Generally I think looking at damage GCDs that take up unique hot bar slots is a little more helpful as they move your finger around the most -- especially the ones that are used the most frequently.
Generally I think looking at damage GCDs that take up unique hot bar slots is a little more helpful as they move your finger around the most -- especially the ones that are used the most frequently.
I agree with Ty honestly that outside of raw button space on PC specifically bothering to count actions like AOW and broil separately is near pointless especially since healer AOE is near always a gain on 2 (except holy) and cleave is never a consideration in savage anymore. Controller players can take it a step further and use two seperate cross hotbars and replace broil with AOW on each one and just swap as necessary to completely functionally fuse the two buttons
Healers aren’t remotely as choked on buttons as people make them out to be (WHM functionally has the second least buttons after SMN when you don’t count pointless skills like repose people always like to include to inflate button numbers), there is 100% space for more DPS options even before you start removing redundant healing buttons we don’t need anyway
I do get the point of having at least one way to hit single target. Not everything is standardized dungeons and 8 man boss fights. Deep Dungeon particularly is an environment where tools like Tomahawk, your Glare/Broil/etc, Heavy Shot, and so on would make things more challenging if everything was an AOE. But all you really need in those scenarios is a way to pull an enemy into the hallway. Excluding examples like Standard/Technical Step or Earthly Star which are really large AOEs, your normal AOE attacks aren't going to clip dangerous enemies in a deep dungeon because if you're that close to an enemy you don't want to be fighting, your choice of battlefield is the real thing we need to question.
But beyond that fringe example, AOE just isn't really an interesting factor in this game 99% of the time. Having the choice between single target or AOE is only meaningful and interesting when the game regularly presents you with opportunities for single target and AOE to both hold value at the same time. So rarely do we even have interesting fights with more than one enemy to target. Hansel and Gretel come to mind, a pair of bosses with mostly fixed movement that will sometimes come together, but even then, a lot of AOEs are barely any gain on 2 or more (and some are even still a loss on two). Oh, I gain an extra 10 potency for using Dyskrasia over Dosis? Woohoo... Lucky me.
Thats why outside of a select few actions, I don't see why we shouldn't just merge every AOE with the single target version of the same thing. Make the potency on the first target the same as it currently is, and pair that with damage falloff on subsequent enemies. Would Monk not be exactly the same if Bootshine, Twin Snakes, and Snap Punch naturally upgraded into Shadow of the Destroyer, Four-Point Fury, and Rockbreaker, respectively? You still have Dragon Kick, True Strike, and Demolish as single targets. It's just instead of your AOE combo taking up three more hotbar actions, its just one of your two combos instead. You could also make Enlightenment an upgrade of Forbidden Chakra and save another spot on the hotbar. And those 4 extra spots can potentially be used for something new. We don't have to just purge things and leave it at that.
Or instead of merging two actions, give a purpose to the AOE action that functions in single target. An example i've gone to before was have Dyskrasia's potency be the same as Dosis on the first target with reduced damage on other enemies, make the MP cost 800, and make it a ranged instant cast attack. Now Dyskrasia is still the attack you spam for AOE, but it doubles as Sage's mobility tool. If you don't need to move or weave, Dosis is half the MP cost. You get more agency in how you want to utilize mobility.
If I put LB/Sprint/Potion on my actual hotkeys instead of a sidebar (to prevent misclicking, from my time as a tank), WHM would still have 4 spaces on the bar. Merge Cure1/2, and Medica1/2, and that's 6 spaces to work with before I have to go into a 4th hotbar on PC. Even then, we have space for more buttons if SE gets creative with how they implement 'more damage options', but the problem with that is the part in italics
healers are there to heal if you want complex dps rotations roll a dps.
Honestly, whenever someone rolls up with the tired old "If you want to dps, roll a dps" line, it's probably best to assume they're here to stir the pot and just ignore. So far, I don't think any of the people who throw out that line are amenable to discussion anyway.
Given that he/she also posted https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...77#post6428277 i don't really think they are open to anything but "stand there and fill up my health bars"