the idea is that its open world group content, so, whatever means of doing things needs to encourage groups. By its nature, this means killing alone will be fairly slow, especially for tanks/healers. Having the elevel, and experience scaling actually helps this a lot already. Groups should be targeting higher level monsters, which give them better defense/offense. I think fighting things your level gets a lot better by pyros, with better elevel, and logos. the very beginning is the worst part imo.

the elemental leveling system is to create a self contained leveling system, which acts as an incentive and reason to kill monsters. As well as create goals, and danger in the map.



The problem with making gear matter more instead of elevel, is gear uses up space, and is a bit harder to give incrementally. It could be done, but is it worth it? Well, they could try out a more gear based incentive system, with monster crafting drops, and gear upgrades, or some currency.

Note, there are actually already a number of items which do have eureka effects, like cassie earring, optical hat, speed belt etc. Also note you can get ilevel 300 gear and use materia on it, (some of these special gears are ilevel 300 for that reason)

As far as new mechanics, Hunts work.... but arent hunts basically fates? They could have some fates triggered by other conditions, but no matter what, the people who dont spawn events will afk and wait for events.

They kind of already have treasure hunts with the bunny fates, but they could reskin it, and make the treasure hunt spawning part be more varied and interesting.

They could design more goals for smaller groups of players inbetween fates, and make some of the spawning conditions less hidden.