Quote Originally Posted by Exstal View Post
A better question is why should there even be an elemental wheel?
Because the rest of the game makes very little sense without it? Look, everything in the game, except actual combat mechanics, relies in some part on the elements. There is a single primal of each element by design. There are elemental crystals used in crafting, and crafting classes have to use only the specific element crystals for crafting by design. Every single player has elemental resistances by design. Hell, BLM and WHM share all six elements between them split down the middle.

And yet, despite this heavy focus on the elemental wheel in every other aspect of the game, it's not prominent in the center stage, which is the combat system. Fire burns fire elementals here, and inflicts the same amount of harm on water and ice elementals. In every other Final Fantasy game, if you tried to use a Fire spell on a Red Flan (a fire elemental monster), it would heal that enemy, and if you used anything but an Ice spell, it wouldn't deal that much damage. Only an ice spell like Blizzard could take out a Red Flan in a single shot unless you were obscenely overpowered for that area.

The fact that the elemental wheel, to my understanding, once existed and is now gone is glaringly obvious. There are other MMOs published by Square-Enix that use the Elemental Wheel. One of them is Wakfu, which is a direct copy of Dofus, which is a game with Final Fantasy Tactics-style combat. It has an Elemental Wheel and it's working out fine for that game.

Final Fantasy XI, to my understanding, also has an Elemental Wheel. I cannot speak about Dragon Quest X, but from the history of the series, I can only assume they would have an Elemental Wheel as well to keep pace with the previous installments of their franchise as well.

I mean right now, I don't even play a BLM. I think it's a pain in the ass to play right now, where I can't play a BLM for what a BLM has historically been best at in previous games in the franchise: exploiting elemental weaknesses. I wanted to play Scholar when it was first announced because I thought "Hey, cool! I can use Libra spells and exploit weaknesses for my party members to use!" (which, again, is historically what a Scholar has done in previous installments of the franchise) But no, all it is is just a hybrid of FFXI's Red Mage and a low-level Summoner.

So much potential for greatness was ripped from BLM, and SCH never got to see that potential as it got relegated to a pet healer job with access to a bunch of magical poisons topped off with a horrifyingly nerfed variant of one of the greatest Blue Magics in the entire franchise.

I respect this game for being true to its Final Fantasy roots, with the setting, the technological level, the emphasis on the crystals, the traditional job system, and all of that. But very few of the jobs have what have distinguished those jobs in the past.

Warrior was never a tank job. It was a Melee DPS that could equip heavy armor. Knight should have been the other tank job in this case.
Paladin is definitely a tank job.

Monk is Melee DPS, but a lot of its classic abilities have been bastardized by the MMO construct, like Kick, Focus, and Counter.
Dragoon personifies itself well.

Bard is a really bad hybrid of classic Bard and Ranger, and really should be separated ASAP so that Bard can shine as a proper Support job instead of a weird amalgamation of support and ranged DPS.

BLM is basically a WoW mage with an infinite mana pool, cut off from the elemental wheel that made BLMs so fearsome throughout the rest of the franchise.
WHMs never had access to elemental spells before except through Cross-Class, and its only actual offensive spells to date have been Dia (which only damages undead) and Holy (which speaks for itself). Other than that, WHM is pretty solid.

SCH has never, in the history of Final Fantasy, ever had access to the Bio tree of spells. Ever. Most installments don't even let SCH learn magic on its own, instead relying on using Libra to reveal weaknesses and elementally-aligned grimoires to beat enemies over the head with. XI made some very fittingly revolutionary alterations to SCH, namely in that it expected a similar level of intelligence from Scholar players as the story expected of Scholars themselves, using abilities that buff other abilities and could be considered highly situational.

SMN is fine as far as the lore is concerned, except that it is tied too heavily in with all of the SCH stuff when it really should be its own entity so that it can better specialize in the use of its summons.

--TL;DR--

All ranting aside, the Elemental Wheel is necessary because this is a Final Fantasy game, the Elemental Wheel has always been part of Final Fantasy from the very beginning, the Black Mage job has always, historically, been very closely tied in with the Elemental Wheel, and the entire game is themed around the very concept of the Elemental Wheel while mysteriously leaving it absent from the one aspect of the game where it really matters.