Alpha First Look: Video 8 – Instanced Dungeons

[Antanias]

SOULFLAYER!!!

[Sakasa]

SOULFLAYER!!!

Actually Antanias already stated it with correct number of ! i might add

[Malakhim]

A freaking mind flayer. Hell yeah.

The thing I dislike about the standard fast-paced combat like the ones in WoW, Rift, and ARR is that it usually becomes a "focus on spamming your rotation and dodge boss mechanics" kind of play-style. I find it more fun if you have to pay attention to what your party members are doing as well, and respond according to what skills they use or what situation they get stuck in. Of course you can still kind of do this in longer boss fights with a fast-paced combat system, but I find it either becomes less important or too difficult to do because you have to pay too much attention to your own fast rotations. There's also the fact that it's really difficult to tell what skills your party members are using in ARR. In 1.0 this wasn't the case.

Fast-paced combat systems also make fighting normal mobs incredibly boring imo. "Oh it just put a buff on itself. Oh well I'll just kill it and not worry about it." A lot of people here seem to have a lot of hate for FFXI's battle system, but the exping in that game was so fun imo because you had to actually pay attention even on normal fights. Dangerous abilities that needed to be stunned, buffs that actually had to be dispelled, and coordinating with party members to set up skillchains/magic bursts. Yea the battle system was slow, but the exping was 100x more fun than doing quests that require no focus at all.

Um... You still have to pay attention. You just have to move faster.

FFXI's battle system was and is far FAR too slow no matter how you swing it. You're still able to do the exact same stuff in FFXIV; buff, debuff, react to party, etc. in FFXIV. Again, you just have to move faster. All it is is enemy and player balance that will make the battle last longer, not action speeds.