Originally Posted by
eschatological
I mean, this COULD exist in FFXIV. The addon programming, the split runs, etc, since you can only fully gear up 2 jobs in the 16 weeks of Savage prior to Ultimate, and so on, and so forth. There's a couple reasons it doesn't:
1) Comps aren't really a major thing in FFXIV. There's no fight where you *need* a, for example, RDM for Empower or some buff or something. As long as you stick with 2 tanks, 2 heals, 2 melee, 2 ranged, you're pretty much good. This happens because FFXIV designs around a tighter raid group of 8 players, and design is more homogenous over roles - IE, all tanks have an invulnerability, all heals have a major CD, non-greedy DPS all have pretty standardized raid debuffs on pretty standardized 2 minute CDs. There's also never a need to stack a particular class - in fact, that's usually a bad thing to have a duplicate job in FFXIV. So even with 2 jobs you can fully gear up in time, you can coordinate with your static to do so just by hitting all the raids weekly.
2) Addons are less necessary because FFXIV has clear telegraphs and pretty strict scripts. I can't tell you how many fuzzy AoEs my raiders have died to in WoW because the graphic, while flashy, isn't very clear. Or how many times a wipe occurs because a spell-queue system pushes a particular boss ability to a bad timing. Or how many boss spells are instant cast with only a voice line to indicate it's happening. While WoW's raiding sound design is great and I raidlead based almost solely on voicelines, for some reason WoW raiders have evolved into playing with 0 sound and usually something on the second monitor while raiding (which is admittedly bizarre to me).
3) FFXIV, in general, is proactive, while WoW is reactive. FFXIV is all about setting up for certain moments. WoW is often utter chaos and very variable from pull to pull. While FFXIV has random ground-based AoE in some dungeons, I've found in lots of trials and raids ground AoEs tend to be pattern-based as opposed to RNG.