Quote Originally Posted by Quor View Post
Isn't that what all of this is? Pushing buttons in the right order at the right times? Distilled down to it's most basic form, that's the entirety of this game, and really any video game. Take the most badass looking DMC5 boss rush you can think of, or the craziest Super Meat Boy speedrun, and it's all just hand movement, entering the right commands at the right time. That sells it terribly short of course, but you get the gist. Of course, we all know the devil is in the details, so it's disingenuous to say that it comes down to hand movement "alone."
Not when all concerns except your finger moving from one place to another within the ~1.7 to 2.5 seconds are absolutely negligible.

oGCD order? That takes some determination. Any effect that will not sacrifice a measure of effect greater than its loss to uptime and sync from delay should be used as early as possible. That involves tactics.
AoE abilities? Further determination in fights with add phases. Just look at Dragoon in Deltascape 3S. Capitalizing on Nostrond is huge there. (Btw, you know didn't reduce it's complexity at all there? Consolidating Geirskogul and Nostrond.)

But a fixed combo? That's not complexity unless you're actively making meaningful decisions about whether to move your shoulder, elbow, wrist, or fingers to get from Key 2 to Key 3. Let me be frank -- you're going to have a hard time convincing me those decisions will be meaningful.

In DMC5, there are numerous answers with numerous levels of "correctness" because there are numerous ways to handle any particular fight. Many of those ways, if we ignore common sense and throw random combinations together, are bad. And, theoretically, one may be the best at any given time, but that's a job for Deep AI. The remainder are we actually play towards and around -- the entire point of gameplay.

Combos do not. They have one answer. They ensure that you can, as soon as you start a combo, only viably touch one normal weaponskill. The entire purpose of combos in XIV to reduce complexity, to reduce the number of options available to the player at any given time.

What complexity you find in any given combo are the few times they act least like a combo, and actually allow a branched action for once. Those are the surviving actions, and why Warrior still at least has effectively 5 GCD skills, Fel Cleave(+), Storm's Eye, Storm's Path, Overpower, and Tomahawk, though combos will then promptly lock out all choice for a further 1-2 GCDs at a time in 3 out of those 5 actions.