Elemental Wheel, What's the point?

[Alhanelem]

Ah, a modified version of the hybrid apocalypse nonsense. WoW's class balance says "hi". It is very possible to have jobs performing equally or near equally.

WoW's class balancing isn't perfect or even close to it.

You accuse me of hybrid apocalypse nonsense, when what you are proposing is essentially that.

You say balanced, I hear boring.

Pretty much this. I'm not even disputing that what you suggested might improve balance. But you don't have to take out distingushing features to obtain that balance.

They broke the potential of having elements make a lick of sense when they removed (wtf?) water from the game, gave wind and earth to white mage, and made black mage elemental spells functionally different between elements.

1) I'm sure water will come back.

2) It's worth noting that other final fantasy games used a similar setup to what FFXIV is using. in FFTA and FFTA2, Aero and Water were learned by Bishop, which otherwise shares a lot of White Mage's functionality. It also learns Stone, though Stone in that game causes petrification, rather than damage. Black Mage traditionally has only had fire ice and thunder since the beginning of the series.

3) I can understand being bothered by the functional differences, but it honestly makes the job more interesting and allows it to work better with the combo system. I like how many of the spells can inflict relevant status effects, in particular. Black Mage would be a lot more dull if all the spells were identical except for their element (and would be even more dull if the OP's suggestion were implemented so that there was no elements or minimal difference between elements)