The amount of things endgame enemies are immune to is TOO HIGH!

[Seaku]

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Blind is useless, I agree. Slow when it can be applied isn't useless. Yes you can do without, does that mean it's useless? No. You can actually upkeep a slow quite easily, especially if it's shadowflare. There's not much to improve on slow unless you make the % bigger but again that would just mean the designers would have to build around it or people needing certain roles to trivialise the encounter. Basically the design as far as I can see in most MMOs is assume all the debuffs are there or none of them. Take WoW for example where they realised this and made it so multiple classes can provide the same debuff and just take up the same slots so they can design encounters assuming you have all present. Where this opts for some, that being RoH and Storm's path + all the required damage resistant down abilities. I can't see either is bad, just that it's a focus of the design and it works.

I'm not sure honestly how you'd include some of the classic final fantasy stuff like mini and confuse without making it stupidily unbalanced as both of those in traditional FF games are meant as an ability to trivialise a fight. Not sure how fun that would be. Unless you change them from their classic FF counterparts then people would whine that it wasn't the same.

Like I said before though it would be easier if they included the abilities to make them have some other effect if they don't work on the target that way the abilities can still be there. Though things like mini or confuse would probably work similar to sleep, hit them once and they 'wake up'. So mechanically I'm not sure what the point would be.

I will disagree with the "Something escapes from their balance claws they will just fix it" as Yoshi has said if the community comes up with something unforeseen they just leave it alone. The only time the fix it is if it is an exploit. The only circumstance where they haven't is virus. Two examples, they caused a bug which made T2 enrage method no longer work, they fixed it back so it did. SE caused a bug in T5 where the tank going into the conflag would cause twintania to attack someone else, they reverted it back again.

What kind of improvisation are you looking for here? Coming up with strategies against the norm is improvisation, something going awry in your pull and you come out anyway due to a quick change of tactics is improvisation. Though I'm not sure that is what you are getting at. Most fights in most any game once you've figured out the gimmick or how to beat them they become repeatable, the exception being PvP. The only thing I can think of is a boss that has something like let's say 4 different phases that are about the same difficulty. When you enter a new phase the boss picks a phase at random and you do that. That way the fights won't be the same each time and ask you to think a bit to see which phase the boss is in. Maybe to put a twist on it each phase gets more difficult at each phase change? Just spitballing some ideas, though they would probably have to make each phase less punishing that way but I guess it would be a more varied fight.

[Renik]

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I agree with you in most things, i think coil and dungeon bosses are fun and they work fine right now, unfortunately i don't have the time to make or be part of a static and my only way to enjoy this content is by pugs, my major gripe is with primal fights which are hallways battles, it's the only endgame content i can play with my play times, but i don't enjoy it at all because it's mindless dance with no place for improvisation or strategy, those fights need a rework on debuff resistances and mechanics, they need true balance and less dance.

Of course i have more gripes with the game but they don't belong to this thread and i have already gone too offtopic with this.

PS: don't look at the times on my sig, those are not accurate.

edit:

The only thing you would be adding to an end-game encounter with status effects (like Virus, remember Virus chains?) is another scripted element (use slow at 44% exactly because he will do 6 auto-attacks that need to be slowed, use Heavy at 70% before the phase change so the tank can kite the mob and we can heal him before the big AE). AND if you could break the encounter with them, how would that be fun for you?.

That's awesome, vanquish your enemies with strategy, that's the essence of a rpg. not avoiding red circles or dancing, they abuse of insta kill and made up mechanics instead of designing fights with the player capabilities in mind.

[Seaku]

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Hmm, well coil does have quite a lot of those points Ehayte's talking about with virus to survive, or foes to strategically burn part of an encounter away. The primals don't have much of that I'll admit, some do, some don't. Titan hm and ex when they were relavant did have that but people were dying to the 'dance' as you put it as he had the most punishing one. I guess SE could improve on some of the primal mechanics to include the use of more varied status effects though at least for Ramuh, I don't think they will. Maybe when shiva comes round? I first want to see what they do with the change of some classes lesser used abilities, it might fit more into the paradym you're looking for. (I'm guessing feint, tri-disaster, one-ilm punch will change.)

We used to use a strategy on T4 which was get the tank to kite some of the mobs in one of the phases debuffing them while we focused on a dread. Meant the healers had to do less or could dps.