Role Breaking Abilities?

Am I the only one who'd love to see more abilities that allow jobs some chance to move outside their role slightly? By this, I mean things like healing abilities on tanks/dps (Clemency, The Warden's Paean), maybe more defensive cooldowns on dps or even healers (like Foresight) or maybe even stuff like short-duration Provokes for high-HP dps.

Obviously this would all have to be balanced very strictly and it's honestly it's likely that even if abilities like this were added they wouldn't be worth using. But personally I feel that the devs are far too rigid with the 'trinity' system idea. It is strange, though, that tanks and healers can put out dps almost equal to actual DPS classes, but dps have absolutely no way of helping the tanks/healers outside of MP/TP regen.

You could argue that Bard and Machinist can do this with Warden's Paean / Dismantle / Rend Mind, but this doesn't really contribute to making the healer / tank's lives easier as much as a max dps healer/tank contributes to those in the dps role, not to mention that abilities like these always have very long cooldown. Whilst Warden's Paean is only on a 45 second cooldown generally if there's going to status effects that can be removed with Esuna there's always going to be more than one going out within the cooldown time, not to mention the fact that it's generally expected of you to use it on the Warrior everytime they pop Berserk.

I really feel like more abilities this like this would encourage more teamwork and less focus on personal dps, and I'd love to hear other people's opinions on this kind of thing!

i dig it, it wont happen unless they loosen up the holy triple triad. But maybe some day.

One of my absolute favorite things about Death Knight in World of Warcraft is their ability to battle-rez. They're one of the only non-healing classes that can do it and it's a wonderful little addition for their class fantasy, given that most (if not all) Death Knights are also necromancers. I'd love to see more of this type of thing in FFXIV, and I've said since ARR that Paladins would make an ideal off-healer (or off-off-healer in 8 man content). The current DPS-focused meta of the game doesn't really allow for such, I don't think, but it's something that could be worked towards.

BLM already have several defensive cooldowns. Not that I would mind more ignore mechanic moves :)

I'd be up for this if they reduced the skill bloat first. Spent so many years playing action mmos that having to use shift, ctrl and alt as modifiers along with full bars is already quite a stretch, especially for 2016.

The catch-all term is called "utility", and yes, this game suffers drastically from a lack of it. When classes are designed around "doing almost everything their trinity counterpart can do", this is the result you get. Healers always need Protect, Swiftcast, a rez, AOE healing, single-target "oh crap" button, and healing throughput buff (Divine Seal, etc). Tanks always need Provoke, a single target threat combo, an AOE threat gen, a "get out of death free" button, and mitigative cooldowns of the flat-% variety (Rampart, Inner Beast, etc). DPS are a bit more varied, but always are stuck getting Invigorate if they're melee, or Swiftcast if they're a caster. They also usually get single-target combos, an AOE rotation of varying efficacy, a self-heal or some kind of defensive cooldown (MCH notably doesn't have much of either of these), and some measure of crowd control that sees virtually no use outside of soloing or PVP because lol meaningful raid mechanics.

I suppose ostensibly, you could break a lot of trinity classes down like this, but idk, it just feels much more noticeable in XIV for some reason.

More utility would be nice, but we already have some, and the majority of the playerbase never use any of it at all. Can honestly count on one hand the amount of DF BLMs I've seen ever apoc someone.

Melee stun could've been better if they hadn't attached damage to it, as it currently stands, any time you might actually need to stun something, it has long gone resistant to it from people just using these in their dps rotation

so while more utility might make things more interesting, can we really expect them to go down this route when we still have brds that never play any songs at all

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Originally Posted by randysquirrel

More utility would be nice, but we already have some, and the majority of the playerbase never use any of it at all. Can honestly count on one hand the amount of DF BLMs I've seen ever apoc someone.

so while more utility might make things more interesting, can we really expect them to go down this route when we still have brds that never play any songs at all

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I think the lack of the utility might be something that exasperates this problem. In all but the hardest content most utility is so limited that it's hard to feel like it makes a difference, especially for the majority of jobs (Bard and Machinist excluded of course).

I mean, nobody's going to ask a BLM why they haven't been using Apocatasis, or why a Summoner hasn't been using Eye for an Eye because they don't feel like it really makes a difference ("why should I buff the tank's magic defense when I could just dps and kill the enemy faster?"). Obviously there's always going to be players who ignore many of their abilities, but this is going to happen regardless.

I think having more varied utility options that aren't as limited as they are now would really encourage people to use them. Unless I'm missing something Clemency is currently the only utility option in the game that's easily available and on the GCD, and even then it costs close to 50% of the Paladin's limited MP pool.

I always use eye for an eye in every class that can have this action on it. That's if my hotbar have space for it. It would be nice to have more of such abilities that encourage team work indeed. AST is the one job I can think of now which apart from healing specialize in buffs and this demonstrate good teamwork if used properly and with little rng help. SE tend to keep the extensive utility actions as part of a new main job actions. Speaking of missing actions, I would like to see a re-raise action.

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Originally Posted by SessionZero

One of my absolute favorite things about Death Knight in World of Warcraft is their ability to battle-rez. They're one of the only non-healing classes that can do it

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Last time I played, warlocks can also do it, and druids are the only healer that can. It's not only limited to resto druids either.

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Originally Posted by basketofseals

Last time I played, warlocks can also do it, and druids are the only healer that can. It's not only limited to resto druids either.

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Right, my point was that a class that has absolutely nothing to do with healing is one of the only battle-rez classes in the game. I'd like to see more of that sort of cross-utility.

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Originally Posted by SessionZero

Right, my point was that a class that has absolutely nothing to do with healing is one of the only battle-rez classes in the game. I'd like to see more of that sort of cross-utility.

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SMN has Resurrection, but since raises in this game aren't particularly finite (being restricted only by healer MP), it doesn't have as much value as it could. In fact, pretty much any SMN utility is made fairly obsolete thanks to SCH, which is a big failure of the "base class" system, IMO. (Personally glad that they moved away from it with Heavensward.)

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Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo

In fact, pretty much any SMN utility is made fairly obsolete thanks to SCH, which is a big failure of the "base class" system, IMO. (Personally glad that they moved away from it with Heavensward.)

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Exactly. By contrast, DK battle-rez is restricted only by a (I think) 5 min CD, costs no resources, and is instant. But since the only other battle-rez classes in the game are Warlock and Druid (iirc), it makes that otherwise small utility a great boon.

I suppose my point was less to do with the battle-rez thing and more the principle of it: a DPS/tank spec class has access to an incredibly useful rez ability that fits within the class fantasy and most healing classes don't have access to (Paladin and Priest's Redemption, for example, can't be used in combat and has a long cast time). Let's see more of that in FFXIV.

The danger with branching out a lot from a defined role is that they become a closer form of a hybrid class/job. In games that only feature the holy trinity as their party form (with XIV being more of a focus), this breaks their balancing and often even makes them OP compared to other jobs (regardless of role). It can even start to make that job perform better than jobs of other roles when combined with the other abilities that define it. Lots of complaints inbound with that.

I'd absolutely love to see a return to some imbalance, akin to old school MMORPGs, since that often makes jobs extremely fun to take part in playing. Tanking Nidhogg/Fafnir/etc as a BRD in XI prior to the Mazurka nerf, for example, was pretty damn fun since it was a change of pace from the norm. BRD was arguably a better tank than all the other jobs for some endgame content, despite it being a support role. Likewise in XI, the discovery of players making NIN a tank from its original DPS (DD) design literally changed the games combat design for a very long time. Hell, even in this game, if they didn't nerf Titan Egi from that Ramuh fight so quickly, we might have actually started seeing SMN become a semi-tank for raids/dungeons as a norm.

As such, we can't really do that here, simply because of the fact that balance and role definition is a big deal to the devs (even though some points are arguably contradictory for them doing that). They want to lock the jobs into their established roles as much as possible without branching out. Maybe they'll just follow WoWs tank path with Legion, in tanks healing themselves for significant amounts during a fight is part of the role. It'd help establish the DPSing while healer mindset that is rampant here, at least.

It's something I wouldn't mind. DRG can't "really" SOS Tank, but I've been in more than enough DF's that have turned south and thanks to a couple cross skills I've been able to reduce damage, evade damage, and self heal pretty well, and kite in the rarest of occasions. I'd love more flexibility in being able to SOS tank on my DRG.