Quote Originally Posted by hunter2 View Post
I went and counted how many hotbar buttons tanks and healers currently have for damage vs non-damage (not the percentage of spent GCDs, just hotbar space).
Tanks have an average of about 18 damage buttons to 15 non-damaging buttons while healers have an average of 6 damage buttons to 24 non-damaging buttons. Even Astrologian with Draw, Play, Redraw, Divination, Lightspeed, Astrodyne and Minor Arcana doesn't come close to having as many damage buttons as Warrior, the easiest tank.
To be fair on both sides, I don't think every individual button as-is should count toward the amount of options each job actually has. For example, I don't count Glare and Holy as separate actions, because they are the same thing. One you use for bosses, the other you use for dungeon trash. If they were the same button, literally nothing would change for WHM gameplay. I also don't really count the 1-2-3 combos of tanks as separate actions because they're really just one long action separated across 3 GCDs. Upheaval and Orogeny are the same thing. Holy Spirit and Holy Circle are the same thing...

Yes they are separate actions, but what purpose do they serve? That's what really should matter when discussing the tools available to each job. What really matters for Warror, for example, would be the following:
  1. Storm's Path Combo
  2. Storms' Eye/AOE Combo
  3. Tomahawk
  4. Upheaval/Orogeny
  5. Onslaught
  6. Inner Release
  7. Infuriate
  8. Beast Gauge Spender (FC/IC/Decimate/CC)
  9. Primal Rend

So that's really just 9 different things you're consistently interacting with, and Tomahawk is debatable given how little melee jobs are pushed out of melee range any more. Warrior is the most simple tank in terms of DPS complexity and does get some criticism for being just a little too simple.