3.0's Coming... What are the Craziest Game Changes you can Think of?

[Donjo]

Is this a spot-a-person-who-doesn't-really-raid thread?
Awful, awful ideas.

Crafted gear isn't superior to the top tome/raid gear available. The fact that it allows to progress faster however is a good thing. It allows players even if unintentionally to find unconventional ways to tackle content, overcome it through the use of mechanics outside of the actual battling. This makes the game feel whole. If you want all balance all the time might as well remove all the gear and preset all the stats. That's gonna be fun.

Scholars and White Mages are NOT gonna be on equal ground if you gimp the fairy through Cleric Stance because White Mages have Regen. Also Scholars tend to DPS more not only because of the fairy but because they have easier ways to restore MP and a super useful tool called Lustrate.
(Also no, it doesn't matter if you summon the fairy while in Cleric Stance, her stats aren't altered)

Two-tanking is already properly enforced in FCOB, very creatively, by multiple mechanics. There's no need for every enemy move to be a tankbuster.

Nobody likes to fight trash. Especially not when the raid goes on farm. The content is built around the idea of repeatability and pretending trash is anything but a minute obstacle is just gonna get on people's nerves. Trash right now is used to wake people up for the raid essentially and that's a pretty good use.

There are far too many situations where crafted gear is superior to the highest iLvl gear. From the mouths of the devs themselves, crafted gear is meant to be "catch up" gear. Use it as it comes and it's equivalent to last tier's raid gear. Put any materia in it and it's now better than last tier's raid gear. Any situation where the fully melded piece actually exceeds the highest iLvl is a mistake. Take a look around and witness all of the BiS builds which consist of crafted gear for over half of the pieces. Then, wonder how much more people would want to stuff in if VIT caps weren't an issue. It's undermining the value of raiding, and if it goes too far a lot of people will stop raiding altogether.

EoS spamming Embrace while under Cleric Stance should be roughly equal to Regen. They're quite equal here.

I'm not just talking about Two Tanking in FCOB; I'm talking about two tanking everywhere. If a fight was ever designed to have two tanks, it should be literally impossible to circumvent that design. The Tank population is low enough without people deliberately excluding a slot normally reserved for them.

People might enjoy trash if it was actually fun to fight. But, then it wouldn't be called trash, would it?

What you need to remember is that the people tanking FCoB in Sword Oath are people that are pretty much already overgeared for FCoB and have the timing on the fights down pat by virtue of the fact that they have the turns on farm. People that are still progressing through FCoB are most likely using their tanking stances as normal. How much time you spend in your tanking stance depends on the comfort level of your healers in whatever content you're in.

One word: Holy. White mage can deal massive damage AND reduce tank damage in one fell swoop. WHM is better for mass pulls, while Scholar excels at single target DPS (I rarely leave cleric stance on a lot of trials).

They seem pretty even to me when you take that into account.

Honestly, I don't get what you have against the "aggressive tank" meta. It makes playing tanks a lot more fun. Probably the worst part about playing a tank is the feeling of utter futility when it comes to solo play. Everything is a battle of attrition - you mayaswell just leave yourself on autoattack and go afk for all the fun you're having dealing 100-200 damage at a time with your skills. Sure, you aren't really killable but neither is whatever you're fighting. Let's face it, mobs in the overworld aren't really even a threat for squisher classes anyway so all you're doing is slowing yourself down if you run around in a fending set.

Overgeared or not, it still shows how stupid the "fluff fluff fluff BUSTER! fluff fluff fluff" design is. Just pop into the Tank Stance for one hit and then carry on? We as players need something new to play with here.

I was more thinking of "what is the healer's ability to heal while they're in Cleric Stance?" angle. Scholar has their fairy in their full glory. WHM can Regen before switching stance and gain a bonus by Divine Sealing it. Either way, SCH has the stronger healing in Cleric Stance.

It's not exactly that I'm against the aggressive tank as a whole. I'm against the flaws in the game that its extreme viability has revealed, as well as the mistakes that let it exist in the first place. Go ahead and look at my lodestone and you'll see that I'm using pentamelded i110 on my Tanks. If it works, it's a disservice to one's party not to try and be the best one can be. I'm just hoping for the day that SE wakes up, realizes they screwed up, and goes to bring jobs to parity statwise, whether it be by bringing Tanks down to the level of everyone else or raising the others up. Either one should solve the issue when proper encounter tuning is attached to it.

Crafted items are super narrow in their usefulness. Only crafted accessories are really decent for anything and those are already nerfed in their usefulness by both removing the 3rd stat and the fact that they get released a full patch cycle after everything else does.

The "problem" is very limited to the highest tier of guilds. "Fixing" the problem by destroying crafted items is no way to fix it.

A better solution would be to put VIT on all accessories and then balance around that so that there's not so much discrepancy between the two.

Even better, give tanks another secondary stat that actually reduces incoming damage in some way and/or make parry better so that tanks WANT to stack defensive stats, instead of ignoring them like they often do currently.

Every job has a BiS sitting around somewhere that heavily utilizes crafted gear, and it's not just the accessories. This problem has been getting worse every single tier. As I said above, crafted gear is meant to be used to catch up. It was never supposed to be as powerful as it is and devs are seriously considering the balance of it right now.

Regarding your solution, do you mean VIT on literally all accessories or just put both STR and VIT on tanking accessories. If it's the first, then we'd just need bosses to do more raidwide damage to compensate for a partywide increase in health. If it's the second, then they'd probably need to be class locked to Tanks so that MNKs and DRGs don't start using them. Either way, wouldn't it greatly invalidate the purpose of crafted accessories anyway?

After all of this mucking with the meta, the only way most Tanks nowadays would willingly stack a defensive stat is if it were actually necessary to survive a given battle. Given the way that secondaries currently work right now(they seem deliberately designed to not make too much of a difference just as long as you aren't egregiously wasting them on Accuracy or something), something like that seems unlikely.