Combat system is beyond saving.

[Cynric]

TP kinda sucked, it was either a nonissue for some jobs, or an issue for others. You press invigorate at the right time or someone gives you tp buff, at least they eventually removed sprint from costing tp, but I do certainly prefer the game without TP since I like playing the faster jobs.
Stance dancing was ok, most of the time on tank it was unnecessary, Drk probably had some of the best stuff with darkside, grit, and dark arts, playing Drk was more fun then and I can agree with that. But outside of the Drk stance dancing I don't think it was needed as often as people make it out to be, like others have said, you just did your hate combo once or twice and dropped stance.

I think people are overstating the complexity of enmity management, you at best as a DPS had to pop your hate reduction tool during opener/reopener/burst phase. The job that handled hate the best was Ninja at one point, but that was an exception, most of the hate stuff was very automated, press the button on CD. They started messing with the enmity a lot because undergeared tanks couldn't hold hate against higher geared or stronger dps players.

It was an endless circle of them buffing hate tools and tanks still complaining about losing hate, that's why we wound up with where we are now.

Clerics stance I think was really cool, but healers in general weren't much more interesting in their interactions and buttons imo no matter when you look at the game. I guess Scholar might have had some decent things at one point, but the role as a whole has been very stagnant. I think some of the most interesting interactions were when you could stoneskin mid battle which led to some interesting strategies.

Things were also very homogenous even back then, you had your piercing and slashing debuffs, your 60s dot that a lot of jobs had, some jobs had another dot to keep up, then you had your damage buff of x%. You had your cookie cutter cross class skills, they tried to give us a slight choice with that system but everyone just used the same thing.


That's not to say nothing was better back then, I definitely preferred having more positionals, dark arts, clerics stance, having distinct healing differences (though this amounted to shield/regular healer, and solo heal+ dps healer),the older raids were also a bit more fun, and 30 button pvp with pve skills was my favorite version of pvp by far.

I just don't think it was all sunshine and rainbows.
Stance dancing was rarely needed, jobs weren't wholly free from feeling samey, tank balance hasn't really been great like ever, healer balance was good for like a patch series, str and vit accessories being on tanks while interesting honestly led to too much problems where tanks would do things they just couldn't handle because they read somewhere that they should, or they thought it made them cool. Everyone complained everything was too hard all the time, then after square enix made things easier they complained it was too easy.

Now we've repeated the circle with people complaining for years they couldn't line buffs up with trick attack and the devs line everything up with each other and everyone complains all the CD's are on 2 minutes.

Not like I'm loving the way things are myself but, it's not hard to see how we got to this point and it took years. So I'm not surprised that it might take a few years to change course since a large part of the population came in during shadowbringers which was after all this stuff happened.

[GrizzlyTank]

First major patch to the combat would be to increase the update frequency. But that's unlikely to happen due to server strain...

[Araxes]

I dunno man. I just wanna wait and see. I am gonna judge the System when i can actually play it.

[4clubbedace]

Heavensward was the peak of this game

>NEAR PERFECT

NOT IF YUOU WERE A MONK OR PALADIN LMAO

[Doopliss]

>NEAR PERFECT

NOT IF YUOU WERE A MONK OR PALADIN LMAO

skill issue

[4clubbedace]

skill issue

NOT A SKILL ISSUE, BUT PARTY BALANCE

pld was just not good compared to a drk war combo, as so much was magic based back then, and war is the etenral favorite

ninja is a hard lock in do to trick and the way the adjusted enmity for tanks, and dragoon for pierce debuff for mch/brd ,

sure balance was swingy and everyone was distnct, but it meant there were some hard loser jobs because of it.

[Doopliss]

NOT A SKILL ISSUE, BUT PARTY BALANCE

pld was just not good compared to a drk war combo, as so much was magic based back then, and war is the etenral favorite

ninja is a hard lock in do to trick and the way the adjusted enmity for tanks, and dragoon for pierce debuff for mch/brd ,

sure balance was swingy and everyone was distnct, but it meant there were some hard loser jobs because of it.

this just goes back into my previous post about how none of this shit just actually mattered. those combos were better, yeah, but literally every job was capable of clearing the hardest fights in the game. i went through all of hw content as a mnk with literally zero issues. i'm sorry you were partied with people who wanted to pretend these were real problems.

[Rekh]

I was there, all jobs were fine in ARR all the way to SB. PLD wasn't as good as WAR through most of it but by no means was it a bad tank; same with Monk. The focus should be on making the cake have some flavor again, right now the menu has no flavor, everything you order (FFXIV jobs) from that menu is all the same flavor with slight sprinkles and coloring.

Any artist worth his salt would tell you that every art piece you make should be different from the last one. Square enix has buried this basic concept in a graveyard somewhere.

[Xlantaa]

Nah. System is ok. It is this forum what is beyond saving. HW was horrendous compared with current. I do not miss it.

[Rithy255]

Nah. System is ok. It is this forum what is beyond saving. HW was horrendous compared with current. I do not miss it.

System being ok, isn't really good enough just being "acceptable" is the issue, the combat is bare bones and barely passes as fun.

HW, was the opposite issue, But lets not pretend that everyone is just asking for hw 2.0, people are here are asking for something more akin to SB/Shb (somewhere inbetween that), people are asking for supports (tank/healers) to actually feel more interesting then their current design.

FF14 is a good game, but it could be a better game by a mile if the job system was more interesting, nice fight design goes well with actually interesting a diverse job gameplay.