I guess it's time

[Brian_]

The dev team has been pretty crystal clear in regards to what they think about elemental affinities in combat. They think it's an antiquated MMO construct that only serves to needlessly complicate and restrict gameplay and design.

What is the point in locking out a huge portion of your character's skill-set because of elemental affinity? The result is that you have to develop a new rotation based around the skills that are still effective but guess what? You don't need elemental affinity to achieve that element of game-play. In the hardest content this game offers, your rotation has to change based on the mechanics of the content -- identical to what happens with elemental affinity. The difference is you don't create a ton of useless skills with one approach and you give players much more freedom to enjoy the entirety of their job.

At the end of the day, regardless of the element, the results need to be balanced. So, ice or fire or wind or earth the resulting DPS needs to fall within a static range. If a BLM is weaker in a fight because they're restricted to an element, people just won't bring them. As such, outside of your individual preference for flavor, the elemental categorization of spells has no larger relevancy. It makes much more practical sense to just create one much more fluid, flexible, and intuitive varying rotation rather than numerous functionally identical skill-sets.