stop stripping tanks skills and abilities and adding them as role actions

[Azerhan]

Yea...can we give provoke only to paladin? Because that was its original gladiator skill please? I mean, we have ultimatum now, other two can just use it for swapping aggro.

Except Ultimatum has a bigger cd than Provoke.
They just have to do things like : bring back all the classical 20% cds def for all tanks, and Provoke, Shirk, Reprisal, Stun, Conva, Awareness and anti-crit are for everyone.
The Cross-Skill idea has never been good, even during HW, all dps get too much ogcd to use for their burst, this was almost comic. There is no point to for all dps to no get a self healing, a PT regeneration or an enmity dump.

[Tint]

Yea...can we give provoke only to paladin? Because that was its original gladiator skill please? I mean, we have ultimatum now, other two can just use it for swapping aggro.

i am fine with getting my own provoke skill for DRK.

on the other hand, yeah, ultimatum is maybe enough despite the longer cooldown - it's the PLD who dies because i can't grab aggro, not me >.>

[Eloah]

The issue was they combined skills that were innate with skills that were "optional". Like with the healers, they all had an Esuna like skill, so it was always there. Because, they merged them, now we have to slot it, which we didn't have to do before, same with Lucid Dreaming. That right there removes two "mandatory" slots. Something like Provoke or Swiftcast could still remain optional, but the stuff they combined, should be given and not take up a slot.

[Lyth]

This is correct.

The main problem with the role action system is that it doesn't adhere to a clear design objective. Is the goal to avoid duplicating essential role abilities, like Rampart and Provoke? Or is it to allow fight-specific customisation, by letting you choose to slot in Low Blow or Interject?

The problem with any system with optional 'builds' is that there will generally be a best choice. You see this in games with talent tree systems. That being said, there need not be a "best" solution for every scenario. Do you need a Silence or Stun? Do you need a PBAoE enmity grab, or one that acts at a distance? If you really want to build up a system that allows for customisation, you need one which makes you choose between related abilities. You shouldn't be choosing between Rampart and an interrupt. Rampart will win out every time. You should be choosing between two types of situational interrupts. This is one place where branching talent trees excel.

Another problem that arises in designing a customisable role-action system is that some jobs have similar abilities built into their baseline toolkit. PLD never really needs to take Low Blow because they always have access to an on-demand stun in Shield Bash. Likewise, most tanks will slot Reprisal for raid content, but PLD and WAR also have baseline access to abilities Veil, Passage, and Shake which can be used for additional raid mitigation. If the point of Reprisal is to give every tank equal access to raid-wide mitigation, then Veil and Shake shouldn't be job exclusive. They should be role actions as well.

The final problem is that the transition from the old cross-class system was poorly executed. At the end of it all, some jobs, like WHM and DRK, were left with fewer job actions than others. Given that the cross-role actions are no longer attached to any job, these jobs will permanently be left at a deficit in future expansions unless they are appropriately compensated. The implementation left many players with the feeling that their job's unique abilities were 'stolen' to be redistributed to other jobs.

I think if the goal is just to standardise a set of abilities across a given role, then the easiest solution is to just remove the element of choice and give everyone a fixed set of common abilities. But I would be partial to a talent-tree based system that allowed you to apply traits to a standardised set of abilities. Let players choose between a short recast AoE Provoke and a long recast ranged one. Pick the interrupt of your choice, silence or stun. Choose a damage down debuff on a shorter recast or a group shield on a longer recast. Perhaps pick between a recast reduction on your gap closer or a Tempered Will styled knockback negation move. Break Rampart down into a choice of a physical defensive and a magical defensive.

Alternatively, allow for cosmetic variations in abilities based on job, such as the old Shadowskin animation. Sort of like the Major/Minor Inscription system.

[Kabooa]

Alternatively, allow for cosmetic variations in abilities based on job, such as the old Shadowskin animation. Sort of like the Major/Minor Inscription system.

Acceptable parameters.

[whiteblade89]

In 5.0 Dark Mind will be a role action skill.

You shut your blasphemous mouth, sir!
Jk, but in all seriousness, that would suck and I would be majorly butthurt over that D:

[Derio]

I am just glad they are giving all of them to us to use in 4.4

[Ultima]

Can we please have War and Drk original stuns back, all tanks had a way of stunning a target, now if the War or Dark wants to stun you have to go to cross role to pick it up. SE really needs to stop taking away skills all jobs have with unique animations and placing it on a role. “Shirk” and “Ultimatum” are good added abilities, I can understand “Provoke” “Awareness” “Convalescence” shared with all tanks. But “Reprisal” needs to be given back to Drk with all its 3.0 HW glory, Drk “Low Blow” needs its 3.0 HW and War “Brutal Swing” needs to come back. “Rampart” was a nice added skill since Drk was gutted and not think of for low level content. TBN is level 70 skill and it sucks running low level dungeons when you need a CD, “Dark Dance” should be added back with its “Dark Arts” buff similar to the new “Dark Mind”. Can we have an ability to have both tanks tethered and have a percentage of both tanks defenses for an incoming attack or maybe have this ability add both tank tenacity stat together for the tank who cast the ability. We have the skills to increase our defense, but no abilities to increase our offense. SE said tenacity is needed to increase damage output and mitigate incoming damage, but I never see tanks with tenacity only CRIT, Direct Hit. I roll with tenacity and I don’t feel the security or power it promises, it confuses me, why not buff it since everything end game is a DPS race. SE gave us something new and people say its garbage, don’t meld it and focus on what counts damage, this drove me away from raiding. I was active in 2.0 and 3.0 raiding but it brings the ugly out of people I can handle criticism not someone calling me out of my name. now I just run everything but Savage, and it quite boring that every tank I loved plays similar to each other to exclude PLD. 3.0 DRK was fun managing MP, stun locking adds because of “Low Blow” procs, dodging and missing incoming attacks from enhanced “Dark Passenger” with enhanced “Dark Dace”. 3.0 War self-healing was BANANAS, we have so much HP, But we heal for a portion, that doesn’t make no sense I have 82K HP and I can only “Inner Beast” heal for 5-6k or 8K-10K if “Inner Release” is active wasting this ability to pull off five “Inner Beast” in which no time is added to the 7sec just a reset of the 7 sec. might as well have 1 secs added for a maximum of 12 sec. I don’t give me this over power crap I run all Tenacity and I don’t push out numbers like people who go for offense, also in old 4.0 EX Primal fights their TB still hit me like I had minimal ilvl with high tenacity, I’m ilvl 367 with high tenacity.

To show you the incompetence of the dev team, I sawed DRK in half! It takes a LOTTA DAMAGE!

[ed3891]

The thing that I truly don't understand - especially with regards to support skills that had a specific function but dealt damage in tandem - is that if the problem, in the dev team's eyes, was the fact these skills were being used for a DPS increase versus the stun/silence utility, why did that necessitate removing them entirely as innate actions and putting them into role skills?

Would it not have made more sense to simply alter existing abilities to suit that need? For example, WAR and DRK could've kept Brutal Swing and Low Blow, but both abilities could've been changed to A). remove the damage potency and B). inflict a combined stun/silence effect. This same change could've been made to PLD's Shield Bash; in fact, Shield Bash could've been made an oGCD and the reset timer on all three abilities standardized to 15s. That solves the issue of having to give up a role slot to something that a lot of content in game assumes is innately available to the tank jobs, while retaining flavor animations without sacrificing standardized utility.

[Azerhan]

I guess in there head, it was good.

I remember a guy on Discord said that the devs don't understand how tanks is played in there own game.
Because some ppl were crying about the difficulty of the role (in HW I mean, and even then that wasn't really difficult as ppl said) they changed the DRK and the WAR in SB. Result : there is less tanks players than before. More : the biggest change when SB has been released was for the DRK, to make it "for everyone". Now, we have less DRK than before. Even less than in HW, were the DRK was already the last tank picked by the players (even if everyone, or almost, according to say it was a good job).
The idea of skill choice in the game is not really good, because some abilities are too much useful to not use them.
And some are just... Useless.