Solving the Fire Mage Problem

[Judah_Brandt]

Why not an elemental reaction system instead of a wheel? If anyone remembers fighting Soulcage in ffix if you cast fire on him he would catch alight and his attacks etc would change. SE could in that case have differing effects across different enemies when casting elements on them. Maybe even have element reaction combos. So while you might have a best element for a particular enemy/boss it wouldn't carry over to every enemy so there wouldn't be a best for all enemies. Elemental reactions could help or hinder the team depending on the effects and the party makeup.

Boss A is easier to deal with by doing only fire damage due to the attacks being easier to deal with. Bring only fire. Boss B is easiest to deal with during its ice mechanics. Etc. People will simplify it to the point of exclusion, because their endgame is to put as little time and effort in for the greatest reward. Pointless system is pointless. Oh, and what if you could just bring an unaspected mage in to deal non elemental damage and avoid the mechanic that way, more exclusion.

While one may argue that some greater form of depth is needed within this particular game's combat system is generally up for debate, all a system like this would do is create occlusion of players. We had a very slight amount of it in terms of the Dark Knight and Monk sharing the Int debuff. Why take Monk, Dark Knight can replace Dragon Kick yada yada. Not the greatest example, but just a point of reference. If you turn "Group looking for Black Mage" into "Group looking for Fire Mage" you're effectively curtailing access to all players by creating a niche role instead of trying to make the battle itself more interesting with functional mechanics that can be challenged by all players regardless of their choice of play. If it was implemented, you'd just have bandwagon players who would see which was the most relevant per patch and that's all you'd have. Diversity in skill would be irreversibly damaged, diversity in class wouldn't necessarily be prevalent once the meta game was discerned, and you'd have a bunch of exclusion to players who favored a certain path. Glamour OK. MMORPG that says "You must have x spell to win" is a no.