What would the game be life if everythign was single target?

[Aldora]

If I recall correctly there wasn't plans to have AoE spells when they first redesigned Ff14 but added them later in development. If you notice it wasn't until later expansions we got proper AoE toolkits.

During 1.0 (before the jobs were introduced) we didn't have any spells specifically for AoE damage or healing. We had spells with which could toggle between "Single Target" or "Area of Effect". You would have to select the spell you wanted to use and toggle between the desired effects before you would conform the spell cast. This would only be available for certain spells, not all of them.

AOE Visual Overlay and AOE Toggle Improvements (sample pic)
Here's another quick UI suggestion, this time to improve the AOE mechanic in the game.

Visual mockup HERE:



Problems with the current AOE toggle:

It's cumbersome to use since the only time it shows up is right before you cast a spell.

The actual "area" of effect is oftentimes hard to discern.

Solutions:

Have the AOE toggle button be present all the time, so that no matter what you are doing, pressing the 'z' hotkey toggles AOE on or off. This would help to prevent confusion.

Have a subtle graphical overlay showing the actual area of your spell.

Have additional subtargets show you clearly which other mobs are going to be hit with your AOE spell.

Since the introduction of the Job system in 1.21 the toggle button was removed and we received specific spells for Single Target or Area of Effect usage. From that moment on, these were always in their design but there weren't that many of them at the start of 2.x. This resulted in mostly spamming 1 or 2 buttons and applying a DoT here and there. It was only with later expansion packs where they added more AoE abilities / spells, condensed them with the battle changes of a new expansion pack and finally "reintroducing" / expanding on them with Shadowbringers.