As much as I enjoyed XI, XIV doesn't work the same way. XI had the subjob system (which would grant you use of all the abilities of that job that was subbed up to 1/2 your current level), which is completely different than what XIV does. Also in XI caster classes had a much wider assortment of spells. In XIV, everything is an ability, essentially there aren't spells, there's just ranged attacks and melee attacks; some ranged attacks look different to appear like magic.
That's really all it is once you take away elemental damage. One one hand, it makes the combat system way more simplistic, yet with the way the jobs are set up they have no choice but to do this in order to not have certain jobs be excluded from content (which still happens anyway, just in a different way).