Quote Originally Posted by Semirhage View Post
There's an ocean of great stuff out there that's completely off the table because of the way Square has settled into an encounter design pattern: the less the player can interact with the fight the better. There is exactly one "correct" solution to every problem laid before you. This solution is (nearly) always some combination of movement and positioning. That's it. An encounter with gaze attacks where a support could cleverly blind their allies to hamper their view of the battlefield but immunize them from a nasty attack? Unthinkable. A boss that summons an add that needs to be put to sleep to keep it from killing the off tank with its strong attacks? No way. A hard CC that works on anything, but also puts a huge regen on its victim so you have to be selective when you use it? Heresy. You could Reflect enemy spells. Use Float to make your party immune to ground effects. Using Raise to instakill undead would be entirely within the Final Fantasy standard. Teleport weaker enemies out of combat in exchange for no reward. Zombify tanks to make them take damage from heals but immune to killing spells. Provide luck buffs. Enthrall weaker enemies into attacking each other.

None of the above works in FF14 because those things fly in the face of solving mechanics via moving and standing in the safe spot. Stacking and spreading. Light parties. Moving to the safe spot. Finding the uptime safe spot. In or out. An AOE that hits one half of the room, then the other. Clock positions. People make megathreads bitching about Rescue one of the tamest, least fight-intrusive abilities that can assist allies within the approved "positioning only" paradigm, so it's not like Square doesn't get feedback that the current flavorless gruel is A Good Thing, Actually. Fluid Aura was ground to dust under the heel of this design direction.

Heals, shields, and DPS+ abilities are what we're down to because that's all you get when fights -must- be solved via burning a boss down while moving and positioning, no further interaction allowed.
While I don't disagree. It goes beyond them simply not wanting to do anything else except positional. The devs don't want any singular job to be prioritized. Take that Zomebie idea you cited. It fits perfectly on Necromancer and no other job except maaaybe Black Mage if we really stretch. The problem is that means for this one fight, you pretty much have to bring Necromancer/Black Mage or the fight becomes harder. Now you could say that's the solution: bring those jobs or you have to deal with the tanks taking substantially more damage. Unfortunately, we all know what would happen. Parties will force them because the healers don't want to deal with excessive healing. We even saw an example of this in P3S and Death's Toll. PF started locking Astro due to Macrocosmos invalidating the mechanic. The irony is it wasn't the high end raid community who cared but the more casual raiders. Which is precisely who SE appeals to.

This is just one example but I guarantee it's their thought process. And I hate to admit it, they wouldn't be entirely wrong for having it. Any form of support or crowd control needs to be universally available on one role. Which does limit the creativity to some degree. I do think they should invest more in that direction but we'll never see job specific things.