Does the combat system need to be reworked?

[midnitdragoon]

Just as title states,does the combat system need to be reworked, should it stay as is? Should yoshi experiment with different battle system mechanics in future content releases?

[OgruMogru]

It needs something that's for sure! I suppose what the specifics of "combat system" actually entails is quite hard to pin down and I'm not gonna get my hopes up for any big changes but we have remained in more or less the same point for 2 expansions now. Something's gotta change. I'd personally like to see the 2 min timers reverted to closer to how they were in SB. I feel like the changes the devs made in ShB onwards were an over adjustment to feedback on timer jank AND the rigid party composition buffs. IMO they should have adjusted one [removed the party comp buffs] not both of those issues and this is something the dev team seem to do repeatedly. Over correcting and removing too many elements of the battle system at the same time so every adjustment feels more like we're having our toys taken away instead of adjusted to be more fun.

[Musashidon]

not until someone gives a actual good rework that is actually different.

the suggestions are always i wanna press the same buttons i have pressed for 10 years in a different order and a slightly different time as if that is some magical rework that is going rejuvenate the gameplay.

[Cynric]

Yeah make this into like devil may cry, but Final fantasy xiv.

[Palladiamors]

This far in to XIVs life span? No. Wide, sweeping changes of that nature aren't usually well received by stable fanbase and it would represent a large risk with no promise of any real gain.

Refined, enhanced, expanded on? Maybe. For my buck I'd like to see them add new specifications to existing jobs to allow for a wider variety of play styles and letting people differentiate themselves a bit more than they do now.

As for new mechanics and such, I'm the wrong guy to ask for those specific questions.

[strawberrycake]

This far in to XIVs life span? No. Wide, sweeping changes of that nature aren't usually well received by stable fanbase and it would represent a large risk with no promise of any real gain.

Refined, enhanced, expanded on? Maybe. For my buck I'd like to see them add new specifications to existing jobs to allow for a wider variety of play styles and letting people differentiate themselves a bit more than they do now.

As for new mechanics and such, I'm the wrong guy to ask for those specific questions.

Nah that only happens when the changes are half assed and not tested properly. This is why XIV needs to allow public testing since iirc, even CBU3 has a hard time testing their own products since they don't have enough people to test half the time.

[Mosha]

This far in to XIVs life span? No. Wide, sweeping changes of that nature aren't usually well received by stable fanbase and it would represent a large risk with no promise of any real gain.

Star Wars Galaxies comes to mind.


IMO should add in a lot of the more niche stuff cut from SHB, easy why to raise the skill ceiling a bit.

[strawberrycake]

My suggesting is what it always is, Go back to having jobs and roles be synergistic with one another. Go back What we had in Stormblood. It worked, fans loved it, allowed for nuance. But with this actually expand upon the roles different abilites, make CC matter, let roles have group based mitigation back, get back to when tanks and healers actually subverted the Holy Trinity of MMOs. the things that actually made XIV different from other MMOs.

[Palladiamors]

Nah that only happens when the changes are half assed and not tested properly. This is why XIV needs to allow public testing since iirc, even CBU3 has a hard time testing their own products since they don't have enough people to test half the time.

Genuine question, can you name one time an MMO made sweeping changes to a combat system that was well received by the community? I've been playing MMOs for about 22 years now and I can't think of any BUT I also haven't played every MMO out there.

In my experience even relatively inoffensive changes usually lead to a lot of community push back if it's not a highly requested feature. I'm not saying I don't believe you, mind, just that I have seen many a community react... vehemently in the wake of combat being changed

[Colt47]

There's a lot of issues with how they did this expansion in terms of combat systems due to how they did the mitigate or die mentality.

Lets just lay this out with removing the defensive stats and just do some simple numbers.

Tank = 200 HP
Melee DPS = 100 HP
Ranged DPS = 90 HP
Healer / Caster DPS = 80 HP

Why does the tank have 200 HP? Because they got the highest HP and defense in the game, so if someone flattened it out they really have a massive health pool compared to anyone else, even beyond what is visible. So technically, to wipe the group you'd need to do something like 200 damage to everyone to make it happen, but the issue is how do the other jobs survive the attack if the idea is they want people to mitigate? The mitigations only do 5%-20% of the damage, so a 200 HP attack would only go down to 160 from the strongest mitigation possible, and mitigation stacking has diminishing returns.

And thus we arrive at the body checks. In order to make this whole design thing work, they would have to make it so that a 20% mitigation is necessary for people who are not tanks. However, healer and casters in this example are at 80 hp, so therefore at least two mits are needed for group content to survive as that means an AOE meant to wipe the group has to do at least 100 HP worth of damage. So then, to enforce the mit or die idea, the next mechanic after the AOE has to be something that requires everyone to be alive. Think the Limit Cut of p12s p1 or paradigma 3. Do you see where this is going?

And then they still have tank busters which have to deal enough damage to kill a tank without mits. This means that they got to either do 200 HP unmitigated to a tank, or have the first hit apply some kind of debuff to make the next hit do 200 HP or more to the tank. Well in this case they actually did both so the first attack will kill the tank unmitigated at 200HP, and then if they don't swap they will die because they got a debuff increasing the damage of the next attack by +100% or some crazy number.

This entire idea was stupid to begin with because outside of the hardest content available, your other content just isn't going to be able to enforce this mindset. People later on are going to out gear the content that came earlier to the point that they wont instantly die to anything except a tank buster. Thus, the aoe that would wipe non-tanks fails to do so, people ignore using a mit, then the coordination mechanic comes and everyone survives without ever knowing there was a check.