Dancer in 6.0

[Kaedys]

A lot of the changes just seem...half-baked. At odds with the rotation.

1. Tillana grants us Standard Step, but I doubt very much that the existing opener (Standard prepull -> Technical) is going to change substantially, as Technical prepull would desync it from the rest of the raid buffs that land during the 3rd GCD. And we use Standard Step as much for its damage as its buff, tbh, so granting us the buff doesn't really save us anything. It's certainly not going to replace a Standard Step usage. So realistically, it's just a high-potency half-GCD with some superfluous extras we don't care about.
2. Starfall Dance is a super heavy hit, but it's guaranteed critical direct hit...and it's a follow-up to a buff that increases our crit and direct hit chance (note: Devilment does not increase critical damage, I just tested it to confirm). And since it's easily our hardest hitting ability, and Devilment aligns with Technical Step and all of the rest of the raid buffs, we'll clearly want to use Starfall Dance during Devilment, despite it being the only ability we have that gains zero benefit from Devilment. It frankly just feels kinda terrible. It's like if Dragoon got a new ability that could only be used immediately after Life Surge, and consumed the buff, but all it did was apply a super high potency DoT (which cannot crit, and thus does not benefit from Life Surge's buff effect).
3. The new Improv, and the finisher, feels poorly designed. It's in essence another raid survivability cooldown, but to use it at full potency, we have to stop DPSing (and moving) entirely for 12 seconds. And it's still a crazy small radius. Since it still provides half the shield (5% HP) and one tick of the rather terrible HoT when used and immediately finished, I suspect that its most common use-case will be double-weaved between damage abilities during a raid stack for an effectively free 5% HP shield and nothing more. But if that's its use case...why not make it just be a separate oGCD that grants a 5% shield? Just weird.
4. What the heck does Flourish not turn into Fan Dance IV when used? For that matter, Technical Step -> Tillana and Devilment -> Starfall Dance could use the same treatment. Why do we need to have separate hotbar slots for these things?!

It honestly feels like they couldn't think of anything to tack on, so they just started throwing new combos off existing spells without any thought to how they'd actually function with the rest of the rotation. Which is really sad, because some other jobs got truly exemplary changes that directly addressed major pain-points, and Dancer, in the first expansion after release, just kinda got a grab-bag of poorly-connected and counter-synergizing random stuff thrown into their kit.

[Rongway]

What the heck does Flourish not turn into Fan Dance IV when used? For that matter, Technical Step -> Tillana and Devilment -> Starfall Dance could use the same treatment. Why do we need to have separate hotbar slots for these things?!

DNC has so few buttons already, and will have even fewer in EW since we'll be able to keep completely separate AoE and single target bars with the change to Steps; however, I will always agree that condition-locked actions should share a button with the action that unlocks them. If you 100% absolutely must press action 1 before you can use action 2, it should be a 1-1 instead of a 1-2. It's puzzling that there are still some buttons that have escaped that treatment (Between the Lines, Yoshi-P please) when so many buttons now upgrade just to save space or prevent you from activating a weaker action that could be used incorrectly instead.

[Kaedys]

however, I will always agree that condition-locked actions should share a button with the action that unlocks them. If you 100% absolutely must press action 1 before you can use action 2, it should be a 1-1 instead of a 1-2. It's puzzling that there are still some buttons that have escaped that treatment (Between the Lines, Yoshi-P please) when so many buttons now upgrade just to save space or prevent you from activating a weaker action that could be used incorrectly instead.

Exactly! In any situation where two buttons are both linked and mutually exclusive, they should simply replace. If ability 2 cannot be used until ability 1 is used, and ability 1 cannot be used while ability 2 is usable (usually due to cooldown), or even often if ability 2 is always used following ability 1, you should have that bar conversion. And there are so many examples of this still out there. Heck, even Reaper still has a couple that could use that treatment (Enshroud -> Communio and Arcane Circle -> Plentiful Harvest), despite having a pretty good ability replacement setup. Hotbar bloat is a serious thing, and FFXIV is, imo, particularly bad about it sometimes.