ELEMENTAL WHEEL REWORKED ?

[Reynhart]

It's because FFXI had a huge difference in basic potency. Of course you'll use Thunder if Thunder I is as powerful as Stone II and Burst if the highest ancient spell.
By the time you learn Ancient Spells II, the potency is the same, so the wheel can be used again.

And if FFXI uses diminishing damages, it's because BLM were outrageously more powerful than physical DD (Manaburn, anyone ? )

All offline FF use elemental weaknesses, even the previous online one, and even the spin-off/sequels do. It it was really pointless, it would have been scrapped way earlier.

[Malamasala]

It it was really pointless, it would have been scrapped way earlier.

It is not pointless if you are guaranteed to have access to the spells, like in single player games. Making it a guaranteed thing that your party of 4 will have a BLM, would not work very well in FF14.

[Haibel]

ITT people with rose tinted glasses hope ffxi-2. Really give it a rest, this isn't ffxi. Yoshi made the right choice getting rid of this.
it didn't even work in XI. And as others have said, XI was out of the norm for BLM in Final Fantasy games.

[Lithera]

In early FFs the Water element was only represented by things like Bio/Poison. As for the tier system and the wheel in FFXI... Yah they screwed it up. The potency differences between the various elemental spells were too great even though there was justification due to the spells being higher level. There was nothing wrong with having Thunder do the most damage but it didn't need to be so strong that even a double damage Stone spell was weaker. Also as much as the next tier obsoleting the previous made some sense in single player FFs (and in some you usually used the TWO highest tiers as the top tier tended to drain all your MP rapidly), it doesn't work in MMO. All it causes is bloat in your spell list. Scaling spells accomplishes the same thing with less waste.