Flaws of the combat system

[Shironeko_Narunyan]

The combat system in this game is flawed at its foundation in a way that makes it difficult to add unique new jobs, make the daily dungeons more interesting, and pace the content in a way that makes it challenging, but not punishing, add fun without wasting the player's time.

Tanks are meant to soak up damage for the party. For that, they need to be sturdy, and they have to be able to keep aggro. They are both in this game, but both in too high a degree. If a tank can keep aggro until the mob dies after just swiping it once with an AOE, keeping enmity is too easy. If a tank can solo a boss in a level-appropriate dungeon after the healer and DPS die, they are too sturdy.

Healers are meant to keep the party alive, but healing is just an afterthought. Most of the playtime as healer is casting damage spells, and with Endwalker, even the cast times of those gets shorter to allow for even easier weaving in of instant heals, which makes healing even less of a challenge, and doing damage becomes an even more important part of the role. If healers even produced decent damage, that would still be not fun for people who want to play a proper healer, but it would make it more tolerable, since you still added value, but if you're 10% of a real DPS player, it's just frustrating. At least WHM has a stun.

Support DPS is not even needed, The little support they do has little impact, and it comes at a cost where the loss of personal DPS is offsetting whatever gain the team might get out of the support.

What this means is, it's difficult to make healing a more active role, and when gear improves, healing becomes less and less important, as tanks grow so durable, they can get by without healing, and just regening after fights. Tanking is boring, because you don't do anything actively. Just hit one thing once with anything, and you can go AFK until it dies. Support with its micro bonus is only important in settings where it adds up, during burst windows in raids, where multiple buffs combined produce a big result, but a BRD or DNC in a 4 man team can't possibly raise the group's performance enough to rectify taking them over a BLM or SAM.

There are other problems, such as "mobility tax" being an outdated model these days, where even BLM has a lot of mobility, and jobs like MNK will have more mobility options than a MCH in Endwalker.

I'm a player, not a game designer, so I won't propose any solutions, but I felt like these things had to be collected and presented in this form at least. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

[Jin-]

Best post you've made and i agree with this

[AnotherPerson]

Disagree on healers, you don't want more "DPS damage", rather you want more "DPS buttons". Otherwise, they'll be incentivized to give us an upgraded Glare II as our spammable attack skill; instead of Glare x 100 during downtime, we just Glare II x 100 instead. Spamming one button over and over again is not fun during downtime, especially when magnified by better gear. Likewise, having too much incoming damage that we spend only spamming GCD heals (Cure II/Medica II) over and over again doesn't work either because it'll be the same issue, except our MP is also not bottomless.

Tanks and enmity is a difficult issue - because if all jobs need to manage aggro, they need an extra button to handle aggro (such as DPS giving aggro away to tanks). That's not fun enmity management, that's just an extra mandatory button pressing that takes up an oGCD slot. Not to mention, it takes up an additional hotbar slot - and these slots are going to get more limited as more expansions come out. After all, skills/actions that was introduced from previous expansions gets trimmed, adjusted, or moved to a later level in another expansion to fit ~3 hotbars worth of skills.

I say this is actually a good change for enmity - but it leaves a lot wanting since tanks don't have a very complicated DPS rotation and mitigating is pretty simple once you get into the habit of doing so. Rather than enmity, I say it would be better to go for making good positioning matter more - such as reintroducing environmental factors (Dusk Vigil / Aurum Vale being good examples of Frostbite wind & Poison puddles). There could be more environmental factors too - such as healing reduction/ occasional pyretic with AoEs/ etc.

[Jeeqbit]

Tanks are meant to soak up damage for the party. For that, they need to be sturdy, and they have to be able to keep aggro. They are both in this game, but both in too high a degree. If a tank can keep aggro until the mob dies after just swiping it once with an AOE, keeping enmity is too easy.

Right, but when it was more effort tanking was harder to understand for a new player and put them off the role. Even now tanks are not the most popular role and most of the tanks in a dungeon are not good at tanking.

In most games the only concept is DPS, so when you start tanking you will most likely just attack enemies and not understand what tanking is, so only having to swipe the enemy once is more intuitive to new players who are playing a tank like it's a DPS.

If a tank can solo a boss in a level-appropriate dungeon after the healer and DPS die, they are too sturdy.

It's not because they are too sturdy, it's because dungeons are tuned to be so easy that a single good player can carry the other 3, because it is very common for the other 3 in your party to not be very good. You can actually do a lot of dungeons as 4 DPS and other unusual combinations.

You can see that tanks are not too sturdy because of the fact they cannot usually solo a trial or raid. Even though they can solo a lot of dungeon content, most tanks probably wouldn't manage it because it usually requires you to know your job and use your abilities really well.

Healers are meant to keep the party alive, but healing is just an afterthought.

Intense healing in required content could cause a lot of healers to not progress so that really needs to be left to extreme, savage and ultimate.

[Lucky_CJ]

Nearly everything brought up as a response so far is stated as though there isn't anything that can be done about it, and that these are all unfortunate realities that we *have* to live with.

I've heard about old aggro management, and I think it would lead to an interesting amount of depth that the game feels lacking in with the normal dungeon content. I don't know how it would be implemented, but I don't like that I was able to begin leveling Gladiator into PLD, and the only 2 things I needed to do to succeed with regular commendations was put on tank stance, hold W and mash my 1 or 2 AOE buttons. (Don't worry, I know that mitigation is a thing, that is a different subject and subnote.) I feel as though I could have very easily went through ALL of the dungeons I ran to level my PLD to 80 without giving a care to the enemies I had following behind me, as long as I was hitting my AOE, I had no worry that anyone in the party was going to die by getting slapped to death unless I did first.

I think having to actively make the trash in dungeons pick me out as the main target over my party would make it more interesting. How anything like that would be accomplished within the current system is beyond me though. I can't think of anything within the current design to make aggro more interesting for tanks. If the tank stance aggro was lowered, and dps were given a mini-shirk button, I feel it might be at the least a more engaging minigame than we have right now, but in its current state it feels impossible to lose. The only thing I can think of as to why there is absolutely no more depth to it than that, is because aggro isn't a feature the design team is worried about messing with.


On Mitigation from earlier. If you are not using it, and your healer isn't communicating to you that you are taking more damage than average, then your inability to play the class effectively, or arguably competently, literally has no way of making its self know to you. I would hope that people playing a TANK role would recognize the use of these abilities, but as a WHM main, I know that is unfortunately not always the case. The unclear thing with mitigation timing talked about in the live letter might be in the right direction.



For healers fix, I say give them another unique damage button as a blanket idea. Plenty of ways to do it, they are all casters, maybe tie it to another resource. Its simple, but it has a chance going in the direction of fixing the mindnumbingness of the 1 button rotations. I know that in reality its much harder to do than say, but I think there has to be something done about the monotony of it right now.


Are there not any ideas that are better creative solutions to these problems? Have I just joined at the weirdest time to talk about the game state with the upcoming expansion? Have problems and ideas like these already been talked to death prior to the live? I am in the wrong spot? Thanks for reading!

[Kozh]

Inb4 someone will come here and go "THINK ABOUT THE CASUALS!!1!", as if casuals means they always play games in journalist mode ¬.¬

That aside, I agree with you your post OP. However, and I'm sorry to put this bluntly, I think post like this won't change anything. By saying that they will base future job system on 5.0, we know they won't go back to pre-shb system (i.e aggro management). At this point I'm already jaded enough and don't expect anything from them. I just hope they don't dumb down the game even more.

[Saraide]

Healers arent 10% of a DPS' damage, more like 50% and above against bosses and sometimes just straight up more damage against trash mobs.

[TheRealQuah]

Emnity is a boring fluff mechanic, I'm glad they made it braindead. Before, casual players couldn't understand how to manage it, and good players found it boring.

Support DPS are key in any content that matters, buffs are big, and once again, good players will know how to maximise them.

You whole complaint seems to be, dungeons too easy. They don't matter, they are story content.

[Kes13a]

On Mitigation from earlier. If you are not using it, and your healer isn't communicating to you that you are taking more damage than average, then your inability to play the class effectively, or arguably competently, literally has no way of making its self know to you. I would hope that people playing a TANK role would recognize the use of these abilities, but as a WHM main, I know that is unfortunately not always the case. The unclear thing with mitigation timing talked about in the live letter might be in the right direction.

nice that you think that a healer telling a tank that they might not be playing optimally would be welcomed... in any game.

even doing it nicely, can result in harsh words from the tank, especially if they have been tanking for years in WoW for instance, so "I know my damn role" is likely going to be a response. not singling out WoW but most of the less optimal people recently have gone on about how much experience they have in 'other game' (singular since the rant is typically involving mythic + blah blah blah) The concept that this is a different game and somethings might not be the same as the idolized WoW is as foreign as the idea that 'murica is not the only country on the planet.

you are right though, it is about communication... but the idea of talking to other people without ridicule and contempt is something is a hard concept to muster up for some.

I main healers, and will carry through healing someone who is taking a boatload of damage and usually after if they havent run off already, will ask if they were having any issues, or bothered to repair or anything else that may seem appropriate. but if its only a one way conversation... not much you can accomplish

[Rinhi]

Tanking is super easy and yet players are still having issues with keeping emnity and using mitigations - and you want to add more complexity to it?

10% of a DPS? a decent WHM does just about as much damage as an average DPS in level cap dungeons and out DPSes them if the DPS' are bad

Ranged DPS are already the most mobile classes and your post makes it seem that it's bad that the pretty immobile MNK is finally getting a movement ability and that MCH should get one too, but why? MCH has no cast times, can move around freely and whatnot
DNC could lose a dash I suppose, but it also has support abilities it needs to be closer to the party for that the MCH simply doesn't have