Quote Originally Posted by Grimoire-M View Post
To be honest one of the things that baffles me about SE is that they haven't taken advantage of the fact that in 8 Mans you can split the party into two completely cohesive 4-man groups with a tank, healer, and two DPS each.

Imagine a savage raid that actually was a raid. Where your goal was to do a speed run down two trash-packed halls side by side with two 4-man parties simultaneously, with mechanics where you specifically have to swap individual members in specific instances in order to clear the fight. Stuff like transferring keys/cargo across from one area to the other, or placing the two trying to swap in a mini-arena on order to use abilities that only that role has access to in order to deal with enemies, or allow two separate arenas to be close enough together that the healers can heal both tanks and/or prey targets in order to deal with one side getting bombarded, or just to barely let you use Ranged LB3 on a pair of giant packs.


Hell that would be a unique enough arena in of itself without having to make it a full-scale dungeon.
They have actually done some of that back in the days when there was trash packs in raids like split groups in alexander, or multiple times in 24 man raids. They also have the party split in Alphascape 4 right now, or 'soft' splits anytime there are two bosses in a fight that self destruct. Someone mentioned being thrown for a tank swap, while not exact, they did have the interesting byakko tank swap among others.

If you look throughout the game there are many examples of basically everything suggested in this thread, and more but usually as 1 offs, or a watered down version to 'test' it in a single instance. SE is a conservative JP company. Western games tend to just boldy strike out in new directions and see what happens, and that leads to a lot of variety and creativity. But it also leads to complete and abject failures that piss off everyone. Sure nax had all this great stuff, but what happened before and after? Instead of sticking to what worked they tried a buncha new shiz and re-made their game 7 times over. Playing it safer is just the mirror of the same double edged sword. Balance is in the middle, but thats a company culture question more than 'right' answer.