Job action combos one button

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

Ahh, Heavy Shot. I always mix the two up. And yes, that... was a very silly change.

Many of those abilities were axed not out of perceived button bloat but in the name of simplification. Yoshida outright said Heavy Thrust and Straight Shot buffs were removed because casual players weren't keeping them up and it caused too large a gap between them and experienced players. I have to disagree on tank stance. I found very little interesting about it. Paladin, in particular, was especially bad given it was more optimal to simply go stance-less than switch to Sword Oath due to the GCD requirement.

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And that's where differing personal taste will form differing conclusions. I always felt like Heavy Thrust and Straight Shot were far duller of "ramp up" than, say, tanks' tank-stance (and enmity skill) suites, so I wasn't sad to see them go, but I very much wanted some similar (or, ideally, far greater) level of engagement with which to replace the removed tank stances and enmity kits, and we instead just got more isolated buttons tacked on / thrown in.

The only thing I ever much liked about Heavy Thrust was that I could, if forced into oddly quick SkS tiers, briefly forgo it for greater potency per minute via an extra Full Thrust where other players would be afraid to drop the buff despite the net gains for doing so. Enmity kits, while dull in 8-man content, at least gave me a fair bit more to do, though.

(In regard to that "something to do" and replacement "engagement", we might, ofc, say the same for 1-2-3 vs. 1-1-1 -- significant for some and irrelevant to others. /shrug)

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

Please don't quote me out of context. That was in response to your comparison combos to abilities like Enochian that weren't pressed whatsoever by decent Black Mages.

As for combos themselves. A good number of people prefer the feeling of actually having to move their finger across different keys than spam one. You may find there's no difference, I, on the other hand, would hate Dragoon going from what it is now to 1222111112.

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huh. Decent BLM didn't use enochian. You learn something new every day.

1222111112?
I wonder what your rotation's like xD
Because if you're being real, you will always be moving your fingers across different keys.
an example. 1>2>1>3>4>1>5>1>c1> and so on and so on.
You won't just be pressing the 3 GCD combos alone. Ever.
Eh, it'll happen anyway. Somehow or the other.
With every expansion, streamlining will happen.
It happened before, it's happening now and it'll most definitely happen again.

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Originally Posted by hagare

huh. Decent BLM didn't use enochian.

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REuse. Given Transpose (and later, Umbral Soul), there was no reason to drop Enochian, and therefore no reason to hit it more than once per instance.

The only exception was long in-fight CSs, by which time its CD would be back anyways and BLM merely joined a long line of "screwed over" jobs, and less severely so than some others.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

REuse. Given Transpose (and later, Umbral Soul), there was no reason to drop Enochian, and therefore no reason to hit it more than once per instance.

The only exception was long in-fight CSs, by which time its CD would be back anyways and BLM merely joined a long line of "screwed over" jobs, and less severely so than some others.

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No one said anything about reuse.
And now you don't have to use it all.
How, automatic. xD

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Originally Posted by hagare

No one said anything about reuse.
And now you don't have to use it all.
How, automatic. xD

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A job that deals has a third the throughput of the second-worst job could be said to have "no" throughput. In that same sense, Enochian, as a button, was "not used" (with any frequency sufficient to warrant a button of its own) except by poorer players.

Automatic, if the button is otherwise to be spent on an only once-per-instance button, is preferable. Even combat pots offered more nuanced and meaningful use.

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Originally Posted by hagare

I'm sorry.
My brain seems to be a bit wonky today.
But can you explain what you're trying to say?

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Out of daily posts, sorry.

Simply this:
- You've misconstrued what was at its most extreme an obvious case of mild exaggeration. (A skill used once per instance is one that goes practically unused. "Not needing to be reapplied" was also explicitly mentioned previously -- multiple times, iirc.)
- Turning Enochian into a trait was a good thing, and fits far better principles of button design that did having it as a separate action. (I'd even go so far as to say it was only ever made an action, instead of a trait, to better hype job trailers -- since the average player, especially back then, was shortsighted enough to think getting 5 new "actions" inherently more exciting than getting 5 new "actions or traits".)

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Originally Posted by hagare

hmmmm.... a button that you only press once for the whole instance. Like the tank stance button?

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Due to tanks having reason, at least in 8-man content, to switch their stance off, there is at least some small point in having a tank stance button. There was none, however, for Enochian. The only punishment added to someone losing Enochian except in under 27 seconds from having used it before was that it'd require a half-second of weave time due to its animation.

Enochian's punishment, moreover, was ill-aimed. It could only worsen the experience for the few players we least wanted to constrain while existing as a non-mechanic for everyone else. Imagine a fee, for instance, for making little money per day; though applied to other systems of the game, such would make about as much sense as Enochian having a cooldown, requiring weave-space, and needing its own button. There wasn't a single thing good about it outside of button fetishism.

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And I thought you like pressing buttons

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You seem to be conflating my position with other camps. I do like pressing buttons at the rhythms, densities, and ranges enjoyable to me, but that range (or total button count) is only a part of the equation, and my preference falls between certain counts rather than simply seeing more buttons as better (especially if the same affordances could be managed with fewer keys).

That said, it's really time we got back to the larger topics:

• Can combo-consolidation be a QoL option (i.e., one that is not banked upon as a means, by itself, of avoiding whatever button counts the devs seen as a reasonable ceiling)?

  I've made the case that yes, it could be, so long as the same push for consolidation insists on its being an option, but I am wholly open to contrary evidence.

• If it can be an option, should that option be allowed to those who'd want it?

  Likewise, I've made the case that consolidating combos is a trade-off; some would prefer the button-efficiency of taking it while others prefer the tactile cues of the current system.

• Is it worth considering other ways of increasing efficiency and buttonflow-based engagement?

  If those are positives of allowing for or barring consolidating, how else might we pursue those benefits? And, is there enough to be had in either direction to be worth talking about or holding the job kits to harder scrutiny (in regard to buttonflow and button efficiency) for?

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

A job that deals has a third the throughput of the second-worst job could be said to have "no" throughput. In that same sense, Enochian, as a button, was "not used" (with any frequency sufficient to warrant a button of its own) except by poorer players.

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I'm sorry.
My brain seems to be a bit wonky today.
But can you explain what you're trying to say?

Is it that Enochian doesn't really mean much because you only press it once and you forget about it.
Except for the bad players who keep having it fall off?
And I thought you like pressing buttons :p
hmmmm.... a button that you only press once for the whole instance. Like the tank stance button?

I hate the idea of single button combos.

BUT what I think could be done and would be fairly helpful to kill (some) button bloat on jobs would be an AoE stance.

Instead of separate abilities that you press for AoE fights, it would be a stance that you throw on and you just do your "normal" rotation which now has slightly lower potency and cleaves. Cleaves would be added to some OGCD attacks too (every expansion, more and more single target OGCDs are getting shared timer AE equivalents, so most will have this). The idea would be to get rid of the emaciated AE rotations that most jobs have and make it so that the game reinforces the job's rotation more (rather than dungeon runs being about 9 minutes of your actual single target rotation and more time doing "boring" AE rotations.

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Originally Posted by Velvet_Lunarfang

Do you think we will see the day where our rotation for combos will be just one button instead of 3-4? I think it would be a blessing and cut down on the hotbar bloat that we are getting for skills. What are your opinions on it?

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I actually support this!!

ESO has it & its pretty pragmatic/straightforward rather than have your screen be flooded with so much stuff; takes away immersion,

Simple, the better,

I vote this as a yes

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Originally Posted by hagare

I'm sorry.
My brain seems to be a bit wonky today.
But can you explain what you're trying to say?

Is it that Enochian doesn't really mean much because you only press it once and you forget about it.
Except for the bad players who keep having it fall off?
And I thought you like pressing buttons :p
hmmmm.... a button that you only press once for the whole instance. Like the tank stance button?

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I mean, technically a tank’s stance can be toggled on and off as an encounter deems necessary (e.g., with swaps). So you’re already pressing it more than the one-and-done buttons that were one-and-done in just about every encounter (e.g., any decent BLM and Enochian). Just because a lot of BLMs were bad and let it drop doesn’t make your argument valid. You can’t use bad play to support this…whatever it is that you’ve been going on about for a while now.


On topic: I’ve always been against the idea of combo consolidation on the basis that I don’t believe it would be an optional thing in this game, or a preference one could toggle on or off. I think they would implement it across the board, and I spam one button enough as it is on healers that I’d prefer to keep my multiple button presses for other jobs. If it were an optional setting, I really wouldn’t care if they put it in or not.

Playing on a controller, pressing X > circle > triangle > X > circle > weave in that up D-pad > etc. just feels more engaging to me than holding my controller in one hand and hitting X over and over again (a la my healer “rotation”). I think that some consolidation could be fine: things like consolidating AST’s Draw/Play and Minor Arcana/Crown Play is fine, making more “proc” toggle abilities like just turning Burst Shot into Straight Shot/Refulgent Arrow is also fine. But I don’t really want to see mass consolidation. I also just don’t think they would fill in the empty space with a bunch of interesting abilities or oGCDs.