Quote Originally Posted by Dzian View Post
There's a lot of useless skills that could be amazing skills with just a small tweak. Surecast for example is absolutely useless, but if it was tweaked to allow you to cast the next spell uninterrupted while moving. it'd suddenly be an amazing spell and a great help for many blackmages, surecasting blizzard 4 for example to keep there enochain up even if they have to dodge mechanics.
What seems difficult about something like this is that you're then blending two functions, which can then step into the domain of another ability (in this case, Swiftcast). You now have two skills the provide mobility. If you went the way of allowing BLMs to use Surecast to simply stand in a given AoE instead such as by taking reduced AoE damage or their cast's potency absorbing incoming damage during the cast itself, then you essentially have a second Manaward, functionally speaking. To be honest, one of the things that I think could go a long way is to simply allow for dual-casting or blended animations, e.g. being able to use Surecast during another cast (flame gathers around your staff while your hand, otherwise unused, forms the Surecast, Manaward, Manawall, next-spell Swiftcast, etc.). One of the main inhibitors of Surecast right now is the clipping it causes. Keep the animation, but kill the clipping, and its use may well be more attractive.

Without that change, or even alongside it, SE will just have to figure out what blends of functions they actually want to assign to n abilities.

Quote Originally Posted by Dzian View Post
All crowd control is useless by game design. shadowbind heavy freeze, sleep repose. a blm will never sleep anything instead they'll just fire 2 the whole lot till its dead, nothing hits hard enough to warrant sleeps or any form of crowd control and everything is simply rounded up and aoed down.
Just a quick question: would it be preferably to you that your AoEs hit slightly harder, and your CCs were far more applicable (less effective but still usable against enemies that would otherwise be immune), but most enemies hit substantially harder? Maybe throw some added active defenses, for non-tanks especially, into that mix as not to kill off all melee when a tank isn't present, but at that point you really are more dependent on coordination in order to go whole hog on your enemies. If playing in the current mass-pull style, tanks get to feel a bit more mitigation oriented and healers a bit more healing oriented as a side-effect.

Then you have skills that are used but totally ineffective or not used for their intended purpose. Pacifys, stuns, silences, etc, are ever used for 99% of the time is a small dps increase, so when you find mechanics you could stun you inevitably can't because the boss is immune because everyones been spamming stuns for the small dps boost.
Similar question: Would you prefer that stuns were balanced in such a way as to be more useful as ways to guarantee positionals, improve uptime of other skills, or reduce (tank) damage taken, etc., than as on-cooldown bonus damage?

Then you have situations like paladins, where a good portion of its toolkit is basically useless in a remotely decent group. Cover is one example, divine veil also. it's a pretty strong shield admittedly but it isn't really needed or useful that often. If you pass a dps check before big aoe damage that damage is trivial. And divine veil is a joke, if you fail the dps check you wipe regardless of how many shields you can throw up.
What I'd say you're looking at are flaw-specific outputs, which can be fine (albeit perhaps a bit overpowered in new settings as sort of a safety mechanics-learning job) if their relative cost onto the rest of the toolkit is low. Granted, I don't think the Paladin toolkit is actually limited to emergencies and team mistakes. Divine Veil is still a very real output even outside of emergencies; I'd argue its best uses are regularly scheduled, as to negate the need for a particular healer AoE, and it can save the raid from certain AoEs, such as all Almost Holy casts going off at once within minimal or no other shielding. Cover itself would seem useful only when a target who would otherwise die is marked for or in a zone for incoming physical damage—extremely niche—but is actually used primarily to cheese mechanics, such as on T13's Ahk Morn, A5, etc., as a strategy-bending gimmick. So they're both useful even when no mistakes are made, and actually have relatively little uptime to support the team when mistakes are frequent. But I have to ask, is something useful at all times even what you really want, especially if the cost for failure-specific outputs are low, when you're playing a more... thematically defender-type tank? I'd agree that these tools should see more use to bend strategies further and more frequently, but I'm not sure they need to be regular outputs.

So many skills are made useless simply from the way content is designed.
And this is where I blame the distinct metas wherein CCs and such go from fully applicable to suddenly useless. There should be a more analog range of effect here to allow for different strategies as enemy resistances increase, rather than merely creating two distinct rulesets wherein a number of previously useful skills go by the wayside.