Combo Action Button

[Sandpark]

Combos cannot and should not be consolidated in PvE. What you're talking about would change the PvE combat system entirely. I don't play a lot of jobs, but every single one I do weaves (sometimes double weaves) ogcds/instant abilities between the weaponskills required for their combos. And if even one job is impacted negatively, then the whole concept crashes and burns.

There is already a limit to the maximum number of skills the devs can implement and give us access to during PvE, and I am sure they are well aware of it. This is reduced greatly due to the game having players that use a controller. This basically gives the devs a maximum of 48 skills (excluding passive traits) to give players access to during combat, or 3 cross bars. The pet classes are an exception and use a 4th, and actually have room for additional skills on this bar if the devs wanted to go there.

There are simpler ways to reduce/prevent button bloat if this is your chief concern. For starters, some jobs have innate gcd skills that go unused because there is always a better gcd to use. Think Repose for WHM. I also believe the role skill system is either being revamped, or (hopefully) being done away with entirely. There are a lot of skills here that can just go away and we won't miss them. Several other skills were wrongfully taken away from their respective jobs, and you can probably expect jobs like AST and WHM to lose access to skills like Eye4Eye come 5.0.

If a weave or double weave is really good or mandatory, wouldn't that mean it should become part of a combo aka the core of your rotation and not a may be good or useless to use ogcd?

Are you saying the server or platform can't handle a big amount of skills or the controller can't?
The XIV hotbar interface can support 256 skills on controller. But just because it can, does not mean a user wants to cycle through all those skills in real time combat. ESO only has 12 active skills per class during combat. Twelve is too small, 256 is too large.

Look at it this way. What happens if SE wants to add a third, fourth, fifth or sixth combo string later on to jobs whose core combos already consist of 3 or more hotbar slots?
Those slots double each string when not consolidated, if the amount of skills stay the same. Each skill is fighting for real estate space. If combo skills dominate the space, there is less room for unique buffs/debuffs,control skills, ogcd skills, and less room for skill modifiers.

So the simpler way is to strip skills from the game rather than revise those less useful ones to be better? Consolidating skills streamlines and condenses but never removes options, omitting skills streamlines and removes options.

I agree with Reynhart saying that having multiple WS on one button would not change weaving much.