Concerns about " Getting rid of unused and ineffective actions"

[Duelle]

My entire mentality when playing PLD is different to playing WAR. For WAR, my primary objective is to beat on the boss, however as a PLD, I am very spatially aware, dealing less damage on the boss, but keeping an eye on other party members, being aware of when healers struggle, and do what I can to assist with the toolkit that I have, which is how PLD should be, and I don't want to be turned into a WAR that has smaller hits but bigger shields.

You're looking in the wrong places for uniqueness. What makes PLD different from WAR is that a PLD can mitigate things with the press of a button, and the gameplay revolves around knowing when to press buttons to take less damage. The simplicity of our combos means that yes, it's a lot easier to be aware of the environment and pay attention to other things (which is why I roll my eyes whenever people complain about PLD combos).

WAR, on the other hand, is designed to mitigate things through actions. Hence why they have Storm's Path and Inner Beast. The self heals arguably fall into this category as well. They also have to generate a resource to spend on said mitigation (Wrath), whereas PLD does not.

The only way PLD would turn into a WAR would be by nerfing or removing defensive cooldowns and giving PLD a clone of Wrath stacks. Which is not likely to happen.

[Lambdafish]

snip

Are you sure about that? Mitigating things with a press of a button is not unique to PLD, it is present on all tanks, PLD just has hallowed ground which is better (and WAR has ONE mitigation through action skill, storms path falls into the same camp as rage of halone and delerium). Pressing buttons to mitigate does not make PLD. The uniqueness of PLD does come from their support toolkit, WAR has wrath stacks, DRK has dark arts, and PLD has support/CC skills (cover, divine veil, clemency, shield bash, shield swipe (pacify), spirits within, protect, stoneskin).

I've also seen people complain that these skills are useless, but, with the exception of cover, I use these skills frequently in a raid environment (even clemency), which is why this side of PLD should be supported, not hindered by cutting away its cross class skills (I don't want another 3.0 PLD)

[Duelle]

Are you sure about that? Mitigating things with a press of a button is not unique to PLD, it is present on all tanks, PLD just has hallowed ground which is better (and WAR has ONE mitigation through action skill, storms path falls into the same camp as rage of halone and delerium). Pressing buttons to mitigate does not make PLD. The uniqueness of PLD does come from their support toolkit, WAR has wrath stacks, DRK has dark arts, and PLD has support/CC skills (cover, divine veil, clemency, shield bash, shield swipe (pacify), spirits within, protect, stoneskin).

Claiming PLD is defined by having access to cure, protect and stoneskin is disingenuous.

What defines the tanks is gameplay. PLD just happens to have a very straightforward approach to doing so, while WAR has to manage Wrath and their active mitigation elements. DRK is on a similar boat with the added stress of managing MP and knowing when to trigger Dark Arts.

Access to weak magic is a Final Fantasy Knight/Paladin thing, which in this case comes in the form of cross class abilities (and at that, cross class skills are just window dressing), but those do not define the Knight/Paladin job.

And besides, there were still those unique individuals who would spec into talents that others would say are not viable for high level raiding. Was it non-viable and possibly a waste? Maybe, but by oversimplification, one is denied that chance to experiment.

I generally don't mind freedom in design, but over time I've learned that false choices are simply no choices at all in the greater scheme of things when it comes to multiplayer games. I'll gladly take a more restrictive design where all the pieces play their part equally well over a system with false choices that feed the illusion of being a unique snowflake.

If people want to have a 3 button rotation with 1 buff and an "ultimate", I would suggest they go play a MOBA instead.

Now you're projecting something that's clearly not there on to the discussion.

Redundancy and button bloat ARE a problem in this game. Some classes feel it more than others, but it's there. Also keep in mind we don't even have the luxury of custom action bar addons like WoW does, on top of having to keep players that use controllers in mind. As I've said in the past, the fact that we got 5 new abilities with Heavensward instead of the 2 or 3 I was expecting exacerbates the problem. On top of that, there are abilities that have become redundant thanks to the HW skills (Unchained comes to mind). Taking all this into consideration, we're due for some adjustments and skill pruning. Even if they were to keep all the existing skills (which I find very likely because removing some skills would create gaps during the leveling experience), collapsing certain combos into 1 button by default won't hurt anyone.

What I am expecting is redesigns of certain abilities. Fracture, Touch of Death and Scathe come to mind.