That brings interesting boss fights. Steps of Faith actually would've been good with a mechanic like this. Instead you stacked underneath what's-his-name and stabbed his belly.
Class: Magic DPS job. It sucks for those who LOVE with a passion to play mage to still be stuck with just 2 jobs so far. It's totally unfair.
Samurai - Offtank competitor to WAR
Dancer - Mitigation/support style healer to compete with SCH
Rework - Astrologian. Remove Noctural spec, make Diurnal baseline, turning them into a support throughput healer.
Red Mage - Melee/mid range chain wearing with a piercing damage received up debuff to compete with DRG.
Give the raid-build meta some more viable choices for each slot.
Alternatively:
Complete rework of raid-wide utility for all/most classes. IE
- Viability for not bringing along a BRD/MCH for progression
- More synergy such as DRG + BRD/MCH for other optionsl IE NIN giving a magic vulnerability debuff (which would help their Raitons and their SMN/BLM friends.
- Offtanks made more interesting than DPSes that tank swap or pull adds, removing the super compelling reason to just bring a WAR who will out dps a PLD/DRK in your second slot
- I'm not sure how'd you fix healing without massive changes. The mitigation/throughput meta is pretty deep.
I'd kill for real summons like the new Xalphatol boss. Where you actually summon a weakened primal and they do an attack. With a decent CD on the abilities.
Personal Trance style limit breaks.
You'd need the Shadow of the Colossus/Dragon's Dogma grapple mechanic for that to work. Not that I'd be against it, but I don't think it's possible with the current game engine.
Red Mage: see my sig
Dancer: Tank
Blue Mage: caster DPS
Three tiers of content: Story, Normal, Savage. Bonus if the encounters are set to Normal but can be turned to Savage if you do certain things during the fight.
Interrupts as part of encounters: Right now there's few uses for interrupts in boss fights. By giving boss interruptable abilities, you have an additional mechanic to implement in encounters. Of course, currently the only jobs with reliable interrupts are BRD, MCH and PLD (and even then, they're not real interrupts since they're just silences and stuns). That would definitely need to change if we were to go in this direction, and you'd probably have to spread interrupts to melee DPS as well. And by interrupts I mean abilities that stop a cast bar. Not a silence or a stun that becomes useless via diminishing returns/immunity.
Dispels as part of encounters: This is also something that's missing from fights. Some of the caster jobs should be able to either remove buffs or steal buffs. If SE had gone with implementing THF as a job, the ability Aura Steal would have been perfect for this as well.
I actually hope not! I love the sound of being a dancer but if it's a DPS then no thanks, I won't play it (or I'll only play it to say 50). I don't like being a DPS. If they make it a healer there's a very good chance it could become my main if it doesn't turn out to be utter rubbish.
I've always liked the idea of a class that uses magic to empower their melee weapon fighting, like the Mystic Knights in FF5.