Originally Posted by
Enkidoh
We had this... years ago. It was called weaponskills and the TP Gauge. (In FFXI this was literally the idea behind it, and FFXIV 1.0 used a modified version originally.). You had to slowly build up TP until it was full enough to let rip with a weaponskill, which were powerful accordingly compared to regular attacks or autoattacks. It meant though that battle was far far slower than it is now (a major complaint of 1.0 players).
Accordiginly, SE changed it for ARR though that instead of building up your TP slowly to use a weaponskill, you started battle with a full gauge that only slowly replenished, allowing players to spam weaponskills and abilities until they ran out (which, was actually quite rare unless you were stupidly button mashing). Eventually, SE just scrapped TP completely, allowing you to use weaponskills to your heart's content.
Job gauges were sort of kind of meant to be the replacement, so unless SE alters Job gauges to better reflect an old style FFXI weaponskill system, I don't see SE going back to that.