Upkeep abilities

[PyurBlue]

What do you lose if they got rid of those three abillities?

In general I'd have less to focus on in combat. Having an abundance of refresh abilities doesn't make it impossible to fail at upkeeping. The refreshers just keep you from being punished by encounter design (gaps in combat). As a side effect they make poor buff management less punishing, but you're still going to be punished for using your out of combat refresher in combat by dealing no damage. I guess than leans the punishment away from casual play and more towards hardcore, but I guess that's OK.

For the ones you specifically mentioned, Enochian is fine and all of the above applies to it. I'm not as familiar with the other two because I don't raid with MNK or DRG but I know they tend to have more margin/refresh more often than Eno. That could be changed by reducing their time if it's a problem, or adding a risky alternative to refreshing them. They don't need to be removed or have their refreshes removed.

There is no challenge in keeping greased lighting, you do it in the beginning of the fight and never worry about it again. Same with Blood of the Dragon. Imagine if those buttons didn't exist, you just started the fight with whatever buff they would give you. Now the buttons that activate and maintain them (few for dragoon, many for monk) could be replaced with abilities that are actually engaging to use.

I see what you're getting at but in practical terms the buttons don't really cost us anything (and GL doesn't have a button if I remember). A one use button can be placed in the most remote spot on your hotbars without being a bother because you only need to press it once. Also while I tend to favor complexity over simplicity, adding more buttons is not the best way to make a job interesting. Having decisions to make and limitations to work with tends to create a better rotation in my opinion, and you can do that with a relatively small set of skills. I think BLM is a good example. In SB it was a little too Fire IV heavy, but Despair alone fixed that and made it a bit more interesting to play. I don't think the job needs any more skills at this point. If it did, there are some underused skills to revamp already (Scathe, Fire II, Blizzard I).

[GrumbleBeard]

Reply

I can agree with a lot of your points. I'm just looking at things through the lens of the changes that have occurred over each expansion.
-In HW, greased lightning was more difficult to keep up due to the shorter duration and less abilities to retain it, which at least gave tornado kick some small value, but since then it feels less and less important. At least in SB you could gain it fast/use TK regularly but it serves no other purpose now than getting it in the beginning.
-Dragoons Blood of the dragon had the interesting play of lowering the time when using Geirskogul versus raising it using the 4th combo abilities, but since then it is just set it and forget it
-blm is the one I'm least familiar with, but didn't enochian used to shorten each time you refreshed and had a longer cooldown to reapply it? The poster above me makes a good case for it's use, but I think with how short the cooldown is to reuse it when you do lose it, there is not too much punishment outside of optimizing damage.

I just don't see a future where these abilities ever really feel like they have impact like they used to. I guess an example would be Dark knights darkside buff. In HW it constantly drained mana in exchange for damage and was balanced around multiple mp regaining/spending moves. In SB it was gutted into a set-it-and-forget-it button, then in ShB it was dropped completely for new spenders that give the buff. I'm just surprised these other abilities haven't gotten the same treatment since they seem to be heading in the same direction.