Quote Originally Posted by Sylkis View Post
I'm looking for something where you can respond to the mechanics not with your feet, but with your abilities. Not simply activating some tank damage reduction skill.
So what you want is something, like, if everyone gets frozen by shiva, the BLM has to cast Fire II to break everyone out?
There's kind of a big problem with having mechanics reliant on abilities: It needs to be an ability usable by all classes. This is why t4's soldiers and knights were nerfed, and why that particular mechanic doesn't show up in later encounters. For example, Leviathan has one part that's meant for physical and one part that's meant for magic/the tank. They share the same HP so as long as you have 2 tanks and everyone attacks the right target, you can win.
SE has stated in no uncertain terms that they want to make absolutely sure that it's possible to do any given encounter with any given class so long as there's a tank, healer, and DPS present. They don't want one class excluded from content because the content does something that class can't handle.
Thus, for this reason, we'll never have something that responds to a unique ability. The only thing every class HAS in common is our feet, so the mechanics are designed around them.There are a few cases of using your abilities to handle/mitigate mechanics, but it's mostly via damage prevention. For example, in FCOB, MNKs and SCH/SMN are used to reduce the damage output on bosses to increase survivability, NIN's have to time their trick attacks to meet with DPS bursts (or vice versa) and a SCH's entire shtick relies on timing their adlos/sacred soil to deal with hard hitting mechanics.
But it's still possible to do the fights without them by design, because not everybody can think this way. It's also reserved for endgame content for this reason.


Or remove rotations and just have harder mechanics. Rotations are something that stay the same all the time but keeps you busy, forcing the mechanics to be easier.
Rotations aren't EXACTLY something that's created intentionally. Combo strings are, but those were purposefully created so we can't just spam one ability and neglect the rest. The design intent is to get us to have all of the abilities at our disposal have value. This is also why we don't have very many compared to a lot of other games, even compared to 1.0. Rotations are creations by the player to maximize their usage of abilities to get the best out of their class. Not everyone uses the same rotation. It's why the class forums have rotation threads and why there are multiple play guides to begin with. Honestly for many classes if you're using the same rotation all the time, you're kinda doing it wrong.
For example, a NIN may have a different rotation when working with a warrior than with a paladin. A BRD should definitely be playing different when teamed with a BLM and/or SMN vs. teamed with 3-4 melees. Hell the BRD even changes when working with the NIN!
While you can get away with just doing the same rotation over and over, you're also not really paying attention to your situation by doing so.
Basically, rotations won't go away even if they remove combo chains. Even the oldest of the old MMOs, like EQ1, have a rotation system. It's just a lot slower because of cast times. "CH (complete heal) rotations" were a thing back then.