How do you feel about Role Actions?

[Lyth]

Any gameplay mechanic is trivial if you read someone else's guide on the subject. But someone always has to write that guide, first.

[Shurrikhan]

Any gameplay mechanic is trivial if you read someone else's guide on the subject. But someone always has to write that guide, first.

I disagree. In-fight conditionals, when of sufficient quantity, can be detailed out in exact if-then protocols in guides without feeling trivial to those who experience the fights they detail. It requires attention during the fight, and adaptation, rather than pre-fight configuration or memorization alone.

That's the difference. Role Action swapping and the like are forms of complexity that have nothing to do with any fight itself. You flip the switches, click-and-drag the buttons, right-click the things and voila, you're set to go. That "depth" tends to add nothing to actual gameplay. That is what makes them trivial, even if arduous. The log-in screen is wholly necessary to play a fight, but that doesn't make it compelling as a "mechanic". Obligatory choices detracting from combat are much the same.

A fight itself, or a job itself, on the other hand, can have non-trivial gameplay mechanics. At the very least, they would at least affect gameplay, rather than solely detract from it.

[Lyth]

You could make Protect and Shell into WHM specific abilities. I suppose the point is that they should do something with Protect outside of something you apply before every pull.

[...]

I didn't follow any of that. Customisation happens outside of combat. It's not about gameplay. It's about fight planning.

Customisation in this game is necessarily going to have restrictions. Your role action choices aren't going to turn a BRD into a tank or healer. That really just leaves us with two possibilities.

The first is to do what we've done all along, and have a common pool of universally applicable abilities. Someone comes along and does the math, tells you which ones are best, and you never remove them from your hotbars. The second is to let you tweak those options to gain situational advantages in fights. Someone can still come along and do the math, but every fight is going to have its nuances, and you'll see a lot more discussion on the subject.

Either way, if you're the sort of person who prefers to sit back and lets others do the thinking and analysis for you, no customisation system is going to interest you.

You generally won't be swapping actions between pulls unless you're actually doing prog and are trying to puzzle out what's optimal on a brand new fight. And if you don't fall into that category of player, who this sort of customisation is primarily aimed at, it's not a problem if you have presets.

[Shurrikhan]

You could make Protect and Shell into WHM specific abilities. I suppose the point is that they should do something with Protect outside of something you apply before every pull.

I didn't follow any of that. Customisation happens outside of combat. It's not about gameplay. It's about fight planning.

Customisation in this game is necessarily going to have restrictions. Your role action choices aren't going to turn a BRD into a tank or healer. That really just leaves us with two possibilities.

The first is to do what we've done all along, and have a common pool of universally applicable abilities. Someone comes along and does the math, tells you which ones are best, and you never remove them from your hotbars. The second is to let you tweak those options to gain situational advantages in fights. Someone can still come along and do the math, but every fight is going to have its nuances, and you'll see a lot more discussion on the subject.

Either way, if you're the sort of person who prefers to sit back and lets others do the thinking and analysis for you, no customisation system is going to interest you.

You generally won't be swapping actions between pulls unless you're actually doing prog and are trying to puzzle out what's optimal on a brand new fight. And if you don't fall into that category of player, who this sort of customisation is primarily aimed at, it's not a problem if you have presets.

My point is do those options improve the game in any way? Our current content does not give meaningful choice between Role Actions even if you segment them specifically into Mitigation/Throughput Slot, Interrupt Slot, Enmity Slot, Survival Slot, etc. For most pulls, one option will be the far better or only viable option.

All it then adds to the gameplay is a debt or sort of choice-debuff every time you go from one fight to the other, until you go back into your menu and swap the options to the new optimal setup. If any Monk thought having to refill their Chakra manually between every fight was annoying, imagine having to use a submenu and click and drag each of those five Chakra. Such would be irritating without adjusting one's perspective towards a fight or increasing the number of ways to perform in the fight.

It's like asking a gear condition system by which everyone must periodically retie their shoes or risk tripping. It has substantial disbenefits, with no meaningful benefits.

Presets can mitigate those issues -- voila, your shoes are instantly retied -- but if the choices themselves add nothing meaningful, it's still pointless.

Edit: That's not to say customization itself is necessarily pointless; I like customization when it's done well. But these Role Action options, divided or otherwise, and their like in this game's content, certainly are.

[Seraphor]

Rather than simply introducing Shell as a Protect counterpart, its be much more worth to make them both WHM skills again, with a unique functionality that works with the job.
Instead of a 30m duration and a minor defence boost, make them more in line with cooldown skills and have them interact with lillies in one way or another.
Perhaps Shell increases the rate or chances at which you gain lillies, and Protect enhances the effects of lillies.

[Lyth]

Again, it really depends on the player.

If you're doing a brand new fight, you have no idea what to expect. When a new tier releases and players go to unlock Savage, they make guesses based off what they see in normal. Part of the guesswork involves trying to adjust your comp in anticipation for what you think you'll see. Guess incorrectly, and you might be at a disadvantage until the next lockout.

The role action system, as it was released at the start of Stormblood, addressed some elements of that. It doesn't really matter if you didn't happen bring a PLD and BRD to silence a particular mechanic. You can talk to your teammates and get someone who is comfortable with the mechanic to swap in the action. You might say "Why don't you just give everyone a silence, then?" But figuring out the correct loadout is part of the puzzle. It's only trivial if you read the answer after someone else has solved it for you.

But I think we can add a bit more depth to this. Interrupts are pass-fail mechanics. There are other decisions that are a bit more grey.

Consider the present system of physical and magical tankbusters. Many fights will have a mix of both. But instead of having this be a job level decision (i.e. do I bring DRK for Dark Mind), what if it was an issue of "Do I bring a physical mitigation cooldown or a magical one from the role actions list?" Now you have to look at the fight, which tankbusters are physical and magical, and see what choice best augments your rotation. You can still work around a bad choice, but a good choice will make your life easier.

If you're the sort of person who is looking up a guide to figure out what's optimal, then it's naturally going to be a chore. But not every player fits this category. Some people read guides, others write them.

One thing that hasn't really been explored is the idea of trait customisation. I'm thinking of something akin to Warcraft's Major and Minor glyph system, which allowed you to tweak your class in small ways. Do you want a slightly shorter recast on your gap closer or a proc that resets it? Not every customisation option needs to impact gameplay either. Some things could be cosmetic (perhaps reskin Rampart as Shadowskin, as an example).

[Shurrikhan]

Again, it really depends on the player.

If you're doing a brand new fight, you have no idea what to expect. When a new tier releases and players go to unlock Savage, they make guesses based off what they see in normal. Part of the guesswork involves trying to adjust your comp in anticipation for what you think you'll see. Guess incorrectly, and you might be at a disadvantage until the next lockout.

The role action system, as it was released at the start of Stormblood, addressed some elements of that. It doesn't really matter if you didn't happen bring a PLD and BRD to silence a particular mechanic. You can talk to your teammates and get someone who is comfortable with the mechanic to swap in the action. You might say "Why don't you just give everyone a silence, then?" But figuring out the correct loadout is part of the puzzle. It's only trivial if you read the answer after someone else has solved it for you.

But I think we can add a bit more depth to this. Interrupts are pass-fail mechanics. There are other decisions that are a bit more grey.

Consider the present system of physical and magical tankbusters. Many fights will have a mix of both. But instead of having this be a job level decision (i.e. do I bring DRK for Dark Mind), what if it was an issue of "Do I bring a physical mitigation cooldown or a magical one from the role actions list?" Now you have to look at the fight, which tankbusters are physical and magical, and see what choice best augments your rotation. You can still work around a bad choice, but a good choice will make your life easier.

Okay, but how does a novice, not-yet-to-be-optimized take on a fight vary from... anything else, in terms of customization selection enabled by Role Actions or any variant of that system? And is it fun to be advantaged for having simply "guessed correctly"?

Figuring out the correct loadout? How are there enough pieces to count as a puzzle? In O7S, you have a either NIN with you, or you don't, and then either you skimp on Anticipation, Awareness, or Second Wind.

And again, is learning which choice to bring fun? Perhaps it is to you. But then I have to wonder, is figuring out which jobs you should bring for a fight and replacing them accordingly... fun? Those two things are fundamentally the same. Role Actions not about working around a bad choice, but rather -- since you always have the option of simply swapping it out -- being informed of which is superior. You can inform yourself ingame or online, but either way that is the extent of its impact when able to "work around a bad choice, but [where] a good choice will make your life easier." Jobs are already close enough in their contributions to often be treated as replaceable parts, balanced -- and consequently perceived -- on more a basis of template than contextual capacity. When you siphon away what could have been cohesive components, you just make these exchanges easier. Kill the inferior choice of RA. Kill the inferior choice of job. Okay, now we can finally play the game for real.

If you're the sort of person who is looking up a guide to figure out what's optimal, then it's naturally going to be a chore. But not every player fits this category. Some people read guides, others write them.

And were this a system with an actual capacity to be played optimally or near-optimally in multiple ways, I'd agree. I very much enjoyed WotLK talents, for instance. I made my own builds that others called trash and then I outperformed them with those builds, almost always at top output per gear score (ilvl) when DPSing even in 25-man raids. But this is not that. These are clearly defined if-then advantages/disadvantages which are isolated away from gameplay rather than augmenting it.

Balance is compromise. A given job performs better at this and worse at that. But when you make the choice just whether you want the one aspect that applies advantage or disadvantage, you don't get choice -- you get UI bloat. That kind of false customization literally siphon away from gameplay, directly and indirectly.

One thing that hasn't really been explored is the idea of trait customisation. I'm thinking of something akin to Warcraft's Major and Minor glyph system, which allowed you to tweak your class in small ways.

Better, but still too shallow to apply choice if I had to guess, unless done just right. Some of those major glyphs were actual choices, for instance, but most were not. They were simply something you collected as soon as you could afford them from a crafter or off the AH because their benefits so obvious outperformed others.

Not every customisation option needs to impact gameplay either. Some things could be cosmetic (perhaps reskin Rampart as Shadowskin, as an example).

Then just give it by default. Why go out of your way to take away a buff that already fit a job thematically to turn it into obligatory choice of bastardized aesthetic to then charge the player for a cosmetic augmentation to get back what they already had?