We have enough melee dps

[Carighan]

If you complain about FFXIV job rotation simplicity other MMOs must make you scream out of boredom.

No, plenty other MMOs do it far smarter by not being static.

Complexity that adds no depth is, IMO, worse than not having any complexity in the first place. Just having 30+ buttons and 2 oGCDs to weave every GCD takes the same 0 brain cells as 1 button you press forever if it's a fully static rotation, it just gives you carpal tunnel faster (which is weird, you'd think the 1 button would, but that's not the case).

What other games do is that they:

* Give you a static rotation you want to do, but your resources are unreliable, and importantly never enough to actually pull that rotation off. But how much you're missing you cannot know in advance, so what portion of the rotation you can pull off is unknown.
* Base your ideal rotation of something that is fight and moment-specific, like gaining a crucial resource on a successfully timed dodge, which of course relies on having something to dodge.
* Proc-enable important abilities that are center to your design, or entire branches of rotations. Since procs are unreliable (even if fudged to be PPM like in WoW), this precludes having a static rotation, you never know when certain abilities can be used, and when they light up they might not be at the right time where you want to use them, or maybe you actually can't (if there's interreliance between procs and resources).

And that's 3 simple cases. Between procs, branching paths, resource capping, resource overcapping and unreliable resource generation, you can make brain-complicated rotations out of just 10-15 abilities max, usually 5-8 core ones would be enough.

The fact that FFXIV has so many abilities and does so little with it is just testament to what a failure it's basic combat design paradigm is. It hurts extra due to the amount of beautiful animations and visual f/x that are all just a wash of "cause X potency of damage" with virtually no identity or specificity.

I agree but at the same time those other bottons make jobs needlessly complicated. I know plenty people who swap without a second thought a job and WoW and have an easy time to perform at top levels, but casually swapping in FFXIV is a bit more of a struggle due to the punishing nature of not using the "lots of bottons" ideally.

This is a bit funny because in particular for Melee DPS, my primary problem is how similar they all play. They look so different on the surface, and yet you can make hotbar setups that work surprisingly similar in actual combat (a problem they share with tanks and healers, but less so with all ranged DPS). They're utterly homogenized but have a rather successful "facade" of differentiation that seems to trick quite a few people into thinking there's a difference.

Which is extra funny when you look at games where classes are actually different, and require extensive reading up to do something meaningful with it. And this can be something as simple as Guild Wars 2, which given it's plethora of stat combinations, skills and traits allows for multiple millions of character setups of which only a dozen are maybe optimal, and for different scenarios, meaning you need to know what wins against what based on context, which can swap frequently during a single raid or zone. And don't get me wrong, GW2 is not a good example because it's class system has a slew of its own problem, and it's not actually very good at deep combat anyways, being explicitly designed to be hyper-casual in its original release. And yet still, it runs circles around FFXIV's class design (only that, IMO, which is part of why I swapped from GW2 to FFXIV).

WoW is on a whole other level then, having more or less tried everything under the sun in it's long lifetime, and providing us with ample data about what works or doesn't work (and it's in fact the giant portion of why we know that all usable class design comes in four basic gameplay types: Static Rotation, Proc-Based, Resource-Based and Dynamic Branching). And again it has a slew of problems of its own, in particular in current class design, but it's a treasure trove of information on what to do and what not to do!