I normally don't indulge in ideas of this vein, but the discussion on unnecessaryadditional stats in gear got me thinking about alternate advancement.

To those of you familiar with FFXI's merit system, it was sort of like that but a lot more involved. To those of you who've never heard of it, you'd basically earn exp towards AA and enhance other aspects of a character beyond stat gains through levels and ability scaling. Some of it was minor stuff (increased the effect buff items like food and potions have on you) while some were pretty crazy (allowing a tank to go into negative HP before actually dying).

Of course, I wouldn't want something as grindtastic as a 1:1 copy of AA in FFXIV, but the approach they took as far as what characters received would hopefully appease the crowd complaining about gear design.

To start, FFXIV's version of AA would be centered on the jobs themselves rather than the classes. Depending on the job, you may have more options in some jobs while others would be very cut and dry. To prevent people from changing specs whenever they want (as that would cheapen the system while creating hastle to those that may want to full-time one spec), the cost for enhancing your character through this system would be 20 of the 30 stat allocation points you get by the time you hit lv50. So you have the option of putting the 30 points into stats or spending 20 of those points to use for AA.

Since I know PLD better than any of the other jobs in the game, I'll use that as a base.

PLD Specializations: Swordsmanship, Defense

Swordsmanship

Enhanced Riot Blade: Increases enmity generated by Riot Blade (x1.5 modifier)
Enhanced Spirits Within: Reduces the cooldown of Spirts Within to 24 seconds
Enhanced Circle of Scorn: Increases the duration of Circle of Scorn's damage over time effect to 21 seconds
Follow-up: Reduces the GCD after using Shield Swipe by 0.5 seconds

Defense

Reflective Bulwark: Bulwark will now reflect the next spell cast on you. If the spell is a damaging spell, spelldamage will be determined by your magic attack stat. Reflecting a spell will consume the Bulwark buff
Enhanced Cover: Cover will now also transfer magic damage taken by target to you
Enhanced Provoke: Provoke now forces the target to attack you for 6 seconds
Enhanced Shield Oath: Shield Oath now also increases healing done to other players by 10%

In application, a PLD would have to choose whether to spec into Swordsmanship or Defense, and then choose one (1) ability to enhance. For balance purposes and to minimize pigeonholing, the options would have to be as close to each other as possible in effectiveness. In the case of PLD, it's really a matter of what you want to do while not really making any of the enhancements required.

To analyze the choices:

- Enhancing Riot Blade is a bit of a wash since PLD doesn't really use Riot Blade to generate enmity. We use it to restore MP. The enmity modifier would be lower than what Shield Lob has (x2).

- Lowering Spirit Within's cooldown would be a small DPS gain and would only really be noticeable during a long fight. The benefit here being that we also get our silence back faster, though if your raid has a Bard this is also a bit of a wash.

- Enhancing Circle of Scorn is also a minor DPS increase if nothing else. Wouldn't really notice the increase unless you're dealing with a large pack of mobs, and even then you'd still get wrecked in the DPS "meters" by BLM, SMN and DRG,

- Follow-up is an example in a slight change in mechanics through this AA system. Basically you're able to get back to attacking faster after using Shield Swipe. Our normal GCD is 2.5 seconds. Assuming 0 skill speed, your GCD after using Shield Swipe would be 2 seconds. This would fall into the ability's concept, since the ability is supposed to be used to unbalance your opponent and quickly attack them to get the advantage. Again a bit of a wash unless you decide to use only small shields for the higher block rate.

- Enhanced Bulwark is a trade-off of sorts. You're giving up a minor defensive cooldown for a very situational spell reflect. Obviously most useful in PvP but would have its uses against caster mobs.

- Enhanced Cover is basically what I think Cover should have been all along. Since Cover itself is situational this isn't much of a gamechanger.

- Enhanced Provoke is also how I think Provoke should have been from the start (because Provoking a mob only to have someone else in the raid sneeze and steal aggro is annoying as hell). Again, not much of a gamechanger.

- Enhanced Shield Oath is a very minor boost to heals cast by the PLD. PLD is after all a tank so healing is not really in the job description, but bumping our 240 HP cures to 264 HP per cure may quell the people who can't understand why a tank should not have strong healing, specially when they have a lot of defensive cooldowns available to them.

I hope the idea for this system got across. I'm not too familiar with how the other jobs work nor what boosts they could get that would be minor additions to the job without creating a mandatory "spec", so I'll leave that for anyone that wants to post their own ideas as far as what they think their jobs should receive within this system.

As always, comments, flames, death threats and so on are welcome.