Quote Originally Posted by Kabooa View Post
Most of what you have listed can already be accomplished by the engine, and effectively have or have had in game examples for it.
No. No they haven't been accomplished now or any time since ARR. I'm not sure what your angle is here, but that's a tremendous stretch at best, with two exceptions:
We have Actions that don't break combo. (Just about every Combo job has an example here).
Except, it's irrelevant. I said we needed increased freedom of rotation. That Bard can Heavy Shot does not mean that a DRG is not held to an incredibly rigid rotation. Nor does Heavy Thrust being a separable action mean that a Dragoon can viably stop at Disembowel to reapply its effect. If one does that, they are a terrible Dragoon, by fact of the way that toolkit is built.

Specific damage types can have debuff interactions (We see this with specific vulnerabilities)
Literally never said anything about a lack of typal debuffs.
To the rest:
Actions can have variable refreshing rates. (We've seen it with Dark Knight)
That's not been shown; Dark Knight had a reset function, and more closely, Spear had percentage recast reduction which then desynced macrorotations. But never has the cooling rate been affected.

We have elemental damage, it's just not utilized. (We use a catch all "Physical" or "Magical" tag on basically everything non-weapon specific)
First, if it not at all utilized, it's not there. It does not exist for the player, nor will the player have any evidence that it does or could exist. Moreover, the requirement is that they act differently, not merely that they are calculated through different tables, as per 1.x's individual element types. The latter is typal debuff that differs only nominally, not in difference in gameplay.
We need less equitable-but-the-same, and more equitable-but-different.
If that's suppose to be in response to anything I've said, you're strawmanning. My point was that the difference needs to be felt. Arriving at the number 6 because you added 4 and 2 instead of 3 and 3 does not make a difference in how the game feels. Hovering around the rear when you would already mostly hover around the rear (or, rear/flank edge) does not change gameplay. Thus far the only gameplay effect of what you'd suggested is likely self-conflict for positional classes that would discourage their use unless your Crit stat were undertuned in its scalability, in which case it would still have no effect as it would be avoided, or undertuned in its bonus, in which case the gameplay addition would be ignored as it would nerf output in those circumstances and would then again present no effect. I saw, and see, no reason to believe there would be increased customization, freedom of play within a particular build, or an enhanced experience.

That is why I disagreed with your block. It doesn't make things more interesting, it just aimed to make things more comparable in a "given 10 minutes, set amount of uptime" sort of way.
It wasn't intended to make things more interesting in any but the way stated--to allow for a greater number of viable builds and to make more broadly viable the only stat which has a gameplay effect, Speed (currently SpS/SkS).

They are removed almost entirely because SE doesn't trust the average player to A) Make use of them and B) Not find ways to break their game with them. Every design decision moving forward reflects a lack of trust in player capability and integrity.
Agreed. And? Do you mean to say we should settle for what we have now? If so, I disagree. Fundamentally. Practically. Entirely.