Job action combos one button

[Shurrikhan]

If they arent in buffs either way, they can be freely shuffled around and IMO that is something decoupled from paying attention to your combo.

I suppose that depends on how far ahead one can predict. To take DRK's combo as example again, because you want to minimize both Edges and Bloodspillers outside of burst, without overcapping MP or Gauge, you're looking any time (not all players necessarily needing more than one glance, but many also needing damn near bar-staring) between end of burst and next would-be overcap at whether you can, before your next Syphon that'd otherwise overcap, start a TBN that would pop (allowing you to push an Edge back towards burst), whether you will can enter burst before your next Souleater that would otherwise overcap, etc. Those things together have so much more cognitive load than shifting, almost subconsciously for most players, from button 1 to button 2 to button 3 with respective combo GCDs that the latter is hardly worth mention. (The latter is a feature, yes, but far more of tactile experience than of any sort of complexity; for most fully able players, it is already autonomous, and soon provides at least as much aid as difficulty.)

The step-tracking is still significant, and the 1-2-3 movement may aid that via tactile cues, but that 1-2-3 movement itself is an incredibly minor part of what goes into and surrounds even that most basic of combos (a straight 1-2-3 with zero alternate combos available) or "the[ir] attention needed".

That's why I have trouble seeing this option, should one choose to take it, as somehow destructive to depth or as "automating" play in any sense beyond its literal effect (to collapse button-movement and only button movement -- not to remove the need to track steps, track contexts, ready positioning, or any of that remaining vast majority of what goes into comboing in this game).

As such, I don't see it as offering, for most players, more than it'd lose in memory aid via tactile cues. Its offerings are merely reach and lost traps of bumping the wrong key; its shortfalls are nonetheless traps, merely of a subtler kind, if one forgets that, yes, they do need to use X action by Y GCD, etc., and fails to track what GCD their on by the next time it matters (which is more frequent than we may first assume), which can be exacerbated by lack of tactile cues if one doesn't grow used to that.

So long as it's an option --and I will insist that it absolutely can be introduced as such and would be if its being an option were presented as inseparable from the request for any combo consolidation (which I would support), for the reasons I have already given repeatedly, until someone can offer decent reasons to the contrary-- I see no reason why players for whom that space matters should be barred from having that option through legal means (or, as available also to any but non-Steam PC players). It's a trade-off, and those who can get more out of one end than the other should be able to take what suits them better.
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Admittedly, there is also a more abstract --OCD-related, if you will-- reason for my wanting to change how rigid combos are presently handled. It's button-waste, and if the game wants to insist on a separate button each for those actions, then those actions should also be separately usable.

At present, the use of any one combo key effectively locks out and wastes all but 1-2 others until that combo has ended; those other combo keys exist only as traps, without even the most situational of reasons to be used beyond having started into entirely the wrong combo by mistake (a mistake that can already be equally well addressed through consolidated keys). A job like Dragoon could manage far more interesting play by using a looser combo structure, managing combos via, say, Momentum (provided by Vorpal, Full, Spike, etc.) and Flurry (Sonic, Disembowel, Chaos, etc.) and certain skills building and/or taking from both. Such would be both less disproportionately punishing and capable of far more ingenuity (while also making for more frequent and interesting SkS tiers).

Give players a reason to use actions separately, outside of a fixed combo, and I'll agree that they should have separate keys, outside of a fixed combo. It's as simple as that.

Short of that, though, I see no reason why we shouldn't smooth the number of keys towards their available number of decisions -- and, ideally, even out the number of decisions available across different GCDs/steps. The buttons shouldn't exist, without contrary option, just to be traps. However subtly (as the case with Monk rotations), they must be capable of more, or the option should be given to trade out the tactile cues that their artificial complexity provides for the ease of reach of forgoing that artificial complexity.