Please change combat style

[Shurrikhan]

Bring back 1.23b combat

Please no. Gods, no.

And this is coming from someone who enjoyed much of 1.x.

Post-Yoshida 1.x combat (1.18-1.23) was the dullest we've ever had. It was not more tactical. Every job was reduced to spam + DoT (modern healer experience, but without the oGCD heals) or alternating A and B combos. The TP system a farce, because the combo opener (a mere 500 or 1000) TP would then make every subsequent step free. Differences between weapon types and forms were removed, elements were made a joke, incapacitations were removed, the skill-chain equivalent removed instead of being debugged.

There was no choice. There was no complexity beyond selecting which element to spam as THM/BLM (since ripped off of CNJ) or Monk stance.

It was ARR, but hugely dumbed down and slowed down, with animation locks up to 2 seconds long (without even accounting for Jump or Dives).
_____________

On the larger topic:

I'd like to see some hefty revisions that might make far better/tighter/more integral use of a smaller number of keys (with no fewer actual actions) and would certainly love some improved net code and (appearance of) physics, but I don't think I'd play a game with a single primary attack button.

Now... it's a little sad how many jobs would be able to play off just the FFXVI keys with no real loss in depth*, but I consider that something in need of fixing more than an opportunity for consolidation.

Just a very quick mock-up for demonstration purposes, but... consider Dragoon.

Background Changes:

• All three combos can now flow into each other. Impulse -> Sonic Thrust -> Full Thrust, Doomspike -> Vorpal -> Chaos Thrust, etc., are just as possible as True -> Vorpal -> Full. F&C now a short, two-strike narrow falloff AoE; WT now AoEs in its second strike. F&C and WT now usable after any combo's completion.
• Battle Litany maybe rehauled/removed?
• Wyrmwind Thrust maybe a little less flexible in its timing, to allow for it to share a key, in effect, with Dragon Sight and maybe Battle Litany?

Cycle: Swap between broods/flights (Affinities). If an ally is targeted while a supportive brood is selected, buff them per your choice of brood/flight. While an offensive brood is selected, hit during trigger periods to release a bonus attack.
Attack: Combos automatically. Slight hold for Focus skills (True->Vorpal->Full Thrust), double-tap for Flurry skills (Impulse->Disembowel->Chaos), tap and slight wait for Surge skills (Sonic Thrust, Coerthan Tempest)
Dodge: If pulling backward at the time, Elusive Jump (hold for more distance). If forward, charging spear forward. Snaps to far side of final target struck, if safe and no more than 20% extra distance travelled.
Eikonic Ability: Geirskogul / Nostrand
Eikonic Feat: Jump. Literally just jumps up, though aimable slightly to snap to surfaces, including vertical ones. [Can skybox during LotD.] Can hold there for up to 3 seconds, effectively auto-dodging non-raid-wides and non-homing attacks. Your next skill is enhanced, but at increasingly diminishing effective potency-per-second relative to ground combat. Use sparingly, alike to a dodge, outside of Blood of the Dragon / Life of the Dragon buffing it.
Ranged: (Spineshatter) Dive/Lunge. Snap to or behind target. Distance traversable based on energy stored. There's enough max energy for two charges at max distance. Can also Jump -> Dive to buff the Dive itself, gaining access to Dragonfire Dive normally or Stardiver under Life of the Dragon.
Utility/Consumable Slot 1: Palette 1 -> Pressing this gives the options of Back/HP Pot/Bloodbath/Second Wind
Utility/Consumable Slot 2: Palette 2 -> Pressing this gives the options of Back/Arm's Length/Battle Litany(?)/Stat Pot
Utility/Consumable Slot 3: True North
Utility/Consumable Slot 4: Leg Sweep

We'd effectively always be on Sprint, so, no need for that.

[Dzian]

Post-Yoshida 1.x combat (1.18-1.23) was the dullest we\\'ve ever had. It was not more tactical. Every job was reduced to spam + DoT (modern healer experience, but without the oGCD heals) or alternating A and B combos. The TP system a farce, because the combo opener (a mere 500 or 1000) TP would then make every subsequent step free. Differences between weapon types and forms were removed, elements were made a joke, incapacitations were removed, the skill-chain equivalent removed instead of being debugged.

There was no choice. There was no complexity beyond selecting which element to spam as THM/BLM (since ripped off of CNJ) or Monk stance.

It was ARR, but hugely dumbed down and slowed down, with animation locks up to 2 seconds long (without even accounting for Jump or Dives).

The 1.23 combat system felt mych better and more tactical than what ARR has ever been.

Something i said a while back. You could liken the 1.23 combat system to a bowl of stew.. It\\'s not one thing its a combination of many things that made it great.

The way TP worked in an earn it then spend it fashion.
The way combos worked in that they took a hint of skill and choice to execute. If you missed the positional on a Dragon Kick you lost the whole combo. What this meant was that landing it successfully actually felt rewarding.. In XIV you wouldnt even notice if you missed a positional. They make no difference at all.

The incapacitation system showed a lot of room for promise and growth adding real choice to your actions.

The overall feel of skills. When you pressed a button in 1.23 they had weight they had impact, even in the animations. You kicked a boss the boss felt it.. Instead of you kicked the boss but the boss didn\\'t even notice. As well as the sense if timing. A tank ducking behind a boss for a combo without turning the boss or the dps. Choosing the right moment to step in front of a boss to drop one of there combos.

The diversity between jobs. every job had strengths and weaknesses and felt unique.

The diversity in bosses in 1.23 where bosses actually felt different.. boss A would be super tough and resilient, they would hit you hard but slow.. Boss B might not hit you quite so hard but they would hit you fast and while they may have been squishier they were also agile.. Boss C might hit you just as hard and fast as B but be more armoured and less agile.. they all felt different. and indeed in many cases required a different approach even in terms of gear choices.

Gear choices. stats that mattered or made a difference. do you go MND on your WHM and focus on stronger heals.. or do you go VIT and go for stronger buffs,, do your DPS go STR for super hurt or ATT to be able to penetrate that tough bosses armour.. or even accuracy just to be able to hit it.. as well as interesting sub stats. the way certain gear granted enhancements to certain skills.

While any one of these ingrediants alone may, or may not have been amazing. The way they were mixed together made for what I believe to be a much tastier and more delicious stew than anything ARR has done since.

By contrast, the ARR Stew has been taking all of its ingredients away,
TP / resource management,
buffs
debuffs,
emnity,
crowd control.
stances..
jobs identity has been stripped away. they all feel the same.
Gear is boring.. 95% of the time if not more.. highest item level wins regardless of stats.
Every boss feels the exact same to fight.. Your biggest badest hit on whatever job your on hits for about the same damage against a level 90 god as it does a level 1 bug. (another reason I find raiding less fun. Bosses are just super inflated hp pools nothing more.)

Again 1 of these ingrediants alone may not amount for much. But with so many ingrediants removed.. XIVS combat is now just a bowl of water. quite tasteless and very lacking. Combat is nothing more than mash a static never changing rotation ove rand over and over. Players spend more time looking at there action bars than they do anything else..

TLDR.1.23 combat feel vastly superior. To anythibg weve had since. Which is nothing but button spam with shiny sparklies.

[MsMisato]

ff17 mmo followed by ffxiv eos announcement when

nah they will probably keep ffxiv like they kept ffxi going all these years lol.

[Shougun]

Said it already but I do hope something like FFXVI is to what FFXII was for FFXIV. Given FFXIV parallels WoW, not carbon just family like, then FFXVI+ may parallel an ESO / GW2, may even hint at the Arc and Diablo like games, again not carbon. Heavy ARPG.

I don't recommend changing FFXIV so much, it would really bump a lot of players who like that fundamental and just seems like a misuse of resources. However, a new game- I think it would be fun and allows FFXIV to continue to be profitable and available. For those who want new or want more action they also get something, and if they want to return they can. It allows two sources of income. Also the difference makes them complement each other rather than consume, they wouldn't conflict much.

So, yes, but not FFXIV- imo

[SilversLyu]

Dunno about 1.0 but the animations looked kinda decent, FF14 needs some of that.

Said it already but I do hope something like FFXVI is to what FFXII was for FFXIV. Given FFXIV parallels WoW, not carbon just family like, then FFXVI+ may parallel an ESO / GW2, may even hint at the Arc and Diablo like games, again not carbon. Heavy ARPG.

I don't recommend changing FFXIV so much, it would really bump a lot of players who like that fundamental and just seems like a misuse of resources. However, a new game- I think it would be fun and allows FFXIV to continue to be profitable and available. For those who want new or want more action they also get something, and if they want to return they can. It allows two sources of income. Also the difference makes them complement each other rather than consume, they wouldn't conflict much.

So, yes, but not FFXIV- imo

This is an interesting observation, altho I am terrified of the idea that the ARPG virus is infecting MMORPG's even more, one of the last strongholds of more classic gameplay.

[Shurrikhan]

<snip>

This reads like someone who never played 1.23.

The way TP worked in an earn it then spend it fashion.

If you're referring to 1.17 and earlier, sure. But if by 1.23 you actually mean 1.23, then no.

Once Yoshida came aboard, 1.x TP made less a difference to combat than modern Darkside makes to Dark Knight gameplay. You could have left TP off your screen and there'd be no discernible difference to gameplay.

You auto-attacked until you could afford your Priority Combo. Then, with your Priority Combo on CD, you auto-attacked until you could use your Filler Combo. If the final step of either combo was on CD, you just used steps 1 and 2 from Priority Combo, then 1 and 2 from the Filler Combo; then back to the full combos. That was it. You alternated between them while occasionally slipping in a self-heal as Bard or a Haymaker as Pugilist.

The CDs lined up automatically anyways, so there was no point in banking TP or forgoing a short-combo in favor of a full combo 20s later, because you'd still be using it on CD so long as you hit your things on CD; the only mistake you could make was overthinking things. Any complexity in that system was illusory and a trap.

Again, combo openers negated the cost of the entire chain. The only reason you see you'd see anyone spending more than 1000 TP at a time in 1.x videos is because they're recording the skills one-by-one, as per here.

The incapacitation system showed a lot of room for promise and growth adding real choice to your actions.

It also did not exist in 1.23. Yoshida had already removed it.

buffs

Yoshida already removed nearly all of those before 1.23.

debuffs

Yoshida already removed most of those before 1.23.

emnity

Yoshida already vastly simplified that before 1.23.

emnity

Yoshida already vastly simplified/removed that before 1.23.

stances

Were on only one job. Who still had them until Endwalker. Without the long animation-lock or uptime cost of 1.x Fists of Earth/Wind/Fire.

Gear is boring.. 95% of the time if not more.. highest item level wins regardless of stats.

That was also the case in 1.23. The tertiary stat thresholds (e.g., MND on PLD, PIE on DRG) were all mathed out, almost entirely inconsequential, and came automatically with one's relic gear anyways. There was no choice, let alone any giving meaningful agency. There was more agency in ARR in PIE thresholds on BLM or even the ability to attach DEX/STR as a tank for the added parry chance / % mitigation than there was in 1.23.

Prior to Yoshida's mass-simplifications... maybe. It'd really depend on the class in question.

Every boss feels the exact same to fight.. Your biggest badest hit on whatever job your on hits for about the same damage against a level 90 god as it does a level 1 bug.

Because you need to hit a bug for millions of damage?

The only reason for enemy mobs to have actual Armor / Defense is for it to be manipulable (think Sunder Armor) and to make it so those manipulations are worth different amounts on different kinds of mobs. But there were no such Armor-reducing manipulations in 1.23.

There was absolutely nothing to make it worth attaching those additional properties to each unit, then, rather than just attaching a damage-taken-increasing debuff to them independent on enemy Armor values. So why would they bother with it?

If you missed the positional on a Dragon Kick you lost the whole combo.

Dragon Kick was a combo ender. You couldn't lose the combo... on a combo ender. It was Pounce -> Sucker Punch -> Dragon Kick (which had no positional and just dealt damage).

You alternated Pummel-Concussive-Simian and Pounce-Sucker-Dragon, and filled with Haymaker as able and would delay the CDs on neither Pummel (a negligible 10s, given the hugely long animation locks -- effectively no CD / there just to foolproof the braindead system further) nor Pounce (20s).

jobs identity has been stripped away. they all feel the same.

In 1.23, all but healers were 3-step combo jobs. All of them. Even Monk. Which didn't even have Greased Lightning yet.

Dunno about 1.0 but the animations looked kinda decent, FF14 needs some of that.

The animations in question (from 1.23, not 1.0; the video title is slightly misleading, as 1.17 and earlier used a wholly different set of abilities, a different skill system, a different approach to customization (every class originally operated more like BLU), and a different way of handling TP).

[Shougun]

Dunno about 1.0 but the animations looked kinda decent, FF14 needs some of that.



This is an interesting observation, altho I am terrified of the idea that the ARPG virus is infecting MMORPG's even more, one of the last strongholds of more classic gameplay.

1.0 Animations were lovely! The grounding that the run / walk animation provided was substantial, took many years before I was not constantly thinking of it when running around FFXIV 2.0. Didn't like the animation lock so much but I thought they were going to attempt to do animation blending, they did.. just not to the level I was dreaming lol.

ARPG VIRUS, ARPG VIRUS, HUZZAH!! lol but jk.. I think there is room for both, this is one of the primary reasons in my post you quoted to preserving FFXIV (and that means continuing it as well). Take over all the live service genres .

[Shurrikhan]

1.0 Animations were lovely! The grounding that the run / walk animation provided was substantial, took many years before I was not constantly thinking of it when running around FFXIV 2.0. Didn't like the animation lock so much but I thought they were going to attempt to do animation blending, they did.. just not to the level I was dreaming lol.

I would love some well-polished snapped-distance animation blending. Gliding Venomous Bite, Dragon Kick, etc., can look pretty ridiculous.

[Syln]

I wouldn't mind a pseudo-counter mechanic for tank that trigger when you use their small defensive cooldown on tank buster/shared aoe though.

And personal LB while we are at it.

Basically adding a few features that would make the gameplay a little more enjoyable and give a feeling of novelty.

[Dzian]

This reads like someone who never played 1.23. If you're referring to 1.17 and earlier, sure. But if by 1.23 you actually mean 1.23, then no.

I played right up till the servers shutting down and referring to many aspects withing the 1.2 era..

Again, combo openers negated the cost of the entire chain.

yes but they also had the positional requirements that actually mattered.. if you missed the positional on that co.bo starter you lost the entire combo.. that's impact.. compared to presently. Miss a positional you lose something like 2 potency per second for the next 30 seconds.
Insignificant. No impact no reward.

That was also the case in 1.23. The tertiary stat thresholds (e.g., MND on PLD, PIE on DRG) were all mathed out, almost entirely inconsequential, and came automatically with one's relic gear anyways. There was no choice, let alone any giving meaningful agency. There was more agency in ARR in PIE thresholds on BLM or even the ability to attach DEX/STR as a tank for the added parry chance / % mitigation than there was in 1.23.

There was actually quite a lot of choice to be had. The set of gear you had for taking down chimera for example was pretty different to these of gear you'd use for taking down garuda or ifrit. Ifrit or miser.

Tanks also. You'd take more defence and hp to chimera than you would to miser or ifrit. You'd probably trade for more str/acc for garuda who was squishy but evasive. Think I had 3 separate builds for my paladin.

Then you had healers where stacking vit instead of mind made a hefty bump to your stoneskiins regens and protects while stacking mind bumped your cures. So many healers would often switch builds. Doing g those sub 17min av runs a healer might stack vit while zooming through the poison rooms and prepping for miser. But switch to mind for coco and other rooms.

Emnity and stuff also mattered much more than they do know...

You auto-attacked until you could afford your Priority Combo. Then, with your Priority Combo on CD, you auto-attacked until you could use your Filler Combo. If the final step of either combo was on CD,

The difference being that when you pressed buttons you saw something happen.. that skill hits notably harder than your base auto damage... ARR and beyond. You just mash buttons endlessly and it's nothing more than an auto attack with shiny sparkly effects. You don't even see an auto attack go off.

The point being to have engaging jobs and an engaging combat system. You need engaging mechanics and systems to interact with.. and 1.2 had a lot more than we have now. Even more than we had when ARR launched

ARR concept art for the combat system we could have had.

[
All the art and the idea to expand upon the 1.2 battle system. with the way tp worked, combos worked, incapacitations, mob strengths and weakeness all that cool stuff. If I recall they even were considering restoring battle regimens.