FFXIV draws too heavily on wow

[CVXIV]

I do agree that they could take inspiration from some aspects of the single player games better to create other experiences though:

• Being able to use items on eachother. Just for fun, but also useful for people that didn't unlock other jobs.

I'm pretty sure you can use items on other players, can't you?
For instance, if your healer or somebody in Palace of the Dead gets inflicted with silence you can target them and use Echo Drops to cure it so they can keep attacking / healing

Maybe use the various battle systems from those games to inspire other mechanics too, such as:

• The materia system from the original FF7.

How would that system possibly work in an MMO setting?
The materia system in FF7 is hilariously broken
Every spell is single target until you give it an All materia in a linked slot
You can get x4 cut and other things to absolutely destroy enemies
I don't see that working with the materia they have us use now, because what would the point be of linking them?

They would have to completely rehaul the materia system (which I think it could do with, just not like this because some stats are not used like piety)

• The slow but more strategic battle concept in the older games where the long recast times forced you to decide whether to heal or attack. To elaborate on this, it's easy to go on a healer and spam your DPS button 100% of the time, but if your recast time was 10 or 20 seconds, you'd have to consider more carefully whether your next action is an attack or heal because you won't get another chance for ages. The rest of that time could be spent doing mechanics. The game was at least closer to this before they added all these ability heals which completely evaporate that choice most of the time.

What games had long recast times?
You pretty much got to use a spell as soon as your bar filled back up, and if it took time to cast you could negate it with an accompanying haste spell
That, or you had a limited number of times you could use a certain spell in combat

Also, with how much people have been talking about healers in the forums I don't think reducing their one dps skill to a 20-30 recast time would do anything beneficial for them

Of course they'd need more skills, but even then it sounds absolutely dreadful to play in an MMO