Alternatives to the Role Actions System?

[Shurrikhan]

1. What are the benefits of the Role Actions System relative to the previous Cross-class system?
   
   
2. What are its benefits in itself?
   
   
3. What are some likely or clearly beneficial things that Role Actions is yet unable to do?
   
   
4. What do you believe the overall purpose of Customization should be?
   
   
5. What parts of Customization can be defeated in their purpose, due to theory-crafting or other relatively natural occurrences, and at what points?
   
   
6. What parts of Customization still fill their purpose despite the above?
   
   
7. How far do you believe customization should go in FFXIV?
   
   
8. To what extent would you like to see Role Actions revised to or replaced with a new system (please detail) to fill this role of Customization?

[TaiyoShikasu]

As far as customization go, they fall flat in that department since 4/5 abilities are often mandatory leaving maybe one slot for something the player wants because they want it. And then other abilities are so niche, they'll probably go unused.

It's a sound idea in theory, but unless they make the mandatory abilities such as Rampart part of the clas/jobs innate abilities, it's honestly a flop in the customization department.

[Lambdafish]

In short: you don't have to level another job just to be effective in the job you want to play. Tanks used to have to level PLD for provoke, melee DPS had to level DRG for invigorate and blood for blood, and healers had to level WHM for protect and stoneskin, and BLM for swiftcast. Now you can play what you like all in one complete package.

I think the system suffers with too many mandatory skills. IMO protect should be removed from the game, and provoke be given to each tank separate from the role system, that way there is more choice of optional skills to take.

[Sylvain]

I don't think the problem comes from the system itself but from some choice made.

Most job currently have a big disparity between good choice, useless choice and mandatory leaving most job with very little choice.

There is basically either too not enough good choice, or (specifically for healers), too many things are just a no brainer living no room foor customization.

Tank have probably the best choice so far since the only skill they actually need (on most fight at least), is Provoke for tank swap.

But then, when we look at the gain some skill are clear winner over others. Too many skill are just too situationnal to be concidered"good" out of a specific fight (Like Awareness and Interject for OS3 for instance).

So once we remove the niche fight. We end up with the same 5 skills on most tanks.
Provoke, Rampart, Convaslescence, Reprisal, Shirk/something else.


Same goes for healers.
LucidDream and Protect are just too good to not be taken, Swiftcast is somewhat mandatory if you want to be able to rez and of course Esuna for the few fight that require it.
Then you have the "always good" Largesse.
Once that done you're left with actually very little choice. E4E is too random and will only work well on a few fight. Surecast is very situational (which is fine), Rescue could be cool if the person you'd pull in wouldn't always die because of the delay.
Then there is break which is always useless (even in Solo) and Cleric Stance which is just... lame.

DPS somewhat suffer the same issue than Tank, there are only 5/6 good choice, which in the end means there's no proper choice.



In order to make this system the way it was intended,
first they need to make all truly mandatory skills baseline (notably Provoke, Esuna. Although it's not absolutely mandatory I'd add lucid dream)
Then, they need to make new skills or somewhat rework currently existing skill in a way that doesn't force the player to get a specific skill.

For instance, Swiftcast is notably taken to get instant rez (spare BLM). Assuming there would be other interesting choices, if they'd make rez instant (they could add a 1min CD to the skill to compensate i dunno), then Swiftcast would loose a lot of its appeal.


There is a limited amount of things you can do in term of situational skills.
For instance, anything that could substantially increase a dps' dps can't really be added because it would make the skill mandatory, and as far as i'm concerned, the point of this system to give you some choice and way to personalise.

Another thing that could be done would be to instead of adding skills, adding traits.

For instance
These spells are now baseline: Esuna, Protect, Lucid Dream

Healer

Improved Ressurection - [Skill] : Ressurect a dead player (no weakened state), 360sec, instant, 3600mana

Swift Resurection - [Trait] : Ressurection cast time is reduced to 3sec.

Cleric Stance: - [Skill] Increase damage by 5% and reduce damaging spell mana cost by 50%, last 15sec, 90sec CD

Improved Lucid Dream - [Trait] : Lucid Dream cooldown is reset upon death.

Eye for an Eye - [Skill] :Increase healing received proportionally to the missing health. Up to 100%. Last 10sec. 90sec CD
hp - heal bonus
100% - 0%
75% - 25%
50% - 50%
25% - 75%
1% - 100% (gl there)

Justification:
These proposition are highly situational and most importantly, group/player dependant.
Improved Resurection is nice in farm group or when you're close to down a boss.
If you're learning a boss and people overall keep dying, then it is not a really good skill. Perhaps Swift resurection would be better.
Then again, Swift resurection would be a non interesting skill if your party, overall, has no one dying. (like any farm group should)

Improved Lucid Dream is again, a very nice skill for progression if you keep dying because you're struggling with the fight. It's a rather bad trait if you simply never die.

The mana cost reduction on cleric stance is to make the talent more interesting. Honestly, 5% dps increase is hardly worth it. At least with the mana cost reduction it can be used for high AoE moment. This could be a rather interesting choice for dungeons.

E4E could be more reliable.Most fight have hard tank buster, this could be a useful spell to help bringing back a tank up. There are quite a few fight where increase the healing done by an ogcd would be very nice.

Most are highly " progression oriented ", but this is pretty much my point, by giving more good choice that are not simply fight dependant but also skill / group dependant, you could see more variation.
I don't think it is possible to make 10-15skills perfectly balanced and good in all situation. However I do believe making skill optimised for specific tast / moment could work fine.


Tank

Swift Stance [Trait] - Stance are now out of the GCD but get a 15sec CD.

Ultimate Sacrifice [Skill] - Heal the target for up to 50% of your maximum HP. Reduce your HP by half of the healing done. Instant. 120sec

Improved Provoke - [Trait] - Provoke also generate half your health as enmity to the target.

Last Stand - [Skill] - You defy death. You automatically resurrect after 5sec in a weakened state with half your maximum health. 10sec duration. 600sec recast

Justification: Again mostly progression skills. Yet again, some group / player could hihgly benefit from these skills instead of the current one. Ultimate sacrifice could ease a tank buster, or perhaps your healer died and the MT is getting low?



Caster

Drain [Skill] - Potency 100 - Same as before except that the heal can heal around 30% of your maximum health. Instant - 30sec recast

[B]Etherical Come back - [Trait] - Reduce the duration of Weakened State by 1min and reset all your skill upon death. 600sec CD

I don't have much idea for the melee and range.
But you get the idea.

[DRKoftheAzure]

snip

Tanks have at least 3 mandatory abilities, depending on job though it may be more, for DRK, Provoke/Ultimatum/Shirk are all interchangeable, Anticipation, Reprisal, Low Blow, Interject, Rampart, and Convalescence are mandatory because there is nothing better for mitigation and utility so that bumps up to 5+ and when DRK needs more than 5 to make up for lack of mitigation and utility, it is a sign that tank balance NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED NOW.


PLD has a built in stun still but no longer has a built in silence, and doesn't need Anticipation even though Bulwark is not always reliable, and Reprisal originally belonged to DRK, so PLD is at 3-4 mandatory depending on the situation.


WAR requires Awareness due to Raw Intuition and Ultimatum with Provoke since WAR can no longer get Flash, so that's bumped to 5 mandatory(this going by theme of jobs)

Healers have 1 interchangeable action BUT ONLY AFTER YOU ENTER A DUNGEON/RAID/TRIAL, which makes Esuna decent mandatory spell because you never know when you need it, making Largesse, Eye for an Eye, and Lucid Dreaming mandatory which leaves Rescue, Swiftcast and Surecast interchangeable for last slot.


DPS are locked to 4 mandatory(Physical Ranged and melee 5 mandatory if they do not trust healer) meaning last slot goes to something that is interchangeable based on job and theme.


I think cross-class was better since it tried to get players to try out new classes but at the same time jobs only allowed 2 classes to be selected from an already limited selection to help perform their role better, just needed more classes and class actions to choose from as well as the job unlocking those actions as soon as they hit the required level similar to role action, so 2 steps forward-1 step back overall...

[Sylvain]

Just one thing, "Nothing better" does not equal mandatory.
Mandatory is something you NEED in order to complete the fight. Like, it is impossible (or it becomes extremely clunky and requires gimmick)
Provoke is mandatory because there are many fight where you need a tank swap and some fight put two tanks on different target making the swapping impossible without provoke.(Bismark for instance)

Shirk is not mandatory and not always interchangeable with provoke. There are many instance where 25% of your threat might not be enough for a tank swap (without provoke Ofc) and its long cd makes it an unreliable tool for frequent tank swap (shin claw for ex).
The long list contains no mandatory skill (spare interject for os3 add).

Can you name a single fight impossible to perfectly (no death) execute without reprisal, convalescence or rampart? By impossible I mean, the boss cannot realistically be done without seriously overgearing the said fight.
Same goes for healer. Although we say lucid dream is mandatory, it isn't. It is an extremely potent and convenient skill to have, but it is not mandatory. Without overheal and proper play, in my experience (up to os3) every fight is clearance without it (ultimate included, I've seen a video with a WHM pov. He didn't need it).

Esuna is, sometime, mandatory. And by that I mean you need it unless you consider rezzing people or letting their dps drop to nearly 0 for 1min part of the fight (see doom on OS4 or paralyse on shin for instance)

Dps have no mandatory skill, there is not a single skill that is needed to complete a fight. (again, useful doesn't mean mandatory, apocastase is useful, but there s no tank buster impossible to survive without it, for example)

[Shurrikhan]

Just one thing, "Nothing better" does not equal mandatory.
Mandatory is something you NEED in order to complete the fight. Like, it is impossible (or it becomes extremely clunky and requires gimmick)
Provoke is mandatory because there are many fight where you need a tank swap and some fight put two tanks on different target making the swapping impossible without provoke.(Bismark for instance)

Shirk is not mandatory and not always interchangeable with provoke. There are many instance where 25% of your threat might not be enough for a tank swap (without provoke Ofc) and its long cd makes it an unreliable tool for frequent tank swap (shin claw for ex).
The long list contains no mandatory skill (spare interject for os3 add).

Can you name a single fight impossible to perfectly (no death) execute without reprisal, convalescence or rampart? By impossible I mean, the boss cannot realistically be done without seriously overgearing the said fight.
Same goes for healer. Although we say lucid dream is mandatory, it isn't. It is an extremely potent and convenient skill to have, but it is not mandatory. Without overheal and proper play, in my experience (up to os3) every fight is clearance without it (ultimate included, I've seen a video with a WHM pov. He didn't need it).

Esuna is, sometime, mandatory. And by that I mean you need it unless you consider rezzing people or letting their dps drop to nearly 0 for 1min part of the fight (see doom on OS4 or paralyse on shin for instance)

Dps have no mandatory skill, there is not a single skill that is needed to complete a fight. (again, useful doesn't mean mandatory, apocastase is useful, but there s no tank buster impossible to survive without it, for example)

I think this has turned into a question of semantics. Azure (as I feel most do) considered "mandatory" as skills without which you likely would or should be replaced from the group because they are just that much more important or powerful, not as skills without which you cannot complete the given content. The majority of even current content can technically be completed at minimum ilvl, undermanned, after all, but that doesn't mean that speed doesn't then remain an important metric.

Shirk, for instance, equates not only to increased safety (which generates slightly higher healer DPS, potentially, around the swaps), but to increased DPS in the vein of having an additional 2 Ninja's worth of Shadewalker and Smokescreen per tank carrying Shirk. To those who care about raid DPS, then, it ends up essentially mandatory.

I mean, if we want to go so far as technical mandate, even Provoke isn't actually mandatory outside of such early and instant swaps as T11, where critical strikes can do easily throw a natural swap into disarray. I managed to get through an Ultima Ex back in ARR where my Warrior off-tank didn't have Provoke. Luckily we already had the enmity meters by then, so we simply took hate from each other in a natural fashion, timed almost precisely to the 3rd or 4th stack as to time out our CDs ideally -- using Storm combos only as often as necessary to maintain Maim as OT, and using only Storm combos as MT once nearing the swap point. But there's no way anyone would accept that level of potency waste these days from having to use so many enmity combos... now that they're a significant DPS loss on all tanks.

The same goes for Lucid Dream; unless casting only Cure I, Physic, or Benefic, you cannot cast use every GCD without running out of mana, let alone continuously stick only to more potent heals and fill the larger number of downtime GCDs with damage skills. In casual content, it might not be necessary, especially if you already have access to Refresh and your casters take Diversion (far, far weaker over time), but it is disgustingly powerful and you likely should be replaced if you refuse to take it, as not taking it will cost you upwards of half of your throughput over the course of a 5-minute moderately intensive fight (much higher, still, for non-WHMs given their free oGCD throughput impact, Assize, and Thin Air).

I imagine that Neo ExDeath would very, very likely meet your criteria for a fight that will at some point actually require Reprisal, Convalescence (not for MT sustain, but for Deployment through Defiance Warrior, especially prior to the Shake it Off change), and Rampart.

The bigger issue to me, though, is why a fight would need be designed around or to include the benefits of some skill, tool, or system that isn't going to be interesting in itself. It's not as if the fight would need to remain tuned precisely where it was if those tools were buffed, nerfed, or removed. Nothing about any fight will ever obligate a design decision outside of it -- it simply scales its tuning with the tools available or expected to be taken. So even if a fight requires these tools, that's no defense of the tools themselves or the system holding them, should they reveal flaws or failings elsewhere.

[Sylvain]

snip

I understand, perhaps I wasn't clear enough but I wanted to make (in my first post) a clear distinction between "very strong" and "mandatory". My point was that anything properly being "Mandatory" should be baseline.
A system meant to offer choice should not contain skills absolutely necessary for the proper completion of a fight.



Currently Provoke and Esuna do feel this way. (As you said,provoke is arguably not required but swapping aggro becomes utterly clunky at this point). Which is why I think these should be baseline.
There's no choice in selecting these skills. There is no strategy (beside removing it if you don't need it for a single fight, like OS1 for instance).
Arguably Lucid Dream and Protect should also become baseline (altough in the case of protect I'd like it to simply be removed from the game, it's such a boring thing)

What I wanted to point out was that currently most role have a set of 3-5 very strong skills that they can easily use on all fight and 1 or 2 very situational that they'll pick over. (Like SureCast for Shin)
If I tell you "Pick 5 out of 6", this is hardly a choice. You just filter the weakest one and that's it. And by choice I mean logical choice. I do have the choice to Pick Provoke, Ultimatum, Low Blow, Interject and Awareness as the OT on OS1, but this is more akin to trolling than anything else)
And with the current Skill design, it is nearly impossible for them to give us better choice. Because there will always be that set of 4-5 jack of all trade skills that fit in every single fight for every tank.
If they add 5 new skills and the 5 new are better than what we currently have, the problem isn't solved, we just changed the name of the new good skills.

This is why I posted these idea (I don't pretend they're especially good / balanced) of traits or alternate skills.

To take tanks as an example, they've already exploited everything they could in terms of mechanics.
- DMG debuff on boss
- More healing received
- Less damage taken
- More Parry

There is nothing more they can add beside toying like "Hard skin: Decrease physical damage taken by 20% for 15sec" or "Etherical Skin: Decrease magical damage taken by 20% for 15sec" smaller CD than Rampart.
(Unless you consider giving Tank a Trick Attack would make sens)



So basically, my idea was that since there's a limitation to what they can do with skills, they could also add traits. This would give them more freedom and by making more situational skills/traits, perhaps they could have a better system where player have more choice.

If you play Heroes of the Storm, many skill feel this way. For example some heroes have skills such as "Every time you succeed with X skill shot, its damage/heal increase by 10% up to 50%. Bonus reset when skill shot X fails". This is extremely powerful, but if you've just started and you basically fail 1/3 shots. This is hardly a good skill at all.
The same can somewhat be applied to the current game in the sens that what is good for me isn't necessarly good for you.
The change to Cleric Stance is a great example. A healer who, overall, has a very low dps uptime would not beneit from that whereas some healer could probably get more mana back from that Cleric Stance than Lucid Dream.

While most of my examples were axed toward progression, these would still be very valid and interesting choice for many players.

[KaosKeith]

I like the role action system, skills needed by all classes of a given role being shared by all those classes i think is a good idea. Having to choose a subset of them is just stupid though.

IMO the devs should remove the "choice" part of the role action system and just have stuff unlock as you level up just like any other skill and be able to use all the role actions.

[Lord_Zlatan]

I would just like to see a bit more depth to the choices, and possibly some synergies with the choices that you make. The ability synergies should allow you to feel as if you are adding some customization to your class, because as it stands, the only thing seperating people is skill level.