SE stop doing the "norm"

[Soukyuu]

Yeah, try to find a group for Argon Corpus hardmode in Tera with tier 12 gear, see how well it goes for you. The same goes for B&S.

I can't comment much on that since the EU publisher of TERA is incapable enough to not be able to fix a bug in a tutorial quest, so I didn't get far in that. For B&S, I didn't go far to not spoil the story since I can't really read/understand Korean.

Still, I don't think any gear will save you if you just stand there idly/spam your attacks and take the hits. The difference is the time span that has to pass before you kiss the floor, and IMHO, in action-based combat it happens much faster.

Every MMORPG depends a lot on gear, no matter how much the developer promises it doesn't. A MMORPG not depending on gear would lack a crucial progression factor and would bomb because people would lose interest faster.

I can't really argue with that...

In high level encounters of both TERA and B&S (in B&S a little less than Tera, but just a little and not nearly losing it's content gating factor) you can be a master twitcher, but if you go undergeared into an endgame instance you die. No question asked.

The difference is though, that in FFXIV, once you have the gear, you're mostly safe and you don't have to worry about anything beyond a set routine/positioning.

Tera and B&S are based on gear AND on twitch. Tera is a little less based on individual twitch and more on party synergies.

FFXIV, The Secret World and many other MMOs are based on gear AND positioning/tactics/party synergy. Mind you, their advanced encounters (at least for the two I named) are actually way more challenging than anything B&S and Tera offer.

Which is kinda weird, since action based combat doesn't only rely on correct positioning/tactics/synergy but also on your reaction that goes beyond "read battle log msg x -> run to other spot in the arena -> continue spamming".

Gear is still a determining factor. The skillset on its side is just different. Neither is more "skillful" than the other.
Twitch does not necessarily mean challenge.

It's a different type of challenge, as you said yourself. Each skillset is there to overcome a type of a challenge. The difference in my eyes is, if you have reaction-based challenges on top of positioning/synergy, which adds one more variable, making a game much more fun.

A MMORPG not dependant on gear is simply nothing else than a pipe dream. You have to give people things to look forward to and the only really viable gating factor is gear. If everyone can access every piece of content off the bat (or even as soon as they leveled to the cap), they'll check it out, lose interest and quit to the next MMO released that offers them new content.

Why does it have to be all about the gear though? For me, the game is not all about grinding for a piece of an armor... so that I can go grind for a new weapon next. If anything, that bores me to death and kills any motivation to log in, especially when it is implemented in the way that requires you to spam the same content over and over again.

There is so much more out there, PvP (which doesn't get old so fast since you're not fighting an AI), world exploration, crafting, simply running around helping people, communicating etc etc.

IE: a MMO with action combat is invariably less challenging, tactically, than one with target-based combat.

Define "tactically". It's a different type of tactics than target-based combat, that's all.
I don't agree on the bandwidth part, either. A typical MMO is using about 1-5kb/s of spike bandwidth. With current minimal speeds of around 50kb/s, there is still about ten times of bandwidth free. In the end, it's all about how the system is implemented.

Which one is "better" is simply an individual matter of taste. They simply challenge different kind of skills, but saying that Blade & Soul or Tera require more "skill" than FFXIV, TSW, SWTOR or even WoW mind you, is simply conceptually false, and is as valid as saying than an FPS requires more "skill" than XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

Generally speaking, you're right. It just annoys me that in FFXIV it's mostly BLM burn instead of actual tactics (or used to be, I'm not logging in much) and the fact that most of the time you just concentrate on spamming your skills as fast as possible, not caring about defense because "magic" will heal you anyway.

I guess you could say that this type of gameplay is not my taste.