FFXIV's Systems Ain't That Deep, but They Could Have Been.

[KenZentra]

Cross-class leveling to unlock Jobs.
Cross-class actions. (Later, Role Actions)
Character progression.
Gear.
Actions.
Resistances.
Materia.

All of these things, and perhaps more, have been changed in similar ways. Pruned, simplified, but never expanded. In most cases, they are completely removed.


Cross-class leveling to unlock Jobs.
To unlocked Dragoon as a job, you were tasked with getting to level 30 as a Lancer, but also lvl 15 as a Marauder. This tied in well with having cross-class actions that you learned from leveling other classes. When equipping your Job Stone would cut off your access to some of these cross-class actions, such as Cure cannot be accessed by WAR, but it could be for PLD. It was removed in SB for several reasons. You now only have to level your associated class to 30 to unlock your job.

Role Actions
After Cross-Class Actions being removed, we were given Role Actions, and depending on your role gave you access to several role actions, in which you could not choose them all. It would make sense to bring certain actions for certain encounters and you could switch between action outside of duties. Unfortunately, most actions were nearly completely unused at max level. This system was then pruned further and what you have now for role actions were pretty much the same you'd have all the time even in SB.

Character Progression
Ignoring progression such as Cross-Class actions and the such. You used to get a attribute point to allocate to whatever stat you'd like. This system from the get go wasn't ever deep, you'd just dump all of your points into your main stat, however aside from gaining levels, and Cross-Class Actions, what Character progression did you have? Gear?

Gear
Gear used to be more in-depth, from Attack Speeds, more options for certain classes, and different strengths and weaknesses. BLM and WHM used to be able to equip some shields rather than having a two-handed staff, meaning they could benefit from blocking an attack. Attack speeds influence the class/job, for instance building PLD Oath Gauge. DRG gear used to have higher Physical defense and much lower Magical Defense than other classes, this could've been a very niche positive since DRG had Marauder's Skull Render action, generating threat, since most AoEs are magic and most autos were physical. Doubt it was ever used however.

Actions
Actions had much more potential than they do today. Lance Charge increased damage dealt, but before it used to increase damage dealt while increasing damage taken under the name of Blood for Blood. Some classes used to apply debuffs to enemies that increase either their own damage or the damage of other classes on that enemy, such as Pierce Resist Down from DRG increasing the attack of BRD during an encounter. PLD had a lot of extra effects in their kits, with Rage of Halone applying Strength Down on the target, Flash (removed ability) applying Blind to enemies. WAR having Inner Beast do alright damage, but also healing for damage dealt and giving some Mit for a few seconds. BRD having Eagle Eye, preventing missing attacks. Most of these actions, and much much more, have been pruned and simplified. They either don't exist or are "does damage", "increases Damage".

Resistances
Now nearly completely removed, Resistance could have been an expanded idea rather than a scrapped one. Nearly, because there is still a difference between Physical and Magical damage. DRK still has a personal mit that is solely for Magic Damage, which until somewhat recently was difficult to use for newer players. To give an example, Alexander from A12 has a Auto Attack, Cleave (Divine Spear), and Tankbuster (Punishing Heat). One of these is magic damage. Up until recently, unless you scoured the battle log, you wouldn't know what kind of damage they are. I think its obvious why they were removed however, why would you meld or use a potion to increase your elemental or status resistance when you could do more damage instead? Resistances were removed in Patch 4.2 of SB. But the potential could have been great, with more resistance to a element you had, you could resist some of the damage, obviously, but you also had a chance to completely resist the attack entirely. Nullifying all of the damage if you were lucky. Melding finally puts us at...

Materia
Many possible meld have been removed over the years, from main stats to resistances. Materia works more or less as it always did, but I imagine it wont be long before Materia is removed as a whole, maybe besides crafting Materia. Why? It was a system with a lot of options. Maybe you would give yourself more VIT even as a healer or DPS to give yourself some wiggle room for mechanics you've yet to encounter before. As a Tank, maybe you get more STR to deal more damage while increasing the % you Block/Parry. DEX could increase your Parry and Block chance. As I said earlier, you could do Resistances also. But why would you? Its way better to stack damage, and for SE its way easier to balance. I think in the future Materia will be removed almost in its entirety, because why bother having to worry about players that have a lot of Skill/Spell Speed Materia? Get rid of it. Direct hit? Crit? It'd be easier to balance a class if it you could foresee when it crits rather than if it can get lucky with a bunch of crits. Tenacity is already viewed as useless, I imagine it'll be gone soon too, just like Parry that it replaced. So what would be left? DET and it just increases dmg and healing.

---

So many of these sections had a lot of potential. Now I'm not just looking through rose-tinted glasses, its not necessarily a bad thing that resistances were removed or that gear defenses were normalized. The problem is though, a lot of these systems had overlapping ideas interacted and reinforced each other. Leveling a different class to get your job? Introduces you to Cross-Class Actions and gets you to dip your toes in another class. Cross-Class Actions helps with character progression aside from leveling and gearing up. Because you have more options with your kit from Cross-Class Actions, you able to clear through dungeons and raid easier, or makes you more desirable for raid spots, getting you more gear.

Lack of Supporting Systems/Systems Dropped
Why did these things get pruned/dropped/simplified? The support for most of these systems went as far as ARR.

HW added no new Cross-Class Abilities, so there was no reason to level any class/job higher than 42 (highest cross-class actions available). New Jobs were added as Jobs only, no classes associate with them or combination of classes to unlock them. From this point on, there are never any new classes, but also no need for a combination of classes to unlock a Job. Abandoning one system probably lead to abandoning the other, later.

Attribute Points were extremely shallow and were also not expanded upon in HW. They easily were just all thrown into one stat or another depending on what Job you were playing.

The few gearing options for BLM and WHM did not get any new support throughout ARR practically dropping support near the end of ARR. Gear was more or less normalized in SB (though im having trouble finding this online could've been HW or ShB) when pertaining to defensive stats like Physical and Magical defense, as well as attack speeds.

Along with Cross-Class actions being dropped going into SB, many actions were dropped or simplified as well going into ShB. Cross-Class Actions were replaced with Role-Actions, but these new Role-Actions also lacked support. To touch on them, I want to talk about WAR. WAR in SB had the action "Shake it Off" that originally had the following effect: "Removes most detrimental effects". This was changed very quickly to giving a barrier to your party members. A self full-cleanse should actually be pretty good, unfortunately for it to be useful there needs to actually be something to cleanse, but being you get the action at max level, there was next to nothing to esuna off of you. So of course it got changed, it was a useless action, but only because it had no support, which is also the case for so many role actions added in SB. Actions such as Break and Erase were extremely niche or unsupported from launch, and considering you could only have so many Role-Actions (5 or 6 I believe) you are more likely to bring something that effect everyone, increases your survivability personally or aids you in your rotation, such as Feint, True North, Second Wind, Arm's Length, Bloodbath, Diversion (removed) and Invigorate (removed). Everything else was removed or reworked along with other revamps, such as removal of TP, improved MP Regeneration, and tanks getting a ton of Emnity from tank stance.

Its no secret as to why resistance was removed. Why increase your resistance to a certain element when you can increase your damage? The support for Resistance was removed in Patch 4.2, but aside from the materia only getting as far as SB, Warding Potions only had recipes for increasing resistance in ARR.

Materia? We still have Materia, buddy. But what are the parallels of Materia and these other systems I have mentioned? We'll touch on this later.

Simplicity of Design/The Strawmans from a Madman
Cross-Class requirements, Cross-Class actions (later role-actions), alternative stat allocation (from attributes or materia), standardization of gear, some actions, resistances, are all a lot of work to keep in mind for. I can only imagine the devs thoughts, as they tend to not tell us anything;

"We should remove classes entirely and just have Jobs going forward. We've decided that to design encounters with these specific role-actions in mind, and we don't want to trivialize an encounter just because you can have several players cleanse a debuff off."

"A player could potentially be able to passively mitigate more damage if they stack strength, dexterity or a resistance... They might even completely ignore an essential mechanic due to full resist, we should remove these inconsistencies."

"A class might too weak for certain attacks, or in some cases too tanky as a DPS... some classes interact very differently with their kits if they have a fast weapon or a shield, so it'd be best to keep that from happening."

"This action's debuff/buff can make some encounters trivial, lets make bosses going forward immune to that effect... actually, lets just remove it all together or replace it with a new damaging attack. This action has potential, but goes unused for one reason or another... lets change it to do either damage, mitigation, buffing one of those two, or remove it."

"The interactivity of classes, jobs and action make doing that difficult, it'd be much easier to balance this game if we can just focus on exactly how much damage a role can take, how much it can deal, how much it can heal and how much it can stop."

Perhaps later, "Materia is just being used to increase damage, it'd be easier to know how exactly much damage a Job/Role is capable of if we just get rid of it. The system is redundant anyways."


What Could've Been
In my own opinion, the answer to every issue since the launch of ARR, and perhaps even 1.x, is to make things more simple and by extension, solely about raw damage numbers. And that is fine to some extent, I really do not want 1.X and I do not want TP back, but I have to wonder what the game would look like if stats that solely increased damage were removed instead of utility and defense or that utility and defense be expanded upon. Not reduced.


Classes could've been an evergreen system, a sort of psuedo-talent tree of sorts. Different combinations could've be used to introduce new Jobs and different "branches" of exsisting jobs, for example SMN and SCH, having a alternate direction for each class. Adding a single new class would lead to speculation of all the new combinations of possible Jobs and cross-class actions.

That instead of new Jobs just being Jobs, that you unlocked them with combinations of other classes. That you obtained new class actions that could be used for another Job rather than its intended job, though without any support from the traits of the intended job (such as Blood for Blood from DRG, it increased dmg dealt more for a DRG than with another job, such as MNK but with the same dmg taken increase). More flexibility in encounters and job builds, so that you could do something off the beaten path that results in more than casting spells faster or hitting harder. Giving support to niche abilities that can solve mechanics, but not having those mechanics only answer be "use this abilitiy or die", like a DoT that can be esuna'd with non-healer specific cleanses, like having the dps do it with Erase or a WAR clears it off themselves. Didn't bring it from your personal selection of cross-class/Role actions? No worries, its not the end of the world, but its going to be more work.


More support for resistances could've been a interest strategy for encounters, especially those with multiple elements. You could shore up against a hard hitting magic attack at the expense of another, or you could forgo the two different elements for a faster encounter using higher DPS and very significant coordination from each party member. This would especially be more viable with encounters being less formulaic and structured.

Gear as it is, is really nothing but stats. Vitality. Main Stat. Secondary stat 1. Secondary stat 2. I used to watch someone who made a lot of WoW content though I had long since stopped playing. His name is MadSeasonShow. During the Battle for Azeroth expansion, he made a video and in a portion of this video (Fixing World of Warcraft - posted Mar 26, 2020) he lamented about gear. That his gear was not important. It meant nothing to him aside from Stamina (Vitality for FFXIV), Main Stat, Secondary 1, Secondary 2. What is insane though is that was from WoW, where gear could have interesting effects on it. Has FFXIV ever had gear that wasn't just stats? Some GC gear have SET BONUSES crazily enough. Some earrings you get from collector's editions have EXP increases. Gear could have a HUGE effect on the game, without it even being overpowered. Something as simple as a piece of Fending gear that says "Your second attack of your main combo hits twice when used as part of a combo, on a cooldown.", giving all tanks a decent bonus and not even because of the damage. Lots of directions you could go for gear.

(if you'd like to give it a watch I recommend this section https://youtu.be/N6X--fhCzCU?t=422 which is from 7:00 to 10:15. Somethings wont apply of course, so keep that in mind.)

Final Words
I think the game suffers from increasing homoginization, simplicity, and a big focus on dealing damage with everything revolving around how much damage you throw out rather than any other aspect of PvE and only SE has itself to blame. Systems require support, without that they might as well not exist. Support requires work. I do not think SE wants to put in the work. The barest barebones you can get with an RPG is having HP, and dealing damage, which seems to be the direction the game is headed.

And while I could (somehow) talk even more about the game could have been more complex, or how specific Jobs and role have become samey and/or boring, and even more things beyond, I want to ask how you all feel about what I've said, the simplicity over the years and what you think would've been a good addition to these lost and/or bare systems, or what you'd add to the game as it is currently is.

Thanks for reading my TEDwrites.

[Swordsman]

Final Words
I think the game suffers from increasing homoginization, simplicity, and a big focus on dealing damage with everything revolving around how much damage you throw out rather than any other aspect of PvE and only SE has itself to blame. Systems require support, without that they might as well not exist. Support requires work. I do not think SE wants to put in the work. The barest barebones you can get with an RPG is having HP, and dealing damage, which seems to be the direction the game is headed.

And while I could (somehow) talk even more about the game could have been more complex, or how specific Jobs and role have become samey and/or boring, and even more things beyond, I want to ask how you all feel about what I've said, the simplicity over the years and what you think would've been a good addition to these lost and/or bare systems, or what you'd add to the game as it is currently is.

Well said. I agree with pretty much all your points, especially the one about SE not wanting to put in the work. It's easy for a corporation to just keep repackaging and reusing the same formula over and over again, and increasing homogenization and simplicity of the game's systems only enables them to do so.

[Oizen]

No you see, its supposed to suck on purpose for the sake of people who dont even play the game in the first place.

[Jeeqbit]

Cross-class leveling to unlock Jobs.

It was removed in SB for several reasons.

Because it was annoying and grindy. It caused you to detour doing the MSQ. Personally, I entered a level 30+ dungeon as a Gladiator and was told to unlock Paladin (I had put off my class quests until I returned to Ul'dah in the MSQ). Unlocking it turned out to be pointless because it was more of a gear problem, but it was not as simple as doing the class quests. I had to level Conjurer as well. This sort of thing is a pain point that can make people quit a game.

what you have now for role actions were pretty much the same you'd have all the time even in SB.

Those of us that enjoyed using our abilities well also got utility such as Mana Shift, Palisade, Refresh, Apocatastasis and Erase. The problem was the majority of players did not see the fun in using those because the majority are casual players that don't contribute their best or only focus on themselves instead of helping party members, so SE saw the low statistics and removed them. It felt good to save or assist people with these abilities though.

You used to get a attribute point to allocate to whatever stat you'd like.

True. This is good for character diversity, but ultimately there is a "best" stat as everyone knows and the less knowledgable players were going to be the ones that lost out from that needless complexity, so being removed made sense.

Actions had much more potential than they do today. Lance Charge increased damage dealt, but before it used to increase damage dealt while increasing damage taken under the name of Blood for Blood.

These sort of changes are the big ones and probably the most controversial. Having to work with a disadvantage in order to achieve an advantage was interesting and caused you to have to be more careful. However, I understand these sort of things being removed to a certain extent, because many of their implementations were just annoying, or didn't manifest as much of a disadvantage (for example, since DRG is not tanking there are only certain attacks likely to kill them while in that and that's if the healer isn't doing their job).

The support for most of these systems went as far as ARR.

That's true and that was part of the problem for the cross-class system in particular. It was painful that it did not extend to jobs, nor to Heavensward jobs.

But there was an argument that people had to level up Gladiator to get Provoke for the other tanks, and similar arguments for other jobs, which is another pain point if the person sees that as a chore.

WAR in SB had the action "Shake it Off" that originally had the following effect: "Removes most detrimental effects". This was changed very quickly to giving a barrier to your party members.

WAR had no utility at the time and it was not balanced with what PLD had so that was the beginning of WAR not being completely selfish.

A self full-cleanse should actually be pretty good, unfortunately for it to be useful there needs to actually be something to cleanse

PLD actually had something like this which I found useful. It was also PLD's knockback immunity and one of the few jobs to have one, so it was fun to use it strategically. Now it's not as special to use it because everyone has it.

Erase were extremely niche or unsupported from launch

Erase only worked on some things and not others, so it was really annoying to use it and discover it doesn't work on a lot of things. But it helped me to heal people on a Red Mage at level 50 prior to having Vercure.

"A player could potentially be able to passively mitigate more damage if they stack strength, dexterity or a resistance... They might even completely ignore an essential mechanic due to full resist, we should remove these inconsistencies."

Honestly, stacking an elemental resist for certain duties was a fun thought for me that I thought about a lot and was sad they decided to remove it when Eureka was being planned for the next expansion.

I went as far as testing where I could get it in duties and how effective it would be.

But it was always just that - a bit of fun. Nobody was seriously going to do this in raids on a regular basis. It would come at the expense of gear, materia, damage, pots, potentially HP. It could not have been a serious concern that many serious players would do it, especially with these resistances being different per fight and per cast, combined with it being flat out unnecessary.

It was more likely a concern that casual players that don't know much about the game would do it without knowing it's sub-optimal. But the bigger reason seemed to be that they wanted to use elements for Eureka and didn't want the two things to be confused.

I think the game suffers from increasing homoginization, simplicity, and a big focus on dealing damage with everything revolving around how much damage you throw out

I agree but the problem is really that the majority of players are casual. Nothing will ever change that they are casual, because the majority of people have jobs or a place of education that takes up their time or they are a parent or a mixture of these things.

They don't have the sort of time to be messing around with stats to this degree, figuring out all these little complexities, grinding this to unlock that to unlock this and meet all these requirements and unlock all the abilities necessary to raid.

Rather, they are happy they can just go to the market board, buy some gear and they are ready to raid.

Many MMORPGs have, in the past, not cared about this, but SE really has to this extreme degree that the game is what it is today.

[Aravell]

While I agree with the overall sentiment of the game becoming too simplified over time, I have to say that cross-class actions, stat points allocation, materia and resistances were never that deep.

Cross-class actions had either ones you are required to have to raid or ones that are so niche to the point of being useless, everyone remembers Mana Shift and Palisade, but barely anyone remembers Erase and Crutch because they were such pointless abilities. Stat points allocation were actually a pain as a SCH main, whenever I wanted to play SMN, I had to reset, then reset again when I wanted to play SCH. Materia was never that deep as well, you'd meld accuracy until you can hit the boss and meld VIT on accessories until you can survive. Elemental resist materia were never relevant as far as I can remember.

Now, I'm not saying that none of these systems have potential, I'm just pointing out that they never really did meet their potential in the first place. I personally would rather see them flesh out job identity again and make all jobs fun to play before looking into supporting old systems again.

[Striker44]

This post feels like it would have been spot on if posted in, maybe, 2010. But not today. I really do feel sorry for people who either were born too late and missed out on the "golden age" of MMO's, or who are just still stuck in that time period and can't really accept that the world has moved on. MMO's are no longer the king of video gaming. Go back 15 years or so, and MMO's were the thing. Their prime demographic was teenagers and college kids with tons of time on their hands, the genre itself was still very "new" to the mainstream gaming population, and so they were designed as virtual worlds you could figuratively "live" in (meaning it was expected that the typical gamer would have hours of time day after day to play).

Fast forward to today, and those same human beings are still the prime MMO demographic...but they're now adults with families and full-time careers, and there's less of them. Today's teenagers and college kids aren't playing MMO's the way we did back in the early 2000's. And many adults have left the genre altogether (and perhaps gaming at large as priorities change). MMO's are no longer the hottest thing on the market, and their overall playerbase is slowly but steadily shrinking. The typical MMO player also doesn't have those hours upon hours to spend every day living in that virtual world. Games are now something you pop into for a short spurt and do what you can. I had an absolute blast playing WoW during the Vanilla days, sometimes spending an entire evening forming a group in Xroads and then heading to WC (which could take 2-3 hours to complete). That was amazing. I also wouldn't even begin to want to do something like that today. It's just no longer feasible (or enjoyable for that matter). Time is more precious, and the more you can accomplish in limited play-windows, the more likely you are to play a game to begin with. Even WoW itself recognized this years ago when it did a huge sweep through those early dungeons and made them much quicker, or split them into "wings" so that you could still earn rewards for a run lasting only 15-20 minutes instead of hours.

Put simply, the game imagined by the OP would have been amazing for the gaming community 15 years ago. Today, it is an idealized vision that would be enjoyed by a few...at least until the servers were shut down because the population had dropped so low as today's gamers flocked to more accessible ones that allowed them to feel more accomplished and making progress in their limited time.

[LilFlowers]

Its sad that they just deleted a lot of stuff instead of reworking it. I'm hoping once we hit a hard level cap we can see some complexity, RNG and player choice come back into the mix.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

the 30 stat points had 0 depth. They got put into your main stat and if your were SMN/SCH screw you you had to keep 20k GC seals on you at all times to switch if you needed to play the other job.


I don't think the resistances added more depth either. If they were significant enough to matter, you'd just stack the one element. no depth there either.

[KenZentra]

I agree but the problem is really that the majority of players are casual. Nothing will ever change that they are casual, because the majority of people have jobs or a place of education that takes up their time or they are a parent or a mixture of these things.

They don't have the sort of time to be messing around with stats to this degree, figuring out all these little complexities, grinding this to unlock that to unlock this and meet all these requirements and unlock all the abilities necessary to raid.

Rather, they are happy they can just go to the market board, buy some gear and they are ready to raid.

Thanks for your insight! I don't think I understand the quoted section though. In terms of things I talked about, I was not coming from a place of even doing Savage content or anything like that. Until this expansion in fact, I havent even done Savage stuff if that can put it in a better picture? The "not having time to mess around with stats, etc." seems counter to also saying that they are going to buy some gear and go raid. Are you talking about doing Normal or Savage raids? Cause, at least to me, it feels like they'd need to know more about the game to raid savage as opposed to doing more casual content in the game. As well, even if they were raiding Savage, I don't think you need to know or grind every single ability to clear a savage fight at all. For better or for worse, my group was stuck on P9S for a month or two before clearing it. If every one of us learned how to do everything nearly perfectly im sure it would've taken less than a week, but you don't need to be perfect or even great at the game to clear some of the harder content.

I think that is also true for the past, where plenty of healers saved their GCDs for needing to heal Coils of Bahamut, so they spend a lot of time doing nothing rather than throwing out DPS. I am sure there are plenty more people that cleared many fight in Coils without leveling more than their starting class and whatever cross-class they needed for their job.

Anyways! Again, thanks for the insight!

I want to mention as well (to everyone I guess), Im not necessarily saying these systems were good or even deep. Hell, its probably good some of them were removed, but they were systems already in-game, with some sort of support at launch. They could have used them in one way or another, but decided to scrap them. However, nothing replaced them so we are at a total net loss for systems, character progression, or player mechanics. Character Progression, especially, is nonexistent beyond leveling up and getting gear. In fact, FFXIV has about the same character progression as FF1. Im not saying we should have them back, I'm only mentioning them as SE has effectively made the RPG aspect of the MMO... how to say it...

More like an MMOrpg

[Jeeqbit]

Their prime demographic was teenagers and college kids with tons of time on their hands, the genre itself was still very "new" to the mainstream gaming population, and so they were designed as virtual worlds you could figuratively "live" in (meaning it was expected that the typical gamer would have hours of time day after day to play).

I agree that the idea was you would live in the games. But there were two major problems with them.

1. They were grindy to the point that, even if you had "too much time", it still took too much of your time ie. so that you weren't eating or sleeping properly.
2. Their priority was to be realistic ie. you have to travel through a world to get from one location to another, and this may even be necessary for things such as group events, which meant your group was tapping their foot waiting for you to arrive. Not to mention having to spend ages getting a group together in the first place.

Being realistic was good from an RP perspective, but nobody really wants to walk from one city state to another. Imagine walking from Ul'dah to Gridania. It was never fun, even in this so-called "golden age".

Fast forward to today, and those same human beings are still the prime MMO demographic...but they're now adults with families and full-time careers

In my experience, many people were adults with families and children even back then. Just like there are in fact young people playing this game now (there are certain places I can see this info). I'm aware the majority of people are over 20 and often even over 30, but that's really the point, some people who play are actually in their early 20s even after all this time.

The typical MMO player also doesn't have those hours upon hours to spend every day living in that virtual world.

They just never did. People spent hours living in these worlds when they did not even have that sort of time, to the detriment of themselves, their school work, etc. That is why I applaud SE for caring about people's wellbeing.

The "not having time to mess around with stats, etc." seems counter to also saying that they are going to buy some gear and go raid.

No, it doesn't. Let's say you have 2 hours after work to raid (average raid time for a static is 2 hours on a raid day). You spend 1 minute buying gear from the market board before entering raid.

Whereas you could spend an hour figuring out stat allocations, or many hours grinding things you need, or days unlocking different classes to unlock different cross-class abilities. Many people just don't have that sort of time.

it feels like they'd need to know more about the game to raid savage as opposed to doing more casual content in the game.

There are people who jump into it not really knowing much and are not very good in it. Just like you will surely have someone jump into the deep end of a pool when they are not entirely ready.

Their goal isn't always to clear. Many people's goal is the social aspect, or the fun of trying it even if they can't get very far. Regardless, there are resources that make learning how to play properly efficient, such as The Balance.

if they were raiding Savage, I don't think you need to know or grind every single ability to clear a savage fight at all.

That is exactly my point. Right now, you don't need to. If we had the style of game we did in ARR and double-downed on it, we probably would do all sorts of grinding prior to entering it.

I am sure there are plenty more people that cleared many fight in Coils without leveling more than their starting class and whatever cross-class they needed for their job.

Maybe, but it's like saying people cleared without food, materia and pots. Probably happens, but a lot of players see an easy advantage as basic stuff that's expected.