How do you feel about Role Actions?

[Lumadurin]

Personally I think they're deeply flawed.
They homogenize roles while also making jobs trickier to balance. Probably the easiest example for me to cite is with the Tanks as they're the role I play most frequently.
Paladin lost exlusivity over Rampart, which pretty much made Warrior the best Main Tank thanks to it now having up to four mitigation CDs to rotate (Rampart, Vengance, ToB amd Raw Intuition).
Meanwhile, DRK lost exclusivity over Reprisal which made it less desirable to bring over the other two tanks (among other issues with the job that everyone's already aware of).

I think going forward - if role actions are going to be a permanent thing - great care has to be taken in what tools are made universal. Giving everyone access to everything doesn't benefit everyone equally.
Personally I'd prefer them to just remove role actions outright and only make the absolutely important skills universal for roles, like Provoke and Esuna.

What are your thoughts on how Role Actions were handled now that we're over a year into Stormblood?

[Mendalas]

Much better now that we can use all 10, especially as a healer. Having to swap out protect after casting it each time was beyond ridiculous.

[DRKoftheAzure]

They might as well do away with Role Actions and start giving jobs the abilities they need for their assigned role. Or add traits on jobs that make role actions feel more unique to the jobs that they are available to(i.e. Low Blow, Reprisal, and Interject have attack potency attached if you play DRK, but apparently they do want tanks to be out DPS the actual DPS roles). Honestly they need an open beta for the next expansion so that players can test how the jobs feel to see if there still needs to be fine tuning on jobs that need it.

[Kabooa]

Good in concept, bad in execution.

When it was limited selection, it was quick to weed out useless abilities. When there is no limited selection, it doesn't make the bad abilities better. A reevaluation of the Roles in general is needed to better consolidate what universal boons they should bring.

[Enkidoh]

I'm on the fence about it really. Although on the one hand it did make learning abilities easier and we did get buffs to compensate, on the other we probably lost more than we gained - GLA/PLD can't use Cure and Protect anymore for instance, which although end game is not a big deal but early on the content was pretty much structured around cross-classing those abilities and others, especially solo battles, and using potions is NOT a viable alternative.

Really the whole reason the cross-class system was scrapped and replaced by the role-ability system was not because of ability bloat, but simply to appease players who were complaining about levelling classes they had no interest in playing simply to unlock certain needed skills (like Swiftcast or Provoke). And as that is no longer an issue anyway (due to the level skip items being added to the game and exp given away like candy at lower levels now), it was largely an unnecessary change in my opinion. Oh well, it can't be changed back now, so all we can do is continue and adapt.

[Jandor]

A mixture of the old cross-class and the new role-actions could be interesting.

Level up in role to unlock the role action, classes can use all unlocked role actions, jobs can use role actions from their main role and their closest thematically linked role.

So Paladin can use tank and healer role actions, Dragoon can use melee DPS actions and tank actions, White Mage can use healer and ranged physical DPS actions, etc.

[RuleofThree]

I want to play as Tatara in the office doing paperwork

[Brightamethyst]

Good idea, bad execution. They should just make the important things baseline and get rid of the rest.

The update giving us 10 slots is a nice gesture but it doesn't actually fix anything. It doesn't fix the useless abilities. I'm still never going to cast Drain or Foot Graze. All that really changes is that healers no longer have to turn protect on and off at the start of every dungeon.

[Ariel_Valmont]

Giving us access to all 10 seems counter intuitive, Stormblood seemed all about streamlining Jobs to reduce button bloat. A few patch cycles in, and it’s all, hey have some button bloat!

Conversely,I am extremely happy every healer I meet, now has no excuse not to have Esuna.

[Raldo]

I'm pretty sure giving us access to all of them is just their temporary way of "fixing" it before they get rid of the whole thing entirely, in favor for something else. I expect to see the whole thing revamped when the next expansion comes, similar to the way they changed many jobs when Stormblood hit.