How many skills is too many?

[Nihility]

The purpose of having varying cooldowns, durations, and potencies is that you might just have to think about when to use what. You might want to activate Rampart early, for instance, so that you can have it back up in time for the next tankbuster for which Rampart will make the difference between life and death, or at least a significant difference in healer contribution necessary. Admitedly, that novelty wears off fast as unvarying fights are gradually memorized, but even the memorized timings are fair bit more interesting than 'press/hold defensive button before incoming hit'.

Without a sufficient number of these, there's no real interplay between them, nor between those "boosters" and the other oGCDs. Remembering to hit a button once every 2 minutes is not fun. Calculating, based on incoming events, when would be optimal to hit it is where it starts to get interesting. Without that consideration, a boosting CD can be handled just as easily by trimming back burst DPS requirements and providing that benefit passively as not to advantage certain classes based on the intervals at which one enters the burst requirement windows, badly limiting or matching their sustain depending on the fight and gear levels, and rather than having a resource CD it would be better just to cut out resources like TP entirely.

Beware how you try to reduce bloat, or you may well just end up creating a yet more pitiful form of bloat in its place.

i know you put think in italics and all but it's just not true. Been through the savage raids with a bunch of groups now and the dps cooldowns all just work off one another so the best time to use all of them is exactly the same as the best time it would be to use a single one. Crit+damage+stat boost+whatever all boost each other making using them all together far more effective than stringing them out individually. With the new shorter GCD not having to weave them all in as quickly as possible would be a welcome change i would think

It's basically the same deal with tanks. You have the cheat death on a very long cooldown, the big damage reduction on a long cooldown, and the smaller damage reduction on a shorter cooldown. Then they have a bunch of trivially small cooldowns(with the exception of dark mind, dark knights have a pretty big bonus on nice damage reduction cooldowns)

and even though it wasn't quoted having evolving skill buttons for combos would cut down needed keys pretty beautifully
I'll Use dark knight since it's a simple one
you have 1. Hard Slash 2. Spinning Slash 3. power slash 4. Syphon Strike 5. Souleater 6. Delirium
6 Buttons could be cut down to 1. Hard Slash -> Spinning Slash -> Power Slash 2. Syphon Strike -> Souleater 3. Delirium
almost every combo component is heavily used so that would free up prime keyboard space for other heavily used skills