But with those games, you're playing by yourself, and you can sit down, controller in hand, and just say "I'm going to practice until I master this." Not so in an MMORPG where you are letting other people down (and taking their valuable time) with each failed attempt.
Some kind of practice area, or Guildhest (preferably with the exact same names for the attacks) would be quite helpful here.
This is the next part of the problem. In a non-MMO, you can pause, whenever you like, and get your bearings. You can typically have all the time you like in between commands, and can lower the battle speed.
In this game, everything happens so quickly, and you can't pause or slow things down at all. When people are talking about using recording equipment to analyze an unavoidable defeat frame-by-frame, that's when you know that your game design needs to be tweaked.
I think you are overly preoccupied with comparing FF14 to a single player rpg, but
FF14 is not a single player rpg.
Taking up valuable time?
That's the point. The balance between making something difficult enough so that majority of the player base has to use a great many hours to beat and making something that can still be beaten with enough skill is something
MMOs are supposed to do. They need the players to continue paying. But they also make the fights beatable with enough coordination and skill. If it takes hours of wipes, then it's working properly.
In the early hours of the game it literally holds your hand on everything. You can't walk into an NPC without a popup telling you what the effects of walking into that NPC does. When an in-game NPC is talking to you about game mechanics (enmity), you don't think, "I've been solo all this time, this talk about enmity is just flavor text"do you really think the NPC would be talking to you about enmity if the game wasn't expecting you to use it right in the next fight? It's not hard! It's actually incredibly easyif you would just open up a bit and take the systems for what they are instead of ceaselessly comparing to "my single player offline rpg experience" and how much more comfortable you have it in an offline game where you set your own pace.
FF14 is not a single player offline rpg experience. To those who are seasoned MMO veterans, I have even heard them call the combat slow.
You want to be able to clear the fight but you carry the attitude that you're wasting people's time when you get into a duty. Why does that matter? Nobody walks into Coil with perfect knowledge and perfect execution from the very start. Everybody has caused parties they run in to wipe in some way at least once. No group clears a Coil Turn the first time they enter. There's no better place to practice than in the arena. Because you can sit in your practice area and practice that one mechanic over and over, but in the actual fight there's mechanics firing off everywhere and you're overwhelmed because you just polished that one stone and didn't learn how to do anything else.
Not being able to pause is not a problem in an MMO. Because it is literally impossible in an action-oriented multiplayer system. You might want to play slow but the other three guys want to play fast. Then what? If there were settings that allowed players to adjust the combat speed are you going to tell the other players to play at your speed because it's what you're comfortable with even if they're comfortable with something else? If the criteria for the game design needing tweaks is that people have to record the battle in order to figure out what's going on, wouldn't that put pretty much all fast-paced action games as problematic game designs?
MMOs are not single player offline rpg experiences.
The story up to 50, the trials (Garuda/Ifrit/Titan), the dungeons, and the guildhests are a gradual ascending slope that does its best to teach you and prepare you for endgame content. The initial Coil ramps up to the most difficult fights and teaches you the necessity of party coordination and the importance of performing your job correctly. If by the time you hit Turn 5 and you still cannot adjust to the speed of the fights after all this time, then that's the wall you hit until you learn the fight. You watch videos, you ask for advice, you repeat the fight until you get the pattern down in your head and you play your job to the fullest of its ability in that battle. You keep going at it because chances are you're not the only one wasting other people's time, there are probably other people learning the fight who will also waste yours. It's an exchange with other players. That's what an MMO is.