Role Breaking Abilities?

[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.

[Welsper59]

The danger with branching out a lot from a defined role is that they become a closer form of a hybrid class/job. In games that only feature the holy trinity as their party form (with XIV being more of a focus), this breaks their balancing and often even makes them OP compared to other jobs (regardless of role). It can even start to make that job perform better than jobs of other roles when combined with the other abilities that define it. Lots of complaints inbound with that.

I'd absolutely love to see a return to some imbalance, akin to old school MMORPGs, since that often makes jobs extremely fun to take part in playing. Tanking Nidhogg/Fafnir/etc as a BRD in XI prior to the Mazurka nerf, for example, was pretty damn fun since it was a change of pace from the norm. BRD was arguably a better tank than all the other jobs for some endgame content, despite it being a support role. Likewise in XI, the discovery of players making NIN a tank from its original DPS (DD) design literally changed the games combat design for a very long time. Hell, even in this game, if they didn't nerf Titan Egi from that Ramuh fight so quickly, we might have actually started seeing SMN become a semi-tank for raids/dungeons as a norm.

As such, we can't really do that here, simply because of the fact that balance and role definition is a big deal to the devs (even though some points are arguably contradictory for them doing that). They want to lock the jobs into their established roles as much as possible without branching out. Maybe they'll just follow WoWs tank path with Legion, in tanks healing themselves for significant amounts during a fight is part of the role. It'd help establish the DPSing while healer mindset that is rampant here, at least.

[Chukkaque]

It's something I wouldn't mind. DRG can't "really" SOS Tank, but I've been in more than enough DF's that have turned south and thanks to a couple cross skills I've been able to reduce damage, evade damage, and self heal pretty well, and kite in the rarest of occasions. I'd love more flexibility in being able to SOS tank on my DRG.