Role actions are lazy, a form of job homogenization, and a cause of hotbar bloat.

[Valence]

On the subject of Rival Wings being dead: SE could just reduce Frontline to 16v16v16 (48 players), and have the Frontline Roulette pull double duty. Either it throws you into Frontline (16v16v16), or it throws you into Rival Wings (24v24). You can only queue as a maximum party size of 4, and a party of 4 slots into both contents' party sizes neatly

I do not understand their obsession with making Frontline 72 players. It makes it harder for the queue to pop too, when everyone's already hit rank 25 and quit playing PVP for the series. Plus, with a lower player count, the combat might be a little more responsive?

We wouldn't need to adjust the amount of players for FL. The roulette was perfectly able to handle the 24 player version AND the 72 player version at the same time when the former was still a thing. You'd just know you were being thrown into the 72 player version when the "waiting for players screen would pop up and show over 24 players", just before entering duty.

[PyurBlue]

We can acknowledge that certain Role actions like Arm's Length, Surecast, Swiftcast, Provoke, Shirk and True North are fundamental to combat, while recognizing that the rest are poorly implemented hotbar bloat.

Before you immediately reject this statement, please hear me out.

Replacing generic abilities like Feint, Addle, and Reprisal with unique mitigation tools for each job would allow for more interesting and varied mitigation strategies. Why can’t we instead have more individual, job-specific mitigation like RDM’s Magick Barrier, WAR’s Shake It Off, PLD’s Divine Veil, or PCT’s Tempera Coat / Grassa? At the very least, we should get unique animations for mitigations, even if their effects are the same (PhysR.)

Role Actions aren't the worst issue in the game. In fact I can't recall being bothered by them much at all. Conceptually, they are designed to ensure that every class can function properly within their role and lower the learning curve for players switching jobs while leaving job specific skills to define class diversity. This is fine except that it hasn't worked in practice ever since SE decided to homogenize class skills.

Why does every major melee mitigation have to be a flat 10% physical and 5% magical? Team composition should require more thought, and jobs should have clear upsides and downsides. If I’m playing Reaper, a hybrid physical/magic job, why can’t my mitigation be more magic focused? If I’m playing VPR, SAM, or DRG; jobs that don’t use magic at all, why am I mitigating magic damage?

Essentially reverting Feint to its older form and then giving RPR a trait for magic mitigation. Not a big change so I don't see the harm.

Why can't the Esuna cleanse be incorporated into the healer's base kit. Certain abilities like Tetragrammaton, Essential Dignity, Lustrate, Druochole (these are just examples) can have additional effects like a cleanse.

I don't want to see this. What would be the point? Esuna is for cleansing not healing and the heals are for healing and not cleansing. Rolling everything together means you're going to waste something. Shields with signigicant heals are bad enough already outside of really hard hitting content. This suggesting sounds like it only exists for the sake of existing, I can't see any benefit here.

Why can’t stuns, interrupts, and other CC be additional effects attached to abilities in a job’s base kit instead of being standardized role actions?

The same goes for this. This would only take away player control and agency and make using these abilities feel awful.

Additionally, this is an obvious culprit of hotbar bloat. Controller already has a finite amount of buttons, why do they waste 2-3 slots with role actions that can easily be incorporated into each job? Healer is the biggest example.

It's actually the opposite. The role actions on paper are those needed by every class. By making them standardize it becomes easier to drop them on to your hotbars for multiple classes. They aren't all actually necessary in practice and that is something that could be adjusted, but conceptually I wouldn't call role actions bloat.

I've heard the game used to be more like this, tactical & party composition. I've heard the old combat system was much more detailed, with unique buffs and debuffs tied to damage types like Piercing, Slashing, Blunt, Magical, and Physical. I can see how that's a bad system, since it would create job imbalance and very specific compositions. It's more suited for a single player JRPG.

This was the case. While that kind of complexity is typically a good thing, I don't think it worked very well with the very static nature of FF14. The optimization problem was too easy to solve and it was too hard to balance classes when it was obviously which ones would perform well and which would not. If FF14 become more dynamic then going back to the older system would work out better.

[ForsakenRoe]

We wouldn't need to adjust the amount of players for FL. The roulette was perfectly able to handle the 24 player version AND the 72 player version at the same time when the former was still a thing. You'd just know you were being thrown into the 72 player version when the "waiting for players screen would pop up and show over 24 players", just before entering duty.

I figured that if there's a 48man duty, and a 72man duty, in the same roulette, it'd just cause the 48man to pop every time. I dunno how it decided the cutoff to just pop a smaller scaled version fo the Frontline in the past, but I would have thought that having the player count be the same across both contents (FL/RW) would be far easier than messing with multiple different content sizes.

Say 96 players queue at exactly the same time for the roulette. Would the game assign them to 2 games of RW (48 each), or would it see there's more than 72 players, put 72 into a Frontline and leave 24 stuck in the queue?

[Valence]

The smaller version tended to pop more in the early afternoon when there wasn't as many players and you'd usually see the 72 version in the evenings, but it wasn't completely binary either. I don't know on what threshold the algorithm based itself to swap to the bigger version and wait for it to fill though.

But I get your point, perhaps you'd have something less subject to randomness with consistent sizes.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I'd kill for a smaller frontline roster.

I've had a taste of it just barely during the sh!tshow that is the DDoS spree from months ago, where there were only 40'ish players managed to click commence because the rest was DDoS'd to oblivion.

I loved every single seconds in that round. I think they just want to reduce the impact of a single player/party can have as much as possible, henceforth the insistence on 72 players FL. In fact, I think they're more likely to bump that number up to 96 than to reduce them (eeewwww pls no lol).

[Astronis]

While I agree that Deep Dungeons help give these abilities more usecases, 'Viper in a FATE' is a terrible example, since you can just have the Chocobo out

While I like my Chocobro, he's not that great at healing my Dancer, and Dancers have Curing Waltz, Shield Samba, Second Wind, Arm's Length, all the Grazes, and Improv. Vipers without role actions have Jack, Squat, and Scouting gear. I remember when I started playing, I went through MSQ on my Dragoon, and used my 'bo...and he had trouble keeping me up in FATEs, because poor 'bo was also leveling. So yeah, I'm not talking out of my ass here.

[KihyiFelhede]

Don't really see where the hotbar bloat idea is coming from. You can just drop the action if you don't use it. I never have Lucid Dreaming on my BLM hotbars, for instance. Sleep/Repose is also one I don't put on my caster hotbars unless there's a mechanic like in Baldesion Arsenal where it actually has an effect. If there was a job specific Esuna for each healer it would still take up the same amount of hotbar space, no? Look at tank stance. They all have an enmity increasing action that takes up one hotbar slot, the only real difference is flavor.

[DRKoftheAzure]

Shirk is such a bloat ability that casual player won't even use it because there is no reason to use it other than to grief other party members. Now if Shirk had MORE effects based on tanks and non-tanks, THEN it wouldn't be AS MUCH of a bloat ability... but as it stands, Shirk is useless in non-high-end raid content...

As for role stuns and interrupts, they are invalidated BECAUSE White Mage EXISTS with it's AoE stun, making the OTHER healers obsolete by default in dungeon content, which is MOST of Final Fantasy XIV's MSQ content, and White Mage's since their inception have conditioned ALL players to not use defensive cooldowns because the White Mage stunned everything so it doesn't matter...

As for why Arm's Length and the role based damage reduction abilities aren't 100% obsolete is because MOST if not ALL BOSSES are immune to stun and there is the off chance that the boss has a knockback mechanic...

Esuna is obsolete because there is nothing TO cleanse, and the only way to fix that is by making damage down stacks, healing down stacks, vulnerability up stacks, and doom stacks cleanse-able, make an AoE Esuna, and have both Esuna spells also have a cure potency...

True North is also bloat mostly because you never have enough charges, and the recast timer is too long with the duration being too short, and not enough positionals for it to even matter...

[Shurrikhan]

As for role stuns and interrupts, they are invalidated BECAUSE White Mage EXISTS with it's AoE stun, making the OTHER healers obsolete by default in dungeon content, which is MOST of Final Fantasy XIV's MSQ content, and White Mage's since their inception have conditioned ALL players to not use defensive cooldowns because the White Mage stunned everything so it doesn't matter...

Yeah, no. Holy allows tanks to delay their mitigation-consumption by up to 8 seconds, which matters only if the DPS is poor enough to allow packs to survive past their and their healer's running out of oGCDs, which is rare. Even then, the others have compensatory sustain tools. Honestly, until everyone got their 2-minute big AoE burst skill, banking Blood Lilies during downtime between pulls was the bigger reason to bring WHM, but now even that is of much less advantage.

Esuna is obsolete because there is nothing TO cleanse, and the only way to fix that is by making damage down stacks, healing down stacks, vulnerability up stacks, and doom stacks cleanse-able, make an AoE Esuna, and have both Esuna spells also have a cure potency...

You don't need AoE Esuna nor both the ST and AoE Esuna to have cure potency for Esuna to be worthwhile. You just need threats/debuffs worth spending a non-offensive GCD on.

[DRKoftheAzure]

Yeah, no. Holy allows tanks to delay their mitigation-consumption by up to 8 seconds, which matters only if the DPS is poor enough to allow packs to survive past their and their healer's running out of oGCDs, which is rare. Even then, the others have compensatory sustain tools. Honestly, until everyone got their 2-minute big AoE burst skill, banking Blood Lilies during downtime between pulls was the bigger reason to bring WHM, but now even that is of much less advantage.

So why is White Mage the ONLY Job AND the ONLY HEALER that gets an AoE stun while everyone else either has a single target stun or no stun at all...? Doesn't that upset game balance...? OH, RIGHT! I FORGOT! Dungeon content doesn't matter because of how casual and easy it is... Take away White Mage's stun effect from Holy and suddenly White Mages will complain about actually healing for 8 additional seconds per pull in casual dungeon content, when Tanks and Melee DPS stun SHOULD be 3 charges of AoE stuns, which would be about the same as White Mages spamming Holy for the stun effect in AoE pulls... Probably... but this assumes people actually want that...

You don't need AoE Esuna nor both the ST and AoE Esuna to have cure potency for Esuna to be worthwhile. You just need threats/debuffs worth spending a non-offensive GCD on.

The cure potency is a bonus for cleansing the debuffs and paying attention to party members... additionally I already provided additional solutions to MAKE Esuna worthwhile to use outside of the cure potency, but I forgot that not everybody plays casually enough to take breaks from the game for long periods of time, and /or not everyone is bad at reading mechanics, and/or some people want to ignore provided solutions so they can needlessly keep the conversation going for 10+ pages... as for having to separate versions of Esuna, it should be self explanatory for a single target and party-wide version, but I will explain anyway; the single target Esuna is for the one person that needs it, with the party-wide AoE is for multiple people that needs it, the cure potency is an extra safety net... though we could have it so that Esuna spells can only cleanse 1 of each stack of debuff to put in a little more effort to fully cleanse the debuff... we could also make it so that Esuna cleanses MULTIPLE debuffs... which, again, assumes people actually want that...