Wonder why they did away the passive buffs from spells. I realize that it sometimes created situations where a skill was picked just for it's bonus but like, right now I have spells picked just because.. because lol.

Beyond that I think it could be part of perhaps an idea Reynhart suggested where abilities become our "ilvl", our staff does nothing already anyways lol. Gearing up via abilities making us more powerful sounds a bit more fun at least XD.

I particularly liked playing blue mage as main in XI, part of why I had really wanted to main it here. Found SMN pretty neat too, well at least much later in FFXI's life span lol, but I only watched my friend play that (SMN takes a bit of prep work with all the avatars, like blue mage getting abilities).