Coming Back Over a Year Later (Final Fantasy XIV Impression)

I stopped playing a couple months after launch...got a Warrior and a Paladin to 50...got them to about 64 ilvl. Then I quit because I found something a little more exciting to play. 

Yeah I guess it's a dead horse, but combat was pretty boring...really slow...slower than a lot of other games out there. Rolling a gladiator/paladin the second time around was a pretty brutal grind. Having only FATEs to grind, a small handful of side quests to do, and the limited levequests to get exp from made it pretty excruciating. The combination of slow combat and the exp grind just ended it for me. 

So I come back about a year and 7 months later, and you know what?

I rolled a rogue this time. Got a pugilist to 15 and got Ninja to 50. From level 1 to 35 was a lot worse than before. It was rare to have anyone around to help with FATEs so it was about impossible to do it yourself as a squishy dps, so since I was capped out on levequests, that got me to about 25. Talk about brutal. Then from then on it was dungeons (with its 30+ minute queue times) and FATEs. My eyes were bleeding. I'm trying to level pugilist/MNK, but I just can't bring myself to do it all over again.

Combat is still slow as mud with the 2.50 second GCD. And I see why now...it's because of the spell animations. Most of the animations take about 2+ seconds to finish. If they changed the GCD to 1 second, they would have to speed up the spell animations and cut the damage in half, I suppose. I would honestly be happy with that, though. I remember in the offline FF games you could change the speed of the battles from Active Time Battles to Wait...or something to that effect...for players who wanted a faster play style. That would be a pretty nice feature to have...let players choose the speed of the combat.

I guess the ability to roll multiple classes on a single toon are really for those that can't afford the standard subscription and can only have one toon on a server. Oh well. Other than that, the game looks like it has a lot of potential...I just need a faster pace of combat.

I never played a FF game before this because FF combat is not traditionally action-based. And ARR is actually far faster than how combat was in the original version of FFXIV (version 1.0, or rather, 1.0's battle system post 1.21 patch) and it's MMO predecessor, FFXI, both of which you basically just sat there on auto-attack trading punches with the enemy while slowly watching the TP gauge build up so that you could occasionally let rip with a weapon skill. 

The GCD isn't actually that bad, as it's a nice balance between a full-on action-based system and the more turn-based battle systems of earlier games in the FF series. If i'm expecting FFXIV's combat to be arcade-style button-mashing, then I'm afraid will be sadly disappointed, as that is not how this game is designed, and perhaps this game is not for me.

Thanks for reading!