Suggested Improvements for Combat

[Fendred]

Diversify healing abilities: Localized and Ranged Heals

In Final Fantasy Tactics, the monk could heal adjescent party members with his chakra. However, doing so came at the risk of enemies using AoE attacks on him and his nearby allies. Ranged heals allowed a party member to avoid being clumped up, but created a situation where the healer could be flanked. Understanding the abilities of your opponent becomes very important, as well as positioning. I feel the same could help bring more depth to combat in FFXIV.

You might be able to tank the boss, but his minions are another story...

Swarms of regular strength opponents using specialized tactics to take down individual players are far more threatening than a couple of elite dragons. Tanking becomes a task of knocking down and repositioning opponents to prevent them from achieving their ideal tactical positions instead of managing a threat meter. Its these encounters that open up the possibility of traditional tanks doing more interesting things than being meat shields as well as allowing damage dealers the chance to protect their allies (something that is kind of missing in MMORPG combat).

Make aggro a more dynamic mechanic (Don't think I can't see what you're doing there!)

In Final Fantasy XI, different monsters had different forms of detection. Some were sight based, others sound based, and yet others olfactory based. If your healer is standing in plane sight of the dragon while throwing heals at the tank, that should be creating a ton more aggro than if he were behind the dragon. Similarly, if a black mage were standing close to a giant bat demon while casting spells, that demon has a whole lot of incentives to go after the black mage instead of the paladin. It just makes sense.