Alternatives to the Role Actions System?

[Sylvain]

snip

I understand, perhaps I wasn't clear enough but I wanted to make (in my first post) a clear distinction between "very strong" and "mandatory". My point was that anything properly being "Mandatory" should be baseline.
A system meant to offer choice should not contain skills absolutely necessary for the proper completion of a fight.



Currently Provoke and Esuna do feel this way. (As you said,provoke is arguably not required but swapping aggro becomes utterly clunky at this point). Which is why I think these should be baseline.
There's no choice in selecting these skills. There is no strategy (beside removing it if you don't need it for a single fight, like OS1 for instance).
Arguably Lucid Dream and Protect should also become baseline (altough in the case of protect I'd like it to simply be removed from the game, it's such a boring thing)

What I wanted to point out was that currently most role have a set of 3-5 very strong skills that they can easily use on all fight and 1 or 2 very situational that they'll pick over. (Like SureCast for Shin)
If I tell you "Pick 5 out of 6", this is hardly a choice. You just filter the weakest one and that's it. And by choice I mean logical choice. I do have the choice to Pick Provoke, Ultimatum, Low Blow, Interject and Awareness as the OT on OS1, but this is more akin to trolling than anything else)
And with the current Skill design, it is nearly impossible for them to give us better choice. Because there will always be that set of 4-5 jack of all trade skills that fit in every single fight for every tank.
If they add 5 new skills and the 5 new are better than what we currently have, the problem isn't solved, we just changed the name of the new good skills.

This is why I posted these idea (I don't pretend they're especially good / balanced) of traits or alternate skills.

To take tanks as an example, they've already exploited everything they could in terms of mechanics.
- DMG debuff on boss
- More healing received
- Less damage taken
- More Parry

There is nothing more they can add beside toying like "Hard skin: Decrease physical damage taken by 20% for 15sec" or "Etherical Skin: Decrease magical damage taken by 20% for 15sec" smaller CD than Rampart.
(Unless you consider giving Tank a Trick Attack would make sens)



So basically, my idea was that since there's a limitation to what they can do with skills, they could also add traits. This would give them more freedom and by making more situational skills/traits, perhaps they could have a better system where player have more choice.

If you play Heroes of the Storm, many skill feel this way. For example some heroes have skills such as "Every time you succeed with X skill shot, its damage/heal increase by 10% up to 50%. Bonus reset when skill shot X fails". This is extremely powerful, but if you've just started and you basically fail 1/3 shots. This is hardly a good skill at all.
The same can somewhat be applied to the current game in the sens that what is good for me isn't necessarly good for you.
The change to Cleric Stance is a great example. A healer who, overall, has a very low dps uptime would not beneit from that whereas some healer could probably get more mana back from that Cleric Stance than Lucid Dream.

While most of my examples were axed toward progression, these would still be very valid and interesting choice for many players.