Suggestion for NIN ability Huraijin

[Shurrikhan]

I would really love to hear your definition of button bloat to have a good laugh.

Using more buttons than is necessary to accomplish identical or better ends.

...Seriously, why are we making this about some arbitrary tipping point in button count?



If I give you 3 buttons for Glare that can be used in any order for the same potency, it's still just Glare... and thereby bloat, regardless of whether you have 3 other actions or 30.

In the same sense, there is absolutely no point in having both Huraijin and Armor Crush when you can just have either act as a Huraijin outside of combo and as Armor Crush (but with 30s Huton granted instead of just 30s Huton refreshed) after Gust Blade.

[Renathras]

and are especially rare from people who actually do put in effort into their gameplay

"it's too hard"

Low-key ad hominem fallacy says "What?"

I don't play with a mouse. I play with a controller. I can fit 16 buttons on a crossbar set, 32 on two. 30 buttons is 3 times 10, which is A LOT OF BUTTONS. It's a third of the way to 100. So the idea that Jobs need 35+ buttons or are "too simple" or "people not putting effort into their gameplay" is just stupid. A lot of games limit you to around 8-16 abilities, and those aren't accused of being too simple or of players being lazy. Just stop.

For me personally, about 29 buttons is where we should draw the line. That allow for Sprint, LB, and Potion to fit in 32, and 29 is still a lot of buttons. I'm not sure why "29 is too few...but 35 is just right" comes into play, as that's a difference of only 6 buttons.

PLD, SCH, and AST are CONSTANTLY getting complained about for having too many buttons. If you aren't seeing it, I'm guessing you don't read many people's posts on the topic over the last couple years. They aren't the only ones, but seem to be the most noted offenders.

I do agree not every Job is for everyone, though. But there also is an issue of, as the game has more expansions, new abilities are added. There comes a point where it's just too many buttons for ANYONE. Where that is depends on the person - for me it's 29, for someone else it may be 40 - but if we don't see some reductions/combinations in rational and intelligent ways, eventually we surpass whatever that is.

On controller, binding all single-target things (which is especially important for NIN due to burst), requires 17 keybinds, meaning it's impossible to fit them all on one hotbar set. And while one might consider having a "burst" and "downtime" hotbar set, a good deal of the buttons used in burst are also used in downtime (Mudras and Ninki spenders, for example), meaning that would require a lot of duplication to achieve, which then would require a THIRD hotbar set to fit in the rest of the buttons. Something I used to do in SB on PLD, btw. And it was every bit as annoying as it sounds.

Single target rotations should consist of around 16 buttons, more or less. Sixteen is not a massive shortage of buttons. Really think about how many that is. And that's the "active use all the time in combat and/or during burst", not including situational stuff like debuffing the boss (Feint), AOE rotations, or other situational stuff like Shukuchi or Hide or Arm's Length.

Add to that you're generally going to have another 4-6-8 buttons for AOE, and that many more situational abilities, and that gets you around 30 total buttons, which SHOULD be more than enough for most people and most Jobs.

You like 50+ buttons, that's great. But it's generally not good game design.

It also really is a keyboard vs controller thing, since I remember playing WoW with Keyboard and having 1-5, shift, control, and alt modifiers to those (20 altogether), 6-= (8 more buttons) of situational stuff, and then other hotbars on the side for professions (given, you didn't swap into those like FFXIV), mounts, foods, and utility stuff for the class like Mage teleports or Druid forms and such. But, it was frankly ridiculous having roughly 50 buttons across all my hotbars, and only around 15 of those were routinely used in combat, with another 5-10, depending on class, being highly situational. At least it made sense there, since WoW was more of an adventure game and I didn't need "Cooking" or "Eyes of the Beast" in an easy to reach button since...you know, I wasn't using that during my burst phase in combat.

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It is fine if some Jobs have more. I'm not saying none can. But they should actually have value and justify their place on the hotbar slot, and you should really have down around 16 or so for high use and burst. That's a lot of buttons if you actually think about it. 1-0 and then 1-6 again.

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It'd be one thing if I was asking for some huge change like "get rid of Ninki and all spenders" or "get rid of Mudras", but this is one button that does make logical sense to combine, not a great culling/gutting.

That said, my OP was just asking if there were any good reasons NOT to do it...and as far as I can tell from the replies, there aren't, and some others think the same idea has merit. That answers my original question.

So thank you to all the people who responded.

Using more buttons than is necessary to accomplish identical or better ends.

...Seriously, why are we making this about some arbitrary tipping point in button count?

And yeah, basically agreed on this.

[Deo14]

I don't play with a mouse. I play with a controller. I can fit 16 buttons on a crossbar set, 32 on two. 30 buttons is 3 times 10, which is A LOT OF BUTTONS. It's a third of the way to 100. So the idea that Jobs need 35+ buttons or are "too simple" or "people not putting effort into their gameplay" is just stupid. A lot of games limit you to around 8-16 abilities, and those aren't accused of being too simple or of players being lazy. Just stop.

You can go for 4x16 with gamepad as far as I know. If you don't want to learn to use 3rd and 4th hotbar, then you can still play on M+KB on consoles afaik.

What you consider lot isn't necessarily lot for others. For 3rd time, complains about button count are rare to see. Games with less abilities aren't necessary simple, you're looking at very, very small picture. In DotA you usually have 4 skills and 6+1 items, which can have active use, depending on items. So you have usually around 7 buttons. Yet the game is extremely nuanced and has one of the biggest esports there is. If you want to have MMORPG example, GW2 has roughly 2x less buttons, but 2x-3x times higher APM and more chaotic and faster combat.

FFXIV has very predictable and slow combat, so 30+ buttons is really nothing hard compared to other games, stop pretending it is. Once you combine executing your rotation flawlessly WHILE doing mechanics, that's where difficulty in FFXIV comes from.

For me personally, about 29 buttons is where we should draw the line. That allow for Sprint, LB, and Potion to fit in 32, and 29 is still a lot of buttons. I'm not sure why "29 is too few...but 35 is just right" comes into play, as that's a difference of only 6 buttons.

"Only 6 buttons". You can ruin job by just removing single button, Hydaelyn help us if they removed 6. Job design is already in dire state, we really don't need to make it even worse. But if you're talking about complete merge of AoE and ST, then I'm in. No reason to have ~7 separate skills just for trash packs in dungeons.

PLD, SCH, and AST are CONSTANTLY getting complained about for having too many buttons. If you aren't seeing it, I'm guessing you don't read many people's posts on the topic over the last couple years. They aren't the only ones, but seem to be the most noted offenders.

As for healers, it's not button count, but more about same buttons over and over. This is problem with healers, devs are clueless what to do with healers, so they just give them another batch of random healing skills everytime and call it a day. As for AST goes, I've just heard that it has bloated burst, as in too many actions and weaving.

As for PLD, people mostly just meme about it, there isn't many people who really do think he has too many buttons that would make it unplayable or anything. Sure, you could merge Intervention with Sheltron and FoF with Req, but in the end, there's plenty of skills you don't use even once per fight so it's whatever, you can just yeet Shield bash to the corner of hotbar and let it rot there. Too many buttons isn't really a problem if you just put situational ones on worse keybinds. In your case, just put them and cross hotbar 3 and you're gucci. It seems that you can shuffle them easily, albeit possibly less conveniently. But why would you need something super convenient for LB for example? It's gonna lock you in animations, so what's the harm in putting it at some 3rd hotbar. For PLD, you could put LB, Interject, Shield Lob (you should always hardcast HS instead of this), Shield Bash and Low Blow on 3rd hotbar. Then maybe stance and even cover, since that shit always comes in handy only when you don't have enough Oath anyway. There you go PLD that you can fit all important stuff on first 2 cross hotbars.

I do agree not every Job is for everyone, though. But there also is an issue of, as the game has more expansions, new abilities are added. There comes a point where it's just too many buttons for ANYONE. Where that is depends on the person - for me it's 29, for someone else it may be 40 - but if we don't see some reductions/combinations in rational and intelligent ways, eventually we surpass whatever that is.

But they do remove buttons. And they also remove all the nuances game has, so we might end up with net positive with button count, but game is overall easier, so it's trade off. I wouldn't mind having more nuances and less buttons, but that's not happening.

On controller, binding all single-target things (which is especially important for NIN due to burst), requires 17 keybinds, meaning it's impossible to fit them all on one hotbar set. And while one might consider having a "burst" and "downtime" hotbar set, a good deal of the buttons used in burst are also used in downtime (Mudras and Ninki spenders, for example), meaning that would require a lot of duplication to achieve, which then would require a THIRD hotbar set to fit in the rest of the buttons. Something I used to do in SB on PLD, btw. And it was every bit as annoying as it sounds.

Single target rotations should consist of around 16 buttons, more or less. Sixteen is not a massive shortage of buttons. Really think about how many that is. And that's the "active use all the time in combat and/or during burst", not including situational stuff like debuffing the boss (Feint), AOE rotations, or other situational stuff like Shukuchi or Hide or Arm's Length.

Rotation should consist of how many button job needs to play and feel good. There is 19 jobs in game, arbitrary limiting yourself in designing them based on crap like button count will result in further homogenization.

Add to that you're generally going to have another 4-6-8 buttons for AOE, and that many more situational abilities, and that gets you around 30 total buttons, which SHOULD be more than enough for most people and most Jobs.

You can make macro to swap between AoE and ST skills, I use it for some jobs and it's pretty cool. And no, 30 is not enough for most jobs, just as you can see in the picture of NIN's skills that I've sent.

It also really is a keyboard vs controller thing, since I remember playing WoW with Keyboard and having 1-5, shift, control, and alt modifiers to those (20 altogether), 6-= (8 more buttons) of situational stuff, and then other hotbars on the side for professions (given, you didn't swap into those like FFXIV), mounts, foods, and utility stuff for the class like Mage teleports or Druid forms and such. But, it was frankly ridiculous having roughly 50 buttons across all my hotbars, and only around 15 of those were routinely used in combat, with another 5-10, depending on class, being highly situational. At least it made sense there, since WoW was more of an adventure game and I didn't need "Cooking" or "Eyes of the Beast" in an easy to reach button since...you know, I wasn't using that during my burst phase in combat.

Everything is hard until you give it a try and learn it. I haven't touched gamepad in many years, so I can't speak from first hand experience, but I've heard that crosshotbar is actually amazing and some people use it even though they play on PC.

It is fine if some Jobs have more. I'm not saying none can. But they should actually have value and justify their place on the hotbar slot, and you should really have down around 16 or so for high use and burst. That's a lot of buttons if you actually think about it. 1-0 and then 1-6 again.

...

It'd be one thing if I was asking for some huge change like "get rid of Ninki and all spenders" or "get rid of Mudras", but this is one button that does make logical sense to combine, not a great culling/gutting.

But then NIN will still have 34 buttons. How do you plan to achieve yours truly beautiful 32 buttons max? We go back to the drawing board, since we need to gut NIN even more, just to remove those extra few buttons, since axing Huraijin won't be enough. Jobs already have set foundations, and most of them have 32+ buttons. Trying to remove buttons for some of your arbitrary number is the most boring, formulaic design you could go for.

I'm really confused what do you even want at this point. At first it seemed like you wanted every job to fit your ideal button count of 32, then you swapped to "It is fine if some Jobs have more.", and lastly you just want to settle on Huraijin, even though it seems like you don't even play NIN in a first place.

When it comes to 32 button ideology, that's terrible idea for many reasons I've listed. When it comes to Huraijin, neither me or you main NIN, so our opinions should have much lesser weight than opinion of actual NIN mains. They are the ones who should decide whether it's time to axe it.

[Renathras]

...

What are you...even talking about? Hyperbole and exaggeration?

You can have 100 buttons and not have a fun class. You can have 10 and have one with complexity, nuance, and an insanely high skill ceiling. "number of buttons" isn't a measure of difficulty in any world. As you even noted yourself, we can end up with more buttons but a more dumbed down system; that means the reverse must also be true, that we can have less buttons and more difficulty. Number of buttons isn't a holy grail.

Again, if you haven't seen people complaining about button bloat, you genuinely haven't been looking, because it's a pretty frequent complaint. Trying to distract by changing the subject or moving the goalposts doesn't make a bad argument a good one.

If 30 isn't enough, that's a failure of Job design. Again, most games don't have 30 separate actions and abilities for the majority of classes and playable character types. If that's not enough for you, you have...eclectic tastes.

But in any case, as I said, I already got an answer. You're one of those people that will resist change, no matter if it's good or bad, because of some weird preconceived notion. In this case, one even your own statement proves is wrong. I'm not going to argue over it. If you have a good actual argument, feel free to present it. If you want to talk about optimal number of buttons for a Job, then kindly start your own thread to discuss it. I'd wager if we started a thread "How many buttons does a Job need to be good", the responses would mostly be "It doesn't matter the number, it matters if they're meaningful and have interesting and fun interactions that allow for some skill expression". Whether that's 15 or 50 is irrelevant.

I'm really confused what do you even want at this point.

Nothing. I just had an idea and thought I'd ask others if it was a good idea or not. You seem the only person dead set against it, and not with any good argument, just with "Herp derp you just are bad and want the game to be dumbed down and easy!!", which isn't an argument.

I never once said "every job" should have 32 buttons. You asked at one point what I thought was optimal. That's the answer to what is optimal, ~30. The thread STARTED with Huraijin! It didn't "settle" on it "lastly". That was the entire point of the thread! Like...what even are you right now?

"for many reasons I've listed" - You didn't list any! You just said that fewer buttons is easy and homogenized, but then defeated your own argument when you said they've added more buttons over time AND made the game easier and dumbed down, meaning at least on some level even you realize that more buttons is not necessarily more skill, which must mean that fewer buttons is not necessarily easier/less skill.

I wasn't making an argument of "should be", I was asking a question of "Is there a good reason not to". I'm an omni-main, and NIN is the one I use on the Melee subrole. But that's irrelevant, as I wasn't asking for a change in the first place.

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Maybe you shouldn't butt into threads and make wild accusations and insults without actually reading what other people are talking about...

Anyway, as I said, I'm done with this thread as I got my answer:

There's no really good argument against it other than one person's irrational and hyperbolic fear that going from 35 buttons to 34 buttons on a Job is instant homogenization and the end of the entire game turning into a nightmare of dumb casuals that don't bother learning Jobs, even if the button loss/change in question is rational and does literally the same thing the Job does right now otherwise.

Farewell.

[Shurrikhan]

But they do remove buttons. And they also remove all the nuances game has, so we might end up with net positive with button count, but game is overall easier, so it's trade off.

These two are ultimately tangential to each other. Adding buttons does not necessitate greater depth in practice. Removing buttons (which does not, in itself, mean reducing actions, capacities, or the number or depth of methods of optimization) does not necessitate lesser depth in practice.

If you previously had an optimization, but now instead gain a button that simply auto-solves it, you will reduced depth despite adding an additional button.

Let's say NIN still required a separate key for Phantom Kamaitachi after Bunshin or Assassinate after Dream Within a Dream (as per ShB), despite the prior of each pair requiring the latter to be cast first. Would that somehow give the job more "depth" than just having the second-step action (literally locked behind the first) replace that first step once it's been Readied?

Yes, there's been a lot of depth lost, but that hasn't been because of the desire for pruning, but rather the devs' failure to understand the in-practice optimizations available to their various jobs. Fracture, a pivotal part of the flexibility in Monk's ARR and HW rotations, wasn't removed from Monk on the basis that it was one button too many, but that it wasn't sufficiently "iconic" (despite it being perfectly timed to coincide with and complement Fracture, offering Monk a greater range of rotational strings and DoT duration optimizations that would not otherwise be possible.

It's largely because the devs are so apt to accept/push this false narrative that "button count = depth" that we end up with nuance replaced instead with mechanics accounting to "Is the enemy singular or plural" so that we can have our basic AoE|ST pairs for every offensive action and its grandchildren.

I'm really confused what do you even want at this point. At first it seemed like you wanted every job to fit your ideal button count of 32, then you swapped to "It is fine if some Jobs have more.", and lastly you just want to settle on Huraijin, even though it seems like you don't even play NIN in a first place.

This... isn't nearly such a jumble as you make it out to be. He gave "32 keys" as a personal (subjectively favored) guideline, not some hard requirement, and focused on Huraijin because (A) it's the literal point of the thread, named after that consolidation, and (B) because there is objectively no benefit to each having a separate key, as compared to just consolidating the two while having access to the capacities of each (still separately).


_____________________


And, not that it matters, but you can easily drop another 3 buttons guideline without loss of depth by just having...

• Mudras change to Ninjutsu after being cast (since you can't viably cast the same twice anyways), forgoing the need for a separate Ninjutsu key. (No, Bunny is not depth; it's just punishment for ping/packet loss. You'd still have to hit the right order to use what Ninjutsu one intended, just as before.)
• Having Forked/Fleeting Raijuu replace Aeolian/Crush under Raijuu Ready, so long as we're not going to allow our GCD combo to be used without cancelling Raijuu Ready anyways.

Voila.

- A former NIN main.

[Deo14]

You can have 100 buttons and not have a fun class. You can have 10 and have one with complexity, nuance, and an insanely high skill ceiling. "number of buttons" isn't a measure of difficulty in any world. As you even noted yourself, we can end up with more buttons but a more dumbed down system; that means the reverse must also be true, that we can have less buttons and more difficulty. Number of buttons isn't a holy grail.

According to SE's track record, no we can't. They'll remove buttons, don't replace them with anything and will not add more mechanics because they take every opportunity to dumb down jobs even more. So yes, less buttons will end up as less complexity. Things like putting Huraijin as uncomboed Armor Crush doesn't seem bad, but it really doesn't sounds like something they would do. I don't think there ever was instance of devs making uncomboed ability with net positive effects. The skill's tooltip will also end up being essay, confusing new players.

If 30 isn't enough, that's a failure of Job design. Again, most games don't have 30 separate actions and abilities for the majority of classes and playable character types. If that's not enough for you, you have...eclectic tastes.

Don't put every game in the same bucket. As I said previously, most games have higher APM and much more nuances than FFXIV. All we have in FFXIV are job gauges, CDs, positionals and few remaining DoTs. Other games have relevant stuns, different kinds of DoTs, each with different effect and most importantly, skillshots. Yes, DotA or LoL can have <10 buttons, but there is mechanical skill involved. Aiming skills correctly, using it in right time, predicting it's speed and predicting enemies movement and possible jukes. Then you have actual mana and other resource management. FFXIV doesn't have any of that (well, SAM used to have Kenki management before 6.1), all mechanical skill in here is about pressing correct buttons without downtime while doing mechanics. This is fundamentally simpler than many games. This is why it's fine for jobs to have 30+ buttons, there is nothing else in terms of job complexity otherwise. If you want less buttons, there is tons of different games, but there is not many games like FFXIV, so stop ruining even that for everyone else who is fine with that. You still have jobs like SMN and healers which are super easy and simple, so you can just play those instead.

But in any case, as I said, I already got an answer. You're one of those people that will resist change, no matter if it's good or bad, because of some weird preconceived notion. In this case, one even your own statement proves is wrong. I'm not going to argue over it. If you have a good actual argument, feel free to present it.

I resist the change because of experience. If you want to claim that using your experience is "weird preconceived notion", then go for it, it doesn't change anything. As for Huraijin, please point out where I dismissed it. I dismissed unnecessarily removing more buttons, because even after Huraijin, you would need to remove 2 more buttons to fit your ideal 32 buttons limit.

If you want to talk about optimal number of buttons for a Job, then kindly start your own thread to discuss it. I'd wager if we started a thread "How many buttons does a Job need to be good", the responses would mostly be "It doesn't matter the number, it matters if they're meaningful and have interesting and fun interactions that allow for some skill expression". Whether that's 15 or 50 is irrelevant.

Why would I start another thread? You even gave me summary of all the responses. This is discussion forums in the end (even though it's personal blog for some), and discussions do evolve. If you don't want it to evolve for some arbitrary reasons, you can just not respond.

I just had an idea and thought I'd ask others if it was a good idea or not. You seem the only person dead set against it, and not with any good argument, just with "Herp derp you just are bad and want the game to be dumbed down and easy!!", which isn't an argument.

Again, point out where I dismissed Huraijin. I dismissed all the "button bloat" and "button inflation" nonsense. Dumbing down jobs is real issue, and you quite literally, said that you want jobs to fit into 32 buttons so you don't need to put in extra effort and use 3rd cross hotbar. If you don't think that keeping some depth to the job is good argument, I wonder what is good argument for you. I guess only good arguments for you are the ones that agree with you.

I never once said "every job" should have 32 buttons. You asked at one point what I thought was optimal. That's the answer to what is optimal, ~30. The thread STARTED with Huraijin! It didn't "settle" on it "lastly". That was the entire point of the thread!

And I told you all the downsides of your "optimal" button count. This is called discussion. You show your ideas, others ideally say if it's good or bad and give reasons why. Putting random info out there and not receiving feedback for it is fruitless.

Like...what even are you right now?

Last time I checked, a blonde catgirl. Used to have black hair few days ago. You like it?

"for many reasons I've listed" - You didn't list any! You just said that fewer buttons is easy and homogenized, but then defeated your own argument when you said they've added more buttons over time AND made the game easier and dumbed down, meaning at least on some level even you realize that more buttons is not necessarily more skill, which must mean that fewer buttons is not necessarily easier/less skill.

They remove buttons, add little more buttons, but remove other unrelated things, like positionals (they obviously still exist, but their impact is lot smaller), resource management (RIP Kaiten) and so on. So we end up with more buttons, but diluted. I'm definitely not saying this is good thing, but if they remove buttons now, it does equal to removing more skill expression. Take SMN for example. It used to be pretty hard job. Do you really want to claim that it's hard nowadays? It's arguably easiest in the game, while having least amount of buttons. The way you want to condensate buttons and the way SE actually does it is different. They will remove all the depth they want.

I wasn't making an argument of "should be", I was asking a question of "Is there a good reason not to". I'm an omni-main, and NIN is the one I use on the Melee subrole. But that's irrelevant, as I wasn't asking for a change in the first place.
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Maybe you shouldn't butt into threads and make wild accusations and insults without actually reading what other people are talking about...

My first response was to someone talking about button bloat, I don't know what are you on about. Discussion was already derailed when I oh so insolently "butted in".

There's no really good argument against it other than one person's irrational and hyperbolic fear that going from 35 buttons to 34 buttons on a Job is instant homogenization and the end of the entire game turning into a nightmare of dumb casuals that don't bother learning Jobs, even if the button loss/change in question is rational and does literally the same thing the Job does right now otherwise.

I was talking about your 16 button ST rotation idea:

Single target rotations should consist of around 16 buttons, more or less. Sixteen is not a massive shortage of buttons. Really think about how many that is. And that's the "active use all the time in combat and/or during burst", not including situational stuff like debuffing the boss (Feint), AOE rotations, or other situational stuff like Shukuchi or Hide or Arm's Length.

This is peak of homogenization, trying to make 19 jobs to follow arbitrary 16 button limit. This will end up in homogenization no matter what.

You're really naive if you think removing one button cannot have serious consequences. As for Huraijin? Things won't change much most likely. Other buttons? Removing Kaiten removed whole Kenki Management. You could say to just not remove these fundamental buttons, but that has already happened, SE is simply clueless about job design. They blindly shoot and remove random buttons without considering the consequences, or give bullshit reasons as "saving 20 Kenki was too hard". But this is definition of skill curve. If you can't even save 20 Kenki you should perform worse than the ones who can.

Farewell.

Bye

Let's say NIN still required a separate key for Phantom Kamaitachi after Bunshin or Assassinate after Dream Within a Dream (as per ShB), despite the prior of each pair requiring the latter to be cast first. Would that somehow give the job more "depth" than just having the second-step action (literally locked behind the first) replace that first step once it's been Readied?

No it wouldn't, just as Ikishoten going into Ogi doesn't add more depth to the SAM. Yet somehow, Kaiten got axed before they merged these two buttons.

Yes, there's been a lot of depth lost, but that hasn't been because of the desire for pruning, but rather the devs' failure to understand the in-practice optimizations available to their various jobs.

Exactly, their track record has been dumbing down jobs whenever they do something, while being incredibly out of touch. Check first paragraph in 6.21 PLD, and tell me they play PLD at all. Which is why I think it's better to have damage control and just try to delay the inevitable.

It's largely because the devs are so apt to accept/push this false narrative that "button count = depth" that we end up with nuance replaced instead with mechanics accounting to "Is the enemy singular or plural" so that we can have our basic AoE|ST pairs for every offensive action and its grandchildren.

Yep, splitted ST/AoE buttons are the real bloat, would be nice if they removed it. My hotbars are so incredibly clean after I started using AoE/ST stance macros.

This... isn't nearly such a jumble as you make it out to be. He gave "32 keys" as a personal (subjectively favored) guideline, not some hard requirement, and focused on Huraijin because (A) it's the literal point of the thread, named after that consolidation, and (B) because there is objectively no benefit to each having a separate key, as compared to just consolidating the two while having access to the capacities of each (still separately).

The answer to that is few paragraphs above.

Mudras change to Ninjutsu after being cast (since you can't viably cast the same twice anyways), forgoing the need for a separate Ninjutsu key. (No, Bunny is not depth; it's just punishment for ping/packet loss. You'd still have to hit the right order to use what Ninjutsu one intended, just as before.)

I like this.

[wereotter]

a bit? I's the most bloated job of all.

Ninja is definitely bad.. but at least in my opinion, dragoon is worse. Ninja has 17 skills for its rotation (assuming you relegate forked raiju into the bin of niche use skills) while dragoon has 18 skills in its core rotation, plus both have the same cross class skills and buttons needed.

[Shurrikhan]

This is peak of homogenization, trying to make 19 jobs to follow arbitrary 16 button limit. This will end up in homogenization no matter what.

While I think we're likely to agree on most concrete specifics surrounding the current state of jobs or what's easily visualized... I can hardly disagree more with this assessment.

When I consider which games tended to have the greatest diversity between their classes, they were usually with smaller toolkits that therefore had to be leveraged far more integrally.

Even if I consider XIV's closest neighbor (the game ARR's rework was explicitly based upon), WoW, jobs felt the most homogenous when their toolkits were at their largest.

That's not to say that pruning, by itself, is ever good; outside of an easy an obvious correction to a former terrible design that costs nothing to improve, pruning is almost always bad. But, working within creative constraints more often forces more vital and influential differences between kits than full freedom (which is largely just a euphemism for the ability to full back on the same poor inefficient, infrequently utilized, or otherwise poorly integrated designs for each job).

It's not as if our 32+ button jobs are ever going to be 6-8x as deep or diverse from one another as any two random 4 or 5-button LoL/HotS/DotA2/DiabloIV characters are...

Generally, what tends to allow for the greatest diversity is strong creative constraints with ultimately a bit of flexibility, and strong breadth and depth of shared undermechanics to act as featurable/actionable sites for kits' differences.

[Renathras]

The Post.

All of this.

One reason Jobs feel so HOMOGENIZED is because they have SO MANY BUTTONS.

Think about it. EVERY Tank and Melee has a 1-2-3 combo for single target and a 1-2 combo for AOE. And in many cases, they are more or less identical. SOME have a -4 buff upkeep button (WAR, NIN), some have a second separate combo (GNB), one has a -2b and -2c-3c secondary combo (SAM), but they all still have the core 1-2-3. Even MCH is in on that act. They all have the same 1-2 for AOE. Like...ALL of them have a 1-2 AOE. No one has a just 1spam and only one has a -3. It's just 1-2 + something random. Some do vaguely different things, like WAR's refreshing their damage buff or NIN's interacting with Doton. Some interact with other things, like SAM's giving them two seals for the AOE Iajutsu, but the base core of it is the same.

The only one that's really different there is DRG - and not because it doesn't have a 1-2 AOE rotation or doesn't have 1-2-3 core rotation, but rather because it has two 4 hit rotations chained end-to-end with each other - and MNK - which is the most distinct in that its 6 buttons across 3 stances can be used in different orders (and should be during the rotation), and that it is the only one with a -3 for the AOE combo.

That's 5 buttons EVERY Tank and Melee has (and 4 on MCH) that do THE EXACT SAME THING. Some damage. A little more damage (rarely some additional effect). Some more damage and a random effect that often ties into its Job gauge. And for AOE, it's the same thing.

Are those buttons making all the Jobs feel different or are they "peak of homogenization"?

More buttons != more diversity. In fact, as Shurrikhan says, more buttons can sometimes LEAD TO more homogenization.

PLD in ARR had a 1-2-3 and nothing more for its core rotation, and its AOE "rotation" was "Flash spam until low on MP, then 1-2 Riot to regain MP, repeat" while WAR's at the time was more involved (and there were the cursed MRD Cross-Class builds). You can't tell me that was MORE homogenized than Tanks are now, and that was with WAR and PLD both having only something like 2/3rds the buttons they have now.

[Deo14]

While I think we're likely to agree on most concrete specifics surrounding the current state of jobs or what's easily visualized... I can hardly disagree more with this assessment.

When I consider which games tended to have the greatest diversity between their classes, they were usually with smaller toolkits that therefore had to be leveraged far more integrally.

Even if I consider XIV's closest neighbor (the game ARR's rework was explicitly based upon), WoW, jobs felt the most homogenous when their toolkits were at their largest.

That's not to say that pruning, by itself, is ever good; outside of an easy an obvious correction to a former terrible design that costs nothing to improve, pruning is almost always bad. But, working within creative constraints more often forces more vital and influential differences between kits than full freedom (which is largely just a euphemism for the ability to full back on the same poor inefficient, infrequently utilized, or otherwise poorly integrated designs for each job).

It's not as if our 32+ button jobs are ever going to be 6-8x as deep or diverse from one another as any two random 4 or 5-button LoL/HotS/DotA2/DiabloIV characters are...

Generally, what tends to allow for the greatest diversity is strong creative constraints with ultimately a bit of flexibility, and strong breadth and depth of shared undermechanics to act as featurable/actionable sites for kits' differences.

It's true that if you have too many skills (19 jobs times ~30 skills), they can start looking similar/overlapping. Half the jobs have essentially identical 1-2-3.

This made me think about DotA and I'm reconsidering what I've said. Heroes in DotA have usually just 4 skills, one of them often being passive. And that's what keeps them so distinct. Huskar is typical berserker, lower health = higher damage. Zeus has passive which deals percentage of target's health whenever he casts a spell, which makes him struggle less with high HP enemies, which are always problematic for casters (caster might not be right word, haven't played DotA in some time). LC gets/gives permanent damage bonus whenever she wins/loses her duel.

Obviously it's pretty far fetched to compare FFXIV and DotA, but there are some interesting things to take away from job design. You 100% can make 100+ very distinct heroes with usually just 4 skills. However DotA goes way and beyond with unique stuff. Mars' ulti makes small coliseum which enemies cannot leave. Tinker's ult refreshes his every skill and item AND it has just few seconds cooldown, so he teleports all around the map with boots of travel and spams his other skills/items, teleports back to fountain to refresh mana and goes back again. Void creates Chronosphere which lock everyone in it, which is one of the best counters for overfed carries. Silencer steals INT stat from enemies that died close to him. You get the point.

There is a lot of uniqueness there. But main reason why you can get away with such a creative design is because you don't need to limit yourself because of balance. You don't need every hero to pass some dps check, you don't need every tank to be able to survive every encounter somewhat equally. But FFXIV needs that. You cannot have a tank which deals 20% more damage than others, but also takes 20% more.

But I'm not sure about conclusion. On one hand, if FFXIV had singificantly less skills, devs will probably try to distinquish each job more. On the other hand, current depth of FFXIV's combat doesn't really offer much creativity. No stuns and other CC, no special effects. We're stuck with job gauges and cooldowns. Damage is everything, even if tenacity melds added some 20%-30% more overall defenses, crit/det/dh will still be preferable. So I guess the takeaway is that homogenization isn't that much relevant to button count, but to the fact that devs keeps restraining themselves just so everything is perfectly balanced. What could they do, however, while keeping balance, is to give every job some interesting and unique mechanic. SAM's Sen and NIN's Ninjutsu are great and fun job mechanics, but some jobs just don't have any. WAR just builds up very bland resource and then spends it. SGE's Addersting is interesting in theory, but it's 50% damage loss even if you do it correctly and it's reliant on incoming damage.

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I think your caps lock is acting up.

I take 1-2-3 as an equivalent of basic filler auto attack. I don't mind it, and I would much rather have that than to end up like healers with 1-1-1-1-1 spam. And yes, damage is all that matters in this game, so don't act surprised when 80% of skills, do in fact, deal a different flavour of damage.