Why can't we have the choice of auto skills and manual impute skills?

[TaranTatsuuchi]

There's definitely some consolidation that could be done, even if you don't do the combos...
There's some skills that you won't, or in some cases can't use unless something else was used first.


Like, with red mage or bard, the proc skills that basically replace one of your skills with a better one while you have the proc.
Those could be made so that the skill becomes the proced one.

And summoner, deathflare can't be used unless you're in dreadwyrm trance, and it ends the trance.
Considering pressing the trance button a 2nd time just ends the trance, there's no reason the flare couldn't replace the trance button while in the trance.

[Dualgunner]

"This doesn't seem to be an effective use of the Dev's time" - It's already working in PvP. The hard part is clearly already done.
"I want to keep doing it the current way" - So long as they don't take away the current way of doing things, I see no reason for anyone to be against such a change. The fact that they DID take away the ability to set various combo actions as individual buttons in PvP is definitely a valid concern.

Your third and fourth are contradictory. Let's use RDM as an example: in order for its gameplay to work in PVP with squished buttons, Verstone and Verfire are 100% procced. Jolt and Impact exist as a faster way to generate mana at cost of MP. These are inherently different to how PVE RDM works, where Jolt is used as the common shortspell to get a dualcast ready; veraero and verthunder, which have a chance to proce verstone and verfire which, themselves, are shortspells used to get a dualcast ready.

What does this mean? It means PVP RDM and PVE RDM have notable differences to not only how much damage they can achieve, but significant differences in gameplay style. There would need to be significant work to balance the game to allow both this squished button style and the regular "manual input" style to coexist and for one to not negate the existence of the other.

So no, the "hard work is not already done." Not if you want to allow players to retain the manual input methods.

Is there button bloat that could be fixed? Yes. They've already started working on some sensible things in Stormblood, like making spells naturally evolve through traits (Jolt becomes Jolt 2). From here, it would be nice if Jolt 2 became Impact because there is no situation in which Jolt 2 is advantageous when Impactful is up, save for "Impact is about to fall off," which I believe if a cast begins, the proc shouldn't be able to fall off. (personal bit there)

[Reynhart]

I was saying balance in the context of button reduction.

Here's how you do it. First, you create traits that we should call "<spell> mastery", where a spell is replaced by its...oh, silly me, they already did it for SMN, SCH, WHM, AST and BLM.
And there's several other modification you can do. "Ley Lines" and "Between the Lines" don't need to be two buttons, likewise for Enochian, Fire IV and Blizzard IV, or Jolt II and Impact, VerThunder and VerFire, VerAero and VerStone...

[RiyahArp]

What about the jobs that can't make use of it? How do you properly balance, say for example, a job like drg in comparison to smn?

DRG just has two combos, 1-2-3, 4-5-6. Reduce them, keep everything else, really. You don't need to go crazy, its just if you have combos that are a single sequence of buttons, its ok. Only Monk really would be an issue.

[Reynhart]

DRG just has two combos, 1-2-3, 4-5-6.

Technically, it's 1-2-3-4-5 and 6-7-8-5-4. They also have their AoE combo 9-10. Going from 10 buttons to 3 would be great for button bloat

[Ruinfeild]

With the fact that we can use all the role actions now (sure you don't need to USE all of them), the button bloat just got worse and I would love to see something like it is done in PvP. Hell, if people want to throw that much of a hissy fit about it, maybe they can work on the macro timing so we can do it ourselves (I tried it a few times and it works but you can tell the HUGE difference due ot the extra half a second to second you need to wait). They said they would do something about button bloat but I am still waiting to see it.

[Ryaz]

If you guys want brain dead combat, I suggest playing WoW with its four button rotations. OI play a ret paladin and while I enjoy it enough, the combat is bland and skilless.