Combo Action Button

[Shurrikhan]

The entirety of this rather pointless triad can be boiled down to will they fix Piercing Talon or equivalent skills like it. If yes, go right ahead—which is what I said. However... if they aren't going to do that for whatever reason than it remains a useless ability no matter how you attempt to spin it, thus becoming button bloat. How this assessment required several paragraphs to reach I'll never understand.

Here's your "saying that".

If they want to improve it, go right ahead—take it off the GCD.

Why did I not take that as agreement with my sentiment that they should makes fixes in such a way that doesn't sacrifice the amount of gameplay available to a job, both parts currently functioning and not? Because it doesn't. Piercing Talon as an oGCD would fill no purpose more than pre-SB Leg Sweep did in raids. You are still thinking of it as just a button, and not a component of gameplay. I can slap on another 6 oGCDs to weave through and it would change nothing about gameplay past the first sorting for ppm by opener order and desync breakpoints -- which occur entirely prior to combat.

And yet you continue to partake in said arguments about it.

Because you continue to apply slippery slopes fallacies to the very idea of it. We are not at a point yet where consolidation is wholly necessary, let alone combo consolidation, but we have both addressed the hypothetical. IF it came down to it, I would sooner protect the amount of gameplay a job has available to it, because to me that is the only purpose the buttons have. Individual skills do not need protection of their individual buttons when they cannot function except in sequence. At that point the only gameplay you have is sequence. So, yes, IF it came down to it, I would protect gameplay over button count, button-to-action correspondence over button-to-skill correspondence. That is all we've been disagreeing on.

Regardless, a poorly implemented skill that isn't being fixed serves no purpose. It doesn't matter how you imagine they could fix it, if they aren't going to, it's functionally useless. There's a reason virtually no melee DPS touches their ranged abilities. Put simply, unless they're changed to have a better implementation, it's better to cut them out entirely before anything else.

Yes. Obviously. We just have very different ideas on what being "fixed" means. Merely having an extra button to slap every 20-30 seconds does not fix what by common sense was supposed to be a tool for add-/mob-gathering and melee-downtime mitigation. Keys like it were removed for good reason -- not because they were unfunctional or provided little ppm, but because they offered nothing to gameplay.

Really? I wasn't aware having a dissenting opinion on combo consolidation was somehow dystopian. Or did I even mention Elusive and Doomspike. In fact, I recall saying outright I'd rather they add nothing to current meta jobs and focus their attention on WHM, DRK and MCH who desperately need a rework. It's almost like this was a massive exaggeration you pulled out from thin air.

I've never said a dissenting opinion was, itself, somehow dystopian. What in "you act as if combo consolidation will be some sort of dystopia" implies that?

You stated that any movement towards combo consolidation would create an quality-destructive outcome without seeming to have remotely considered the risks involved opposite that.

The moment SE moves to consolidation is the moment it becomes their solution going forward. People who prefer unique key presses will simply be inundated with new abilities because they have no reason to prune or upgrade anything.

To which I have disagreed because whether or not consolidation takes effect is entirely irrelevant to having reason to prune or upgrade, and because in MMOs statements which minimize expectations of additive work -- Yoshida saying they have no plans to create a further surge of abilities with 6.0 -- have far greater staying power than any decision which is merely technical and easily reversible. We are not getting that "inundating" surge of abilities either way. The majority of requests for consolidation in any form, be it Defiance<->Deliverance, a modified Shield Oath <-> Sword Oath, Jump <-> Mirage Dive, SSD <-> Mirage Dive, Doomspike <-> Sonic Thrust, Ley Lines <-> BtL, Fire IV <-> Blizzard IV, DWT <-> Deathflare, Summon Bahamut <-> Enkindle Bahamut are being made simply because it is simply a wholly obvious and logical choice, not IN PLACE of something else. We do not have a fixed maximum or minimum button count. No one is arguing for a fixed button count.

But when, in the instance that something does have to go, and you sacrifice real tools or decisions (which, for instance, a Piercing Talon off the GCD would not be; that's just pre-SB Leg Sweep in raids) in order to protect button count... something's wrong there.

If there is a slippery slope to consolidation, the opposite is true as well. When every skill is protected as its own entity just for splitting a given action across multiple inseparable GCDs with different labels each, and the only metric to a successful ability is the frequency with which it participates in a button cycle, then you eventually stand to lose the majority of gameplay that is not dependent solely on whether one forgets what comes after their button 4.

We agree that we shouldn't consolidate combos yet. (Even, again, if I don't care that much either way--I swap my binds all the time without issue so I have nothing at risk from--I understand that others may be inconvenienced by it just as others would be convenienced, and it seems the prior is either more numerous or more vocal.) But our reasons for that are absolute opposites, it seems. I want whatever gameplay a best-fleshed-out job can offer, efficiently and cohesively, regardless of how many or how few buttons would be involved, and when I look at a toolkit I see actions permitted and the breakpoints between them, not separate skills except wherein those skills may actually behave separately. That's probably why we differ here.