I believe in old fashion level scaling. Optional quests. That was always one of my grumbles about early CoP. Not enough missions had the "extra quest item to use" fight.

Whether it be "go through all these side quests to find out boss weakness" or "Farm item that disables xyz" or even "Alternate route to BCNM if you want to go around the continent" things.

Basically you can spend tangible effort to weaken bosses, or take it straight up like the true RPGist you are.

I fought my CoPs with preparation. Sometimes I lost, but not many. I had drinks, elixirs, eithers, etc ready. They can usually be enough...except for certain really annoying fights...

There were three problems with CoP method.

-It took a long time before (expansion+update) equipment caught up, even assuming that half the people were even decently equipped with level capped eq. Most of us ran on hand-me-downs.

-There was no incentive for people that did it, to do it again, except under peer pressure. If the missions had repeatable rewards, CoP would have never been a problem (even gil would have been enough incentive)

- There were no side quests or "rewards" to lower difficulty. I mean it would have been so much easier and funner, if you could do a bunch of mini quests to get this item that if used in xyz mission it would raise your level cap by 5 for instance.

If FF14 ever got around to BCNM and level cap for the true RPGing I would put the top three in.