I'd honestly love to just see the Trust and Squadron systems blown wide open

[Hasrat]

Overall the Squadrons are more responsive and more active than the Trusts are.

Lol. Squadrons are in no way more responsive. They hardly "respond" at all. Their whole design is basically being so overpowered that mechanics don't matter, which is also their weakness, in that they can't/don't really respond to necessary mechanics at all without the player giving orders. Their system is also flawed in that the game doesn't really consider them active combatants, so every single targeted attack is placed on the player instead.

It's absolutely fun and great and satisfying, to be sure. But it lacked the nuance/balance the devs were aiming for. Trusts are much more formulaic and predictable, and achieve the desired goal of all runs taking a calculated approximate amount of time. Which is also why you will never see the oft-suggested "fill empty party slots" idea; adding in even one additional player massively unbalances the estimated run time, and risks effectively killing Duty Finder if it ever happens that 2-3 players + Trust NPC is faster/easier than queuing or running solo.

[Zairava]

Man all I want is for trusts to use aoe, lol

[ReynTime]

FFXIV "Trusts" are complete trash compared to how XI does it, in every conceivable way. Though I suppose they accomplish their amazing goal of offering a very neutered, watered down version of a single player game experience.

[Communion]

Squadron system? Oh yeah... that thing that the devs abandoned a LONG TIME AGO!

[Deceptus]

Not sure how it is now but Squadrons used to be the fastest way to level through most early parts of game once you got their maxed Offensive Tactics. I guess they didn't want AI to be better than players so they implemented the trust system that actually does the mechanics and doesn't cruise through everything with slight micro management.

Still it's a waste of fun system and could have been reiterated on.

I've been in more than a few groups who took longer to beat than a Trust would. And trusts are designed to be extremely inefficient (read: Barely no AoE to speak of)

[RitsukoSonoda]

I've been in more than a few groups who took longer to beat than a Trust would. And trusts are designed to be extremely inefficient (read: Barely no AoE to speak of)

Trusts may not AoE much but some of the member options feel like they output excessive amounts of single target damage which results in the trash pack shrinking rapidly 1 mob at a time rather than all at once after a small amount of time passes.

[Akonyl]

Had my own thoughts on this, but searched + found this thread, so I'll stick it in here.

My squadron has been out of work for ages, and I just wish there was an actual reason to use them. The system to glam them was even added in, but since then, not much's happened with them.

Whether being able to slot them in in place of generic trusts (like the grand company members in ARR-level trusts), or using them on the overworld in place of a chocobo companion, it'd be nice to be able to have *something* that wasn't content you spend a few weeks on + then put in the closet forever.

Once upon a time, I think this was brought up and there was a dev response of "we don't want to run into issues where multiple people are running around with the same named follower", but I could see that being dealt with easily enough like how WoW did it with bodyguards, where for example if you were running around with Khorchi, other players would see her show up as "Au Ra Pugilist" or something.

I dunno, there's a decent amount of side systems that let you glam NPCs (namely this + crafter/gatherer turn-ins), but it just seems like a chunk of wasted potential when they're all NPCs you don't see much of.

I just dream of an MMO that lets me glam up/customize a full JRPG party, that isn't just alts I choose between at a title screen or something (like lost ark, or wow's new warband system). I know FF14 won't be that, but I can dream of a little something.

[Razraptre]

Garrisons are one of the few things that I wish they would copy and improve upon from WoW. Maybe having 3-4 squadron members act as "bodyguards" would be cool too.