Quote Originally Posted by Carighan View Post
#respectfullydisagree

I should add that I think all jobs have too many buttons for how insanely shallow their gameplay loop is. GW2 achieves far more interesting core gameplay with just 12-15 buttons. Hell I'd go as far as saying that most MOBAs achieve deeper gameplay with four buttons.

I could understand 20-25 buttons for jobs if that were actually relevant, but it's really not. Just on Dark Knight, consider that all the following abilities could be removed cleanly if the skills did full damage to the main target then reduced damage to extra ones:

* Unleash
* Stalwart Soul
* Quietus
* Flood of Darkness
* Abyssal Drain

That's 5 hotbar buttons freed up at not a single spit of depth lost. And in turn shows how absolutely irrelevant the existence of these skills even is, beyond some funky visuals (which I very much enjoy, don't get me wrong!).
You just listed aoes. Then every job has too many buttons? And its not even true

Unleash/Stalwart have a unique niche of gaining 600 MP and 20 Blood in two GCDs instead of 3, making it optimal to switch to this on any boss that is at .01% HP but doesn't die due to game mechanics to build gauge faster for next phases.
Likewise, Abyssal Drain has a niche of being a Ranged AOE pull on DRK. Its not available enough to ever justify this but it is a thing it uniquely does over Carve and Spit.