I only ever had issues with Scholar and Monk.
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I only ever had issues with Scholar and Monk.
Button bloat? No, not at all
A remotely close issue would be sam, but perfect manageable.
People just need to separate their hotbar and keybinds in aoe trash and st damage with utility skills.
Move aoe trash to some "hard" reachable buttons or uncommon button combination and voilĂ , problem solved
You have to plan at what button what skill is best but i wouldnt say that there is a button bloat problem.
There is some bloat, but not a lot. And when there is, they find a way to improve it later.
Like, in my opinion, DRK is very bloated (many oGCD that do not really serve a purpose other than being oGCDs)
The change they are doing with SAM's 3rd eye also addresses button bloat a bit.
Suppose they do the PvP thing.
1-2-3 goes to 1-1-1
1-1-1 is just button mashing
You can make a keyboard macro that autofires 1-1-1, no hax or game modification required.
Your rotation is now automated.
That particular "bloat" isn't actually bloat. The combat is all about making your brain juggle a rotation, cooldowns and fight mechanics together.
Less balls to juggle is actually just flat out simplifying the game to be easier.
For the most part, no. They do, however, have a bad habit of implementing AoE equivalents to single target abilities that do nothing but add bloat. Guren and Senei come to mind on Samurai alongside the upcoming Shoha II.
I think there are indeed too many buttons per job. I do NOT want to have only like 6 buttons or so. But about 30 is too much; for me it's overwhelming.
I notice how on jobs with less buttons to press I'm much better. For example, MCH has a good amount. NIN has too many. I like 16-24 buttons you have to keep track of, including situational and role actions.
For tanks, WAR has a nice amount of actions. PLD has way too much, and it's not very fun to play because of this.
I'm all for combining some actions that proc through others or can only be used under specific buffs. There are still enough other buttons so the jobs definitely wouldn't get dumbed down just by reducing how many different buttons to press. But it would get easier for the fingers and for hotbar management. I don't want rotations to be less complicated. Just some actions combined into one button, or some actions removed that don't do much by themselves.
IMO as a controller play, no, I don't think there is.
And I think they've been throwing in smarter solutions to keep the number of buttons down whilst having more abilities to use.
But as somebody who uses the Expanded Crossbars on controller, I feels I still have room for more. Though how much room varies from job to job.
However, I feel like with anything that gets mixed views like this, the true beauty of having multiple jobs per role is that they can satisfy different types of people and what they like.
For tank classes, and this is coming from the controller perspective, I put my defensive cooldowns on the double tap R2 hot bar extension, which gives 8 cooldown slots. Since they're something you plan out when you press them and when you need them is telegraphed, you can just use that extension as they're needed.
For dragoon, though, the single target rotation the skills just for the rotation, and your generic buffs you want to watch (Dragon Sight, Battle Litany, etc) made up more than 16 skills, so it's impossible to place them all on one hotbar. You are forced to set up more than one hotbar for just your basic single target rotation, which means a lot of hotbar swapping on that job which is something you don't have to do with any other DPS.