Quote Originally Posted by Nalien View Post
It's not just Warrior either... Pretty sure Dragoon has bits of Dark Knight mixed in... Blood for Blood and Life Surge particularly... I suppose it's left over from 1.0s original class system, which didn't have Jobs but instead essentially let you make your own through cross-class skills...

Kinda wish they stuck with that actually, though it would be (and I guess was, for a brief time) a nightmare to balance...
It always felt like that system was built for battle regimens and a plethora of damage types with inherent effects. I mean, we had Umbral, Astral, Bleeding, Sonic, etc., damage types back then. And even then there were abilities that would need certain undermechanics to differ at all—Circle Strike and Brandish, for instance, were both circular slashing AoEs, virtually identical. And then you had Doom Spike, Skewer, and Puncture all has piercing linear AoEs, differing only in flat damage, increased damage per hit, and decreased damage per hit, respectively. Had I actually had a reason to want to combo my Aura Pulse with my friend's Arrow Helix (donut AoE), knocking enemies outward into it, rather than it just being yet another self-centered AoE with a different damage type that nonetheless did the exact same thing as Circle Strike and Brandish... Pierce to start an armor break, blunt/sonic to widen it, and then slashing/bleeds to take full advantage. Frost to rigidify for earth; water to wet for lightning; fire to spread wind from target, frost to double some of the AoE damage back into the target; wind to increase burn rate on a Fire-struck target...

I imagine that would have gotten pretty cool. Mix and match for personal identity and raid composition... with some serious undermechanics to take advantage of multiple damage types.

But they scrapped the route that then seemed the obvious way to flush that system out in favor of simply removing all the extra damage types and adding combo chains acted basically like a 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2 system where the most thought you could put into your decisions was to delay until the last component of either combo came off CD without capping your auto-attack generated TP (spent on the first, and only the first, move of the combo). I could see hope for the first system, but very, very little for the second.