Originally Posted by
Brine_Gildchaff
It's not about "simplicity", and I wish people would stop using that ancient canard. Affinities were removed because if they weren't, nobody would EVER let a black mage play in their party against Ifrit, or Ramuh for that matter. And on the flip side nobody BUT black mages would be allowed in parties to fight, say, Shiva. The problem is that if you make affinities, as they existed in previous titles, they will cause black mages to do wildly varying damage against various bosses and the community of this game would react even more absurdly than when the potato-tank strat for Ramuh was discovered, or how they did to 2.0 WAR.