Cross-class vs. Role Actions

Just some thoughts i've had since the release regarding this topic.

It seems at the cost of having a homogenized role skill selection, certain classes had parts taken from them and added to the pool, albeit weaker versions. A good example of this, as many DRKs' know, is the Dark Dance/Reprisal combo. Where DD would increase your parry rate so you can proc Reprisal to get some nice oGCD damage and damage down on the enemy for 15s, it was a nice although somewhat random combo. Now Reprisal is a role action, in a hollowed state, no longer doing damage and only applying a dmg down debuff for 5s. A minor one that comes to mind is Leg Sweep from DRG, it no longer does damage and is no longer specific to DRG.

However, there are also some new original skills, with varying efficacy(looking at you Drain). Some of my favorites have been Shirk, which helps with tank swapping. As well as True North for melee dps.
Im not against the role abilities but because some of the skills in the pool were from other classes, it seems to have impacted some more than others.

When you think about cross-class skills, in order to get some of the really useful ones, you'd have to level the other class that it shares skills with in order to use it. This was a bit of a bummer because if you didn't want to play that class youd have to grind out the levels just to get to use that one skill. However, it did feel good swiftcast ressing people knowing you took the time to get such a useful skill.

Although there are some positives that come with the role actions, I wish they would've kept all the skills for their original classes and come up with new role action abilitiies.

Maybe they could include the more useful skills to each class, for example every caster/healer having a version of swiftcast in their class, or each tank having their provoke, etc. This idea is already in the game with each tank class has their own version of an invulnerability buff, and how the healers used to have their own debuff cleanse. If they baked in the staple abilities to each role, we could see some interesting new role skills in the line of True North, Shirk, Mana Shift

It provides an easy way to add abilities that would be useful across all classes, while allowing them to count against an individual budget (5 role slots), instead of having to factor them into the Jobs themselves.

There are currently issues with some of them simply not being as good / having a narrow margin of use, but it is a solid system concept that can easily be expanded upon as needed. It effectively does what cross class came to do but cleaner.

The loss of some of 'unique' interactions for some jobs is understandably annoying or upsetting, but overall I think the change is for the better. The main issue many of them face is that mechanics are hard coded to ignore them and thus their niche use is only in low end content, while others simply lack enough 'oomph' in them.

For example, as a Caster, I will never take Break, Drain, or Erase. Even Surecast is struggling to keep its spot in favor Apocatastasis.

At least with the cross-class were able to check out a class/job that you might play in you off time or need to switch to without changing your static group.... Which is actually a lot a better than cross role... They should have kept cross class but allow more abilities available that makes sense to the job, like DRK getting Bloodbath because of the lore...