Please change combat style

[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.

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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.