Combat system is beyond saving.

[xivYuiM]

I can't quite remember- I wonder if I missed the time when this was the case in regards to Tanking

When was it that Tanks had to make macros to mark the kill order of dungeon trash so the DPS wouldn't attack an enemy the Tank wasn't attacking and pull aggro from them?

Yes tanks marking kill order was common for dungeon packs especially for the first couple of enemies or if you had a DPS with strong single target weaves because managing aggro was always an engaging minigame and people who try to dismiss it are wrong.

[xivYuiM]

The HW DRK has been the best job design to date. Is so sad to look to drk today, a trash clone of WAR, and seems it will be a clone of GNB on DT. And the worst is, we will never see another job with such good design like that again, so it seems.
Such waste....

HW DRK was a work of art. I pity the massive wave of people who started in 2020 and only know DRK for the sad husk that it is today.

[xivYuiM]

Ive completly given up with pve content and have moved entirely to pvp. It's the only content in the game I currently enjoy. I didn't even bother with the last raid wing because the bosses were so horrible. If they're as bad again as they were in ew. I will not do them again. I do not enjoy these style of raids. I want arr style back

It makes me so sad when I see that every raid since ShB has just been simon says followed by a body check. ARR coils raids were some of the best content this game has ever offered but unfortunately new players will never get to experience them.

[Averax]

Bro i hated cleric stance so much. Disincentivized throwing out deeps as a healer unless you knew the damage patterns. (Also birthed the concept of a Main-Heal/Off-Heal in raids/trials. Main heal stayed out of cleric stance and off heal stayed in unless more healing was required)

Also i can't think of anyone who had a meaningful interaction with TP. I remember playing AST in HW and if anyone gave a melee dps "The Arrow" they'd have a meltdown because it reduced recast times and made them run out of TP faster. Similar with giving BLMs "The Ewer" since it messed with their MP management.

Also what "multiple viable builds" This game has no builds. Unless you mean that annoying period where tanks wore slaying accessories for damage and you could allocate like 20 points of a stat somewhere.

And that last one is still true.

[Bonoki]

For years, I've relied on others to guide my every move. It's become a routine: hop on the Balance discord, absorb the job guides, dive into FFXIV Analysis for the best logs, mimic the rotations, drill them in Stone Sea Sky, and watch YouTube for a video guide on the fight itself, and then replicate everything in real duties. It's all about studying, studying, studying in this game. There's little room for discovery anymore. This game has fostered a culture of dependency, where it's easier to let others pave the way than to figure things out on your own. No matter how intricate and engaging a rotation might be, it loses its allure when it simply boils down to replicating someone else's creation. Success seems guaranteed as long as you follow suit.

[xivYuiM]

These forums are such an echo chamber.

This could be said about any place online where people go to discuss something opinion related. Reddit, 4chan, twitter, discord, etc. Especially places like reddit or discord where opinions are heavily moderated they are all bound to become 'echo chambers'. Not to mention that no matter the platform a discussion is taking place on, you will inherently only see people posting who are more passionate about whatever the subject is than most of the people involved. It's not necessarily that the 95% of people who ignore the forums "all disagree" with the opinions being shared, but they just don't care enough to share. In the case of this game I would bet that most of them probably don't care about the combat system AT ALL.

[Averax]

For years, I've relied on others to guide my every move. It's become a routine: hop on the Balance discord, absorb the job guides, dive into FFXIV Analysis for the best logs, mimic the rotations, drill them in Stone Sea Sky, and watch YouTube for a video guide on the fight itself, and then replicate everything in real duties. It's all about studying, studying, studying in this game. There's little room for discovery anymore. This game has fostered a culture of dependency, where it's easier to let others pave the way than to figure things out on your own. No matter how intricate and engaging a rotation might be, it loses its allure when it simply boils down to replicating someone else's creation. Success seems guaranteed as long as you follow suit.

I mean rotations are designed by square enix. There's no talents or builds or rotation changing options in this game. Everyone playing your class is playing exactly the same class, and there will only be one optimal way to play it. That's just the nature of this game in particular. No build variety, no gameplay variety. Aside from the occasional fringe rotation that usually gets patched out later.

[Souljacker]

Anything, and I mean literally anything, would be better than the completely brain-dead, everything telegraphed, every job being almost indistinguishable from one another mess we have right now.

I miss the old days of serious theorycrafting, back when we were having debates about "days and directions" - you know, when the devs hid so much about their design that we had to work for it.

[Enjuden]

I was more referring to the limits you could push in non-raid content (like dungeons) where there was endless fun to be had in trying to maximize the damage you could deal while also staying just on the edge of losing aggro or dying because you lost the damage reduction from tank stance. If all you wanted to do was hold aggro and not worry about anything else you could just turn on stance and walk forward while you spammed flash and used DCDs which is basically how every tank has been forced to play for many years now. There is no depth, no reward, no excitement. The dungeons mobs can't kill you, you can't lose aggro, and everyone does pretty much the exact same DPS assuming you have the same gear on while we mash the same 3 abilities without thinking for 17 minutes in a dungeon.

People really have this strange idea that Heavensward magically was able to kill you in non-raid content when it was exactly the same every expansion. Only one dungeon did that and it was release Vault, and that was because AST/MCH was horrendously bad on launch and took a long time for them to fix. And frankly, was overtuned comparatively to the rest of the dungeons in that expansion. Only one raid did that, and it was Mhach, and that was Ozma being Ozma.

You couldn't die or lose aggro regardless unless you were not pushing your mitigation or you decided to pull wall to wall while the rest of the party refuses to aoe for whatever reason. Difficulty in dungeons specifically was and always is because of terrible players being terrible. The same players will refuse to do things out of sheer spite instead of playing the game as it was made.

The rest of your points are baseless at best and hyperbolic at worst, and is a complete waste of time going into, with the only exception being job design being poor. Job design was bad then too, and worse than now. DRK being the only exception to that rule.

[Awful]

Combats been going downhill since ShB and SE has even stated they're not doing anything about job identity until 8.0, so what we're playing is everyone's a tank but not a DRK/GNB/PLD/WAR since they all play the same and VPR is just RPR but flashier than an anime episode on DBZ, they even have the same gauge lmao.

So I hope you enjoy your x3-4 finishers while spending your gauge on your single target attack or AoE attack while spamming 1-2-3 while still enjoying that 2 min burst window because that didn't get old at all.