Opening up every target as ideal for battle would greatly increase the difficulty of the game.

Having action based SP would allow for varying party set ups.

With the addition of a traditional auto-attack, we've no need to worry about zerging per ce.

There is one other major problem I think anyway you all seem to see as well, it's that why the hell is everything so powerful?!? lol

It just doesn't make battle fun, I mean, most of my time spent soloing is just cure bombing myself, it's boring and sucks.
One of the things action based SP would do is give you the option to pick a target because it was a good fight that took strategy, even if there was a harder fight I could fight, the SP difference wouldn't be significant enough for me to want to use that cure-bomb strategy I'm so ever starting to get annoyed with.

I think what they need to do is make monster react in a more realistic pace.
Why have a monster attack every 4 seconds when we attack every less then one? To make monsters more difficult they just have these ridiculous attack powers. Rather I'd like to see them attack similar to us, every second or so. It's not right that I can be fighting something and it just stands there and watches as I lay 5-6 hits into it, I feel bad lol.
Then it turns and "Blam!", there goes half my health. IDK, but I don't call that very strategic, fun or realistic.

If it requires them slightly extending the length of battle so be it.
I remeber those crabs back before the SP switch though, they were alot of fun to level off of, then they swtiched and I was stuck figthign Coblyn for the next 20 levels or some crap. Instantly it made me realize why they tried action based SP.
It also made me realize how much the system we adopted (from ffxi) fails in comparison.

Action based SP is defiantly the way to go but it needs to feel rewarding.
Changing it from a random proc to every hit does this.
Having it relate to stamina and TP prevents exploits
having party SP split makes it fair.
It has the the base to give bonuses to things that matter like AOE and effects in battle, though as we know from beta this can't be given in the same relation to cures buffs and debuffs because it makes people act stupid.

Even though I made < 20% of the SP that the mages I leveled with did the fights were rewarding and fun, I enjoyed the game (besides that damn randomness of SP lol). Now I can't even bring myself to playing it. Behests are just getting old and I don't always want to do guildleves to level off of, for one they are incredibly annoying. It's just because it takes time to figure out what difficutly.

I could rant about stuff here all day xDDD lol it's kinda fun.
Anyway I also think the choices for guildleves should be very easy to very hard.
Depending on your party the battle should just scale accordingly. rather then all this guesswork that's involved. I think it would be a very user friendly feature, part of what the game needs is just simpler methods of doing stuff. They're realizing that and are making crafting easier, next I think they should hit up guildleve difficulties.

And I'm really sorry if any of this sounds like gibberish, i'm rushing.
Thanks!