Flaws of the combat system

[Shironeko_Narunyan]

I'm not against story mode in this game being approachable by casual players. I'm in my 40s now. I work, I have a wife, my sons are already out of the house, and I got dogs. I'm not playing all day every day. I don't know every encounter. I only raid when I have to (raids in another game made me hate that kind of content). I'm not a fan of sprinting through dungeons, dragging a horde of insignificant literal trash around that then gets three-button-aoe'd. That's not adventure. That's not scary dungeon with bloodthirsty monsters. It reminds me constantly that I'm playing a game.

What I miss from the games of old is the slower, more methodical way to fight. The need to plan and execute as a team. Fights took longer, but they were also more satisfying, because the outcome was not predetermined the moment you showed up. "Trash" would wipe you out if you got cocky. Trash in an 80er dungeon doesn't command respect, it's just there as decoration between the boss fights, and with Endwalker, it won't even give experience anymore (incentivizing players to find cheats and exploits to skip content, and to further make people want to rush to "not waste time").

Maybe I need to step back a little and think less and just focus more on side content, like deep dungeons etc.

[Nihility]

While it is true that tanks are probably too good at tanking and healers are too good at healing. It is funny that if a tank loses control everyone else just dies in one hit and healing has basically become the healers subjob outside of hitting their one dps button over and over
The real problem is how the whole game has kind of evolved into a clockwork, all the gears must fit together just so, sort of thing.

Like yeah there are regen healers and shield healers but guess what.. they all have basically all the same tools that all fit the same timing
Same with tanks. They're just variations on a theme. You have short cooldown damage reduction, standard damage reduction, big damage reduction, aoe damage reduction, cheat death and one less useful flavor skill. They all have single target rotation, aoe rotation, long range skill, and dash. It's just a matter of how much button pressing you want to do to keep dps number up

dps are really the only jobs afforded any flexibility in playstyle, They just turned every important dps utility into a shared skill set and removed any cross class synergies so they don't actually matter for anything except dps anymore

So basically we will never have a tank or healer that functions differently at all outside of core tank+embellishments or core healer+embellishments
and will never have dps be anything but a number on a spreadsheet, no more bring class X and class Y together and they make each other shine

[midnitdragoon]

What I miss from the games of old is the slower, more methodical way to fight. The need to plan and execute as a team. Fights took longer, but they were also more satisfying, because the outcome was not predetermined the moment you showed up. "Trash" would wipe you out if you got cocky. Trash in an 80er dungeon doesn't command respect, it's just there as decoration between the boss fights, and with Endwalker, it won't even give experience anymore (incentivizing players to find cheats and exploits to skip content, and to further make people want to rush to "not waste time")

This here is why I always say that final fantasy xiv 2.0 + would have benefited in a positive way long term from a combat system similar to final fantasy 11 and final fantasy xiv 1.0. And no... Im not saying that 2 hour abilities are a good thing...

In final fantasy 11...nothing felt so satisfying as that moment your party does a successful weapon skill chain followed by a magic burst.... Or when you perfectly execute a sneak attack trick attack combo as ninja. It's interesting how in final fantasy xiv 1.0 the whole weapon skill chain system was missing.... And in the current iteration we have now is all just fast paced combos.

Simply put.... Final Fantasy Xiv would have benefited immensely from a more tactical based approach to battles, one that rewards planning and its proper execution of skills and abilities. Right now, it's a spam fest, and I know a lot of ppl on this forum are quick to defend its design. However, there are plenty of articles online asking for the developers to reduce the amount of skills we have in the hotbar because it's becoming over bearing.

[Wasselin]

I think that the way the "holy trinity" works in this game is faithful to the Final Fantasy series. Also I personally like it. I love playing the healer role in every MMO I've ever played, but it's especially good in FFXIV because healing is choice. You don't just mindlessly spam heals because the incoming damage is so high that people will die if you stop or miss a heal. Because healers can contribute meaningfully to damage, this gives everyone an incentive to avoid damage.

[Shironeko_Narunyan]

healers can contribute meaningfully to damage

According to Wesk Alber, a tank does roughly 60% of the damage a pure DPS job does, a healer about 40%.

From my own experience doing deep dungeon, you'll run into time problems at about lvl 140 in potd (110 for ast) and 70 in hoh (50 for ast).
Calling that "green dps" sounds like a gross exaggeration, and I would just so grant you the "contribute meaningfully", because it's easier to actually deliver the DPS... with the 2 buttons we have (3 if you include AOE).

If a healer could actually do proper DPS, all classes lost AOE power, and trash had actually interesting mechanics, and players had ways to do real crowd control (mez, root, stun, charm, fear, debuffs), gameplay would be a lot more engaging, and more methodical.

Reading the forums, you'd think people want 4-man content to be more difficult and/or engaging, but in this thread, I see a lot of concern for newbies/casuals, which is usually missing from such discussions.
Like I said, it doesn't even have to be more difficult, just more interesting.

And before someone says "omg, dungeon runs without aoe would take forever", well.. trash numbers can be adapted. Some dungeons have an ungodly number of mobs that right now hit for nothing, have no abilities, don't drop anything and just act as decoration and time sink. If every enemy in a dungeon was meaningful, every fight could be meaningful as well, and the number of encounters could be balanced for that kind of system.

But to be honest... I don't see that happen, not even in the far future. That ship has sailed since Stormblood.

[DPZ2]

And before someone says "omg, dungeon runs without aoe would take forever", well.. trash numbers can be adapted. Some dungeons have an ungodly number of mobs that right now hit for nothing, have no abilities, don't drop anything and just act as decoration and time sink. If every enemy in a dungeon was meaningful, every fight could be meaningful as well, and the number of encounters could be balanced for that kind of system.

But to be honest... I don't see that happen, not even in the far future. That ship has sailed since Stormblood.

Oddly enough, the stat squish may take care of that for you. I believe there will be a number of players surprised by how much harder the instances become in gear that is 300+ ilevels higher. Mass wall-to-wall pulls might have to be reconsidered and abandoned, and the age of "Just AoE the heck out of it" will end.

[Shironeko_Narunyan]

I wonder if that's the case. We don't have enough data yet to determine it. I know that YoshiP said that the echo will be adjusted for unsynced solo content, will be interesting to see if there will be any consequences for group content.

And for POTD/HOH, for that matter, I do that stuff a lot.

[Raikai]

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.

Hm, I agree that the combat system has flaws - but most of what you pointed seems to be more related to numbers. Tanks self healing too much, healers overhealing too much, support not supporting enough %s...

The overall design, regardless of numbers, in fact is very cemented, but I don't think it's just for the reasons above. Proof is that every job literally have no playstyle variation - what changes is whether or not a player is able to reach the optimal output. We don't see a lot of out-of-the-box jobs either, and I keep thinking if this is the result of the developer's mindset to have everything on tight leashes or this is actually ingrained with the game's code and engine limitations. Maybe a combination of both?

I mean, why we never had Summoner as a true pet job? True I mean in everything around micromanaging 2 or more entities (you and the pets)... The combat system responsivity, server ping, makes it an extremely unresponsive and unpleasant experience. No wonder why Summoner ended where it is today, and probably the reason why we'll never see a new pet job in the true sense of you controlling both entities. Maybe the best we can get as a Beastmaster is a Limited Job with the pet combat being a separate combat system.

[Shironeko_Narunyan]

Ultima Online and Everquest had perfectly fine pets two decades ago. WoW has similarly complex raid encounters nowadays, and its pet classes work well in that game. You'd think FFXIV is being made by at least equally good devs and coders. I find it really weird that they're having such problems with pets.

[DPZ2]

Ultima Online and Everquest had perfectly fine pets two decades ago. WoW has similarly complex raid encounters nowadays, and its pet classes work well in that game. You'd think FFXIV is being made by at least equally good devs and coders. I find it really weird that they're having such problems with pets.

None of the games you've mentioned allowed for both PC and Console players to exist in the same game worlds. I suspect that many of the game systems would have been designed quite differently if the game only ran on Playstation.