Role Breaking Abilities?

[Connor]

Am I the only one who'd love to see more abilities that allow jobs some chance to move outside their role slightly? By this, I mean things like healing abilities on tanks/dps (Clemency, The Warden's Paean), maybe more defensive cooldowns on dps or even healers (like Foresight) or maybe even stuff like short-duration Provokes for high-HP dps.

Obviously this would all have to be balanced very strictly and it's honestly it's likely that even if abilities like this were added they wouldn't be worth using. But personally I feel that the devs are far too rigid with the 'trinity' system idea. It is strange, though, that tanks and healers can put out dps almost equal to actual DPS classes, but dps have absolutely no way of helping the tanks/healers outside of MP/TP regen.

You could argue that Bard and Machinist can do this with Warden's Paean / Dismantle / Rend Mind, but this doesn't really contribute to making the healer / tank's lives easier as much as a max dps healer/tank contributes to those in the dps role, not to mention that abilities like these always have very long cooldown. Whilst Warden's Paean is only on a 45 second cooldown generally if there's going to status effects that can be removed with Esuna there's always going to be more than one going out within the cooldown time, not to mention the fact that it's generally expected of you to use it on the Warrior everytime they pop Berserk.

I really feel like more abilities this like this would encourage more teamwork and less focus on personal dps, and I'd love to hear other people's opinions on this kind of thing!

[ADVSS]

i dig it, it wont happen unless they loosen up the holy triple triad. But maybe some day.

[SessionZero]

One of my absolute favorite things about Death Knight in World of Warcraft is their ability to battle-rez. They're one of the only non-healing classes that can do it and it's a wonderful little addition for their class fantasy, given that most (if not all) Death Knights are also necromancers. I'd love to see more of this type of thing in FFXIV, and I've said since ARR that Paladins would make an ideal off-healer (or off-off-healer in 8 man content). The current DPS-focused meta of the game doesn't really allow for such, I don't think, but it's something that could be worked towards.

[Lunavi]

BLM already have several defensive cooldowns. Not that I would mind more ignore mechanic moves

[Zafrei]

I'd be up for this if they reduced the skill bloat first. Spent so many years playing action mmos that having to use shift, ctrl and alt as modifiers along with full bars is already quite a stretch, especially for 2016.

[loreleidiangelo]

The catch-all term is called "utility", and yes, this game suffers drastically from a lack of it. When classes are designed around "doing almost everything their trinity counterpart can do", this is the result you get. Healers always need Protect, Swiftcast, a rez, AOE healing, single-target "oh crap" button, and healing throughput buff (Divine Seal, etc). Tanks always need Provoke, a single target threat combo, an AOE threat gen, a "get out of death free" button, and mitigative cooldowns of the flat-% variety (Rampart, Inner Beast, etc). DPS are a bit more varied, but always are stuck getting Invigorate if they're melee, or Swiftcast if they're a caster. They also usually get single-target combos, an AOE rotation of varying efficacy, a self-heal or some kind of defensive cooldown (MCH notably doesn't have much of either of these), and some measure of crowd control that sees virtually no use outside of soloing or PVP because lol meaningful raid mechanics.

I suppose ostensibly, you could break a lot of trinity classes down like this, but idk, it just feels much more noticeable in XIV for some reason.

[randysquirrel]

More utility would be nice, but we already have some, and the majority of the playerbase never use any of it at all. Can honestly count on one hand the amount of DF BLMs I've seen ever apoc someone.

Melee stun could've been better if they hadn't attached damage to it, as it currently stands, any time you might actually need to stun something, it has long gone resistant to it from people just using these in their dps rotation

so while more utility might make things more interesting, can we really expect them to go down this route when we still have brds that never play any songs at all

[Connor]

More utility would be nice, but we already have some, and the majority of the playerbase never use any of it at all. Can honestly count on one hand the amount of DF BLMs I've seen ever apoc someone.

so while more utility might make things more interesting, can we really expect them to go down this route when we still have brds that never play any songs at all

I think the lack of the utility might be something that exasperates this problem. In all but the hardest content most utility is so limited that it's hard to feel like it makes a difference, especially for the majority of jobs (Bard and Machinist excluded of course).

I mean, nobody's going to ask a BLM why they haven't been using Apocatasis, or why a Summoner hasn't been using Eye for an Eye because they don't feel like it really makes a difference ("why should I buff the tank's magic defense when I could just dps and kill the enemy faster?"). Obviously there's always going to be players who ignore many of their abilities, but this is going to happen regardless.

I think having more varied utility options that aren't as limited as they are now would really encourage people to use them. Unless I'm missing something Clemency is currently the only utility option in the game that's easily available and on the GCD, and even then it costs close to 50% of the Paladin's limited MP pool.

[BraveheartRamo]

I always use eye for an eye in every class that can have this action on it. That's if my hotbar have space for it. It would be nice to have more of such abilities that encourage team work indeed. AST is the one job I can think of now which apart from healing specialize in buffs and this demonstrate good teamwork if used properly and with little rng help. SE tend to keep the extensive utility actions as part of a new main job actions. Speaking of missing actions, I would like to see a re-raise action.

[basketofseals]

One of my absolute favorite things about Death Knight in World of Warcraft is their ability to battle-rez. They're one of the only non-healing classes that can do it

Last time I played, warlocks can also do it, and druids are the only healer that can. It's not only limited to resto druids either.