Most of my daily activities in FFXIV are extremely routine and boring: My friends and I get the same few leves we got two days before, we instantly teleport to one of the two same camps where we've been ranking up for the last five weeks, and we kill the same mobs one after the other. I can't recall, the last time any of us died, or were--even in the remotest sense-- in danger. There are at least 4 of us healing at every run (people of several classes, not only DoM) but most of the many cure spells spammed heal only a few HP, if any at all. This happens, because there's little need for anything in the rich array of abilities we all have learnt and equipped, the monsters are so weak! Plus, the spells take so long to cast, most of them die on our staves and wands without ever hitting the foe they were destined for. Not a thought ever crosses about enfeebling, draining stats, crowd control, or support.
We do this with about 6 different leves, but the process is the same all the time. Most of the party members don't bother anymore to cast, or use special abilities, since the mobs die so quickly. We're given 30 minutes to fulfill all objectives in a leve, but the game manages to make us use anything close to that amount of time only rarely. And this always by means of having us run back and forth from one end of a maze-like cave to the other, in search of identical (and identically-behaving) waves of foes again, and again. Most of the time is used in running, only a small fraction in actual combat. This could've been fun if we had had to perform this exercise a couple of times, but I've been doing this levequest almost daily for months, no end. We all have... for all of our classes. I now curse as I run through that cave.
I'm aware of the extensive redesign of the battle system currently underway, and I'm hopeful the new development team will take combat excitement all the way to where it should've been from day one. But sometimes I fret...
It's my opinion that mobs die too quickly and the pace of combat is much too fast; this is combined with buffs and abilities whose cool-off period clocks all too slowly. I'm sure this is evident enough, but I'm afraid the dev. team might think the corrective measures to take here have to do with accelerating the abilities and spell clocks. I happen to think this would be one step further towards trivializing combat and blurring the sense of cooperation and collective endeavor that every battle, at least in my mind, should become. In precipitous, breakneck, rushed combat, only those people who seem to have a compulsion to kill anything and kill it fast are satisfied. Even with a streamlined, swift, mouse-based combat interface, that type of battle tends to be perfunctory and far from gratifying to most Final Fantasy fans.
I would like to find out how many of you, out there, are for rich, dense, exhilarating combat in which the exhilaration does not come from breakneck speed, but rather challenging AI, surprising variations and unexpected turns that keep you on your toes, at a speed which allows for maneuvers and corrections, but still keeps you panting for breath. Battles in which there's a syncopated, jaunty rhythm to the participation of the party members, but plenty of time for all to do their thing, to feel we're all contributing something. I certainly would like to be able to use, at least once on a levequest, that ancient magic spell that takes so many seconds to cast, and finish casting before the mob is dead. To the developers I say: Please, don't solve this by making the spell cast faster.
Your thoughts...