Easing things for new players & Job Changes

[Azurarok]

XIV isn't an action combat game and we don't need more games to converge into that style either.

I enjoyed this game's combat for the detailed skill interactions its jobs had and the challenges content used to provide in maintaining its rotations, as much as it all may look like bloat from an action game viewpoint

[Carighan]

I enjoyed this game's combat for the detailed skill interactions its jobs had and the challenges content used to provide in maintaining its rotations, as much as it all may look like bloat from an action game viewpoint

Hrm, I don't necessarily mean action-game style combat though, even though the comparison to GW2 - which is much faster in many regards, but not always in a positive way IMO - might suggest that.

How do I best explain this... Basically if I got 5 buttons I use in a sequence that is static to achieve result X, that might be complex, but it's not exactly deep. In board gaming terms, where complexity often has a negative connotation, while depth has a positive one, and achieving the latter without increasing the former is the big goal to achieve, difficult as it is. So back into MMORPG terms, it's one thing to achieve a certain amount of depth with 20 buttons, it's much better to achieve even the same depth, and if you somehow could do it with 1, that'd be impressive.
Quite understandably, this means you need some interesting systems to surround these 1-20 buttons. And they should contain ~all the complexity, so you have as little of that as needed, to achieve maximum depth in the interaction between your - now limited - toolset but the complicating system they interact with. And that's the simplicity but also the difficulty behind good RPG-y combat systems: Use underlying non-trivial systems to edge maximum depth from the least needed complexity and least bloated setup. You can still bloat it later (usually in expansions etc), but the depth should never require it, and be independent from it.

Of course, without a sweeping re-implementation of most jobs it'd be difficult to achieve that. A simple approach is adding a certain reliance on procs/randomness into many/most jobs. Not necessarily in an "Ooops, all casino"-way, but just enough to force players to engage with a combat system without a static, pre-learned rotation. In fact 1-2 jobs can then have this exact static rotation, but only a minority, to contrast with the non-static nature of everyone else! How these non-static systems work should ideally be mechanically different for each class, but in FFXIV's case with so many classes, it'd be understandable if some systems are shared.

This does not mean however that we need action-y combat or a 0.5s GCD or something. Even though my comparison with GW2 maybe made it seem like I meant that. :')