【Suggestion】MCH "Pure DPS"

[Shurrikhan]

Role skills don’t need to have the same animation by necessity; we saw that during Stormblood with Refresh/Tactician having different character animations. It was the same particle effects sure, but I don’t see why that has to be by necessity either, if the animations can be unique.

Plus, there is the sad truth that we live in a game with (apparently) limited design space. Putting literally identical skills (i.e 10%DMG reduction on phys ranged) in the role skills section just frees up an additional ‘ability’ slot for them to actually do something unique with the jobs instead of just ‘exact same ability different particles’.

A few things:

1. Having the unique animations per skill requires unique skill IDs per skill. So, it would save zero space to remove the name and icon. In fact, you'd now have to add three around this new "Role Action".
   
   
2. The game still stores the animations, icons, etc., of removed (and even never-used) abilities (as we know from mods being able to swap animations to those of said removed or even never-added skills [Power Slash, Brimstone, etc], so removing the unique names and icons would also save no space. It would be solely a net increase in space used.
   
   
3. These amounts do not remotely matter anyways. The "space" they consume is primarily client-side and, altogether, is a fraction of a fraction of a percent, while spell/action IDs already allow for many orders of magnitude more actions than we have.

Isn’t that like saying Scholar and Sage are two completely separate and unique jobs because all their nearly 1:1 ability counterparts are visually different and draw from (very slightly) different systems? Even though they’re effectively the same thing at their core?

???

No, it's saying that having the same effect but different names and icons is marginally but noticeably better than having the same effect, name, and icon -- That two-to-three points of job flavor is better than (n)one.

How did you arrive at this reduction?

I mean, why wouldn’t you want skill duplicates moved into the role skill section?

Because it's no easier to equip the skill from the Role Action menu than from the Job Action Menu despite, again, the latter permitting unique names, icons, and animations.

I’d rather have the extra space for more unique and interesting abilities and effects personally.

Purposely removing job flavor from among what we've had has never caused us to get more job flavor in other ways -- especially not in unique or interesting ones.

Wasn’t that one of the reasons they added role skills in the first place? Along with deleting cross-classing and needing a replacement lol

The latter was the only actual reason. (Removing cross-class was done to remove the "irritations" of being incentivized to multi-class and being punished (or, punishing one's group) if refusing to do so, but that's a separate matter.)

Role Actions "saved"... nothing -- neither server space nor hotbar space. But by originally giving 10 Role Actions and allowing players access only to 5, they were able to maintain a brief pretense of customization, allowing them a new "feature" as a selling point despite its utter lack of any real benefit.

Ultimately, Role Actions' largest effects were just to (A) slightly nerf Monk skill expression (primarily via competitive GCD thresholds and rotational/positional flexibility) through the removal of XC-Fracture (though that's arguably just the removal of Cross-Class / "Additional Skills") and (B) nerf Dark Knight dungeon kit through the gutting of Low Blow. The addition of Rescue, Arm's Length, etc., could as easily have been done through cross-class as before or by separate job actions, be that with identical effects or otherwise.