Combat system is beyond saving.

[Averax]

Only one raid did that, and it was Dun Scaith, and that was Ozma being Ozma.

Correction, it was the Weeping City of Mhach.

Or as we liked to call it then, Wiping City.

[Enjuden]

Correction, it was the Weeping City of Mhach.

Or as we liked to call it then, Wiping City.

I'm old and gray in game. Oops.

[IDontPetLalas]

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.

At least it required pay me to pay attention and have some knowledge, which made the dungeon/encounter more interesting for me. My first healer was a SCH in HW and I couldn't sleep my way through healing, I had to pay attention on how stance was used, which made DPSing and healing more interesting. I also liked that it encouraged some interaction with the co-healer. I don't think that it's a bad thing, that's already something that exists /existed to an extent with tanks. It is supposed to be an MMO after all.

[ReynTime]

The thing with stuff like cleric stance is, it was optional. If you were doing any content that was the "normal difficulty" of the time then there was nobody forcing you to use it. If you were worried about activating it and then getting caught unable to heal enough then simply don't use it! It was a brilliant way for people who spent the time to learn the limits of their job to take the risk of turning it on to squeeze out extra damage when they could and, if done appropriately, they would be rewarded for doing so. There is nothing even close to that in the game the way it is today.

"Risk" is the keyword here.

With the way FF XIV is designed the potential to go beyond the "good enough" output of your rotation is the only type of "risk vs reward" that existed and involved player expression.

There is no player expression at all now. Mouth breathers probably think "player expression" is limited to how they dress up their catgirls and bunny boys though, so they're fine with that.
And yes I do miss cleric stance, TP costs and definitely miss enmity management. Enmity management alone made fights more than just a focus on maintaining the highest possible dps and memorizing mechanics timing, not to mention it made dungeon trash mob a lot more fun than the brain rotting garbage it is now.

People who keep advocating for less interactions with the combat should quite frankly shut the hell up and stick with their trash housing, gposing, limsa afking and lifestyle shit. The XIV casual community really loves to deprive people who like to engage with PvE content just because they personally would gladly spend no more than 5 minutes getting all that done so they focus on their second life FF edition.

[xivYuiM]

"Risk" is the keyword here.

With the way FF XIV is designed the potential to go beyond the "good enough" output of your rotation is the only type of "risk vs reward" that existed and involved player expression.

There is no player expression at all now. Mouth breathers probably think "player expression" is limited to how they dress up their catgirls and bunny boys though, so they're fine with that.
And yes I do miss cleric stance, TP costs and definitely miss enmity management. Enmity management alone made fights more than just a focus on maintaining the highest possible dps and memorizing mechanics timing, not to mention it made dungeon trash mob a lot more fun than the brain rotting garbage it is now.

People who keep advocating for less interactions with the combat should quite frankly shut the hell up and stick with their trash housing, gposing, limsa afking and lifestyle shit. The XIV casual community really loves to deprive people who like to engage with PvE content just because they personally would gladly spend no more than 5 minutes getting all that done so they focus on their second life FF edition.

Spot on. I couldn't have said it better myself.

[Boblawblah]

"Risk" is the keyword here.

With the way FF XIV is designed the potential to go beyond the "good enough" output of your rotation is the only type of "risk vs reward" that existed and involved player expression.

There is no player expression at all now. Mouth breathers probably think "player expression" is limited to how they dress up their catgirls and bunny boys though, so they're fine with that.
And yes I do miss cleric stance, TP costs and definitely miss enmity management. Enmity management alone made fights more than just a focus on maintaining the highest possible dps and memorizing mechanics timing, not to mention it made dungeon trash mob a lot more fun than the brain rotting garbage it is now.

People who keep advocating for less interactions with the combat should quite frankly shut the hell up and stick with their trash housing, gposing, limsa afking and lifestyle shit. The XIV casual community really loves to deprive people who like to engage with PvE content just because they personally would gladly spend no more than 5 minutes getting all that done so they focus on their second life FF edition.

I respectfully disagree, and I don't think there's a need to insult people.

[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.

[Aword3213]

I respectfully disagree, and I don't think there's a need to insult people.

It's probably why people here often thinks they're king of debates and queen of arguments who knows no defeat when it's just better off not engage with them at all, then wonder why their feedbacks are not listened to.

[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.