And the slow death of the RPG based battlesystem

[Valence]

There is another thing that is also directly tied to the problem at hand, however it's not specific to ShB razing down the battlesystem. It's always been there in a way, and it's how 99% of the boss mechanics don't tie into the battle system, often AT ALL. What I mean by that is that every mechanic you'll see on a boss most of the time is self contained. It appears within the fight design, and is resolved exclusively through the fight design. Even complex mechanics like, I don't know, High Concept, are a series of buffs/debuffs that appear, and everything related to its resolution is where the player has to stand and move, and how those buffs and debuffs resolve (I love high concept, I know it's subjective, but I just love it, and yet...). I'll be free to admit that it's not entirely true however since a lot of those mechanics generally can damage the party, and therefore involve mitigation and/or healing. And, to be also perfectly honest, since ShB, there is nothing else left to the battlesystem so even if the fight designs tried, they wouldn't find much else to play with.

However, if you go back in time, the problem was still there even though we had a lot more meat to it. If you still don't see where I'm getting at, then let's remember a relatively simple and unassuming mechanic from O11S, which is Blaster. Blaster does target a player with a tether, and somebody has to pick it up and eat the blast, which deals damage and inflicts a big HP down debuff, which means that the following hit (here a party wide) is going to delete that player no matter what you do unless you omegashield the player or use cover on them. This type of mechanic directly/indirectly interacts with the battlesystem because it specifically requires players to find creatives ways to deal with it with their toolkit. Back in O11S the default was to dedicate your off tank to the task, picking up the tether, drawing the huge AoE of blaster away from the party, and then being tough enough to survive the following raid wide. The savvy strat could be however to have your rphys take it instead, and then proceed to cover them, and not lose tank uptime in the process. I liked omega because it had a lot of little things like that one could do, like giving an actual role to your rphys baiting all the AoEs in Pantokrator. Hello World also had funky uptime strats with rescue strats used on tanks.

Now then you're gonna tell me, we still have uptime strats and mechanics tied to it, and I'd agree, since uptime directly ties into the battlesystem since it plays on certain classes being only melee, or having to use their ranged tools, etc. And in a way, perhaps too much those days due to everything else being removed over time, casters (SMN is not a caster) have to deal with mobility and movement during mechanical resolution as well, yes. I'll admit that it's still there, even though it's starting to look very unstable, what with those boss position resets, huge hitboxes, etc. Anyway, not a new debate there.

One type of mechanic that I actually was very, very positively surprised to see appear in the last tier, which was one of the worst DDR based tier design ever (or maybe I'm just too biased and jaded comparatively to the past), we had actual uses for Warden's Paean. I know right? P10S where you can save people fucking up towers, and P12S p2 where you can alleviate healers GCDs by removing the crush helm debuff on a tank. That's literally what I'm talking about, and those are extremely basic. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to imagine more intricate new ideas of those, but for that the battlesystem will actually need more than the little it has going for it right now. Else yeah we'll be stuck with interrupt based mechanic and esunas when it comes to fight mechanics tied to the battlesystem.

Another type of mechanic that felt almost alien and refreshing happened ironically in one of the most annoying DDR fight of the whole tier, P10S: Harrowing Hell. That was awesome. Legit, give us more Harrowing Hells. We can use tank LBs, we can use other strats, and the mechanic is actually trying to outright delete you and it doesn't pull up punches. You have to ensure the mechanics are covered, yes, but everybody in the team also needs to make sure they survive and use their toolkit into doing so. It's a far cry from absolutely finicky or obnoxious mechanics like Bonds 3 or Superchain Theories.

Point is, even as basic as they are, those mechanics require the party to talk and offers OPTIONS and AGENCY. If there was more rng accompanying them as well, we'd have actual plays that aren't scripted as well. Who's to say some of those can't come at non fixed timers?