Help with cross class skills

[PirateCat]

Manipulation - IMO, no very useful, Master's Mend only cost 4 CP more for basically the same effect.

In addition to what Silverbane pointed out, Manipulation also just lets you be more reactive. Consider these two sequences on a 35 durability recipe:
SH2 - BT - BT - BT - MM - BT
SH2 - Manip - BT - BT - BT - BT
Both get you to the same ending durability and the same number of touches, but the second lets you react to conditions better. If a Good or Excellent condition pops up in the first rotation after using Touch three times, you can't use Precise Touch there because you'd eat the last of the durability. If it shows up at the point where you would use Manip in the second rotation, you can use Manip a step later.

That being said, in practical terms this tends to be one of the first skills I drop to make room for other things in more complex rotations, but it has its uses.

Rumination - Allows you save yourself from Poor condition on Byregot's Blessing, if you are using Reclaim, otherwise, your rotation needs works.

If you get a Poor on Byregot's, it's because the step before it was Excellent. Since rotations almost universally pop Great Strides immediately before hitting Byregot's the solution here is to just use the Byregot's directly on the Excellent step. This hits harder than GS+Byregot's on Normal anyway.

This is still potentially useful if you need to rescue a synth that's gone really bad and you're at a point where you wouldn't have enough CP for Reclaim otherwise, but it's something of a crutch skill. Generally when one gets familiar enough with a rotation it's easy to tell far enough in advance when it's not going to end well that you can use Reclaim instead of the regular finisher.