Quote Originally Posted by Kitfox View Post
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There are other ways. For instance, you can make certain other skills do things and actually make them relevant in combat. Increase the base speed and damage of boss attacks and allow the DPS jobs to have paralyzes, slows, blinds, etc that actually... you know... WORK on the boss to mitigate that increase from the base. Give Aero, Aero II and Aero III a defense down ability and... maybe Bio and Bio II a magic defense down ability and allow Combust to go either way depending on the sect the Astro is in.

Allow there to be ways to extend the boss enrage timer (I would say these are the primary culprit for the need for high DPS). Give bosses mechanics that drain MP, TP etc from players to make the fight harder instead of just hitting harder. Give the boss silence mechanics, Don't Act mechanics, etc. Give us dispels (well MNK has one I'm sure but I don't know if others do) to get rid of boss buffs. Give the bosses defense/mdefense down debuffs to give the tanks, that healers would have to cure.

In other words... make the fights more complex. The new raid finder kind of sets the jobs up for this. If SE thinks "Hey, you should have 2 tanks (different jobs) 2 healers (different jobs) 1 melee dps 1 ranged physical dps and 1 ranged magical dps and 1
"other" DPS, then they can distribute these abilities across the jobs so that between these categories all the jobs have the ability to do what the other one(s) have so that no one job is required, rather 2 different jobs of the same role will be enough. As iLVLs increase and the content becomes dated it'll be easier to do the fights without these new abilities etc, so random DF parties, etc shouldn't have trouble.

Give us something besides damage to focus on.