Combat system is beyond saving.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Well, you won't find me calling BG3 an mmorpg but it does prove that that kind of gameplay and game design is still very much revelant.
The issue is no major or even minor mmorpg has tried to replicate it as an mmorpg unfortunately.

Game designers have this belief that people don't have patience for more tactical gameplay; again BG3 proved them wrong.

I don't think it'd make for a good MMO though. Imagine waiting for 24 people to take turns.

[Rekh]

I don't think it'd make for a good MMO though. Imagine waiting for 24 people to take turns.

XI, X-2, and XII already invalidate your bad faith example. Those 3 games are BG3 but in real time; of course they'd use real time turns-taking for an mmorpg.

[KisaiTenshi]

I don't think it'd make for a good MMO though. Imagine waiting for 24 people to take turns.

You don't wait for 24 people to take turns, you wait for 24 people to telegraph what they want to do, and the server executes all the turns in order of agility/dexterity at once.

In a 2-4 player game you can "wait", because you're only really waiting seconds. Final Fantasy has never been a Tactical RPG, and FF1-5 didn't have ATB (that was introduced in 6) up to that point they were based on the player's internal "speed/dex" values, so a character with higher dex would be able to hit twice as often, but maybe not twice as hard. Meanwhile a fighter/knight/tank-type character is slower, but if they defending or drawing enmity (no FF game actually does in the way other RPG's do) they can be more effective at defending if they are slower. A DPS that has a heavy weapon, can hit twice as hard, but their dex will be lower, so they don't hit as often. The amount of damage both do is essentially the same, but the amount of critical damage the heavy hitter can do is much higher, where as the fast hitter is more likely to hit a crit, but not twice.

Overall, no MMO has tried to go back to the Ultima Online/Everquest model because of reasons that still permetate the MMO landscape today:
1. Cheaters/Botters/RMT
2. AFK/Server Capacity
If there are too many people in the game doing "non-productive" game activity while hogging server capacity, then the game just asphyxiates.

I'd love there to be giant world bosses, but we basically only get FATE's that people can cheese solo. (Blue Mage basically makes all ARR FATES over in one second.) Nobody needs to call for help, no FC has to get the gang together when the boss spawns. Even the "Hunt"'s are super cheesed, if you spot a hunt target, you just kill it, even if you don't have the hunt mark for it. Cause it doesn't look like a rare monster, it just looks out of place. What people should be doing, and what developers think players should be doing become farther and farther apart as time goes on. Which makes old content (particularly the relic weapons) pointless unless you want to collect everything. And the developers don't even want us doing that, because otherwise we would be able to stick every piece of gear collected into the glamor dresser as a "collection book" rather than having it limited to 800 pieces. Once you found it, you shouldn't need to "find it again" to glamor it.

Some of the silliest things I've had to do in this game is glamour the same gear over itself because it was the only gear at that level but I wanted it to be available on more than one jobs of various levels. That should not be a thing. If I want to run the dungeon 30 times to get a piece of gear, I shouldn't have to throw away all the other pieces "today" if I might want them tomorrow.

Likewise I'd like the game economy to actually function with proper gil sinks. If you are leveling you should either buy the NPC NQ gear, or HQ gear off the board, but the reality is that the HQ gear is often non-existant, and the tomes gear is pretty much good for the ENTIRE expansion, by which you can then get the next tomes gear. Once a crafter has leveled past that point, there's no reason to buy it except to desynth.

If combat is to be saved, then gear has to matter, and it pretty much doesn't except for glamour purposes and whatever is the highest end raid at the time.

[UkcsAlias]

Game designers have this belief that people don't have patience for more tactical gameplay; again BG3 proved them wrong.

N=1

Just 1 example of a good game doesnt mean every game has to adapt. Just like shooters not every game needs tarkov levels of complexity. Most players just want a call of duty.

MMOs arent very diffirent here either, to some degree they want complexity, but it shouldnt be excessive. Complexity brings issues that can be anoying to analyze, and becomes even worse when the game doesnt allow tools like dps meters to analyze other players. If you make it that complex, players will demand for such tools to exist.

And extra complexity does also cause an additional issue: job imbalance. If tanks need enmity management, they suddenly become a lot more difficult than a dps. Making most players go for a dps and hope for a tank to carry them through, while now tanks only have a few very basic tasks in exchange for a slightly easier rotation.

Balancing a game is hard, very hard. You can be sure that 90% of people arent capable of properly adjusting balance. They think they can, but they just dont realize how easy it is to cause new issues. This is why the devs chose simplification, it manages this problem. And yes, it did go at a cost of a peak-era. But this era would have never survived the next expansion anyway, as anything they would add would make things significantly more difficult as a result there. And this is something BG3 doesnt suffer from. It has a clear start and end of progression and doesnt need 'more more more' because of expansions.

[Shurrikhan]

You don't wait for 24 people to take turns, you wait for 24 people to telegraph what they want to do, and the server executes all the turns in order of agility/dexterity at once.

Which, as soon as you account for the fact that the more agile can lap others, is effectively what the GCD does now. You're just allowed oGCDs and positioning atop that.

If combat is to be saved, then gear has to matter, and it pretty much doesn't except for glamour purposes and whatever is the highest end raid at the time.

I'm struggling to think of any actually combat-focused experience that wasn't improved by capping or outright ignoring gear. Gear exists specifically as either a grind-wall for content or a difficulty slider moved via luck and/or money instead of a menu option, and generally through as haphazard of granules as possible.

Perhaps if gear-progression (too often synonymous with progression in general, imho) came through nonetheless enjoyable means other than those dependent on completing/clearing those core crafted experiences, I could see it, but otherwise it just means "Here, you finally learned how to do X. You are now free to do X a tiny bit worse while still succeeding."
That said, the last thing I want the gameplay I'm playing the game for to be barred instead by gil-grinds the moment-to-moment and overall gameplay of which has no appeal for me, such as in having to buy crafted gear repeatedly just to not "sandbag" my party while leveling. /shudder

[IcarusAvery]

You and your ilk killed off every other MMO by incessantly spamming every forum, Reddit thread, comments section, etc. about how much better FFXIV was better than WoW and so on. FFXIV has a near-monopoly among MMOs and now you tell us to go back to playing those other games? The same games that you killed off?

WoW still has more players than FFXIV, even after one of the most disastrous expansions in WoW's history.

[Kathryn]

I only play FFXIV these days for the crafting and gathering side of things as I have a serious dislike for the combat, but put me in WoW and the combat is fluid and not every claass is builder spender like it is here, I love proc based classes and only dancer comes close for that in ffxiv out of so many jobs.

I just feel all the DPS classes in this game feel identical due to the builder spender and 2 min damage windows... something needs to change but I doubt it will ever change too much so i'll stick to crafting and gathering.

[WaxSw]

I would rather take a bit of unbalance if that means that jobs become more complex and fun again in a heartbeat. People seem to forget one thing, FFXIV is a videogame and in a videogame fun comes first, all this changes to oversimplify, homogenize and remove skill ceilings only detract from the experience at the cost of something that doesn't matter for the majority of the content.

That is without mentioning how EW really wasn't a significantly better balanced experience. It was an homogenized, oversimplifiied mess with balancing so poor they had to lower the boss hp of a savage tier last floor for the first time in over half a decade (and many other awful balance problems like how superior shield healers are to regen healers, 6.0 whm being basically griefing, mch being undertuned, drk dominance over the majority of the expansion, how rdm was so undertuned compared to smn that there was no point bringing it until recently or the fuckery that happens below lv80).

Its true that a more complex game makes balancing harder but managing that is literally the devs work, if they make the experience worse to make their job easier they are not doing a good job, they are being lazy.

[Valence]

I love proc based classes and only dancer comes close for that in ffxiv out of so many jobs.

Proc enjoyers unite. We want full proc based jobs again. Only BRD still satisfies that criteria to this day.

It's seriously an endangered playstyle in this day and age in XIV. Both added jobs for EW? No procs. Both new added jobs for DT? Sill no procs.

One added job for ShB, procs (DNC), but one also removed them (MCH), and the latter unlike DNC was a full proc job, so it's still a net negative.

[ty_taurus]

It’s so bizarre to me that a game that lets you change jobs whenever you want continues to eradicate play styles in the effort to make all jobs the same. Do you like positionals? Gone. Do you like DOTs? Gone. Do you like pet management? Limited job only. Do you like RNG? Getting purged with each expansion. Do you like offensive healers? Gone. Do you like aggro management? Gone.