Elements

[TheDustyOne]

While I enjoy elemental systems, it's a system that has to be designed around with from the start of development. As it is currently; BLM would not be able to fight against any fire or wind mobs and would be extremely broken against ice and water mobs, RDM would suffer from very bad mana alignment against fire and water mobs, as well as lightning and ice mobs while fishing for procs, WHM would be as useless against water and earth mobs as BLM is against fire and wind. There's also elemental abilities that people often forget about in most kits, like NIN having Lightning, Wind, and Water, and MNK having Fire, Earth, and Wind (although they exist only as buffs that don't directly change elemental affinity).

Between all the casters (including the upcoming Pictomancer), WHM, the 2 melees that prominently have elements in their kit, that's 7 jobs that need to be reworked from the ground up and 10 years worth of content to redesign. You then have to ask how much of a bonus job A should have over other jobs in fights because of the elemental differences; should it be fair for job A to have a 10% bonus over job B because the boss is weak to Fire and job B has Ice? And if you think it's unfair for there to be large discrepancies, then you have to introduce all elements into any elemental job for parities sake, which makes the system very homogenous and heavily bloats job kits. That's not to say that it's impossible to have missing elements in kits, but it's very difficult to balance around.

All this to say; this game wasn't designed for it and you're better off asking for a new game that incorporates such systems. There's too many bosses, mobs, and jobs to redesign from scratch to make it work and could negatively affect the enjoyment people have with those jobs now.

[RyanCousland]

i like the elemental aspect that you are proposing however and im sure a senior player may correct me but wasnt this implemented in 1.0 or in previous expansions and later scrapped?

As to why it was removed (or not implemented) im sure there are many reasons, lack of dev resources to maintain this system, complexity to some of the player base, a narrative conflict ect.

maybe im inferring incorrectly but if youre suggesting that elements have a beneficial/detrimental relationship in the pve aspect then this would only apply to (GNB?)DRK,PLD,RPR,MCH,NIN,(MNK?),RDM,BLM,SMN as these are the classes with some or most notable elemental effects, but this begs several questions, do the devs then have to make other classes with elemental effects too? how would this elemental feature impact balancing of classes in regards to dps output or even dmg mitigation? do healers use just magic or is it some type of holy or spirit/astral type element? if its no then we remove PLD and conversely DRK & RPR from the list of affected classes.

im sure if we were to use a chart of these elemental relationships then this may help with how it affects dmg. a small example being Fire > Ice > Lighting > Fire but this may conflict with established concepts already in place, now the other proposed method would be to add more elemental skills and thereby broaden this feature but this would require a complete rework on any class that has this elemental feature & if im being honest the devs do enough damage with their reworks as it is & i dont want to imagine what adding an extra layer would do.

in all honesty as much as we can fault the devs on certain aspects of the game this is something that i think would be too much of burden on them & believe me im not a fan of the devs. Had they started with this feature from the inception of the game & did a better job of building around it, then im sure it wouldve been easier to manage but the ship has sailed and we are now left with just magic vs physical dmg.

if you wanna satiate your elemental appetite i recommend any of the Dragon age games as they did a decent job with this elemental topic & while im sure "play another game" is not something anyone wants to hear, its unfortunately all anyone can do when a game lacks a certain desirable feature