Please Remove Role Skills and Give Them Back as Class/Job Abilities

[Jirah]

Some should be removed and be its own unique skills...some. Surecast, SwiftCast, Addle should stay in Magical. Surecast Swiftcast Repose should stay in Healer. Shirk ,LowBlow, Arms length and Provoke could stay in tanks (give all tanks a general defense CD to replace rampart) Second wind, Arms length and Peloton, and Head Graze should stay in ranged (Bind and Slow are the most useless skills in the game and should just stay in PVP) and Second wind, True north, and Leg sweep should stay with Melee (Fient and bloodbath being debatable)

[Lauront]

Definitely something I'd support!

[MartaDemireux]

Here's hoping this is happening and these are two new versions of Rampart!

[Shurrikhan]

I'd support this regardless, but it's worth noting that some of the Role Actions, especially in their current iterations, are pure bloat:

Shirk

Shirk's tank-swap QoL would be better done by changes to Provoke itself. As for a mere hit-on-refresh maintenance function... such adds to annoyance without adding fundamentally anything to agency. Buff Provoke's functionality and get rid of Shirk.

Lucid Dreaming

It's a mere hit-on-refresh maintenance function. Get rid of it.

(Perhaps even) Arm's Length

So we spend time to make these knockback mechanics, which rarely ever go off more often that AL's CD, and the bloat our bars with an ability to just undo the mechanic we just spent time designing, replacing the more nuanced interactions available through pre-positioning, banked mobility, stutter-casting, and native toolkit usage, etc.... Why? Get rid of it. Bake the mitigation difference into the tank's kits, and the toolkits that already have measures by which to counter a knockback to be less vulnerable to latency in that countering interaction.

Similarly, not all of the remaining former Role Skills need to be given to every job, especially so long as other skills that are similarly, at present, just reskins and renames of the exact same skill (e.g., Raise, Ascendance, Resurrection) are themselves adjusted.

Consider, for instance, a WHM without Swiftcast who still has that level of snap-casting capacity in their own way.

Perhaps they have a trait called... Water's Wake, whereby each healing spell cast causes the next to be completable even if interrupted by movement or damage taken up to .5 seconds earlier, stacking up to 10 times (i.e., a full 5-stack usage for a mobile cast, twice). Alongside this, perhaps they have a unique effect on their Wind DoTs that allows to be refreshed earlier at relatively little potency loss, allowing for mobility in that regard as well. Finally, Raise itself is no longer a 8s cast that returns the enemy from K.O. instantly, but merely a 2.5s cast that causes a certain amount of healing received to then reawaken them (which takes advantage of both Water's Wake and their heighted healing potency).

[Raikai]

I'd support this regardless, but it's worth noting that some of the Role Actions, especially in their current iterations, are pure bloat:[INDENT][INDENT]Shirk

Shirk's tank-swap QoL would be better done by changes to Provoke itself. As for a mere hit-on-refresh maintenance function... such adds to annoyance without adding fundamentally anything to agency. Buff Provoke's functionality and get rid of Shirk.

I would also say, for tanks, bake Rampart into their basic defensive cooldown, while adjusting the % and giving it 2 charges that can stack, so people that used to stack Rampart with something else could potentially still achieve the same.

Lucid Dreaming stands in a weird place, because how MP became meaningless... I don't even prioritize Piety as a healer and heck, I only have to use it in the rare rez-chain situations (and often just wiping and restarting is better). The thing is, LD lost its importance to healers after SB when they got a number of MP-free oGCDs and instant casts. If your group is doing good, it's rare to even need to spend a lot of MP with hardcast heals.

[Shurrikhan]

I would also say, for tanks, bake Rampart into their basic defensive cooldown, while adjusting the % and giving it 2 charges that can stack, so people that used to stack Rampart with something else could potentially still achieve the same.

I would hope we could go further in differentiating those skills and their features that to give each the same two-charge affordance, but yes, that would absolutely be a step in the right direction, imo.

Lucid Dreaming stands in a weird place, because how MP became meaningless... I don't even prioritize Piety as a healer and heck, I only have to use it in the rare rez-chain situations (and often just wiping and restarting is better). The thing is, LD lost its importance to healers after SB when they got a number of MP-free oGCDs and instant casts. If your group is doing good, it's rare to even need to spend a lot of MP with hardcast heals.

The problem to me is that even if MP was an extremely limited and therefore MP gains extremely useful, Lucid Dreaming would still have no place as a button in its current functionality. It has no cost, no timing advantage, no reason not to hit it as soon as it's refreshed. It plays like a passive, except it also requires a button that could otherwise be given to more interesting gameplay loops (i.e., one that require more than just that you track its CD and don't use it ahead of higher priority oGCDs within a given gap).

Worse, I suspect that even if we were to give it a reason not to just be used on refresh (such as in instead reducing MP costs for X seconds, or refreshing a larger portion but only of missing MP, it still wouldn't feel like a well-designed or worthwhile skill.

[ArianeEwah]

I'd support this regardless, but it's worth noting that some of the Role Actions, especially in their current iterations, are pure bloat:

Shirk

Shirk's tank-swap QoL would be better done by changes to Provoke itself. As for a mere hit-on-refresh maintenance function... such adds to annoyance without adding fundamentally anything to agency. Buff Provoke's functionality and get rid of Shirk.

Lucid Dreaming

It's a mere hit-on-refresh maintenance function. Get rid of it.

(Perhaps even) Arm's Length

[...]

Except for Arm's Length, I 100% agree.
Arm's Length still gives you a choice what and when you want to immune yourself against a knockback. If it still would be on 60s CD as it was the case in SB, I would've agreed. We would be able to counter every knockback if it remained that short of a CD. But since it's 120s now, I don't mind it staying the way it is... or at least bake it into other actions (e.g. Warriors IR).

Lucid Dreaming really doesn't make any sense on any caster right now. SMN already has so many phases and actions that reduce your MP cost to practically 0 (Egi Assault, Pheonix Trance, Tri-Disaster instead of dot-casting), RDM didn't have any mana issues since the start of ShB either (after they reduced the MP cost with an early patch), and BLM... no problems for obivious reasons...
It's really just there as a button bloat for healers because their actions are gosh dang expensive. Healers are the only role with high costs on their spells, starting at 400 MP on single target, and 600 aoe, whereas casters average spell cost is 200 (Ruin, Jolt, Verfire/-stone), and 400 in aoe-spells (again BLM is a special case).
The CD reduction from 120s to 60s (from 4.x to 5.x) also makes this action just more annoying/spammable and useless, because it also lost its more important enmity reduction effect... which again is useless now since the enmity adjustments. 60s would've made sense in SB, but it really doesn't in ShB. Someone behind the design team just didn't think this through... or was just adjusting this action with DPS (death/rez) in mind.
I would really like to see spell costs for healers reduced by 100/200 MP, and see their unique mana refresh actions reviewed (Assize, Draw, Aetherflow... EnergyDrain will probably be removed anyway).

On Shirk: I have nothing to add. I have barely seen it being used efficiently since the start of ShB, and more like out of habit. You've made an excellent point!

make Samba, Troubadour, and Tactician not mere reskins of each other

This!
To this day I don't understand SE's way of thinking with the homogenization process. MCH never had an "aoe mitigation" action. Dismantle (and Rend Mind) were always single target. Scrap Tactitian, and reintroduce Dismantle as a similar to Reprisal on target action (-x% dmg dealt on target + nearby enemies in y radius).
Troubadour can stay the way it is, and Shield Samba... well, can make a shield instead of %-mitigation, or vice versa.
But I would like to see all of the ranged dps mitigation actions getting reduced CDs (to 60s/90s). 120s is way too long, especially for support jobs.

[Shurrikhan]

Except for Arm's Length, I 100% agree.
Arm's Length still gives you a choice what and when you want to immune yourself against a knockback. If it still would be on 60s CD as it was the case in SB, I would've agreed. We would be able to counter every knockback if it remained that short of a CD. But since it's 120s now, I don't mind it staying the way it is... or at least bake it into other actions (e.g. Warriors IR.

I get that, and admittedly I had a way bigger issue with it in SB. But I would much prefer the "bake in" option over keeping it, especially if we pruned the others. I'd probably break knockbacks and draw-ins into those that are potentially helpful (you need to be knocked back to purge a lethal debuff or to get away from another, otherwise lethal AoE, etc.) and those that are not, and vary their potency with mitigation / shielding / certain hidden baked-in effects. I'd probably, though begrudgingly, make movement skills a bit less demanding in their being counters to KBs/DIs, by giving them immunity to non-helpful KB/DIs during their animations (with player knockbacks used on knockback-immune enemies instead knocking oneself back, for similar effect). Riddle of Earth, Inner Release, and Passage of Arms seem good fits for baked-ins, but apart from casters pretty much everyone's got sufficient movement skills.

Random note: If Aero III were still a thing, I'd have loved to have it and Holy, alone, lift WHM significantly off the floor, thereby preventing KBs mid-animation -- but that's mostly because that's the kind of "steadfast healer" utility I feel WHM should uniquely have. (And there's no way I'd want a spammable like Glare to be capable of that, unless it and Dia were locked behind a WHM super-seiyen mode CD.) For any other casters, per their animations, their relevant skills would only affect the end of the cast, which leaves you only a .5s safety window that you'd really have to pro-gamer-move. RDM, per its hyperversatile form, might get it for each time it takes a gaudy backflip off its sword, but it's already got CaC and Displacement, so...

I would really like to see spell costs for healers reduced by 100/200 MP, and see their unique mana refresh actions reviewed (Assize, Draw, Aetherflow... EnergyDrain will probably be removed anyway).

Probably a hot take, but... I wouldn't mind MP becoming a real concern, or even having reason to use Cure, Physick, and Benefic. Anything that makes it more than just a wonky rez-limiter and Spell Speed tax, really, since it's more MP efficient to AoE than single-target heal anyways.

But yeah, for now just making up the difference would probably be best. Drop the bloat and indirect AST buff via its oGCD-weave tax, and keep the resultant playflow otherwise the same.

________________

Scrap Tactitian, and reintroduce Dismantle as a similar to Reprisal on target action (-x% dmg dealt on target + nearby enemies in y radius).

Honestly, I don't even feel like every job needs a(n effectively) raid-defensive tool. (To clarify, I mean this in the sense that even if one were to affect only a single target, such as via Addle, if it thereby affects raid damage, it's still effectively a raid defensive). But, I certainly wouldn't mind some sort of Pacify/Silence skill that degrades to a damage decrease for a brief time when used on immune enemies.

If we wanted to really draw more from the idea of "Dismantle", for instance, I almost wish MCH had more persistent-device summoning and that the game had a greater number of mechanical enemies, while Dismantle in turn could quickly salvage your devices OR pacify/silence/inflict vulnerability upon said mechanical enemies (assuming similar utility among other classes, ofc., which should hardly be a problem if the effects were reduced in 8-man content, as there is no 4-man content beyond the extra-casual level of difficulty.)

[NobleWinter]

Role skills, lost animations, and similar skills like Troubadour, Shield Samba, and Tactician have been something bothering me for quite awhile. I love this thread. The Physical Ranged Mitigation skills in particular are annoying to me becuase they completely ignore what makes role skills great. A new player who has only leveled Bard learns Troubadour and has a messy tooltip telling them it can't be stacked with Tactician or Shield Samba but these skills they have never used before have completely different animations and buff icons so how in the world are they supposed to keep themselves from overwriting them on accident? A unified buff icon like the role skills provide would work wonders becuase then they could see someone already applied the buff. Healers with Rescue and Surecast need to be able to recognize that players with Arm's Length (a skill they may have never used personally if they prefer casters) have the effect of Surecast and can't be Rescued. Arm's Legth and Surecast should look similiar so that they are more easily recognizable as serving the same function. Giving unique animations and skill names to every class while using similar buff icons would make things much easier to pick up for newer players and add so much more flavor to the individual jobs. Ta ks in particular would be well served by a unified buff icon for their larger mitigation tool so its easy to see they used the bigger Rampart.

[Shurrikhan]

A new player who has only leveled Bard learns Troubadour and has a messy tooltip telling them it can't be stacked with Tactician or Shield Samba but these skills they have never used before have completely different animations and buff icons so how in the world are they supposed to keep themselves from overwriting them on accident? A unified buff icon like the role skills provide would work wonders becuase then they could see someone already applied the buff. Healers with Rescue and Surecast need to be able to recognize that players with Arm's Length (a skill they may have never used personally if they prefer casters) have the effect of Surecast and can't be Rescued.

Or maybe, just maybe, we could:

• make Samba, Troubadour, and Tactician not mere reskins of each other, and
• make targets immune to a given effect (such as Draw-ins or Knock-backs) invalid targets for skills which only apply that effect (such as Rescue or Blank).