Did Stormblood fix abilty bloat? What is your opinion?

[Smexynerdy]

Hello fellow Eorzeans,

now that Stormblood is in full release and many have at least one charater at lvl 70 i thought it would be a good time to talk about ability bloat again, and whether or not it is fixed.

We all know the opinions on this are widely different, but i wanted to look on this topick from the keybind side of things.
Therefore we have to first agree on what abilitys realy need a keybind.
In my opinion this is ultimately defined by the abilitys potential use in a bossfight. If we go by this notion all class and job skills would need a keybind to be quickly accessible.
It is important to note here that i play on pc with mouse and keyboard as well as that in my opinion no of the above stated abiltys should be klicked. I know that some might for example consider to switch tank stances by klicking instead of using a keybind. And in some cases this might be ok, but for the sake of this discussion i will presume that those have to be keybinds as well.
This for example leaves me with 31 keybinds as a DRK.
This is obiously not point of this discussion since everyone uses different keybinds, but for the sake of completeness i include mine below:
I can manage this by using the following keybinds:
Q,E,R,F, 1 to 8 (5-8 on mouse)
Shift+Q,E,R,F, 5 to 8 (5-8 on mouse)
9,0,ß (on mouse)
Alt+(5-8 on mouse)(9,0,ß on mouse)

So do you think, from a keybind point of view, that:
- there are still to much abilitys.
or
- we are fine for Stormblood but need another prune in the next expansion.
or
- we are fine regardless.

Regards
Smexynerdy

edit: i compleatly forgot to include my own opinion...
As a keyboard and mouse user i think we should not exceed 24 keybinds. I know this sounds very specific, but in my opinion this is a number a keyboard and mouse user can manage without using special hardware (like a razer naga) and without more than two abilitys on the same key via shift.

edit2: As stated in some responses i should have phrased the title better. It appears my original attention was more targeted towards hotbar bloat caused by ability bloat. Based on my experience in other mmos i am also an advocate for consolidate combos, when it is possible to not lose the functionality. This would be the case for most of the tanks aggro combos, but NOT for the dps combos, since they end in two different finishers!

[Ruinfeild]

Personally I would say no.

As a paladin, I still got about 2 1/2 bars of skills that I use and I don't even want to think about what the other classes are. I was hoping that they would do something along the lines of either combining a lot of skills or giving us the option to meld skills together (with a limit of course) to help with the bloat.

[Tsukino]

I mostly like the new things for SMN (except the removal of Sustain), but I don't think they've reduced the bloat hardly at all. On PLD they hardly removed anything except the changes to the cross role, and actually added an earlier ability, so if anything it's worse than before.

I haven't played too many other jobs yet, though my overall impression is that they kept things roughly the same while still giving us 10 levels of new abilities, so it's the same at 70 as it used to be at 60 and not worse.

I personally would prefer more simplification, but I know there's a huge number of people here who love their 47-ability rotations and somehow think the combat is "slow" as it is.

[Driavna]

Some classes ended with fewer skills and some with even more, like PLD. Mix results.

[SaitoHikari]

The bloat for me as a Bard is the same as before, the only difference was that I replaced a ton of buffs and debuffs with potency attached to them with cross role skills that are used or greyed out depending on what gets swapped in/out.

[Robbocroft]

I main DRK and honestly i can't see any difference...I'd like there were fewer skills actually. Playing on PS4 right now i had to resort to the hotbars switching option where you have different skils if you press L2 + R2 or R2 + L2. It's a bit clucky in concitated battles. And some skills are the same. Lime Rampart and Shadowskin. I wish there was only one with shorter cooldown

[Lildragora]

I was comfortable using my 3 hotbars, 1 for each fairy and a 3rd for DPS (technically 4 if you count things like sprint and teleports, other things you might need in or out of a battle). I never felt there was a problem with bloat as this was comfortable for me. Now I have a hotbar thats missing like 4-5 buttons and it really bothers me. Also at some point Yoshi made an argument against giving summoners a new egi due to wanting to keep job abilities the same count wise and now look where we are... some jobs have 2-3 abilities over some and others are just way less.

Outside of my perspective I dont think they really accomplished what they portrayed since some jobs are bloated still or now are and some are not.

[Serilda]

I use a pad with two bars and extra trigger bars, so I have enough space for most jobs without feeling too cramped. I'm having varied results so far. With WHM I have a ridiculous amount of space now and have more duplicated abilities across my bars (which actually works fine since Cleric Stance was removed, but I still have far more space available for the last 2 abilities than I need).

Meanwhile, I'm not 70 yet but it feels as though RDM has some of the bloat we were trying to get away from with the older jobs' simplifications, which is weird; I love its design but it's difficult to decide which skills I don't need on my primary hotbar when it's so flexible. And in general, actually using role abilities the way they were apparently designed - which I don't - requires you to either dedicate spare buttons to situational skills, write bar-swapping macros (hello, bloat!) or spend 3 minutes at the start of each instance rearranging your keybinds on the clunky pad interface, which sort of sucks. I wish there were fewer role abilities that are 100% useless in certain content, e.g. Protect in fights with two healers, Esuna in fights with no debuffs. Especially as you can't tell you're in one of the latter until it's too late to remove the skill.

[Talec]

No, because it was never their true intention. They clouded nice words behind the true goal of the rework: They wanted to make all classes significantly easier. It's deep within japanese mindset, that something complex is discourageing a lot of people. They hoped to attract more people by changing the System to an easier gameplay.

And to cover their Intention, they talked about useless abilities.

"Just deleting not much used abilities"? Aha, that's why all the dmg selfbuffs have gone while we still have amazing movement slow debuff but lost so many important skills... guess what? The pet control for SMN is still horrible for PS4 Players like me.

[Lildragora]

No, because it was never their true intention. They clouded nice words behind the true goal of the rework: They wanted to make all classes significantly easier. It's deep within japanese mindset, that something complex is discourageing a lot of people. They hoped to attract more people by changing the System to an easier gameplay.

And to cover their Intention, they talked about useless abilities.

"Just deleting not much used abilities"? Aha, that's why all the dmg selfbuffs have gone while we still have amazing movement slow debuff but lost so many important skills... guess what? The pet control for SMN is still horrible for PS4 Players like me.

I dont think pet control will ever be one of this games strong points which is unfortunate since they have 2 great pet jobs!