What are your thoughts on FFXIV's combat?

[Rolder50]

I find it amusing how, in the past, the developers said they didn't want to make everything a 2 minute cooldown. But then they go ahead and do it anyway. Makes the high end gameplay real stale. But the low level gameplay is even worse, you can fall asleep in most content these days and it's no problem.

[Soge01]

But in all seriousness, the gameplay for all job class could use some diversification. Too many have copies of the same skill/spell or ability, just in AoE form or just as an extra shiny new button. And others are noticable copy and pastes of one another with just a few minor differences (healers).

[midnitdragoon]

What makes a good combat? Do you think FFXIV has good combat?
Is a large number of skills to be pressed and memorized making the combat of a game good?
Is it the many procs to keep track of good?
Is it the many oGCDs with long cooldown to weave between skills and spells with GCD good?
Can UI help make the combat feel better?
...
And many other factors which require your value opinions.
Is FFXIV's combat satisfying to you? And how to improve it?
Please give me your thoughts and opinions (with valid explanations). It may be helpful to the devs too.

Combat is good, but lacks the final fantasy feel. Final Fantasy 11 menu-based combat feels way better and would have been better fit for this game had it been developed around it from the ground up.

Combat is currently a spam fest, memorized rotations to be executed as fast as possible. Personally, i don't believe it requires much thought, which is good if you want this game accessible to the masses. Below video is how i feel about the combat

https://youtu.be/xkoj2np6JQQ

Should we ever get another final fantasy mmo, i hope its combat is based around 11 style of combat.

I don't think much can be done to change up the combat system in XIV though.

[vetch]

If you did ARR content before the Trust updates, you can definitely feel it. Sure, some of the dungeons benefit from a touch more engaging design (I'm looking at you, Praetorium bosses that used to be training dummies). But when I go into any of the redesigned dungeons with fresh eyes, it's pretty telling when my brain script is correct 90% of the time.

Let's see, we're pulling a boss. I wonder if it...yep, there's an unavoidable roomwide hit that does about half of everyone's HP approximately 10-15 seconds into the pull. The standard post-Stormblood "healer, use your oGCD AOE heal here!" move. Let's see then there's...yep, a tankbuster that does about 1/4 of the tank's health. Next is...oh yeah, boss auto teleports into the center of the arena, then begins channeling some exhaustingly long cast where it completely stops outgoing damage, then puts really obvious tells on the floor, and if it's REALLY complicated it'll cover part of the floor, then another slightly overlapping part, and you'll have to stand in the second orange indicator, then move to where the first one just exploded.

If you haven't been paying attention before, just run this script in your head when you pull a boss. Almost every. Single. Dungeon. Boss. in this game. Is like this. And people wonder why veteran healers say they can easy peasy oGCD heal the brand new "expert" dungeon when a patch drops. It's because the boss mechanics are VERY predictably patterned, even if the precise shapes of the AOE markers are different.

Midgarsormr's new 'tankbuster' can be healed with a max potion. Unless you take it raw, then you might need a few ticks of in-combat regen too. And the dragon minibosses are reduced to a pair of adds you just burn down, so you have to carve through his whole healthbar while he slow-pitches mechanics at you one at a time. The fight used to be a joy on every role because there was so much to dodge and do at once, and now you just hit him like a training dummy for 5 minutes. I hate it.

[Avu]

It's a horrid abomination and one of the worst/dumbest I've seen. Certainly I didn't kept playing the game for it's combat or most of duties.
I started playing on Shadowbringers. And I haven't played Tanks seriously yet.

Talking only about individual play, all the DPS jobs feel like I could do one giant macro and keep dodging mechs; the only exception I've seen and that makes the combat a bit more interesting to me is the BLM due to it's cast + buff timer management. From what I've seen, tanks looks a really boring play: hit one obligatory skill, know when to mitigate. The end. It's a really sad way to tank. Healers are half useless as many here already said. Not only that, but each time they update a job or make a new job it's always the same: rotation 123,123, 4. They keep dumbing them down, feeling almost as if they want to make an auto battle feat in the future. We saw that with AST's cards, we saw that with SMN (it needed a rework, sure, but it's not a SMN anymore, or even a caster), we saw that with RPR. I'm leveling Ninja and when I reached 60, it felt like everything I learned after 30 became useless.

The battles have a really bad concept, more than a bad design, overall. First thing because you have no way to prepare for most mechs when you're doing it for the first time. Raids and Alliance Raids are an awful experience for the first, or firsts (?) time you play. Also, one-hit kills (not DPS checks) shouldn't be present on "normal" content, only on Ex/Svg etc. I don't want to go watch a youtube video about the MSQ battle that I'm going to do just because I don't want to spent half of it dead. It's boring and frustrating for the player to be dead for reasons unknows, revived and die instantly again.
This also kills opportunities for Healers. On most raids/trials, a DPS hit with one skill can be max healed, but and then if it gets hit again by another mech, or even those global damage attacks, they will die because of Vuln stack. So it's almost even useless to the healer to heal anybody with a Vuln stack.

Bosses are immune to most ranged DPS abilities. The buffs are half useless too: 1% from the bard and 5% from the Dancer? So if I do 10k damage I give 100-500 damage more? Wow.

For all my experience playing, I always have the feeling that the devs want to have a strict control of what I'm doing and how I'm doing it. Foods "offer" 5% status but it gives 1% max; healing potions doesn't work after lvl 40; jobs that gives buffs that make no difference at all; I have to level how they want and where they want (I never heard of a game where I can't farm XP killing monsters before). All the jobs feel like the same: they killed SCH with the SGE launch. The only purpose of the tank seems to just press one button and keep doing its rotation. Raid and Trial mechs feel like an artificial difficulty: you guess and memorize it or you die with one or two attacks.

[Semirhage]

This stale design has crept upward into harder content too. Even if you, dear reader, don't do Savage level content, I invite you to watch mechanic videos for the patch 6.2 EX trial and Abyssos fights. Get a big bottle of alcohol. Take a sip every time you hear:

• Clock positions
• Healer stacks
• Light parties
• Protean waves
• "This mechanic can either be a shared tankbuster or a tank swap"
• "This mechanic will pair each Tank/Healer with a DPS"
• "The first mechanic is a raidwide, so mitigate and heal"
• "This mechanic puts 2-4 debuffs on each character that must be solved in a specific way, much like Relativity or Hello World or Grand Cross"

Those are just the items off the top of my head. I'm not saying there are no new mechanics, as that would be silly. But there comes a point where you muse, "gee, I wonder if we'll need to do *deadpan voice* healer. Stacks. Shared. Tank buster. Protean. Waves. That One Four Debuff Mechanic. A set of protean waves that hits half the arena, and then you need to dodge into the ground indicator while it cleaves the other half."

Fights feel MUCH more like templates than they used to.

[indigo_imp]

The battles have a really bad concept, more than a bad design, overall. First thing because you have no way to prepare for most mechs when you're doing it for the first time. Raids and Alliance Raids are an awful experience for the first, or firsts (?) time you play. Also, one-hit kills (not DPS checks) shouldn't be present on "normal" content, only on Ex/Svg etc. I don't want to go watch a youtube video about the MSQ battle that I'm going to do just because I don't want to spent half of it dead. It's boring and frustrating for the player to be dead for reasons unknows, revived and die instantly again.
This also kills opportunities for Healers.

I don't agree with everything in your post, but I do feel that raids and alliance raids are indeed not a great experience combat-wise until you fully understand the mechanics. I've been in raids where I have no clue what's happening, and I'll often end up dying with no idea what caused it. I've seen plenty of deaths too so I'm not alone in that. It's like the raids are designed to be done by coordinated groups that would have to go through a process of trial and error, and not designed for the duty finder.

There are definitely many mechanics that aren't clear at all, and I've had to look up guides online to find out what exactly I was doing wrong. I feel like that's not good for the game. It happened to me with the first alliance raid and the same issue occurs in the latest one.

When I first started playing, I liked that people would explain the mechanics in the party or alliance chat, but that isn't common. I feel like in-game hints in some kind of journal would be helpful so players who are new to a raid don't feel like they had no chance to figure it out unless they manage to do so in the heat of the duty. A journal would help people who want to learn more do so without having to check online or rely on their party/alliance chat.

Figuring out mechanics on your own is great, especially when under pressure, but it feels like there's a line between that's being crossed sometimes that turns it into an unpleasant experience.

I don't think simplifying a job is a problem unless it removes key elements of it. I haven't played SAM but it looks to me like the removal of Kaiten wasn't good, even having no idea how to play it. The description of it indicates it gives the player choice about when to use it, it's better to keep that kind of thing in the game.

I've been trying the new extreme, and I learned more about my job during it, things that I hadn't considered before. It feels like they have more room to do that with fights. I don't feel like I can give a good opinion on job design overall, the jobs I'm playing so far are simple but enjoyable to me.

[Raoabolic]

I find it amusing how, in the past, the developers said they didn't want to make everything a 2 minute cooldown. But then they go ahead and do it anyway. Makes the high end gameplay real stale. But the low level gameplay is even worse, you can fall asleep in most content these days and it's no problem.

THIS RIGHT HERE.
It really steams my hams when they lower the difficulty for classes but double down on the burst window meme. We need another Dalmund to fall.

[Dzian]

There are definitely many mechanics that aren't clear at all, and I've had to look up guides online to find out what exactly I was doing wrong. I feel like that's not good for the game. It happened to me with the first alliance raid and the same issue occurs in the latest one.

In my experience at least this comes down to the disconnect between what you see happening and what really is happening... the game is nearly always lying to you. your standing in stupid but you dont get hit. you dodged the stupid but did get hit. because the damage was calculated and worked out sometimes 3 maybe even 4 seconds before you actually see the animation...

this is what often makes things unclear. especially in later sections of fights where 2 sometimes 3 mechanics can overlap or happen in quick succession. so the first time you see a mechanic you do x and survive. cool. secondd time you see same mechaninc you do x again and take a ton of damage. so now your confused because you did the same thing withthte same mechanic but got inconsistant results.. completely unaware that you actually did it correctly both times but it was another mechanic that hit you. just that was calculated 3 seconds before you even see it.

gets even more confusing when you see players running into the stupid and barely taking a scratch. so then you try but get floored... all because of the huge disconnect between what you see and whats actually happening.. certain abilities highlight this pretty well. things like arms length in nald thal for example. you can pop it on the last boss. when he does the jumps. it will usually wear off 2 or 3 seconds before the last jump but you still dont get knocked back. becasue you had the buff 3 seconds ago when the hit was calculated...

[LittleChickenNugget]

XIV has some of the most boring combat in gaming. No, I will not hear anyone out. Even with the OCDs, the regular CD is just too long and the fights in general are not engaging or threatening.