What are your thoughts on FFXIV's combat?

[Dzian]

It gets the job done, but I feel it would be far better if they went with the more action oriented style we have seen of recent games.

Gotta disagree here.

the problem with many of the recent games is that sure they look cool but really they're quite lacking. take ffxv for example action based combat. some very visually impressive fights such as that epic leviathan battle. but strip away the visual flare and that whole fight is basically just press circle and win. you have next to no control over the action or whats actually happening your just pressing circle. it's not action combat its a big ass QTE. all flair no substance. even the ff7 remake is guilty of this in many places.

Sorry but this is 100% wrong. It makes a big difference if you push 100 buttons a minute (and get the feeling that you actively doing something and the char respond imidiantly to your actions) or like you said just 10 where you have big breaks and gap between all the actions you do. It maybe doesn't make a difference to you but there are a lot of people out there that ting otherwise. Even if the fights take the same amount of time, the feeling during the combat will be complete different and that's what it is all about.

The problem as i said earlier is that the combat lacks weight and impact.. doesn't matter how many buttons you press when they do nothing.
FFXIV combat feels like this
mashing buttons endlessly but there's no weight, no impact. doesnt matter if your pressing a hundred buttons a minute you're doing nothing..

combat should feel like this

I'd rather press 10 buttons a minute that feel like this. than a 100 that feel like that.

The GCD or amount of buttons you press doesnt really matter. what matters is what happens when you press them. do they feel weighty or impactfull

[vetch]

Gotta disagree here.

the problem with many of the recent games is that sure they look cool but really they're quite lacking. take ffxv for example action based combat. some very visually impressive fights such as that epic leviathan battle. but strip away the visual flare and that whole fight is basically just press circle and win. you have next to no control over the action or whats actually happening your just pressing circle. it's not action combat its a big ass QTE. all flair no substance. even the ff7 remake is guilty of this in many places.

The problem as i said earlier is that the combat lacks weight and impact.. doesn't matter how many buttons you press when they do nothing.

The GCD or amount of buttons you press doesnt really matter. what matters is what happens when you press them. do they feel weighty or impactfull

I would go even further and say that having action combat with actual weight and impact to your moves is incompatible with FF14's established design paradigms of 'we put 28 skills on your skillbar and you're going to use all of them' and 'respect the encounter mechanics as we have written them or perish'.

[Shurrikhan]

I've definitely enjoyed XIV combat a lot in the past, and still enjoy parts of it, but it has a few issues:

1. Button bloat, such as our "combos" being instead linear sequences that simply, in effect, make a waste of n-1 to, at best, n-2 combo skills in a given GCD instead of actually functioning as combos (separate usable skills with synergetic, not merely gated, effects that nonetheless allow for varied but distinct/choiceful rotations).
   
   
2. The sometimes-massive gap between what we see and what we get, especially in terms of damage snapshotting times, the animations of those events relative to when they check for victims, etc.
   
   
3. The barren-ness of undermechanics and, more than likely, the engine's inability to support anything more complex. There's no way for this game to pull off a constantly ramping or constantly declining effect (the smallest interval we ever work with is 3 seconds), there's no Z axis (mobs can auto-attack you from some 20+ meters below you), there's no way to "snap" movement abilities to pathable terrain (i.e., such that Elusive Jump might end itself a couple meters early if any further would take you off of pathable terrain), the game's incapable of mixing movement vectors (it can only override), it still has a somewhat absurdly low debuff cap (to the point that sometimes questionable design choices "must be made" just to work within those confines), etc.

Atop that, there's a larger matter of overarching design.

• I preferred when there was a larger sense of difference and unique affordances in different damage profiles and the like between jobs. That's not to say outright imbalances were a good thing, but I'd have no issue with, say, Monks taking a little longer to ramp up every other pull or so (or else forcing a chain-pulling style) in dungeons so long as they brought some unique affordance against weak mobs. Similarly, it was also fine to me that not every job got its AoE early on back when mobs could actually be a threat and healer direct damage was enough that (CC +) focus-targeting was competitive with mass pulls. That overly easy tuning removed any place for those kinds of nuances seems a shame to me.
  
  
• It also seems a problem that the general player experience must suffer from the actions of a few. We used to have, for instance, a Z-axis in the game; it was removed, allegedly, to prevent Ninjas from reaching unintended locations back when Shukuchi was an actual teleport instead of a dash (understandable only if they were falling through the world and somehow they couldn't have just addressed the problem through Shukuchi itself). We used to be able to set waymarks in combat, which was a large boon for PuG runs in easier content (especially was a way for someone to note safe zones or the tank to inform melee as to where he was taking the boss/mobs); it was removed because of a small group of cheaters in T9S. Macros themselves were purposely broken (unable to queue, unable to accept small intervals) for fear of a few potentially macro-ing their rotations (which would not be competitive anyways if they didn't utterly replace any chance for mid-combo nuance with the rigid sequences of XIV "combos").
  
  
• I dislike that the frustration of failure is usually addressed by making failure, itself, more difficult, instead of simply decreasing its extrinsic punishment. Consider pre-nerf Amdapor Keep, for instance. Admittedly, the Demon Wall could be difficult for newish players before KB immunities, the removal of bees, etc. But why would not be addressed simply by moving checkpoints to just in front of boss rooms and activating them upon reaching the boss room while no party member is in combat (deterring sac runs), so that there's no run-back time for each attempt against the boss as you learn its mechanics, instead of outright removing those mechanics? Perhaps even provide hints as to what to do in the fight after X deaths to a particular mechanic. But do not remove the mechanics!

[Enjuden]

It was better in Stormblood. I like having more things to push, having things be a little more nuanced than 'Are you holding cooldowns for 2 minutes? Why are you not doing that?' for every single job. I like the management of resources and having things to keep in mind, I didn't care for HW for a majority of jobs but there's a few I like, such as Dark Arts Dark Knight. Monk is a pretty big exception. I'd never play the job in savage/ultimate but I feel it went in a good direction compared to most of the other recent changes.

I doubt they'll make jobs go back to Stormblood, so I hope they eventually just release a job that will cater to people who like 3.0/4.0 combat.

Good combat is complex. Depends on the genre. If you want a slower combat that relies on OGCDs, XIV is honestly very good in that. Large number of skills and memorization is different strokes for different folks. Sometimes it's great, sometimes it's not. I like memorization and large numbers of skills, but with how EW is going they are catering to people who are not me in all jobs. oGCD to enhance GCD is a big plus for me, and with Samurai losing Kaiten, I have lost the only job that has this, so I'm very sad about it. I don't need a ton of procs, I want resource management, I want there to be punishment for mistakes, and I want the skill ceiling and skill floor to be given a greater distance. This will likely end up just being a different job rather than job balance in general.

If you want an example, a melee or phys ranged that could use mana to augment certain abilities like Dark Knight did would be pretty cool.

UI needs improvements, and the meme bans for players who had UI mods to actually help with that is ridiculous and should be overturned or ignored from the ban history they had, especially with the whole 'Well, you used it before we did, so we're going to ban you'. It's a ban from pure malice rather than things that could be malicious, which are very, very obvious.

[ReynTime]

Gotta disagree here.

the problem with many of the recent games is that sure they look cool but really they're quite lacking. take ffxv for example action based combat. some very visually impressive fights such as that epic leviathan battle. but strip away the visual flare and that whole fight is basically just press circle and win. you have next to no control over the action or whats actually happening your just pressing circle. it's not action combat its a big ass QTE. all flair no substance. even the ff7 remake is guilty of this in many places.



The problem as i said earlier is that the combat lacks weight and impact.. doesn't matter how many buttons you press when they do nothing.
FFXIV combat feels like this
mashing buttons endlessly but there's no weight, no impact. doesnt matter if your pressing a hundred buttons a minute you're doing nothing..

combat should feel like this

I'd rather press 10 buttons a minute that feel like this. than a 100 that feel like that.

The GCD or amount of buttons you press doesnt really matter. what matters is what happens when you press them. do they feel weighty or impactfull

I will add that it has the worst auto-attack I've seen in any japanese game. We get those 123 action combos because of how almost invisible the actual auto-attacks are. Their animation is atrocious, you need a magnifier to see the particle/VFX it does, the damage is basically an invisible DoT filler for sake of it, it serves no purpose to build up absolutely anything in combat. A better use of auto-attack can be seen in games like FF VII Remake or Xenoblade 2 or 3. It's still serving the filler purpose, but they have impact, the animation is more satisfying without overwriting the real skills/magic/actions/arts, and they exist to build up your stronger attacks/other resources.

[Leifei]

I think that the combat is fine, in my opinion. Shikuchi needs work though. It's buggy. At least on controller, it is.

[Tiramu]

I'd love it if XIV had good action combat, like a good Tales game. But, ignoring compatability with the current games design, it wouldn't really be feasible
Latency issues can cause people issues as it is.

[Rolder50]

I wish abilities were more unique and impactful. It feels like almost every skill is just "Does damage with xyz cooldown or combo requirements" while cooldowns are minor things like "Deal 10% more damage for 20 seconds" Meanwhile if I look over to the other MMO I play, WoW, every class and spec feels distinct in how they play.

Ninja Edit: Also healers are terribly designed just in general.

[Kisshu]

I kinda miss parts of the older game at around Stormblood.

Having to work for enmity on a tank was fun, now it's not something you have to consider unless the tank forgets their stance. Although I do understand the "problem" of expected stance dancing that it could lead to.

Ninja being a real support job and not just dmg buff. Goad giving TP back when that was a thing, or being able to manipulate enmity build up for tanks or reduce build up for a target with Smoke Screen and Shadewalker.

Being able to transfer MP to a different target as a DPS caster. Had several healers thank me between pulls in dungeons when I was a BLM.

Nowadays, the combat itself is really not something I think about a lot, it's just there and what's more important to me is how enjoyable the fight is.

One thing I would like to experience, possible in a new MMO, was a combat system designed around the FF7R combat. Each characters feels different enough that they could use it as a foundation to build jobs on. Along with the whole pressure system.

[Jettinson]

Sadly i have never experienced combat befoe ShB so it is hard to compare when you never get the chance to have a feel... still i say i enjoy for what it does, PvP sadly suffers with delay in a terrible way, classes that are meant to be fast like monk or have quick burst do not feel great when you weave\heal etc.

Still, wonder how FFXIV would be if it played like FFVII Remake. I adored that game along with the system, each character felt unique while stlll able to build the materia you get (and funny enough would love to see a XIV Job that kinda plays like Barret. Tifa's still my favorite to play)