Matchmaking without the Trinity: how would you do it?

[Auteur]

The one thing that has a track record of being done before, albeit only in PvP MMOs, is adding dedicated support classes. NCSoft in particular stands out for this as Lineage 2 and Aion both have such a class (Iss Enchanter and Chanter, respectively). Applied to FF14, bard would be converted to support, add new class (dancer?) and make astrologian a hybrid option (can queue as either one). This would require such a drastic retooling of the game though and would put such insane pressure on maintaining a critical mass of players (now SE has to ensure enough players are available for 4 distinct roles, 1 more than 3) that this is probably impossible to SE.

Another way to spice things up would be to create and enable hybrid roles with pre-existing classes. To me, I can see Scholar as hybrid healer/dd, Marauder as tank/dd, and Bard as dd/healer (I can imagine the eyes rolling now but Bard is already stationary as is and the songs could be easily converted into healing spells).