For those of you who dont understand the elemental weakness system in final fantasy its basically this:

You see slime.
You hit slime with a water element attack.
the slime completely ignores this attack , or worse yet HEALS from it because its a slime and they like water.
You change your strategy and use a lightning elemental attack instead, theorizing the slime is conductive like water.
The slime takes critical damage because your theory was correct; slime is weak to lightning attacks.
You proceed to spam every lighting based attack in your arsenal until the slime is dead.

So as i would assume most of us would know that elemental weaknesses are a thing in final fantasy, in fact nearly every final fantasy game incorporates this mechanic; Its been sort of a staple in the franchise, but for some reason in FF14 its been banished to being a eureka thing alone (for what i assume is to keep the delicate balance in high end raids and fights), and from what i assume, the guaranteed crit/extra damage from an elemental weakness would totally break the meta in end game content -- which in that case i dont know why they dont just add the elemental weaknesses to everything, but make the boss monsters immune, but i digress.

SO an alternative/idea is to make elemental weaknesses work by potentially inflicting status effects onto thoes weak to the element rather than granting large chunks of damage; This will incentivize the player to consider elemental weaknesses more, and also not completely break the meta of fights. And before ya say that this will still break extreme/savage fights, may I remind you that just as with the current elemental weakness system already in the game Square enix could have solved this problem already by simply giving the bosses elemental immunity (like some bosses have in classic FF games already).

Fire: will have a 10% chance to inflict burn on an enemy weak to fire
Ice: will have a 5% chance to inflict freeze on an enemy weak to ice
Wind: will have a 5% chance to inflict bleed on an enemy weak wind
Water: will have a 5% chance to inflict weakened on an enemy weak to water
Earth: will have a 15% chance to inflict slow on an enemy weak to earth
Lighting: will have a 8% chance to inflict paralyze on an enemy weak lighting
Holy (unaspected): will have a 5% chance to inflict confusion on an enemy weak to holy
Poison: will have a 10% chance to inflict poison on an enemy weak to


Just a small idea -- please try not to roast me to hard