Suggestions: Keeping the Game Fun

[Kaurie]

This would be a great way to add hotbar bloat without adding much depth, because 90-95% of the time the enemy wouldn't resist or be weak to any elements so you'd just pick whichever element you like the most and go through your rotation. And for the other 5-10%, you'd just... do the same rotation but with the right element. The only times where it might possibly be interesting would be if you had mixed elemental resistances in the same pack.

Think about the other single-player FF games: elemental weaknesses basically never forced interesting choices, it just became 'equip this weapon to deal double the damage' or 'only use fire magic'. That's boring.

It wouldn't need to add skill bloat. For example, we already use a lot of stances and (borrowing from GW2 here) we could have 4 elemental stances. Each stance would change 5 skills on your hotbar (similar to how diurnal/nocturnal affect your skills). You then would have 20 skills on a total of 9 buttons.

These stances you could change in combat, and I'd have them follow roughly the following:
1. GCD, low damage, basic attack i.e. Fire I
2. 20 s CD, high damage, single target attack i.e. Fire IV
3. GCD, aoe damage i.e. Fire II
4. 60s CD, Armor, provides different effects by element - (Fire provides little defense but burns attacks, earth high defense, water/ice chills/heavies, air increases evasion) 10 s duration
5. 120s CD Self-serving support buff, shares a CD between elements (i.e. fire = haste/ss, air/thunder = crit, water/ice = self heal or MP regen, earth = removes debuff)

Then have each element have the following effects:
1. Fire causes burning, water causes dropsy, earth causes bleeding, thunder causes shock, ice causes chill
2. When a mob is weak to an element and its status effect has been applied, all elemental damage received will hit for the weakness bonus (i.e. if weak to fire, you cast an Ice spell while it is burning, it takes the extra weakness modifier)
3. Have the elemental debuffs affect other spells. For example, a bleeding enemy who has been hit by
a water attack will bleed faster (higher potency per tick on bleed)
a fire attack will be cauterized (instant damage equal to the amount of both bleeding + burning debuff)
a thunder attack will result in extra thunder damage per spell

This will result in various best methods depending on the weakness of the mob and your party composition. For example, 1 BLM would apply bleeding with earth, the next BLM would use water to increase the dot potency, then both BLMs would use thunder. However, if there was a single BLM it would be better to use earth for bleeding, water to increase potency, and then fire to cauterize and repeat.

This is all just a random idea that is in part taken from Elementalist in GW2 (mostly the first bit)