Combo Action Button

[Seraphor]

On AST I technically need more than 32 Slots. But the only skills I use that are outside of my 32 slots in a fight would be Largesse and the LB. The "card cancel" skills are not needed there, and neither are the sects.
PLD is the same, there are a few things that don't fit the 32 slots.

(one tip for Sprint on controller, assign a joystick click button to Macro 99 and put Sprint as that macro. It saved me countless times)

AST only has 23 unique skills once you discount the undraw skills.
Only 5 essential role skills, which I suppose you could stretch to 8 by including the situational Eye for an Eye, Surecast and Rescue. But you've just said Largesse was 'outside' of that so I'm assuming you're not counting situational role skills.

I might try to make use of that sprint thing though, if I can get used to it, as I've had sprint on the same space on every job since I started playing.

[Gralna]

I'll have to agree with Daniolaut, I use a gamepad on PC and have yet to run into button bloat issues. Almost all of my jobs fit onto one crossbar + expanded crossbars, even Sch and I don't run into issue of mixing healing/dps utility.. I have enough space for everything to be neatly organized.

If you're playing with default gamepad settings though it can feel extremely limiting, I have a lot of filters on for combat/non-combat, for targetting and crossbar rotation as well as some crossbars that don't show up at all unless I use R+Dpad. There are a lot of tools to customize gamepad to your playstyle, just need to mess around with them a bit.

[Seraphor]

If you're playing with default gamepad settings though it can feel extremely limiting, I have a lot of filters on for combat/non-combat, for targetting and crossbar rotation as well as some crossbars that don't show up at all unless I use R+Dpad. There are a lot of tools to customize gamepad to your playstyle, just need to mess around with them a bit.

This, there's a lot of tools you can use between expanded and double xhotbars, hiding certain hotbars in combat, and displaying 'hidden' skills on the linear hotbars.

I have xhotbar 1 as my main combat hotbar, with all my main skills.
Expanded hotbar L>R has stuff like sprint, LB, mount, and agility or stance type skills, like peloton, or darkside, etc.
Expanded R>L has misc cooldowns and role skills (I have a separate linear hotbar to display those that have cooldowns I want to keep an eye on)
Then my xhotbar 2 is set to only be displayed when not I combat, and has all my job changes, and a couple extra things.

That’s all I use, and I never have a problem.

For example, AST, each section clockwise from top:
Xhotbar 1:
Gravity, Sleeve Draw, Malefic, Combust | Royal Road, Redraw, Draw, Hold | Lightspeed, Ascend, Essential Dignity, Minor Arcana | A. Benefic, A. Helios, Benefic, Helios
Expanded R>L:
Collective Unconsciousness*, Earthly Star*, Esuna, Celestial Opposition* | Largesse, Synastry*, Time Dilation*, Lucid Dreaming
Expanded L>R:
Mount, LB, Ghysal Greens, Protect | Sprint, Nocturnal Sect, Swiftcast*, Diurnal Sect

*duplicated on a display only mini hotbar to keep an eye on cooldowns.

[NocturniaUzuki]

Well, to be clear I said I DIDN'T use all 48, but that it's still hard to fit them on LOGICALLY.

However, I don't ignore abilities just because I don't use them that often. All 10 role skills are on my hotbar on healer jobs. For something like Break, you might ask why? That's because it is used in some ARR content (looking at you, Twintania), and also because my gameplay style takes me outside of the norms. I don't want Break to be in a different spot for every single healer I use, though. Same for other skills. I map my hotbars logically across all jobs. R2 is offensive. L2 is defensive. It's not a hard and fast rule, but in general I have a system that makes sense to me. However, as I run out of space, I start have less options. Maybe I have 6 slots left, and I need to place a new primary spell (GCD only). I only have spots available on my long-winded spell slots. So now I have a random GCD spell in the middle of my oGCD cooldowns.

I also have slots assigned for items you might consider trivial, because of unconventional gameplay. My L2->R2 WXHB is reserved for potions. Or it's supposed to be. But on some jobs, I've had to put random abilities on it. The result is a lot of confusion when switching jobs. I'll try to pop an antidote on PLD because on my other jobs, it's in that slot. But I end up wasting Tempered Will.