Too many "Must-Haves" in the Role Choices Menu.

[Shurrikhan]

While they may resemble Talent Trees in other MMOs, that is not their main purpose. Folks appear to forget that the major point for Roles is not "choice", it is an attempt to provide skills that previously required leveling multiple classes. For example, you are no longer required to level Thaumaturge as a White Mage in order to gain Swiftcast.

That is the advantage of Roles.

Their purpose is neither. Note:

• The role skills provide incredibly little choice, usually the difference between Anticipation and Awareness outside of fights with auto-crit abilities, a backup Protect or a Rescue/E4E. Primarily, they simply provide time spent in UI. The choices themselves are 90% obligatory. Apart from this changes amounted only to an initial SCH mana buff over which its MP costs were crippled and a Warrior defensive buff that only furthered its ability to avoid Defiance for entire fights.
• The role skills do not provide anything that native toolkits could not already provide. Square Enix had already shown itself quite comfortable with creating copied abilities, simply tailoring the name and animation to the receiving class. Removing the fitting names and aesthetics does not provide additional functionality (Shadowskin->Rampart).
• The role skills do not reduce bloat comparative to the cross-class skills before, save in that they have reduced the overall ability count of CERTAIN jobs by reducing the size of their native toolkit, and by extension the actual functionality and ability count available to them through both native and additional skills. This is also known as imbalance in means (not necessarily ends).
• The role skills did not free players of the need to level other classes for their full arsenal of skills; the removal of cross-class skill acquisition did, a supporting but separate change. This could be done more simply by:

1. Giving all classes/jobs in role the core skills freely.
2. Removing the need and access for/to previously cross-class skills altogether.
3. Providing job variants of the same core skills.
4. Continuing to provide job variants of the same overall capacity, albeit in different ways (i.e. the entire purpose of having different jobs for the same role).

This leaves its purpose as only either:

• an excuse to further homogenization and/or refusal to balance classes across the leveling process, between each other or previously released content, or
• a simple selling point of no further purpose, cashing in on the dislike of the cross-class system before it (though without solving any of its alleged problems of bloat, non-choice, homogeneity, or non-impactful differences—save for having to level multiple classes, which the removal of cross-class skill acquisition solved,not the introduction of Role Skills).