what is so "slow" about 2.5 GCD trolls claim this game has?Follow

So it came up in a thread before and I dont get it. I had this to say about it:

"Also what is 2.5 GCD you keep whining about? Are you implying that the game is so slow you have to wait 2.5 secs inbetween attacks? If thats true then why am I firing off a new attack/ability IMMEDIATELY after the animation for the previous one is finished? In letting off attacks back to back, not ONCE have I every stood still idling for 2.5 secs before I could attack again. If THAT were true then youd be right.

But someone who DOESNT suck has so many abilities and attacks to use at high level that before you can use them all the previous attacks cooldowns have already recharged and are ready to be used again. Now when youre at level 1 with only 1-2 attacks then sure it might be slow and that MIGHT be true. but when you're letting off 10 different attacks in a fight there is never a cooldown wait time inbetween attacks. SO I fail to see the slowness you claim to see cause Im ALWAYS attacking from the time a fight starts til the time it ends, never once have I had to wait for something to recharge while I stand there doing nothing. THAT would be slow."


So someone wanna explain what it is and how its "slow" because as you see by what said. Im failing to see whats so "slow" when Im playing

Yeah, it's this. This is what they're talking about.

In reality it doesn't matter because you have so many off-GCD abilities that there's always a button you need to be pressing, but initially the game will feel quite slow to someone who's only ever played WoW.

You're not wrong but there's a valid point to be made that a game needs to hook you faster than FFXIV actually does. Just because the end of the game feels good doesn't mean a new player with no attachment to it is going to last the dozens of hours it takes to get there.

Let me use FFXIII as an example here. I gave that game about 10 hours to make me like it and it failed miserably. And I heard it from everywhere... "oh the game gets good around the 20 hour mark" ... "you just have to get through the tutorial hallway" ... I gave it 10 hours, I was losing the will to live.

Now an MMO obviously lasts a lot longer than a single player game but it still has to be fun. FFXIV's early game is VERY weak especially if you choose a class like Lancer that literally pushes like 2 buttons for nearly 30 levels of play.

I would have to echo what others have said about WoW.

WoW's GCD is actually affected by your Haste. And some classes/quests/buffs are ridiculously awesome when they reduce your GCD to <1 second which just feels awesome. For example, Fury Warrior. If you kill something with Execute, you get a HUGE haste Buff that lets you just straight up rip into the next enemy, unleashing a furious flurry of blows and it feels awesome.

Also, Rogues have a fast GCD to begin with, and it feels nice to be hitting a button every 1 second or so.

Then... you load up FFXIV and you hit a button......wait.......hit a button.........wait....... hit a button........wait.... it just seems..... slow until you get used to it.

And yes, FFXIV seems extremely slow at start, but then you know what? So does WoW. Every class in WoW starts off with 1 and only 1 ability and sometimes you go even further on some classes before you unlock anything else.

That, and in WoW, you one-shot everything so you can't even use your character's full toolkit until Level 70+ unless you purposefully take on a Rare or Elite enemy or go to a Dungeon.

I have a Level 78 Paladin and I am STILL one-shotting enemies with Judgment (without heirlooms!). If I don't one-shot it, it has <10% of its health left and the next ability (or even an auto-attack) will finish it off. That gets boring as heck.

Though, in FFXIV's case, pounding away on an enemy for 10 seconds with 1-2 abilities near the beginning of the game is arguably even more boring.

EDIT: Upon reading my reply, I forgot to mention how big of a factor Kill Speed is, to a game feeling "slow" or "fast". Even at Level 100+ content in WoW, kill speeds are generally faster (unless you play a tank or healer solo, but why would you?). If you are killing stuff and moving onto the next enemy faster, the game will feel faster paced. This is one of the reasons FFXI had always struggled until Adoulin; wailing away at the same enemy for a minute+ feels.... boring and grindy. There are rare and elite enemies in WoW that take awhile to kill, but yet those usually drop really nice rewards if you can kill the thing, and they usually try to reserve it to only boss enemies or enemies that have a special purpose in the game (usually loot or quest bosses). Normal enemies, though, you mow through them and simply have fun doing it.

EDIT2: I would be careful on that story thing, Duo. I just started Legion not that long ago, a week or so ago, and I've already seen vast improvements to the story. More cutscenes, more dialogue, and more coherent story that ties zones together. It isn't FFXIV levels of storytelling, but yet it is markedly better than before. If you haven't touched WoW in a long time, you could be pleasantly surprised at what they've been doing the last couple years. I know, I am surprised (I took a couple year hiatus and recently returned). I initially waved Legion off to be a "meh" thing that was all demons this, demon that... I used to wave off the Legendary Weapon as "you get a legendary, you get a legendary, everybody gets a legendary!" but yet they wove the legendary weapon into a nice quest-line, and it gives you something to progress towards. It was far better designed than I originally thought or gave it credit for.

Edited, Nov 30th 2017 2:04pm by Lyrailis

Slower GCDs are more fun in dungeons/instanced combat so that you have time to think about what you're doing, and also to have time to react to what's going on in the battle. There's longer GCDs in FFXIV vs, say, WoW... but from my experiences it looks like there's a lot more movement and mechanics to deal with from your average boss fight than WoW (at least, the easier difficulties).

I would not want FFXIV-style mechanics and movement with WoW's fast GCDs, lol. That would be a little insane.



This is a big part of it too, FFXIV loves its long cooldown abilities. And yeah, they're usually OGCD, but they don't really "matter" in terms of balancing out the length of the GCD because you only use them once every 30-60+ seconds. WoW has pruned a lot of their long cooldowns within the last couple expansions, now most classes have one or two, tops.



This is something WoW has done, with varying success. Holy Power for Paladins feels nice, and they've vastly improved Combo Points for Rogues and Feral Druids over the last couple expansions. They've even added such resources to other classes, such as Shadow Priest, though some of these classes, it seems more like a gimmick than an actual mechanic that you commonly use.

FFXIV is trying to dip their toes into the water too, with things like Oath Power for Paladins. The problem is, the builders and consumers of these resources are too few and don't really weave into a regular rotation. Therefore, most of what you do is still the same old GCD combo abilities that don't care about the Oath Meter whatsoever. Now I'm not saying you should ignore the Oath Meter, as it does have its place, but most of your ability usage is the same old 3-button combos, depending on your needs.

I don't know about ditching GCD altogether, though -- if you ditch it altogether then you're forced into mashing buttons as fast as you can. GCD prevents you from being measured by how fast you can hammer buttons. Now, what I think we COULD do, is base the class around 1-2 resource builders and 2-3 resource spenders and give the builders a cooldown.

Ret Paladin in WoW does this -- your Holy Power builders are Crusader Strike and Blade of Justice. These both have a ~4 second cooldown. Your Holy Power spenders are Templar's Verdict, Divine Storm, and either Word of Glory or that Damage+Heal Attack I can never remember the name of but is insanely overpowered.

You get 1 more ability that does not build Holy Power, nor spend it, but it is a ranged attack, and is your opening attack, and places a debuff on the enemy called Judgment.

You build Holy Power with CS or BoJ, throw Judgment when it is available, and spend your Holy Power as the situation calls for it. The GCD actually matters very little with Ret Paladin; you barely notice it whatsoever. Usually only when you use Judgment, or when you're about to use a Holy Power spender (and just used something else previous to it). It's a very balanced playstyle, and it is one of my favorite.

It toes that line between button-mashing and fall asleep boring, the happy Middle-Man, it's perfectly in-between both. It's easy to just pick up and play, anybody, even a complete newbie could sit in front of a Level 110 Ret Paladin and figure out how to play it with adequate proficiency within five minutes or less, but yet there's room for refinement that takes quite a bit of practice to get to, especially if you take the random extra attack proc talents.

Edited, Dec 16th 2017 10:48am by Lyrailis

I'd always understood the primary reason for the longer GCD was to accommodate console and controller players who have a more awkward interface when it comes to dealing with more than a handful of buttons.

This is a great point, SE says a lot of things. You probably should've stopped here though because the rest of your post reads like a rant.

For more fuel on the SE says a lot of thing fire...

SE says they don't want you sending mail to alts because it'll deter RMT.
SE says you have to subscribe to more bank space because the bandwidth usage is too high otherwise.
SE says they can't make more housing because of server restrictions

These are all failures of design not technological impossibilities. They're obstacles SE created for themselves and then proceeded to hide behind when someone noticed.

The GCD thing... eh. I'm not convinced that's a design failure really. It's a design choice for sure, but failure? That's not really apparent here. Maybe it is and there's some kind of in-engine reason why the GCD needs to be that long... I doubt it since most of the melee dps classes have the built-in function of making it shorter, so I don't really know. The controller thing was something I'd heard a long time ago. But not being a controller player myself I never really thought about it any further than that.

To be fair here, the FFXI team said that too and then they found a way to make it work anyway within their limitations... also it's another game that makes you subscribe to storage space (wardrobes 3 & 4) for really no reason at all... SE has a thing for that I guess. I don't begrudge a developer the right to say something isn't possible one day and then contradict themselves when they figure out a way to make it possible. In the end I'd rather just have the thing.

Been doing that in WoW for years. You don't really need all that extra time to think unless you have the mental reflexes of a butternut squash.



"Top priority button to mash" -> "Execute current mechanic"

Two things.

EDIT: Submitted this too early in a vain attempt to escape the perpetually-loading Zam ads.

You alluded to DBM at the end of your post trivializing fights. And it did when the only fight mechanics were "dodge this" or "stack up" and the fights got more complex after DBM became really widespread. I'd argue that's a GOOD thing. The early WoW fights were stupid. The later fights had a lot of moving parts to deal with and were far more interesting as a result. Yor'sahj hitting you with 4 mechanics at once and your group has to decide which one to cancel and handle 3 of them simultaneously... that's cool. Big Bug Thing in Heart of Fear (whos name escapes me right now) having to damage his legs to hurt him and constantly being on the move so he doesn't just squash you... that's good stuff right there.

Also you might be surprised how many people are incapable of following DBM's instructions when it DOES tell you what you need to be doing. You still have to DO it and that's not always easy.

Edited, Dec 18th 2017 9:58pm by Callinon