Random Elements in Fights

[frostmagemari]

The problem with adding randomness to an encounter is that too much of it can start to stray into artificial difficulty territory if certain combinations/timings of mechanics end up being much rougher to deal with.
Having played WoW in its earlier days, some of its mechanics could vary between being either trivial or hellish depending when/where they decide to occur and/or who they target. They eventually learned their lesson and largely stopped having unpleasant scenarios such as both healers or tanks being temporarily out of commission or otherwise placed into a situation that limits or prevents them from executing their role

At the same time though, there is a middle ground between completely random events and perfectly scripted events. You mentioned WoW, and they have come up with a good system of how this is done. The bosses will not use their abilities in a perfect order, but rather they have a cooldown for each ability and there is a window after the ability is usable that they will use said ability; in addition to not allowing for shotgun uses of different abilities. This sometimes allows for one ability to happen before or after another, depending on how the windows fall. You can never have a truly randomized encounter without making it very basic, but you are not able to plot out the fight from start to finish before you start the encounter either.

It'd be easy enough for XIV to start to transition to something like that, they just have to be willing to try it instead of staying with the formula they have that ends up making a lot of the game feel the same.