Quote Originally Posted by Dzian View Post
Elemental weaknesses and things would be fine as long as they didn't repeat the mistakes of ffxi and end up in a situation where almost 90% of monsters shared the same weaknesses. Thus they were the only 2 players would typically sync merit points into.
The problem is, FFXIV isn't built around such a system. Just as an example, Black Mage now has most of its damage coming from Fire aspected damage. This is fine if an enemy is weak to it, but what if it is neutral or worse, resists/absorbs the fire damage. Going with weak vs neutral, which one would you balance the BLM's DPS around?

Now, to get around elemental weaknesses/strengths, you would need to allow BLM the ability to swap which of it's spells actually do damage. A couple of ways this could be done is a stance that swaps Fire and Ice functionality, with all Fire spells being replaced with an Ice equivalent and vice versa or, if you want to go down the talent tree route, have one for fire, one for ice. The first option is essentially a palette swap. The second on has issues in being able to swap to a different element when you are randomly placed in an instance. Imagine you are set up for a fire weak enemy, then you go into the next encounter, and they resist/absorb fire, but you have no chance to change. You have been neutered due to no fault of your own.

This then leads back to encounter design, you have to have an enemy that is either weak to Fire/Ice or Lightning (assuming we can have Lighting as another option to use for the main damage spells). That in itself restricts what you can do. Unless you also want to give BLM access to Wind, Earth and Water spells as more, what is essentially, spell glamour options.

If we then extrapolate this to other casters, RDM and SMN and soon PCT, where they use a variety of elements for their damage, it can cause issues there as well.

Take this and expand to slashing/piercing/blunt resistances for melee.

To solve all of this, the easiest thing would be to have the benefits/downsides be small but at that point, you could argue what the point of it is. Bearing in mind, this is only scratching the surface of potential pitfalls. Yes, encounter design is important however, designing enemies that have certain weaknesses where you have no time to prepare is not good design. You are better off making the boss do mechanics that can potentially force you to use your utility. Yes, you could Triplecast at that point where you are standing still, but the next mechanic is movement heavy, so you are better off planning it around that. Make the boss hinder your rotation so the player has to have more forethought in to what they might need tools for. Something to break up the rotation you just mindlessly repeat.