Quote Originally Posted by Shaedhen View Post
Or they can make a single action called "attack" that does everything for you no matter what's going on in the fight.

It's not about giving an illusion of freedom, it's about making fights more tactical and force you to work in team. See what others do, use the appropriate spell or action to gain full benefit of what others did before. What you suggest is just an extreme simplification of battle mechanics
Don't exxageate now :P
"tiered system" and "scaling system" both are fine and both have pros and cons, as I said many times in this thread. The fact that many recent games still choose for one or the other should be proof enough.

Scaling System
pros: your actions automatically become better with each level you gain, you don't have to wait the next tier. It's also easier for developers to handle and balance them
cons: it can get messy for those situations where you want to use a lower tier action on purpose. This doesn't happen often with damaging actions, but it's quite common for defensive/healing actions. The way most games solve this is by adding more spells. So as a comparison, whereas in FFXI you have Cure1, Cure2, Cure3 and so on and use them accordingly to how big of a spell you need and how much mp left you have, in other games (WoW?) you have a "big curing spell that consumes a lot of mp" and a "small curing spell that's mp-cheap". Both of them scale with your level, and you use one or another according to what the fight needs at any moment.

Tiered system
Pros: more complexities, more tacticity, more choices in the hands of players who can adapt to every possible situation, especially true for healing/defensive actions
Cons: harder for developers to handle and balance, you need to wait the "next tier" to make your action better, and also this system can be even too much complex, while giving sometimes just a fake feeling of more choices.


So yeah, don't say one is better than the other, it's just a matter of tastes and pros/cons imho.
But still, part of what you said is true. The "elemental choices" typical of many FF games (even more in games like Persona) is a really deep and interesting stratetic aspect.
For example in WoW you don't have this aspect anymore. Each class uses its own element (or set of elements) and enemies are not "weakr" to fire or "strong" to water. The type of element you use makes no difference, is just aesthetics.
Enemies' weaknesses and strenghts are divided between physical damage (no matter the source) and magical damage (no matter the source).

I don't want to say WoW is a game without depth (it sure has a lot!), but still what I'm saying is that I SURE HOPE the elemental tactical use typical of FF games is not going away.
I'm not saying this is what will happen, just what I'm afraid of after reading the changes to DoM.