Paladin doesn't suck, 2 minute rotations just ruined combat

[Shurrikhan]

You wanna talk about real hopium? 7.0 introduces a full rework of classes styled after PvP - individual LB bars and the works. Each class only has say 6-8 core buttons, plus some role ability buttons, and most of the variety in play comes from things added on to flesh it out - maybe one class has meaningful job gauge management rather than a very basic builder-spender setup, maybe another has positionals that are required to activate other abilities or traits, maybe that one is heavily focused on responding to and utilizing procs at the right time and in the right order.

The pvp stuff here is fine for pvp given the nature of pvp, but I don't want that for 12 minute pve fights...I actually enjoy maintaining a rotation and dealing with the drift of your buffs/debuffs/dots. Narrowing everything down to a handful of skills would be awful.

Generally agreed, but...

I would outright never play this game again if they did that to pve. WoW did that garbage and it now has the most boring combat ever.

Two things here:

1. It hasn't, let alone as any sweeping change (instead of individual small consolidations or expansions of a given spec's rotation).
2. Many DPS specs will even now will frequently have a greater number of separate rotational choices/actions than a typical XIV DPS job; button count alone does not tell the whole story.

There has been no sweeping change across WoW specs that has reduced the actual button count of combat-related skills by more than a sixth or so at most, unless you want to hugely stretch that definition by counting each of the umpteen forms of "Track X" as combat related and as separate actions just because there was, for a time, no tracking button on one's mini-map.

They've trimmed RPG-skill bloat, brought it back (since one could just not bother putting in on their bars anyways), slightly de-clunked/unbloated rotations (no Jab for Monk, no Hemorrhage for Sub Rogue, etc.), only to usually refill those lost buttons with new ones, etc. I'm sitting on 12+ non-situational rotational buttons (Charge [which, yes, is a damage gain], Slam, Whirlwind, Execute, Mortal Strike, Cleave, Skullsplitter, Rend, Thunderclap, Colossus Smash, Avatar, Bladestorm) on a Warrior, a "zug-zug" class. (Yes, if using an at all hybrid build there, even the AoE (minus perhaps Thunderclap) skills see use also in ST due to their amp windows.)

That's... the highest it's ever been, unless including incompatible or wasteful actions like Shield Slam (can't use except when sword-and-board, which in turn prevented/nerfed-to-death your core DPS rotational skill[s]) or pre-Cata hybrid specs (which were generally quite poor).

Moreover, if we compare that against the likes of, say, SAM, you'd have count each combo action separately --despite their being non-separable actions-- in order to push over that --especially given that, unlike the spec above, its AoE has no place, not even in short windows, in ST combat. You have a hit-when-charged Shoha, up to 4 charges of Shinten/Senei, Gekko [combo], Kasha [combo], Yuki [combo], Meikyo, and Ikishoten, Iaijutsu [combo via TG], and Namikiri -- is just 10 rotational actions. We could push the envelope a bit there and somewhat consider Hagakure rotational since it's used for sync, but that still pushes us up only to parity -- 11 actual separate rotational actions. (And if counting TG separately, we should probably do the same for rotational uses of Heroic Leap for its reduced uptime costs on Charge, etc., etc.)

One has roughly ~24 buttons and the other ~30, but both have roughly the same number of actual separable rotational actions (and a good deal more meaningful utility --3 mobility tools, 2 external mitigation tools, 3 personal mitigation tools, 3 CC tools, etc.-- on the one with fewer buttons).

We can definitely afford to convey more spec identity and flesh out spec kits even while spending fewer buttons on basic functions.

Whether "6-8 core buttons... + role actions + "things added on top to flesh it out" would be sufficient comes down to...

• to sophistication of consolidation and/or small tweaks to better allow for consolidation,
• semantics regarding what is "core,"
• and how many actions are given to "things added on to flesh it out,"

...but since PvP was the example [and given the later comments on XIV's "combos"], you can be assured that the likes of DRG's 10 combo buttons would instead just take up 3 slots (leaving enough also for Geir/Nos, Jump>MD, SSD>DFD>SD, a personal buff and a shared buff among the "8 buttons" -- which would be damn near the whole kit already -- without even relying on the X additional keys to flesh it out).