Quote Originally Posted by Acidblood View Post
Except I thought the whole idea of this 'cross-role' system was to make sure everybody always had the tools they needed to play their role (i.e. no having to level PLD to get Provoke)...
It was a change so that jobs could always have access to the tools no matter what classes were leveled not always have them. I've run into far to many Dark Knight and a fair few Warriors who had not leveled Gladiator to 22 for Provoke when running Mentor roulette. You can not complete Ultima's Bane and several other extreme trials if the other tank can not even equip Provoke. This change is intended to prevent content from being impossible to complete due to failure to level a certain class or not bringing the correct job(s).

It is better for the game if a player can just swap which abilities are active rather than have a party fall apart due to duty finder messing things up.
however, by putting so many basic skills in there (and limiting it to 5/10 at a time) it pretty much ensures that no-body will ever have all the tools they will situationally need...
I disagree.

It should be fairly easy for the playerbase and casual players to come up with a "good in general" ability set.

From what we know so far, this looks to be a good set for doing content in general:
  • Low blow
  • Interject
  • Either Provoke or Ultimatum depending on player preference
  • Rampart
  • Convalescence

Awareness, Reprisal, Anticipation and Shirk will likely be niche enough than most casual players might not see the situations they would be used in. Core players will, on the other hand, run into those situation and then swap the more niche abilities in as needed.

and I'm not sure about you, but I am no fan of having to swap out skills based on content, which means they’ve either made everything less than savage raids very boring mechanic wise, or there are going to be a lot of 'you need to swap in X skill for this fight' conversations (wasn't the skill barrier supposed to be getting lowered? and now they want casuals to know what skill they need to have equiped for X boss?), and in my book neither is a particularly good outcome.
I'd argue neither outcome will happen in casual content once a good general set spreads.

Extreme Primals and Savage raids may end up with players having "Who has which skills to handle which mechanics" conversation but those already happen in that level of content. More often than not it requires a job change rather than a skill swap to get the needed abilities right now.