I'll be brutally honest. I did not discover the subtleties of the current battle system for months. Now that I have it's like the game completely opened up to me in a very enjoyable way. Now the unfortunate thing is, I have my main class at R47 now, and completed all but the final (current) story mission.

Where a fault may lie in SE's design is that it takes too long too learn the depths of the system and take advantage of it. I like to consider myself fairly adept at gaming, coming from the earlier generation of gamers (AKA I started gaming on the NES). Despite my enjoyment for all things gaming, it did seem to take a long time to learn this system. If I recall correctly (and unfortunately this puts me in the good things from XI club), you were forced to learn to take advantage of the FFXI battle system by rank 20 or you were completely crushed. That is with auto attack too I might add.

It looks like Auto-Attack coming whether I like it or not. I hope that Auto-Attack is added in such a fashion as to take advantage of the current system, and to tweak the current system so that the effects are more profound. Maybe this would enable players to learn and take advantage of it sooner, and thus making their experience more enjoyable.