Quote Originally Posted by Grimoire-M View Post
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But again... What is the difference of having additional General Actions and having Role Actions that you automatically learn exactly like General Actions?

With them becoming General Actions, you have possibilities to actually rework or otherwise alter various General Actions to incorporate the mandatory Role Actions with a net reduction in button bloat while also making some of the "Useless" or more niche General Actions better.

Meanwhile it's very easy to simply cull the non-mandatory skills that are deemed useless altogether.

I mean, you talk about how Traits would simply lead to picks based on meta, but that's literally what Actions do, which you stated too. Just, with the addition of having additional button bloat on top.

Role Actions are actually pointless as a mechanic as it stands and is actually detrimental to players. Since either the skill is mandatory and so you just artificially increase the number of buttons necessary to play the job, or the skill is useless or niche in which case it either may as well not exist, or it may take up button real estate for the 0.01% of the time when it's actually useful. At no point is this either good game design nor an interesting system.

I'd rather see Role Actions just go away entirely than see them continue to exist in their current, pointless state. Thus, just giving all the "Mandatory" skills to jobs as General Actions, if not reworking existing skills to incorporating them. Like, there's no reason that all Casters couldn't simply just learn Swiftcast at the appropriate level in addition to their normal skill progression.

As such, I thought it might serve an interesting replacement for the Role Action system, which has potential to be actually interesting design, if it would still enable some form of character customization (Something sorely lacking in FFXIV what with gear options being lacking and Materia being completely dull due to how its effects are literally just +stats with the only actually part that makes a difference being when at BiS levels of gear being able to focus on stat breakpoints instead of just blindly melding towards optimal stat weights)

If an alternative to Role Actions cannot function in a good way, I'd be happy with just seeing the system in its entirety just be removed completely. But I'm not quite ready to rule out alternatives just yet, hence this thread asking people's ideas about alternatives including my own tentative idea surrounding optional Trait selections.