Time for a slight evolution in gameplay: DEPTH

I love FFXIV. It's my MMO of choice, I will be subscribing for another 6 months after my 6 month sub is up at the end of March. With that said, I BIGGEST issue with the game is the lack of depth in STATS and in COMBAT.

The PvE encounters are wonderfully designed. I think the difficulty is spot on with hardmode dungeons, hardmode primals, extremes, casual CT and progression raiding Coil.

However, have the identical primary stats on all i90 gear, or i80, with minor differences here and there does not get one excited about getting different gear sets.

SE and YoshiP, please consider adding the following, or any other idea you can come up with:

(1) Add Gear Set bonuses to Artifact Armor and DIFFERENT gear set bonuses to Coil drops. In WoW, for example, have 2 items of a set gave a bonus to either stats, or enhanced an existing ability (adding 10 seconds to the length of an ability), or changing the characteristic of that ability.

For example, 2 set bonus of AF3 could add a 6 second bleed to steel cyclone. 2 set bonus could add a reflective ability to sentinel that mitigates damage and reflect a 40 potency back to attack for 10 seconds. Another example would be 2 set bonus that removes the behind component of Bootshine on Mnk, etc.

(2) Create new stats per class that give people meaningful choices on how they want to gear up. What about adding critcal bonus multiplier. So that if you crit, depending on your bonus, your crits will do 5-15% more damage. What about a modifier that reduces the opponents armor. A modifier that reduces opponents parry/dodge chance. A separate modifer that also increases block chance.

(3) The game is 6 months old. The classes need to have additional mechanics and synergy between abilities to give meaningful choices at any given time during the encounter. For example, Doing Butchers block combo 2x in a row gives 3% more threat generation for the next 5 seconds. Doing Storms Eye combo followe by Storm's path gives 3% damage increase for the next 5 seconds.

There's a million ways you can add depth to the existing system. WE've had time to learn out classes/jobs and we should be able to take it to a slightly higher level.

There is always a balance between combat mechanics and the pve design. The baby/learning stage is over, let's take it a step above what we're used to.

Unless you 100% redesign the combat system of the entire game to make it a action based reactive system, everything is still just a rotation. All you propose is to have additional bonuses in some parts of your rotation, but it is still the same thing as it is now. This combat system isnt that different from ANY standard MMO (i.e, not action MMO) I have played, speed differences really only thing that changes. Some have more flash, some have more complex stats, but in the end it all comes down to 1 (sometimes 2) best gear set to get and 1 (or 2) best rotations to use.

All FFXIV has done is make less choices in the gear sets, and make the impact of different gear of the same level less so its easier to gear up. Its not the same as every MMO, but some of you really need to realize its not that far off from what many people ask for.