What are some things you would be okay with SE dumbing down?

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Button quantity for button quality.





I'd rather have fewer buttons with better skills/skill ceiling than more buttons to make rotations look bloated.





20-24 is enough.

[Shurrikhan]

Button quantity for button quality.





I'd rather have fewer buttons with better skills/skill ceiling than more buttons to make rotations look bloated.





20-24 is enough.

Honestly, just revising macros into a form that is far, far more polished and accessible would probably do the trick. We can have our whole 32 or so actions while still only using some 16-24 buttons, after all.

Call this rebranded, more accessible form of macros "Stacks" or "Gamuts" or what have you, but let them do seamlessly/flawlessly anything that is effectively permitted without loss by macros (e.g., combo consolidation, procced over proc-er, etc.), while retaining whatever only strictures almost unavoidably have cost (i.e., we could still only perform one action per button-press, even if we could use that button for multiple actions in series).

Add a couple extra conditionals, such as for range or whether one is moving or modes (player-determined, such as being able to hit a button to change all one's stacks to "AoE" mode, via their "ST|Cleave|AoE" button) and provide a new GUI to make the options used in building these stacks/gamuts super obvious.

Finally, to finish polishing this system...

• allow for an underlying CD to be shown above a no-CD action (such as per a charge-wheel, rather the grey-out of a cooldown), such as Tsubame-Gaeshi's CD being visible as a subtle charge wheel (and a timer, of course) atop one's Iaijutsu button;
  
  
• allow for buffs to show their remaining duration on their icons themselves (if they also have CDs, they'll switch to showing the CD once the buff has completed);
  
  
• make it so combo steps not yet reached literally cannot be hit (outside of Gpose, obviously), since they already have zero use case and are therefore solely finger traps, and because there is no reason to add even that further disadvantage to using unconsolidated combos;
  
  
• provide an option to display one's last (combo, GCD, any) action, as to make it easier to track combo progress.

Compared to forced consolidation, letting players choose what to consolidate has certain additional advantages.

For instance, what if I, as a Dancer, prefer to have all my weaponskills that do not require procs (Cascade, Fountain; Windmill, Bladeshower) to cover my 4 step actions, instead of mixing in the procs?

What if I want to consolidated Cascade and Fountain, Windmill and Bladeshower, since there's no use case for an uncombo-ed Fountain or Bladeshower, but I want to be able to bank my Fountainfall/Bloodshower for a short time? The way each move is linked inseparably to a particular step right now does not allow for that.

And that's not to say we can't provide some Stacks/Gamuts by default, with players just being able to revise them as they like (having Aetherial Manipulation lie atop every, say, single-target attack button so that AM needs no separate key, or every Monk attack turn to Meditation if more than 5 yalms away, or every tank attack outside of their combo having said combo as a fall-back since the only real decisions there are to bank gauge or not bank gauge, anyway, etc., etc.,).

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Of course, if just not losing track of our CDs across multiple buttons that nonetheless work inseparably until a mistake is made should count as "complexity", then there would be "downsides" to letting people combine what makes sense to them to combine, since it'd reveal just how shallow most jobs are.

A majority of MCH's "complexity", for instance, could be very reduced to a single stack that will use the first available of Drill, Air Anchor, Chainsaw, Heat Blast, Clean Shot, Slug Shot, Split Shot.

Comparatively, retaining official control over how actions are put into buttons allows the devs to better pretend at whatever level of complexity they'd like to impress upon players, though it also would have a lower ceiling for its actual quality of use.