Make FFXIV more like FFXI and less like WoW

[Worm]

Zantetsuken after seeing some FFXI gameplay of a person randomly changing outfits for every attack, I'd be really interested in hearing how that combat had so much more decision making and less rotation and memorization than FFXIV's does right now.

You're being pretty hyperbolic about gear, there are choices between gear that has equal ilvl for example. :P That is not a problem materia can really fix either.

Danger/Difficulty, are you sure you're not just saying you don't want an instanced game? Because there are a lot of implications of that. I'm sorry to say but when you have an instanced game you have to ease down the difficulty of the overworld. Danger gets pushed into dungeons because they're the focus. Though don't take idiosyncrasies of the non-instanced system and go "why can't we have this in this game" well we can't because it was something that naturally happened by having the world not be instanced. In having the world be instanced the nasty monsters are generally ... in instances. I guess you could just make the whole over world into a group affair, but again just not very popular in this market.

Eh blaming the combo system for rotations is a bit silly. Rotations are a direct result of people putting a lot more thought into these games, I actually thought the combo system wasn't so bad since it kind of gives you an idea of your rotation early on so you can actually learn it rather than getting into a raid and have someone say "why aren't you filling empty GCDs with X". I'm not a huge fan of GCD locked rotations but I was pretty happy with my monk's.

I don't know how you think what you wrote here could be changed with a patch or two like let's get real.
Hypothetical patch
1) All stats are redone ... amount of stats possibly doubled, all bosses now require resist gear, insert meaningful choice that everyone always picks, insert meaningful choice that everyone always picks, insert meaningful choice that everyone always picks, and done
2) Make all boss patterns random? I honestly don't know. I'm looking forward to some concrete examples of FFXI boss decision making and it better not be something like "I decided to use this set of gear before I cast that spell"
3) Every overworld mob is twice (three times) as strong, they're all aggro, and monster hunting parties now spawn to muder anyone who dare AFK.
4) I don't necessarily disagree here but this would be something that will improve over time when new classes are added. Did you have a lot of hard choices after launch in FFXI? So I guess to fix this we just add more jobs ... like right now?