Concepts from other MMOs that would be utterly anathema to FFXIV

[Packetdancer]

Wildstar action combat. You hit the thing(s) that your animation showed your weapon hitting.

I really miss spellslinger play sometimes. I'm fairly sure no other MMO will give me a teleporting gun-mage who can shoot holes in space-time itself (and then leap through them).

The fact that you could literally hop into an entire other dimension outside of the fight very briefly to avoid attacks, reposition yourself and then return to the real world allowed some really creative strategies, especially in combination with the action-based nature of Wildstar's combat. (Of course, the fact that you could not see the battle while doing so—or any other players—meant you had to really fix it in your mind's eye and move precisely so you didn't pop back right into the middle of something Very Unhealthy.)

Of course, spellslinger also let you so terribly cheese the fall mechanic, because the teleporting dash reset the falling distance. So you could leap off of a cliff that would be certain death to fall down... and then once you were within a safe-falling-distance of the ground, rip open spacetime and hurl yourself forward to touch down safely on the other side of the teleport. (And watch your stalker or engineer friend who was blindly following you towards the quest point go 'splat' like a pancake behind you. My apologies to my friends who plunged off many a cliffside... though you'd think after the first dozen or so times you died that way, you all would learn not to follow me when I leapt off things.)

The Armory System.

No, really. 1.x is such a different beast that I'm not sure why the faintest pretense of that system is still here, though whenever I think back to how that system might have worked out today if it had the polish and pragmatism the current game has (or, ideally, even more), I can't help but drool a bit.

I love build-your-own class systems, but if they're not well-explained, they can make it very easy for a new player to blunder into a totally unworkable build and hit a wall.

The original version of The Secret World, for those unaware, had a system where you didn't level classes at all; there weren't even 'classes' in any real sense. You leveled skills with specific weapons, and each weapon had specific abilities associated with it; you earned Skill Points (which you would put into a given weapon to level up your 'rank' with that weapon), and Ability Points, which were used to purchase abilities with a given weapon. You could equip two weapons at a time, and the weapons were locked by rank; you might need to be rank 7 or higher with blades to be able to equip a specific nice katana.

You then had two sets of active abilities: seven active ones, and seven passive ones. The seven active ones were the abilities you actually used in combat—like FFXIV hotbars—and had to be for one of the two weapons you had equipped; the seven passive ones were like FFXIV's 'Traits', and could be drawn from any weapon's passive trait set. And you had to finish buying all the basic abilities under a given weapon to unlock more advanced abilities. This combination of fourteen abilities (along with whatever gear you had associated with it) was referred to as a 'deck'. There were no class names or anything, but there were achievements associated with specific sets of abilities; if you unlocked all of a specific set of pistol and blade abilities as a Templar, for instance, you gained the 'Paladin' title and a Paladin's dress whites uniform to use. (Gear was purely cosmetic, save for weapons and the 'charms' you carried.) And you could store multiple decks and swap between them at-will, akin to FFXIV gear-sets.

Though you only had the seven actions and seven traits at a time, it gave you the ability to build some interesting custom 'classes', some of which could be devastatingly effective if you hit on the right synergy of active/passive abilities.

Unfortunately, this system also made it very easy to build some utterly useless decks which would be impossible to really progress with.

And the game did not provide a lot of guidance on how to build a deck, or know the difference between the two.

I know a lot of people who built unworkable decks, then slammed into a wall when they got to the Blue Mountains area of The Secret World. They found themselves unable to progress the quests—or even survive battles in the area—and thus found themselves unable to really earn XP. With no way to earn more XP while stuck, they had no way to buy different abilities and make a more functional deck. Many of them just gave up at that point.