Hello!

I'm fairly new to FF14. So far I have mainly been playing Paladin and am currently at around level 56, so I can't speak on behalf of other jobs (but do suspect that they might suffer from similar issues).

Rant:

My gripe is mainly with the amount of unnecessary buttons that clutter the hotbar. Mind you, I don't mind having a lot of buttons that have a reason to be there. This is not about having too many stuns or anything like that.

The simplest example is this:
  • Eclipse always leads into Prominence. There is, to my knowledge, absolutely no reason to use Eclipse over Combo'd Prominence or uncombo'd Prominence over Eclipse.
  • The fact that Prominence doesn't overwrite Eclipse when available is a waste of UI space; 2 buttons where 1 is enough.

Hopefully this was enough to illustrate the issue.

Next up is the Fast Blade chain.
You got Fast, Riot, Royal, and Goring. 4 skills.
  • If you land Fast, you dont want to use it again if Riot is available, so it should be replaced with its only combo lead.
  • If you land Riot, you don't want to use it again, so it should be replaced by the main alternative which is Royal (replaces halone?), or if the player level is too low, cancel the chain and set the skill to Fast Blade again.
  • The only alternative to Royal is Goring which is fine to leave on a separate button sine its a branch.
  • To top it all off, you never want to use any of these moves uncombo'd over Fast Blade anyway.

Point is, these are 6 skills that only need to take up 3 slots, each part of the chain replacing the previous:
Fast→Riot→Royal
Goring
Eclipse→Prominence

Hell, it took me around 20 minutes to get as close as possible to a solution this with macros, 15 of which were spent learning how macros actually work. Frankly if macros were slightly more powerful, i.e. could access properties such as whether a skill is learned, combo'd, or whether an attack connected, this wouldn't even be an issue.

I do have some hope though, as I looked at the wiki and the Confietor→Blade of w/e chain already works this way.

While this rant is most likely not going to accomplish anything, I still welcome any arguments in favor of having all this clutter in hope of some newfound appreciation. If anything, at least I got this out of my system. Thank you for reading.