I Miss Cross-Class Skills

[Vidu]

I'm with you OP, it just added so much more depth and personalization to the game, I loved it. I remember playing Beta on my WAR and looking so forward to levelling up all of its alt classes to learn their skills. And also, didn't PLDs also have access to Raise (outside of combat I think)? Man that is so sick. But now, they've stripped away almost all the originality in the game and made each class just a slighty different variant of its role counterparts.

...it really didnt.
Each job had 2-3 "You absolutly need those cross-class skills for your job to function so you better go ahead and level a class you have no intrest in"-skills; then 2-3 "nice-to-haves" and 4+ that no one ever used because they were, well, useless. They gave an illusion of custimastion but at the end of the day the most relevant choice was wether or not your scholar had protect or cleric stance as their first cross-class-skill (or the question: Do you have protect or healer-dps in Sastasha)...

Raise on paladin was nice, agreed. But as you noted: Only out of combat and therefor rarely used. I think I might raised 30 people total while my paladin still could?

I never understood whats so great about locking key-skills for your job like provoke or swiftcast behind another job. It really wasnt all that funny to encounter a warrior who didnt leveled his galdiator up to 26 to get provoke in Ultima...

[Silver-Strider]

I miss Fracture on my MNK and Stoneskin on my PLD

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

I miss Fracture on my MNK and Stoneskin on my PLD

Fracture on mnk was a dps loss.

[Shurrikhan]

Fracture on mnk was a dps loss.

That's just wrong. It was a dps increase unless it delayed Demolish by a tick, Touch of Death by more than one tick, cost you a Bootshine within DK/Twin window, or drained your TP when you have no downtime in which to restore it. Even with Dragon Kick up, Fracture still had more relative potency than True Strike.

It was a TP-hog, no doubt, requiring a long jump period (optimally, per 3 minutes) to regenerate its excessive cost via a free Purification, but it was in fact a dps gain over any appropriate rotational string. Fracture was actually a far more often viable skill on Monk than on Warrior, its native job.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

That's just wrong. It was a dps increase unless it delayed Demolish by a tick, Touch of Death by more than one tick, cost you a Bootshine within DK/Twin window, or drained your TP when you have no downtime in which to restore it. Even with Dragon Kick up, Fracture still had more relative potency than True Strike.

It was a TP-hog, no doubt, requiring a long jump period (optimally, per 3 minutes) to regenerate its excessive cost via a free Purification, but it was in fact a dps gain over the given rotational string.

Apparently it was drg that was the loss. Still, not a great example as it was situational at best.

[YojimboM]

Apparently it was drg that was the loss. Still, not a great example as it was situational at best.

It was also a gain/required skill for Warrior in HW. Landing Fracture at the end of Berserk was pretty much the only min/max Warrior had.

[Metalwrath]

That's just wrong. It was a dps increase unless it delayed Demolish by a tick, Touch of Death by more than one tick, cost you a Bootshine within DK/Twin window, or drained your TP when you have no downtime in which to restore it. Even with Dragon Kick up, Fracture still had more relative potency than True Strike.

It was a TP-hog, no doubt, requiring a long jump period (optimally, per 3 minutes) to regenerate its excessive cost via a free Purification, but it was in fact a dps gain over any appropriate rotational string. Fracture was actually a far more often viable skill on Monk than on Warrior, its native job.

As far as i remember it was most of the time either a dps loss or it causes too many tp issues.It depended mainly on your build and skill speed.Some builds could get a slight dps boost from it but the gain was so marginal it wasnt even noticeable.

[Barraind]

There will always be a best choice.

Ehhh, theres always some amount of leeway into things like that.

As much as I really dont like the way Guild Wars 2 handles a lot of its combat systems, they've managed to figure out how to give players a wide array of customization and choice and get 2-5 different specs per class to parse very similarly, and be better or worse than others depending on fight, though a couple exceptions do exist.


Some of the problems you run into are that the fewer options the game gives you where something could be useful, the more raw damage wins.

If we had a solid number of encounters where having someones secondary class open up crowd control options, and made crowd control a viable option over "lets just ae it down", or if secondary classes opened up a hybrid style gameplay where your blasty mage had reasonably effective spot healing for massive ae phases, and designed fights in a way that was significantly less scripted, you'd have plenty of arguments over the sacrifice of personal damage contribution for raid utility (see the support class thread).

14 is just not the kind of game that can be that deep.

[Moomba33]

I miss them too. It was fun unlocking a new class then throwing on Protect and some damage cross class skills in those early levels before you unlocked your job.
The current way is better for the game overall in my opinion (I remember being annoyed that I needed to get Lancer up for Blood for Blood for my Bard when I started the game) but I do look back on cross class and those early 2.0 days fondly.

[RegularJoe]

To be honest, I'm actually glad that they are gone. It was annoying to level up a class you had no interest in to get a skill you wanted elsewhere. It's the only reason I have stuff like DRG and BRD at lv 34 or so. On the other hand, stacking all the damage buffs on any class was insanely satisfying.

Cross Class skills really worked well for the classes, but not really jobs, and all the best ones were mandatory anyway. All healers needed to level THM to get Swiftcast, and CNJ for the now defunct Protect, Stoneskin, and Cleric Stance (and Aero). All Tanks needed to get Rampart and Provoke from GLD. All damage dealers wanted B4B, Invigorate (if phsyical), Rapid Strikes. And if you didn't have those skills on your respective class/job, people would react to you like you murdered a baby.

I'm more than happy with these skills being rolled into the general Role kit. It eliminates things like healers not having the Swift-Raise combo, new tanks not having Provoke, and damage dealers not having their damage boosters, among other things. There were a few nice to have options, but those options were rarely worth considering in normal conditions. Customization in XIV is really limited and rather useless because the fringe options make very little impact on the grand scheme of things. It is nice to have the options for it, but with how streamlined everything is, most people would have still slotted the same 5 or so abilities that everyone else has.