4.0 tank buff ability changes, please don't do this

[Lyth]

If one of the goals of the new battle system rework is to keep the number of actions unchanged (to keep hotbars and keybinds from becoming excessive), then you cannot add a new action without either removing one action or merging two. It's a bit like that challenge mode at fanfest where you are only allowed five actions on your hotbar: it forces you to distil the job down to its essential actions.

I feel like the shared role actions are a bit of a distraction in this regard. If you move Provoke off of PLD's job actions and into the shared role actions, it does not free up an extra place on your hotbar to introduce additional action. Every tank still uses it. It just simplifies the naming conventions because you no longer need a new "Provoke" for every tank job. It also simplifies the work needed to create a new job in a particular role category, since you have a starting template to work with.

If you want to look at how the devs could free up hotbar space, it's worth looking at some of the proposed BLM changes. For example, if Enochian is now a permanent buff, then it also doesn't have to take up space on your hotbar. It just needs to be a trait. Likewise, you really don't need two separate hotbar actions to change between two stances. If Sword Oath and Deliverance were traits instead of actions, you would just need a single action to toggle to Shield Oath and Defiance, respectively. That would free up room for additional actions. You could adopt a similar approach to NIN poisons and MNK stances as well.

The proposed change to merge Thunder I-III could be implemented as trait-based as well. If you need to have an action whose potency scales with level, then you can just implement in different traits instead of distinct actions. When you level sync, the traits adjust. I wouldn't be surprised to see something similar for WHM's Stone I-III, although I can't really think of a tank analogy at present.

There are a few other ways that you could combine actions as well. WAR's stance dependent actions could be merged to free up hotbar space (i.e. IB/FC and SC/Decimate). This wouldn't be particularly surprising, given that the Wrath/Abandon stack system is potentially getting merged into a single "Origin" system, based off of their proposed UI changes. Similarly, some buffs that get activated synergistically (i.e. IR/Berserk) could have their effects merged into a single action without significantly changing gameplay.

I don't think that moving Rampart/Shadowskin to the shared role actions pool represents homogenization. Functionally, defensive cooldowns often have parallels across all three tanks, with slight variations for flavor. As an example, you could easily merge Sentinel, Vengeance, and Shadow Wall into a single shared action, and keep them functionally identical to the way that they are now by adding job specific traits:

i.e. Sentinel: Reduces damage taken by 30%. Duration: 10s, Recast: 180s.
PLD trait: Increases damage reduction to 40%.
WAR trait: Delivers an attack with potency 50 every time you take damage. Grants a stack of Wrath/Abandon/Origin. Duration increased to 15s. Recast reduced to 120s.
DRK trait: Nil.

This sort of thing doesn't change gameplay, outside of helping newer players to pick up and learn new jobs without having to relearn the nomenclature. Also, if you need to introduce a new tank job, you just look at the shared role skills and make slight variations on the theme to create a starting point.

The merge between Rampart and Shadowskin doesn't really affect PLD and DRK players outside of superficial appearances (personally, I don't care what they do with the name as long as they keep the DRK animation, as it's aesthetically a step up from PLD's 1.0 era animations). It does, however, impact WAR, giving them a powerful new 20% DR cooldown.

This is important, because most of the differences in WAR's cooldown kit relative to the other two tanks were based off of the fact that it historically didn't have access to Rampart. Inner Beast was changed in 2.1 from a major self heal to a short duration, on-demand 20% DR cooldown as an alternative, compensating for the fact that ToB and traited Foresight just didn't cut it on their own. WAR's stronger cooldowns tend to be much shorter in recast than the other two tanks to compensate for a lack of access to Rampart. This historically lent itself especially well to OT situations where you just need to briefly step in once every minute, blow through your strong cooldowns to eat a tankbuster, and jump out, rather than taking sustained damage with 35s interval tankbusters.

The addition of Raw Intuition in HW as a makeshift physical Rampart, along with the introduction of Fell Cleave to disincentivize IB fit in with this proposed development. If WAR gains access to Rampart, I'll be very interested to see how the rest of WAR's defensive kit gets reworked around this.