New Caster Role Actions?

[Shurrikhan]

You say, "stepped on the toes of healers"; I say "saved healers from spending a GCD on Esuna".

The problem with Erase was never that it was a cleanse action on DD jobs. BRD has Paean, which is a cleanse action on a DD job. The problem with Erase was that it was specifically limited to DoTs. This made it useless in most fights. However, it is/was quite useful for things like covering people's mistakes in alliance raids (namely, mistakes that resulted in Bleed effects). Not only could it save a healer a GCD in such a case, but it is/was fast enough to prevent deaths.

Aren't those one and the same.

His DoT cleanse is free. Yours costs 250 potency. So...

Would you like to Cleanse?

No. Unless more DoTs need to be cleansed than your casters can take of, you absolutely should not touch your cleanse. It thus feels less like a healer duty than a caster/Bard duty.

For a healer to even compete with its reliability given by Erase's immediateness they'd need to then have an instant-cast, if not oGCD, Cleanse.

Personally, I don't think that would have been a huge issue. Give healers two charges each on a one-minute CD. When present, Esuna is an Ability, thus an instant-cast oGCD. When they're not, it's a 1-second cast Spell. But, as things stood, casters' Erase definitely did step on healers' toes in terms of role duty/identity when the cleanse-able in question was a DoT. I don't personally care much about that, but it does seem simple, objective fact to me.

And let's not pretend that Bard is "just another DD job". Its entire original identity was built around support.

I think the only Role Action ability I'd actually miss is Manashift, though I'd have been fine with that turning into a purely RDM utility.

We've already made enmity a non-issue, so why keep a two-minute CD to hit on CD to "manage" it? Just further affect enmity generation, such as by basing it on the position (front > flank > rear) and range of each attack (not fully stacking, so ranged can still kite if they wish).

The same could of course be done with Lucid Dreaming, just raising the MP gained per tick (or better yet, GCD) to provide an extra 45-50% of total MP per 2 minutes. Compensate Astrologian for the loss of Celestial Opposition impact and raise the amount of MP we resurrect with. Done.

Return Erase and buff it if there's actually stuff remaining to healers despite it. Return Mana Shift. Replace Drain with Necrogenesis (Bloodbath, but for magic damage; shorter and stronger). Add Lethargy (Ability-based Heavy). Kill the two-minute "hit on refresh" CDs.

Other than that, I'd like to see Manaward taken off of BLM and made in a Role action.

And then Verraise and Vercure off RDM and Devotion and Summon Titan Egi off SMN? No Role but tanks have maximum eHP-increasing actions. Leave that level of capacity, and BLM, alone, unless you're willing to take whatever balancing penalties that unique survivability advantage would cost you and would be as willing to see your own job lose ownership over its tools.