Question/Concern regarding the Cross Role System...

Quite frankly... these are abilities that are considered necessary for jobs to perform their function... so why are we limited to the number we can have? When I first imagined this system I thought well, Raise, for example could be added because all healers have raise and need to use it. You could then even get rid of the Raise equivalent on summoner if you wanted. Maybe you still have, I don't know. But the thing is: these would just be a pool of abilities that the role was supposed to have and use. For some reason, I figured these wouldn't be limited in number.


Now, I main a healer, but please make no mistake. I'm not creating yet another WHM sux thread, I already did that in the healer forums (and I'll totally take any heat you want to give me in that thread). But I have to imagine other jobs might have the same plight.

For a WHM to get all the skills it has now and uses frequently back, we would need to take:

Protect
Cleric Stance
Divine Seal (or whatever they're calling it now)
Esuna
Lucid Dream
Eye for an Eye
Swiftcast

That's 7 abilities and we only have room for 5 of them (or did we get a 6th slot at 70? I forget the stream was on at 12midnight here and I passed out around 2:30). I don't really tank much, but I'm curious if any of the tanks have similar problems or if even some of the DPS jobs have problems fitting these new abilities in to get back to their current settings.

People wanted to have different builds. This was their answer.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

People wanted to have different builds. This was their answer.

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I thought that was the reason for having the cross class system in the first place and that this new system was supposed to get rid of that =p

Not all of them would be useful all of the time and you can swap out skills in dungeons if you're not in battle. Like I can see the rescue thing as being completely useless if you're doing main scenario but useful if you're on a mentor roulette with a sprout who's still learning how Titan works or which bosses have unmarked frontal cleaves. Overall the system will probably still be kind of rough when the game actually drops and we're going to have to be vocal about any issues that come up so the devs know what adjustments need to be made.

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Originally Posted by Reiryuu

I thought that was the reason for having the cross class system in the first place and that this new system was supposed to get rid of that =p

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People said the cross class system was lame because everyone used the same abilities cuz there were only a few good ones. People wanted a way to differentiate themselves from another player of the same job.

Protect, divine seal( or whatever the new version is called), esuna, swiftcast, lucid dream. IMO those 5 are necessary. But those are the ones I would choose. Cleric 5% damage bonus for 15s is meh, but you can swap them out so after you cast protect at the beginning of an instance, just simply swap it out for another skill.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

People said the cross class system was lame because everyone used the same abilities cuz there were only a few good ones. People wanted a way to differentiate themselves from another player of the same job.

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I highly doubt this system will be any different, do you?

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Originally Posted by Derio

Protect, divine seal( or whatever the new version is called), esuna, swiftcast, lucid dream. IMO those 5 are necessary. But those are the ones I would choose. Cleric 5% damage bonus for 15s is meh, but you can swap them out so after you cast protect at the beginning of an instance, just simply swap it out for another skill.

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Did they remove the cooldown for swapping?

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Originally Posted by Reiryuu

I highly doubt this system will be any different, do you?

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Oh, I dunno about that, it sounds like there are a lot more situational skills or build type skills. tanks in particular i think will benefit from this, as there are skills that specifically will benefit a main tank, and off tanks wont need them.

Also, dungeons vs raids. there will be many variants to player skills this time around i believe.

Tanks get both a silence and stun. There's very few instances where you need both, so you would take the one you need (or, have each tank take a different one).

The choice seems more to customize your build to the fight; there's definitely places where you never use Esuna, or you have little chance to DPS. What if everything (dangerous) is magic, and E4E can never proc? Why do both healers need Protect?

I explained it like this:

Imagine you are in raid, and you are learning and haven't cleared yet, you have no need for cleric stance, and some abilities are not necessary all the time (such as esuna). When you clear however, you then switch cleric stance in and switch out something like eye for an eye which you no longer need.

The point is that this system allows players to think about their toolkit, and adjust it situationally. Yes, all of these abilities are important, but by limiting you it allows you to prioritise the ones that are truly important in that singular encounter, and gain a new understanding of how your class plays in different scenarios.

I'm wondering if this will bring a new age in which not using protect is a viable strategy (probably not)

If I have to constantly go into the menu to change what skills I have then this is a bad system.

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Originally Posted by PArcher

The choice seems more to customize your build to the fight; there's definitely places where you never use Esuna, or you have little chance to DPS. What if everything (dangerous) is magic, and E4E can never proc? Why do both healers need Protect?

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Why do you need to give up access to a skill just because you're not using it for that fight? Are you going to be reorganizing your hotbars each time too? Or are you just going to have a grayed out protect on your hotbar to look at and feel like a dummy when you have to raise a few people and can't recast protect because of this unnecessary change?

I'm going to wait and see how this shakes out during EA before I make any snap judgments. Don't forget that while they're taking some things out of the main job's toolkit they are also granting access to some of these skills across multiple roles (i.e. offering DPS roles a cleanse skill that they've had access to in PvP for ages, rolling Bloodbath out to classes other than DRG) and the one thing I'm really excited about is this offers players a choice. Am I concerned that some seemingly essential skills are being removed from the job toolkits? Absolutely. But the amount of power this gives players and groups versus the old way where you were more or less railroaded into the same five skills I think is worth the risk.

Wasn't the main benefit of this not having to level the other classes to get access to the abilities? This clearly solves that issue, at least.

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Originally Posted by Alendris

Wasn't the main benefit of this not having to level the other classes to get access to the abilities? This clearly solves that issue, at least.

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Yes, it was.

And there are lots of dungeons where Esuna was only good for getting rid of Pacification on Warriors, so whatever. We will see, I feel like the only thing I actually need all the time for Healer is Swiftcast.

Can see it being useful in spreading...well...Role actions about.

As a Tank, I'm thinking you may be able to have one 'set' that is primarily highly defensive, while the off-tank may take things that give a bit more punch or utility unless they know they will be needed for serious tanking.
It could be really interesting, or we may end up using the same things all the time. Saw the one that looked kind of like the current Ninja one that transfers aggro you generate - that would be an awesome one for an off tank at the beginning of a fight to help build the main tanks threat.

Either way, that people will be able to start as Marauder/Warrior, and get everything they need along the way, will be a huge step up from the current system where people have to level different things to continue on properly, particularly when folks are enjoying themselves then get forced back to level 1 to unlocked a job, possibly playing a class they have zero interest in ever using at all.

It does also mean that in the future we will have a baseline knowledge of utility that new Jobs will provide for definite, before they bring any Job based flavour to the festivities.

You can't have everything with your limited 5 slots. This actually gives the job more customization than before.

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Originally Posted by PArcher

The choice seems more to customize your build to the fight; there's definitely places where you never use Esuna, or you have little chance to DPS. What if everything (dangerous) is magic, and E4E can never proc? Why do both healers need Protect?

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If they're going for an encounter-specific swapping situation... they need to let us save loadouts so that we can switch with a single button press.

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Originally Posted by LunarEmerald

You can't have everything with your limited 5 slots. This actually gives the job more customization than before.

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Aside from Rescue I think I already have the equivalent skill for all of the healer role actions on my hotbar.

If they were adding 10 brand new skills and letting me pick 5 that might feel like customization, but taking 9 skills I can already have all at once and making me pick 5 is not customization, it's limitation.

I think some people here are just "lazy", WoW did something similar and you can have a "good enough build" for everything or change according to the encounter (and in order to change skill in a dungeon at WoW you needed an item there. Here is not a problem. Just a few clics). Would even better if those skills change how you play your class (and even what stats are better for you) like Legion did with Shadow Priest ^^

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

Aside from Rescue I think I already have the equivalent skill for all of the healer role actions on my hotbar.

If they were adding 10 brand new skills and letting me pick 5 that might feel like customization, but taking 9 skills I can already have all at once and making me pick 5 is not customization, it's limitation.

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Based on what I read you will complain too, your problem is that you don't want to rearrange your hotbar if needed.

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Originally Posted by Reiryuu

Did they remove the cooldown for swapping?

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Big question and one I would like an answer for as well. If the cool down is gone then I could see people macroing changes to their cross role skills. If it's 2xGCD, then I could see people using a macro to change their cross role slotting after each boss and at the start to ensure they have the right commands available.

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

Aside from Rescue I think I already have the equivalent skill for all of the healer role actions on my hotbar.

If they were adding 10 brand new skills and letting me pick 5 that might feel like customization, but taking 9 skills I can already have all at once and making me pick 5 is not customization, it's limitation.

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Very much agreed. People effectively losing access to abilities they had before is one of the challenges here.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

Big question and one I would like an answer for as well. If the cool down is gone then I could see people macroing changes to their cross role skills. If it's 2xGCD, then I could see people using a macro to change their cross role slotting after each boss and at the start to ensure they have the right commands available.

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They did, also no CD for class/job change too and people wait for CD after a wipe in any "real" raid group (others game reset all your CD after a wipe anyway). I don't see a problem here.