An Experiment: Revise your job's toolkit to have more depth, in just 15 buttons.

Again, the limit is 15 buttons, to therefore leave one for Sprint. This includes, however, any Role Actions or their job-specific equivalents you feel are actually worth keeping. Obviously, try to be as button-efficient as possible.


Work off these design and QoL assumptions:

• Assume mob facing will have been somehow changed to be accurate even on mobs being rapidly spun.

  Idealistic, I know, but if you actually like positionals, assume for now that they'd be reliable in all content, at least within the bounds of the user's own skill.

• You may have buttons adjust their actions based on enemy type (Enemy or Ally).

  If you have an equal number of offensive and supportive/curative spells of a given type (e.g., single target, no reason to be used cross-target, etc.), you can have the button dynamically swap between attack and support actions. E.g., while an enemy is selected, it's Glare; while an ally is selected, it's Cure II.

• Skills now support custom targeting schemes by default.

  When placing any action onto your Hotbar, you can choose to include a Targeting Scheme, whereby you determine on whom/what the action will act, if possible. For instance, you may have it go from Mouseover (skipped automatically if no mouse is active) -> Current Target -> Target of Target -> Focus Target). You may filter the different fail conditions by which the next selection is attempted, but by default is uses all among: Out of Range, Wrong Target Type (Enemy, Ally, Party Member), Out of Line of Sight.

• Buttons and button sets may vary conditionally in their actions accessed.

  For instance, you may (1) have a single button cover both Blizzard IV (must be in Umbral) and Fire IV (must be in Astral), or (2) even have button set by which 2 buttons cover the needs of Fire IV and Blizzard III (from in Astral or AF3, if you choose to keep that mechanic as such), and Blizzard IV and Fire III (from in Umbral or UI3).

• You may use differences in charge times to differentiate spells.

  For instance, a short Fire cast may cast Fire I, a longer Fire cast Fire III (from out of AF3) or Fire IV (from within AF3 and Enochian). Assume that the thresholds by which this will change will be well-marked to the player along with the predictive time at which they can stutter-cast and still hit that threshold. Still, if you do this, try to include an element of granularity or compensation by which to bypass or mitigate relative uptime loss from latency on casts that do not max out one's charge for their particular cast line.

• You may use differences in position relative to one's target to differentiate actions.

  You may, for example, choose to make Wheeling Thrust and Fang & Claw altogether different abilities with unique, animation-fit effects. Having, say, kept them activated by combo completion but also having made them bankable by being usable at any time without breaking other combos, they'd likely be worth their own key, but perhaps not two separate ones. You may then choose to make F&C available from the flanks and Wheeling Thrust from the rear.

• Anything else similar to the above that you can think of.

  Just do explain the concept if it's new and try to keep it from being too convoluted. Having Quick Nock turn into Wide Volley or Split Shot into Grenado Shot beyond x yalms, for instance, anyone would understand with just a sentence's worth of explanation. If it takes more than 4 to explain it, it could probably be simplified, or deserves earlier introduced common undermechanics. On that note, if you want to suddenly add Stagger or (Armor-)Break concepts to the game, go for it... but do explain that beforehand.