make as large of an impact in FF14. It seems disingenuous at best.

For instance - compare my Ret DPS cooldown in WoW vs. NIN/MNK/SAM's skill speed modifiers. By removing a haste source like this from my Ret you're removing a staggeringly large portion of its kit. I'm not confident that normalizing MNK/SAM/NIN's skill speed buffs even remotely captures the same level of interaction and depth that the Ret cooldown does.

Mostly because the concern I was responding to when I first gathered the data was the fundamental difference at nominal or base rate between the faster base GCD but fewer oGCDs and vice versa, and because the numbers then skew so widely depending on whether the given spec scales CDs to Haste or not, tossing the stat's value about even harder in some cases than from, say, SpS from BLM to RDM. Even at base or lower benchmark original 7% Haste, Dauntless Rage Arms would outpace XIV, but by the time I'm weighing Haste Fury or Outlaw against an XIV class, it feels more like I'm weighing one secondary stat saturation rate vs another rather than any fundamental difference in design. WoW just gives you a lot more secondary stat to work with, to the point that people have hit hard caps before the end of final raid tiers. While this has been toned down somewhat since Mists, partly due to the removal of being able to swap stats via original Warforging, it's still just leagues off from what we see in XIV, yet a single expansion, stat squish, or curve adjustment could completely remove that difference in 5.0. While the scaled CDs are important to WoW's gameplay, they're just as arbitrary as our XIV examples such as Empyreal Arrow, so I guess I decided to skip/strip it for the time being.

The other half of it was simple accident. I'd accumulated the data before, but forgot to store the context, and it wasn't until after reviewing it that I remembered what specifics I'd set in its accumulation.

Note: Haste / Attack Speed generated from anything but the Haste / SkS-SpS stats themselves was not removed. Greased Lightning, Adrenaline Rush, what have you, all remained accounted for.

[Xiomara]

Is the GCD, rather than number of button-presses within a given minute or second, our only metric for speed of combat?

No idea, I just constantly see people bang on about the GCD being slow and I just hope SE continues to ignore them.