The combat is not revolutionary, even a step back from modern systems. The slower pace feels just "alright" once you've put enough time into it. The GCD ensures time for some of the more pleasant animations to come through. Each attack feels really powerful since each ability "counts for more", given the longer GCD. Combat itself is pretty responsive to everything you do besides running from AOE circles, which is a matter of when hits are registered in game code. If you need as good or better than WoW style combat, FFXIV in its current iteration does not provide that. The biggest staple that is missing (subjective), is the lack of reactionary abilities on so many classes. Everything is set in stone for Paladin, Warrior, Dragoon, and Monk. Black mage, Bard, and Conjurer all have procs, but those aren't overly interesting right now either.
Tangentially, if you can look past the combat (which I recognize, is a deal-breaker for many people), the game has a lot of character in its art design and, as a sum of its parts, there is a very large feature set of ways to play. Between questing, main quest, class quest, leves, guildhests, hunting log, FATES, chains, and dungeons there are a lot of options to pick your style on playing the game. This flexibility is useful to delay the life span of the game by making multi-classing necessary and more fun than repeating SWTOR mandatory story quests. That being said, the complete lack of end-game right now will kill the game unless they accelerate their patch cycle. There needs to be as much, if not more, ways to play end-game. Maybe PvP isn't necessary, but the time not taken into PvP needs to be developed in generating more playable content that isn't quickly consumed.
