Job action combos one button

[Shurrikhan]

There is a difference between Dragoon and Reaper combos and gameplay in general that I would like to address and that is knowing where you are in your combo. Imagine if everything was consolidated, you had the one button combo. Could you honestly say that, during moments of heavy mechanics, you could keep track of where you were?

In my case, yes, definitely. It takes a fight or three to get used to, but I need only either to have positionals on the job (basically, anything but Reaper) or my SFX turned on. Either is sufficient.

I played around with key-swap macros to test out exactly that and never felt remotely lost as to what positional was coming up or when. The only real (and still brief) sticking point was remembering when a mechanic would be coming out for, say, a pre-pop Veil, TBN, or Third Eye, since that used to occur on a certain button-press.

The learning curve is shallow and short. It very, very quickly doesn't matter which button you just pressed and instead which action you just used, for which there are cues beyond mere button-press. Just as I don't need a separate button to tell me that, via Between the Lines, I'll be teleported to my Ley Lines when I've already hit Ley Lines (button-swapping one over the other), I don't need a separate button to tell me that if I just heard Disembowel go off, my next two GCDs are rear attacks followed by a flank.

It doesn't take additional buttons to remember that you merely alternate between Double-rear Split-flank, and the SFX of Vorpal, Full/Heaven's, and Disembowel are plenty to remind one to Life Surge or move if not pre-positioned.

However, whilst I am on this topic, giving the option could also lead to problems. Some consolidate, some do not, the ones that do consolidate suddenly say, 'my bars are empty, add more as we have the space', whereas the ones that do not say it is fine. Is there going to be pressure from one side to force the game into a particular option? If the option was there, I do not see the devs bending to cater to one side or the other, however, the possibility is still there.

This seems the larger concern to me, though I do think there are precedents that disarm it, as I'll get into in a moment. It essentially boils down to (A) many wanting jobs not to have further depth and/or (B) that the devs won't necessarily fill that space with anything... better. The last thing Dragoon would want, for instance, is yet another Dragon Sight or unbankable "just damage" oGCD.

Alternatively, it could be seen as homogenizing (in terms of difficulty and modes of complexity) if jobs that previously devoted a large degree of button-space to non-complexity then added complexity in its place. We could say, for instance, that the mindless rigid combo backbone of Dragoon is what really gives it room to think about banking oGCDs like Mirage Dive and Stardiver (not that there's much thinking to be done at this point, under modern CD alignments). And that all therefore becomes a much larger can of worms.

I don't think it's a particular threat, though. So long as Yoshida lays out that the change is a QoL option, and will only ever be a QoL option, and those who want more buttons from those jobs are free to just not use that feature, then that's pretty much the end of it. The threat is more in any ambiguity about future design, if left hanging, than inherent to offering that choice. Resolve that ambiguity, and there's no such issue.