What skill(s) would you change for your class if you could?

[Shurrikhan]

For brd/drg/mch, get rid of straight shot/heavy thrust/hot and fold their damage boosts in to the job or add the buffs to their normal dps rotation in the same way sam's buffs/debuffs naturally fall in to it's Sen generation as a baseline.

I feel like this would leave Bard with essentially just one weaponskill being used for 11 out of 12 GCDs... Neither Bard no Machinist really has any rotational strings by which one can time or prioritize buffs as Attack Speed falls into Ka or Damage into Getsu.

Personally, I'd like to play around with something far more dynamic, and perhaps even bring in a sense of Bard as having those stronger, really drawn-back shots that Heavensward (poorly) imitated, applied and then uprooted both out of the blue, but for the short term I'd settle simply with a cumulative sort of Critical Strike buff with which for Straight Shot to interact.

For instance, let's say Archer receives a new gauge-style trait called Focused Aim, with a thus-far unique mechanic, whereby every relative potency of critical strike damage increases your Critical Strike stat, with each application's bonus fading individually—or the total amount degrading—over x seconds. Now, rather than giving Straight Shot a duration of Critical Strike Chance +, it simply has a bonus critical strike chance in itself, which you can use to rapidly ramp up that Critical Strike chance, the idea being that you make sure it's peaked well enough before your high per-execute potency weaponskills.

Similarly, for Machinist, I'd most like to revise the Heat Gauge mechanic, making it more dynamic and offering more player control by which to make use of their ammunition banking and other tools. This would require some rather hefty changes to the Heat Gauge itself, causing it to cool over time (at an rate increasing as Heat increases), and granting damage and attack speed bonuses with that applied Heat, but in this scenario Hot Shot couldn't be any simpler: it's your pure Heat generator, used to ramp up incredibly quick if you need the early Damage and especially Attack Speed bonuses, or to peak Heat just before unloading your oGCD or auto-proccing arsenal.

I wanted to add, for things like Heavy Thrust, Hot Shot, Straight shot, and Huton (i.e. buff moves that fall outside your damage rotation) I refer to those as "maintenance buffs." I am all for scrapping every single last one of them entirely or (failing that) putting them in the base damage rotation in the same vein as Samurai. Samurai is the only time I actually haven't minded those sorts of buffs on something I play.

I'd argue that's because they're not just "maintenance buffs" on Samurai, at least for when returning to uptime under abnormal circumstances. I'd also caution against placing any of these buffs in the "normal rotation" of a weaponskill kit as bimodal as Dragoon's. You'd essentially lose what few choices you have over opening your combo (just imagine if it was tied to either Disembowel or Vorpal Thrust). It would be better at that point to adjust potencies outright, though it would come at the cost of one of the few—or, the only—mental calculation(s) every involved in DRG WSs.