Korean Live Letter Summary

[Lauront]

If 1-2-3 does not take more skill than 1-1-1, then that logically means 4-8-2 or any other 3-step combination does not take more skill than 1-1-1 either, because they're fundamentally all the same.
That also means that the combination of 1-2-3-4-8-2 does not take more skill than 1-1-1-1-1-1, as these can be broken down into their respective micro-combos. And you can repeat that argument for any chain of any length ad infinitum. 12-4-1-5-2-11-8-1-4-2-6 clearly isn't harder than 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1, except it is, in fact, a lot harder to memorize and perform flawlessly under combat conditions.

In other words: Yes, it does add skill. People commit the fallacy of looking at it in a vacuum, but in a vacuum, all skills are very non-demanding. Most of the OGCDs are, in a vacuum, literally just one button press every 20-90 seconds. You could make the argument that this adds so little gameplay that you can remove them entirely. But you have multiple OGCDs on top of your combo on top of your job mechanics on top of the boss mechanics. It all adds up, the 1-2-3 as much as the single button presses every 60 seconds.

So basically to make your argument work, you need to stretch it to chains like 12-4-1-5-2-11-8-1-4-2-6, i.e. something like playing a piano (where the skill lies in executing particularly long sequences of key presses, among other things), because it's pretty transparently ridiculous when you compare say, maybe, 1-1-1 or 1-2-1, to 1-2-3 or 2-5-6, i.e. 3 button combos. There is no skill differential between the two - not any that really matters on any level, because the difficulty increase between 3 and, say, 10 buttons is not at all linear. For FFXIV, it's all keyboard memory and two sets of 3 button combos is not particularly hard to execute. So I'm not buying that. The sequencing and timing is, as always, what matters for melee combos. It's in fact easier when the number of buttons falls to lapse into pressing the wrong one.

They don't need to do it exactly like PVP, where the entire combo is contained in just one button, but they can at least make it so that, e.g. buttons 5 and 6 are reduced to one, i.e. shared moves between sets would be fixed to a single button, so you'd have 1-1-1, maybe 1-2-1, and so on.

[Lastelli]

So basically to make your argument work...

He's right though. If you claim that a 1-1-1 combo is as "difficult" as a 1-2-3 combo, you're basically claiming that any fixed combination of x different inputs is as difficult as repeating the same input x times.

Anyway, this argument has no purpose. The dev team should totally redesign most jobs to make a 1-button-combo based combat system work. Actually, if we consider dps jobs, the only job that could benefit from such a system without any major change to its base rotation is DRG since it has 2 fixed combos. All other dps jobs can at best free 2 or 3 slots by merging some skills here and there (like straight shot and refulgent arrow for brd or summon baha and enkindle baha for smn). Of course, they won't implement 1-button combos for 2-3 jobs only, since this would pose several issues in terms of jobs balance.